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Danilo Kiš's little known second novel, Psalm 44 (1962) is his first major prose work about the Holocaust. This novel was published for the first time in Hungarian translation in 1966 and English translation in 2012. The novel is quite different from Kiš's later works on the Holocaust, the autobiographical trilogy comprising Early Sorrows, Garden, Ashes, and Hourglass. The first difference is in setting. In Psalm 44, a number of important flashbacks take place in Újvidék/Novi Sad, the region of northern Serbia (then Yugoslavia) under Hungarian occupation after 1941; much of the rest of the book takes place in Auschwitz and associated camps in Poland. The amount of Hungarian material is significant, but the inclusion of so much material from Auschwitz is not found elsewhere in Kiš 's oeuvre. The second difference is in the author's graphic portrayal of gruesome atrocities. For the literary historian, Psalm 44 is an important milestone in the development of Kiš 's thematic and stylistic inventory. For other historians, the novel functions in part as a microhistory of the Újvidék massacres (the "Cold Days") of early 1942. Kiš 's quest to find his own voice to attempt to convey the tragedy of the Holocaust—as important for the entire human family and the very region of Central Europe as it was for his own family—finds a parallel expression in the confusion, exhaustion, and skepticism of the characters in this novel.
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Thomas Sakmyster’s prodigiously researched book lifts the curtain on the legal and illegal activities of the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) by tracing the involvement of the Hungarian born communist, Sándor Goldberger, who was also known among his many aliases as Jozsef Péter (Pete, Joe Péter); later as J. Peters, Alexander Stevens, and Steve Miller
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History textbooks in Hungary date the arrival of the ancestors of the Hungarians to their present homeland to the end of the 9th century A.D., while the fact that there are other theories about the timing of the settlement of the Hungarians in the Carpathian Basin is often not even mentioned. Yet in the past half-century alone at least a half-dozen prominent Hungarian academics have advanced theories that place the arrival of the Hungarians much earlier, sometimes several centuries prior to the time given in the textbooks. Péter Király is one of these historians and his book under review here is just the most recent of these works questioning the accepted dogma of Hungarian historiography about the settlement of the Magyars in East Central Europe.
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This article questions the validity of Deborah S. Cornelius’s claims which she presents in her recently published book on interwar and World War II Hungary. These exonerate the revisionist, anti-Semitic and war-time policies of the Horthy regime. The monograph also presents the Hungarian leaders in an undeservedly positive light. The author of the review demonstrates that Cornelius’s representation of the past was accomplished by the selective reading of primary and secondary sources. Cornelius also commits too many factual errors in order to justify some of her assertions.
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The name of Theodor Herzl (Herzl Tivadar) evokes his Hungarian ties and the major stages of his life and work with relative ease, but doctor, writer and journalist Max Nordau (1849, Pest – 1923, Paris), requires a more delicate approach, having essentially sunk into oblivion despite his prolificacy in literature and his wide-ranging Zionist activities. In the case of Max Nordau, the second personality discussed in this paper, the aim of this paper is not to remedy the lack of information on Nordau, but to draw a comparison and a parallel between the years Nordau and Herzl spent in Pest in terms of assimilation and issues of language and identity. We first highlight events that are relevant to Nordau and Herzl’s family background, schooling, school transfers and university education, and then discuss in greater detail the linguistic and cultural paradigm shift that began in 1861 and forced Nordau first into a defensive position and then into isolation both socio-culturally and occupationally, but led to well-balanced bilingualism in Herzl’s case.
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This paper presents the cultural activism of a group of Hungarian émigrés who fled their homeland following Soviet occupation at the end of World War II and arrived in Argentina around 1948. It deals with the intellectual activity of these exiles, especially through their cultural and educational institutions. Within five years of their arrival as dispossessed “D.P.’s,” they founded a Hungarian Center (“Centro Húngaro”) that housed, among others, a theater group, a free university, a cultural and scientific academy, a weekend school, and scout troops. At the same time, new periodicals appeared, and a substantive number of books banned in Hungary were published. I argue that it is due to the work of these institutions that the community flourished and is vital to date, in spite of its isolation and lack of reinforcement through new emigrant waves, and in spite of its hostile relationship with the government of the People’s Republic of Hungary and of a series of Argentine economic crises that forced many of its members to re-emigrate. I also discuss the impact the exiles had on their descendants, contending that as a result of the strong cultural foundations laid by them during their first twenty years of emigration, third- and fourth-generation Hungarian-Argentines have maintained to this day a strong cultural and ethnic identity, while fully integrating into Argentine society at large.
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The use of personal names by minority Hungarians, both men and women, varies not only according to the circumstances of the country where they live but also from community to community and even from individual to individual. This study focuses on different forms of first (given) names and family names (surnames) characteristic of female ethnic Hungarians living in Slovakia, including the usage of the Slovak feminine suffix -ová with Hungarian surnames of women. The paper also discusses the topic of relevant legislation – laws and regulations – concerning the use of personal names of members of national minorities which, to a great extent and especially for women, can influence the choice of the form of their given name and surname.
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This book is an important landmark of Nóra Séllei’s professional career. For several years Nóra Séllei has been progressing straight ahead on the path that she mapped out for herself as a feminist scholar, and her enterprise is indeed worthy of respect. She explored the possibilities offered by feminist literary criticism, writing three monographs (Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Personal and Professional Bond, 1996; ‘The Middle-Class Woman Began to Write’: Essays on Novels by 19th-Century British Women Writers, 1999; ‘Mirror, Mirror on the Wall …’: Women Writers’ Autobiographies from the Early Twentieth Century, 2001), has edited two anthologies (The Junctures of Feminism – A Reader in Feminism and the (Post)modern, 2006; Woman as Subject, the Female Subject, 2007.), has translated Virginia Woolf, has organized gender-oriented interdisciplinary conferences, and she holds graduate and postgraduate courses on gender topics at the University of Debrecen. Everything considered, Hungarian (feminist) literary criticism owes a lot to her.
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In this paper I try to approach contemporary Hungarian political culture through an analysis of the history of changing monuments at Szabadság Tér in Budapest. The paper has as its point of origin a protest/irredentist monument facing the present Soviet liberation monument. In order to understand this irredentist monument, I look into the meaning of the earlier irredentist monuments under Horthy and try to see what monuments were torn down under Communism and which ones remained. I further argue that changes in the other monuments also affect the meaning of the others. From this background I enter into a brief interpretation of changes in memory culture in relation to changes in political culture. The conclusions point toward the fact that Hungary is actively pursuing a cleansing of its past in public spaces, and that this process is reflected in an increased acceptance of political authoritarianism.
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Since tobacco smoking acquired important patriotic symbolism in nineteenth century, the history of tobacco sheds light on Hungarian nationalism. Hungarian tobacco growers found the Austrian tobacco tariff policy harmful to their interests, particularly when war disrupted the supply of American tobacco in potential export markets. Pushing for a different tariff, Hungarian patriots turned smoking into a marker of Hungarian patriotism. Tobacco symbolism was prominent during Hungary’s 1848 Revolution, not least because tobacco acquired revolutionary symbolism in Italy and Germany as well. The culture of patriotic tobacco corresponded to revolutionary national ideas in that it mostly transcended class barriers but excluded women.
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The present article draws attention to the significance of the “Christian” component in researching Chinese migrants’ presence in post-1989 Hungary within the framework of Chinese globalization and the globalization of Chinese Christianity. After a brief review of the dynamics of Chinese migration to Hungary and special focus on the formation of Chinese Christian Communities, the article examines how the concept of diaspora and the rhetoric built around it is used by missionaries to create new ways of understanding the world from migrants’ perspective and interpreting migration experiences as empowering and liberating divine arrangements for the well-being of their current residence and beyond. The case of Chinese migration to Hungary shows that the concept of diaspora implies a diverse range of community formation practices and the complexity of negotiating Chineseness, which highlights the need of revisiting the very concept of diaspora as reduced to a homogeneous and ethnically essentialized community.
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In 1944 the Second World War had been raging for more than four long years, with the death toll among soldiers and civilians alike climbing. European Jews constituted a special group of the victims, a fact that leaders of the Allied powers failed to acknowledge. In January 1944 a major revision of previous government policy was brought about in the United States with the establishment of the War Refugee Board in Washington, promising an American commitment to the rescue of European war refugees, including Jews. In March of the same year the situation for Jewish inhabitants in Hungary turned dire as German forces occupied the country. For lack of any other instantly applicable way to influence Hungarian developments, leaders of the new American War Refugee Board decided to launch a propaganda campaign to fight the Nazis and their accomplices. This paper will examine the motivations of American policy makers in focusing on political propaganda measures during the first phase of the Hungarian Holocaust (March–July 1944), and it will describe the logic and workings of the campaign as a means to save Hungary’s Jewry in the last full year of the Second World War.
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This paper is part of a larger research project that explores the contributions of women intellectuals to the nationalistic, anti-liberal rhetoric of the early 1920s and the gendered aspect of the official ideology of the Horthy-era. The paper probes the connection of the personal and the political by exploring the shared history and competing memories of two woman writers, Anna Lesznai (1885-1966) and Emma Ritoók (1868-1945). The writers were friends and founding members of the Sunday Circle in 1915 but ended up in opposite camps during the 1918-19 revolutions. Ritoók, with Cécile Tormay, became a champion of the counter-revolution, contributing to its anti-Semitic ideology and rhetoric. Lesznai, the wife of Oszkár Jászi and a supporter of the Republic of Councils, was forced to flee and she spent the rest of her life in exile. Their diaries and autobiographical novels reflect the two writers’ diagonally opposing perspectives on their past and their shared intellectual and spiritual home, the Sunday Circle. The juxtaposition of their respective biographies and literary works offers insight into the process of re-interpreting and re-writing the past, whether for personal or political ends. It also illustrates the broader contours and irreparable breach between the Left and the nationalistic Right in Hungarian political and intellectual life after 1919.
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