Tangible Belonging: Negotiating Germanness in Twentieth-Century Hungary

By John C. Swanson

Tangible Belonging presents a compelling historical and ethnographic study of the German speakers in Hungary, from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century. Through this tumultuous period in European history, the Hungarian-German leadership tried to organize German-speaking villagers, Hungary tried to integrate (and later expel) them, and Germany courted them. The German speakers themselves, however, kept negotiating and renegotiating their own idiosyncratic sense of what it meant to be German. John C. Swanson's work looks deeply into the enduring sense of tangible belonging that characterized Germanness from the perspective of rural dwellers, as well as the broader phenomenon of "minority making" in twentieth-century Europe.

The chapters reveal the experiences of Hungarian Germans through the First World War and the subsequent dissolution of Austria-Hungary; the treatment of the German minority in the newly independent Hungarian Kingdom; the rise of the racial Volksdeutsche movement and Nazi influence before and during the Second World War; the immediate aftermath of the war and the expulsions; the suppression of German identity in Hungary during the Cold War; and the fall of Communism and reinstatement of minority rights in 1993.

Throughout, Swanson offers colorful oral histories from residents of the rural Swabian villages to supplement his extensive archival research. As he shows, the definition of being a German in Hungary varies over time and according to individual interpretation, and does not delineate a single national identity. What it meant to be German was continually in flux. In Swanson's broader perspective, defining German identity is ultimately a complex act of cognition reinforced by the tangible environment of objects, activities, and beings. As such, it endures in individual and collective mentalities despite the vicissitudes of time, history, language, and politics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Release date: Apr 19, 2017
• ISBN: 9780822981992

Book preview

Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies

JONATHAN HARRIS, EDITOR

TANGIBLE BELONGING

Negotiating Germanness in Twentieth-Century Hungary

JOHN C. SWANSON

UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260

Copyright © 2017, University of Pittsburgh Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Printed on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-6429-2

ISBN 10: 0-8229-6429-5

Cover art: Woman reading, Baranya county. Rudolf Hartmann Collection, Institut für Volkskunde der Deutschen des östlichen Europa

Cover design by Alex Wolfe

ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-8199-2 (electronic)

For Ágnes

Every Eye sees differently. As the Eye, Such the Object.

Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth.

WILLIAM BLAKE,

marginalia to Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

Note on Terminology

Maps

Introduction

1. A Rural World, before 1918

2. Cultural Contact, post 1918

3. Minority Making, 1920s

4. A Unique Identity, 1930s

5. The Volk Triumphant, the Second World War

6. Return to Minority, 1945–1993

Conclusion

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

PREFACE

The subjects of this book may be Germans living in Central Europe—more specifically, the German minority in Hungary—but the book’s purpose is to question the notion that Germans are Germans. I would argue that a term such as German, as well as similar expressions used to depict identity, nationality, ethnicity, citizenship, and race, convey what Pieter Judson has described as a deceptively (easy) empirical sense of familiarity.¹ We believe we know what is considered German, and we transfer that understanding to the past when we read and discuss primary and secondary sources. We ignore the temporality of historical knowledge.²

All too often the modern history of Central and Eastern Europe is portrayed as a series of nationality conflicts and the struggles of oppressed nationalities to gain consciousness and escape the tyranny of others.³ Alternatively, in the chapters that follow I eschew a study of a nation, a nationality, a minority in a time of self-discovery, and instead I examine how people throughout the twentieth century thought German—how individuals understood (and understand) an identity that has been designated by various constituencies as German. I do describe conflicts, but I understand them more as conflicts over identity than between national groups. My aim is to avoid an essentialist portrayal of Germans as a fixed and bounded category of analysis.⁴ However, it may be useful for me to begin with some statistical data—despite their problematic nature—in order to provide an introductory context.

Most of the German speakers in today’s Hungary arrived in the eighteenth century, long after the arrival of Germans who settled in Transylvania or in Upper Hungary (today’s Slovakia) or the migrations of German speakers to other regions of Central and Eastern Europe. These eighteenth-century immigrants to Hungary, often referred to there as Swabians, arrived a few decades before Catherine II of Russia began to settle Germans in the lower Volga region of Russia. Because many of the German speakers in the Kingdom of Hungary built new homes and villages along the Danube River, they also acquired the designation Danube Swabians.⁵

Image: FIGURE P.1. German settlements in Hungary, 1927. From Karl Bell, Das Deutschtum im Ausland (Dresden: Deutscher Buch- und Kunstverlag William Berger, 1927).

In post–First World War Hungary, German-speaking Hungarians lived mainly in communities west of Budapest; in southern Hungary; in the west, along the border with Austria; as well as in individual villages across the country. In the mid-interwar period (1930), the largest percentage (34.7 percent) lived in Baranya county, in southern Hungary, followed by 25.7 percent in Bács-Bodrog county, and 24.8 percent in Tolna county. The overwhelming majority of these German-speaking individuals (83 percent) lived in villages, and most of them were agricultural workers. Of these Hungarian Germans, 66 percent lived in communities containing a majority of Hungarian Germans, most often with additional self- and other-defined groups, such as Hungarians, Croats, or Serbs.⁶

Image: FIGURE P.2. Swabian farmhouse in Gara, Bács-Kiskun county. From Karl Bell, Das Deutschtum im Ausland (Dresden: Deutscher Buch- und Kunstverlag William Berger, 1927).

In 1920 there were 551,211 people in Hungary (6.9 percent of the total population) who registered in the census as having German as their mother tongue; the Germans were the largest minority in interwar Hungary. This number decreased to 478,630 (5.5 percent of the total population) in 1930. In 1941, when Hungarians were asked—for the first time—to identify their nationality as well as their mother tongue, 477,057 citizens (within the former borders of Trianon Hungary) considered German their mother tongue, but only 303,419 thought of themselves as belonging to the German nationality.⁷ After the Second World War those numbers would be reduced to an almost negligible amount. (These figures will of course acquire more meaning in the chapters that follow.)

At the point where this book’s explorations begin, there were 42 million Germans in East Central Europe, and they had become the largest ethnolinguistic group in the region.⁸ By the interwar years, Germans, along with Jews, was one of the two largest minorities in Eastern Europe. At the same time, rural dwellers continued to outnumber city dwellers in Europe, despite steady urban growth.⁹ Two factors provide the general context of the book, with the chapters providing various examples of the issues involved: (1) the large number of German speakers living abroad (who could be described as Auslandsdeutsche, Volksdeutsche, or as specific German minorities); and (2) the conditions of rural life in the twentieth century. I explain how Germanness was negotiated in one particular region, but many of the conversations and circumstances described below stretched across Central and Eastern Europe, and sometimes across the entire continent. A new, modern, secular, urbanized, homogenized, centralized way of life arrived in most places, even if at different times and at different speeds. It was a new world, one that offered alternative ways of belonging. The following stories and methods of understanding the concept of belonging may therefore be applicable to areas and situations beyond the Germans in Hungary.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Hungarian Germans and the issue of tangible belonging have woven themselves into the fabric of my life (as well as the lives of those around me) for more than a decade. I have labored in numerous archives and libraries in Hungary, Germany, Austria, and the United States, and I have listened to and bent the ears of many people. The list of those whose assistance, advice, and support deserve recognition is long, and since the research for this book merged with the work for my documentary film About a Village, individuals who helped with one project really helped with both. Allow me to recognize many of them and extend my equal gratitude to those who remain unnamed.

The research for the project began with summer IREX (International Research and Exchanges Board) grants and really took off when a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship allowed me to spend a year in Hungary. Additional support from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Center’s East European Studies Program, the Gerda Henkel Foundation, and the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies assisted me in continuing my research and provided me with the opportunity to write the manuscript. Various grants from Utica College also helped by letting me conduct shorter research trips between semesters.

Throughout the whole process of researching and writing, I spent a great deal of time in Hungary. The person who offered assistance from the very beginning was Attila Pók; he was always ready to meet and to facilitate connections. Béla Tomka and his family opened up their home to me on more than one occasion. Early on Loránt Tilkovszky shared his scholarship and offered insights into how the Hungarian Germans have been studied in the past, and individuals such as Ferenc Eiler, Györgyi Bindorffer, Károly Manherz, and Ágnes Tóth updated me on newer scholarship in Hungary. As I ventured out and searched for people at the village level, Wendelin Hambuch provided names, addresses, and phone numbers. In southern Hungary Miklós Füzes played the same role. Through Wendelin and Miklós I met János Eppel, Dániel Krähling, János Ravasz, András Újvári, and many more. Gábor Gonda and his parents introduced me to the village of Nagynyárád, where I met Antal Weisz, as well as other Nagynyáráders. Gyula Varju, a Budapest Rotarian, took me to Solymár to meet Hungarian Germans. Máté Fellner introduced me to Zsolt Czigányi and Szabolcs Varga, who assisted in getting access to many church logbooks. Máté also arranged a meeting with Ilona Kiszler. My Hungarian teacher, Frigyes Jónás, put me in touch with László Szita, through whom I met Etel Ness and her neighbors. Filmmakers István Szakály and Sándor Kiss helped in numerous ways. The whole project would have been unthinkable without the gracious assistance of the archivists and librarians in the National Archives of Hungary, the National Széchényi Library, and the archives of Baranya, Tolna, and Pest counties. Magdi Rott facilitated meetings in Máriakéménd, and Judit Strasser was always interested in every interview and every archival adventure.

I also spent more than two years in Germany conducting research, talking to people, and enjoying the solitude necessary for writing. The two people who helped me find my footing in Germany were Márta Fata and Gerhard Seewann. Márta invited me to the Institute for Danube Swabian History and Regional Studies in Tübingen, where I spent time familiarizing myself with much of the historical literature on ethnic Germans in East Central Europe. With the help of Dieter Langewiesche I spent a year at Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow, and Professor Langewiesche became (and remains) a source of inspiration for my work. In Sonja Levsen I found a good friend and colleague; she was the one who encouraged me to go to the new Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies. While in Freiburg I benefited from the collegiality and expertise of the great scholars in the institute, including Jörn Leonhard, Gregor Thum, Dietmar Neutatz, and Kathleen Canning, among others. I am very grateful for the assistance I received from archivists in the German Foreign Ministry Archives, the German Federal Archives, the Danube Swabian Museum, the Institute for Danube Swabian History and Regional Studies, and the Johannes Künzig Institute (Institute for the Ethnography of Germans in Eastern Europe), as well as from librarians in Tübingen and Freiburg.

In the United States there are also many people to thank. Gary Cohen helped me, both personally as well as through his work on Germans in Prague, when I first became interested in the topic. Individuals such as Robert Nemes, Michael Melancon, Peter Pastor, Nancy Wingfield, Catherine Portuges, Thomas Lorman, Deborah Cornelius, Árpád von Klimó, Holly Case, Paul Hanebrink, and Melissa Feinberg have offered advice and moral support along the way. Archivists at the National Archives and Records Administration provided great assistance. Much of the research for this book was conducted while I was a faculty member at Utica College, so I want to thank all my Utica College colleagues. At the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga I would like to extend thanks to my former colleague Wilfred McClay for his comments concerning the manuscript, as well as my new colleagues in the Department of History there. My students in Utica, Cracow, and Chattanooga listened attentively and discussed with interest ideas about nationalism and ethnic identity.

Of my many interview partners I want to thank first and foremost Elsa Koch, whom I initially met during an event organized by Henrike Hampe and Christian Glass at the Danube Swabian Museum in Ulm, Germany. Elsa shared her own stories about life in rural Hungary and in postwar Germany, and she introduced me to many other Hungarian Germans, such as Johann Kerner, Rosa Ruff, Gisela and Johann Pfilf, and Barbara Hummel. As the net widened I met and interviewed Ádám Rogner, József Schleicher, Ferenc Rott, Ottó Hoffmann, Ferenc Uzsoki, and many more.

At conferences and workshops in the United States, Germany, Hungary, Austria, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Canada, and Japan I presented various versions of this work and my ideas, and I want to thank everyone who listened and shared their thoughts. Robert Nemes, as well as Michael Melancon, read more than one draft of the manuscript, and both were always willing to read more. I also want to thank Dieter Langewiesche, Diane Matza, Tara Zahra, Kate Brown, Irina Marin, Jonathan Kwan, Maciej Janowski, and Zsolt Vitári for reading all or part of the manuscript, and I extend my thanks to the anonymous readers from the University of Pittsburgh Press. I am also deeply indebted to Peter Kracht and Alexander Wolfe of the University of Pittsburgh Press. There are many people who deserve my gratitude, but the one person who has supported me and been there through thick and thin, as well as read and carefully edited various versions of this manuscript, has been my wife, Ágnes Fellner. And last but by no means least, János, our golden retriever, who perhaps sacrificed the most when I left him behind for a total of three years in pursuit of this book project. He always bore my absences with patience (I owe eternal gratitude to my mother and her partner, Michael, who took care of him) and never failed to forgive me.

NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY

Despite the practice of many scholars who differentiate between Hungarians as all inhabitants of the country and Magyars as ethnic Hungarians, in this work I refer to the people of Hungary as Hungarians. The distinction made by many scholars does not exist in Magyar—the language of Hungary—and so I have chosen not to continue a mislabeling. I instead use the word Magyar to refer only to the language of Hungary, which is one of the correct uses of the word and one that has been adopted previously by scholars writing in English.¹⁰

When referring to the German speakers of Hungary I strive to use either the original expression (or its translation) employed at the time by the people whom I am describing or the one I believe best fits the given context. German speakers is perhaps the most versatile and accurate expression with which to describe the individuals speaking various German dialects in Hungary. I also favor the designations Swabian (a term that essentially refers to rural German speakers in Hungary, regardless of the fact that many of their ancestors had not emigrated from Swabia, in southwest Germany), as well as Hungarian German, perhaps the most common expression employed throughout the twentieth century. Scholars have argued that Hungarian German puts the emphasis on being German, while the older (and no longer used) expression German Hungarian puts it on being Hungarian.¹¹ Today Hungarian German has taken on a more neutral meaning referring to the German speakers of Hungary, which is the interpretation I prefer. To call these people German is more problematic, and I have striven to avoid that, except when it fits the particular context. (It will become more common in later chapters.) It is the very differences between these designations that constitutes the gist of the narrative in this book. (I provide more explanation as to what these terms mean in specific contexts in chapters 1 and 3.) To remain true to the sources, I occasionally use all of these expressions in the chapters that follow. When necessary, more clarification will be provided.

Throughout the text I often employ the descriptor inner Hungary, a term that I have found only in the work of C. A. Macartney; I use it for the area that remained as the Kingdom of Hungary after the First World War, when the country was reduced in size.¹² The other geographical designator that may not be familiar to readers is Swabian Turkey (Schwäbische Türkei/Sváb Törökország), which is used frequently by scholars working on the history of the Hungarian Germans. In its simplest interpretation Swabian Turkey refers to the southern region of Hungary, specifically the counties of Baranya, Tolna, and Somogy.¹³ This region received German-speaking immigrants (Swabians) after the Ottoman Empire (Turkey) was expelled from Hungary in the seventeenth century. It is the region where, by the twentieth century, the majority of the German speakers resided.

The expressions Volk, Volksdeutsche, and völkisch appear frequently in the chapters that follow, since they were often used by the Hungarian-German leadership and by Reich Germans (Germans from Germany). The word Volk in many ways came to replace nation—too strongly associated with the West, especially France—in Germany by the 1930s, and sometimes it carried the meaning of race.¹⁴ Ägidius Faulstich, a Hungarian-German leader, argued in 1939 that Volk was a natural phenomenon based on blood and language.¹⁵ Volksdeutsch is often translated as ethnic German, and I use that translation here, but it does not always express the overtones of blood and race that Volksdeutsch also contains.¹⁶ It is a word that was used by Reich Germans to describe members of the German Volk who were not citizens of Germany, most frequently Germans in the East.¹⁷ The adjective völkisch has been around since before the twentieth century, as a descriptor for a movement that promoted a sense of Germanness based on blood and descent, thereby replacing an early understanding that emphasized language, education, and liberal convictions.¹⁸ After 1933 the word völkisch became interchangeable with the term National Socialist, so in many contexts it referred to a relationship with the Nazi weltanschauung.¹⁹ Volk, Volksdeutsche, and völkisch are key expressions in this text, and since the way they were used and understood was in flux, it should be clear that they do not refer to the essential nature of individuals and groups, as they were often meant to, but rather to attempts to control and give meaning to individuals and groups.

Names of places are often problematic in this region of Europe, as there can be numerous correct versions and spellings, many of which have taken on a nationalistic edge. I most often use Hungarian place names, as this book is about the country of Hungary, but at times I may also provide alternative designators. Whenever there is confusion regarding such usage, I give explanations either in the text or in the notes. Translations in the book are my own unless noted otherwise.

MAPS

Image: MAP 1. German-speaking areas in nineteenth-century HungaryImage: MAP 2. German-speaking areas in post–First World War HungaryImage: MAP 3. Swabian TurkeyImage: MAP 4. Hungarian border changes between 1938 and 1941Image: MAP 5. Modern-day Hungary, with counties listed

INTRODUCTION

József Kakas, one of the hosts of the authors in Átány, related that as a schoolboy he often loitered around the village on summer evenings with his friends. They went to the church and talked as follows: We know that Hungary is in the center of the world, Átány in the center of Hungary, the church is standing in the very center of the village. Thus we stand in the center of the world. They observed that the sky is highest above the Átány church, sloping in a circle all around: this must in fact be the center of the world!

— Edit Fél, Proper Peasants (1969)

The often-used expression minority policy must in the near future be clearly defined in all of Europe. In Hungary we are getting closer to finally giving meaning to these words.

— Jakob Bleyer, Neues Wiener Journal, 5 January 1929

I visited the southern Hungarian village of Máriakéménd for the first time in the winter of 2006. I was there—on the advice of former members of the community now living in Germany—to meet with two men who could tell me about the way the German minority in Hungary lived before, during, and after the Second World War. (The village had been a German, that is, Swabian village before 1945.) When I arrived in the small community of approximately five hundred inhabitants, it was a chilly March morning and both Ádám Rogner and József Schleicher were already waiting at the mayor’s office. They were very eager to talk to me. Perhaps they were captivated by the idea that someone from the faraway United States was interested in their past, or perhaps they could hardly wait to tell their stories again, which seemed more likely.

We met in a conference room next to the mayor’s office, where an enormous rectangular table was waiting for us, surrounded by many empty chairs. Ádám and József sat on one side toward the middle and I on the other side. They both were nicely dressed: József in a colorful cardigan and Ádám with a gray-and-black sweater. At the time of our meeting they were in their early seventies, fit as fiddles, and very energetic.

I was prepared with questions about village and German life between the two world wars: How did rural German speakers understand their Germanness in relation to their German-speaking and non-German-speaking neighbors, as well as in terms of their relationship with Germany and with the Hungarian state? What did being German in Hungary mean at different times? I wanted to know how rural dwellers approached ethnic identity in early twentieth-century Central Europe. But we immediately plunged into a haphazard conversation that touched on a variety of topics. For example, Ádám described his journey in 1947, after he and his family had been expelled from Hungary for no reason except that they were Germans, to a camp near Dresden. József told me that his mother had been taken as a forced laborer to the Soviet Union in December 1944, hurt her shoulder when she fell off a truck, and was eventually returned to Hungary. (Upon her homecoming in 1949, she was the only family member left in the village, all others having been sent away.) I had to keep asking for dates in order to clarify the chronology, as József and Ádám often spoke without referring to time or at least some landmark events. Both of them set out with the intention to speak High German, yet elements of the local dialect inevitably seeped in.

From the seemingly often chaotic dialogue, a main topic emerged: what happened in the years immediately following the Second World War. Of course, these were the stories that the majority of people wanted to hear and also the ones that affected Ádám’s and József’s later lives the most. In 1944–45, at a time when many German-speaking and other Hungarians fled westward to avoid the approaching Soviet army, Ádám’s and József’s mothers and grandmothers (the fathers were away at war) had chosen to remain in their homes. But after two years of living in the new Hungary, their families, like most of the inhabitants of Máriakéménd and about half of all Hungarian German speakers, were transported to occupied Germany. Both Ádám’s and József’s families ended up in the Soviet zone. Unlike most German expellees, however, their families furtively returned to Hungary illegally, crossing borders on foot and evading police and soldiers. József, his grandmother, and his sister were captured upon their first attempt, put in jail for four weeks (Andrássy út 60, the location of the Hungarian secret police at the time, recently turned into a museum called the House of Terror), and returned to the Hungarian-Austrian border. The second time they successfully arrived back in their home village of Máriakéménd.

Image: FIGURE I.1. Young men and women at a dance in Máriakéménd, Baranya county. Photo courtesy of Elsa Koch.

Their stories strictly adhered to facts—when they were expelled and how they returned—but I managed to broach a few other issues as well. I did get them to talk a little about life in a more peaceful and simple prewar village, which they viewed as 100 percent German—without giving too much thought as to what German meant at the time or even today. Ádám also recalled his family’s back-breaking struggle to save enough money to buy back their original home—Hungarians expelled from Slovakia had been placed in the houses once owned by Germans. All the while, the unvoiced substance of our whole conversation was that the village of Máriakéménd (as an example of many Swabian villages across Hungary, as well as many rural communities in Central and Eastern Europe) occupied a central role in the lives of the people who lived there. So much so that Ádám and József did not hesitate to endanger their lives in order to return to the place where their ancestors had settled a little more than two hundred years earlier, notwithstanding that they had been forcibly removed as Germans from a non-German state.

Back in their home village by the late 1940s, being German had become an almost entirely private affair. Publicly self-ascribing as German was taboo, and membership in an imagined community of Germans had been discredited, especially for a minority population that now found itself in one of the new people’s democracies of Eastern Europe. How and to what extent did this situation affect the lives of German speakers in Hungary? And how did they get to this point? If they defined themselves (and others defined them) as Germans, what did (and does) that mean? And did that understanding of being German undergo changes from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century—a century during which homogenized, standardized, urbanized, and secular nation-states became commonplace? I went in quest of what it meant to be German for the rural German speakers of Hungary—to produce a case study in how ethnic and national categories acquired and modified their meaning. This book presents what I discovered.

HUNGARIAN GERMANS

Historians frequently integrate the history of the German minority in Hungary into German nationalist history.¹ German speakers in Hungary are considered components of a larger Germandom, with a clear ethnic relationship to the mother country. All too often German speakers in Hungary (like all Germans abroad) are portrayed with reference to the twentieth century either as fascists (Hitler’s fifth column), who therefore deserved to be expelled from Hungary and the new nation-states of Eastern Europe after the Second World War, or as pawns who received unfair treatment at the hands of local officials and the Allied Powers.² These extreme positions partly stem from moral and ethical questions connected to both German involvement in the war and German suffering after the war, which in this sense has rendered their history a sensitive topic for serious scholarship.³

When these German speakers appear in Hungarian nationalist history (or in general European history), they are often presented as one of several distinct groups (usually referred to in this context as nationalities).⁴ The nationality story is on the one hand one of competition: struggles for self-liberation from a different nationality’s or a nation’s domination, the purpose of which is to obtain freedom to live as Germans, for example. On the other hand, there are observers, such as the composer Béla Bartók, who offer a peaceful image of coexistence between the various nationalities. Peasants are entirely free of hate against other nationalities, and have always been, Bartók wrote. They live together peacefully, each speaking their own language, following their own traditions, and finding it entirely natural that their neighbor of a different mother tongue does the same.⁵ Both of these perspectives, however, rely on the nationalist assumption that Germans and similar groups are homogeneous, bounded, and clearly distinguishable from other such groups, and neither perspective is therefore helpful when trying to comprehend how people understood their belonging to an entity that is essentially a social construct.

The traditional historiography of Central Europe since the late nineteenth century also supports the notion of a region with divergent and competing ethnic groups: the Habsburg monarchy was a multinational state—a mosaic of peoples or a prison of peoples—and the First World War was the ultimate conflict between these peoples. In the customary narrative, the dismantling of the monarchy is the logical destiny for an archaic multinational state.⁶

Newer scholarship has challenged this story, most recently by offering portrayals of national indifference in the region. Pieter Judson, Tara Zahra, and Jeremy King, among others, have successfully argued that the history of Central and Eastern Europe was not only about acquiring national consciousness or about inevitable struggles between nations and nationalities.⁷ It was also about what was not recorded: national indifference, often associated with bilingualism, national hermaphrodites, side switchers, and amphibians.⁸ Zahra’s study about the history of nationalist activism concerning children demonstrates that nationalist battles over children in the Bohemian Lands did not typically pit Czechs against Germans in a world of national polarization; instead, conflicts raged over who was Czech and who was German in a world of national ambiguity.⁹ Zahra and others have changed the narrative: they assert that, instead of national difference and conflict, indifference constitutes a new form of agency for citizens in a world of competing nationalist movements and nationalizing states.¹⁰ Forms of identity are defined not only from the top down but just as much from the bottom up, and despite the fact that the new focus on national indifference has been criticized for restricting the interpretation to either national or non-national modes of identification, the addition of national indifference as a category of analysis challenges scholars to think in new and innovative ways about ethnicity, nationalism, and identity.¹¹

The Germanness of rural German speakers in twentieth-century Hungary, however, was characterized by aspects beyond the dichotomy of national or indifference to being national. I am arguing that, like many residents of Central and Eastern Europe, the German speakers of Hungary understood their identity as German even before the twentieth century, but what that meant varied according to time and perspective; it did not always represent a national identity. The competition did not take place between national and non-national forms of identity but over what categories such as German meant. My subject therefore is not just the categories themselves but the cognitive process of understanding those categories’ significance for a rural population.

When I first approached this topic, I borrowed the civic-ethnic model that scholars beginning with Hans Kohn have used to describe variations in national identity in Western and Eastern Europe, with areas farther east described in ethnic terms only, without the Western sensibilities of civic loyalty.¹² But what I discovered could not be presented as a dual identity (or dual loyalty) consisting of a German ethnic identity and a Hungarian civic identity, no matter how good that sounded, since doing so would oversimplify the fact that all personal identities are complex representations of categories that are both distinct and overlapping. More contemporary studies on hybridity, especially some recent literature on borderlands, seemed more useful.¹³ Hungarian Germans could conceivably be seen as possessing a hybrid identity mixing elements of Hungarianness and Germanness. But this would imply that there were pure components of ethnic or national identities that mixed together to form a hybrid identity—the myth of pure wholes whose intersection generates intermixture, as Pamela Ballinger so aptly puts it in her critique of the concept of hybridity.¹⁴ The hybrid model does prove useful in understanding why people make certain choices, yet it does not satisfactorily explain the entire gamut of complex behavior that I found.

In many ways Gustav Gratz, a Hungarian-German politician and diplomat, had already articulated this same problem in 1938, even though he did not use the expression hybridity. When people referred to the Hungarian Germans as a people with two souls, Gratz countered,

Outside of our borders it is often inconceivable how it is possible for the Hungarian German to integrate his loyalty to his Volk with his loyalty to his fatherland so impeccably, that the two deeply felt obligations never contradict each other. Those who live in an environment where the concepts of belonging are identical with state and Volk see this as ambivalence and thus describe Hungarian Germandom ironically as a people with two souls. Yet, no one should be shaken by this in his loyal attitude toward Volk and state, which is congruent with hundreds of years of Hungarian-German tradition. As it is not impossible to love one’s father and one’s mother the same way, and to regard it as a heartfelt necessity to loyally perform one’s duty to both, it is likewise not only possible, but even one’s obligation to be equally true and devoted to one’s Volk and to one’s fatherland. . . . The less those abroad understand these circumstances and the consequent mindset of the Hungarian Germans, however, the more valid the latter’s demand that they not be reproached for their unique attitude regarding the relationship between Volk and state and that it be their prerogative to find the correct path that follows from their unusual situation and perception.¹⁵

The German speakers of Hungary were, according to Gratz, one people with undivided minds—a people who lived in harmony with their loyalty to the German Volk (understood as the German motherland) and to the Hungarian fatherland. Gratz realized what many contemporary nationalistic thinkers, as well as more modern scholars, did not: Hungarian Germans did not fit into the narrowly defined categories of either German or Hungarian. They were their own people; their consciousness was not split into two separate souls. But even this more nuanced perspective on their world ignores the fact that Hungarian Germans, just like all similar groups defined by such terms, are not an actual group but rather a representation of arenas teeming with competing interests—junctures where negotiations are constantly taking place over the meaning of such categories as German.

As I was trying to understand the relationships between different constituencies vying for control of the meaning of categories like German, much of my research was guided by Rogers Brubaker’s proposed triadic nexus for the study of nationness. His nexus, which places the nationalizing state, the external homeland, and the national minority in a competitive political field, was a useful tool as I thought about how to explain the various participants in the negotiations, but it became clear early on that the triadic nexus leaves out the people—the individuals—who either defined themselves or were defined by others as, in this particular case, Germans. Brubaker’s national minority is not so much about the people, specifically the rural dwellers, who are the subjects of my research as it is about the abstract concept. The further I delved into the subject, the more I realized that there were additional members to be considered in the negotiations.

I came to the conclusion that German speakers in Hungary, similar to all peoples in Central and Eastern Europe, were struggling, perhaps not always consciously, to comprehend the designations that defined them as Germans (and also as Hungarians or as peasants, for example), as well as striving to participate in the defining process itself. They both actively and passively engaged in imparting meaning to their identity. The focus therefore should not be on nationality conflicts (or peaceful coexistence) between peoples—or on national differentiation or national indifference—but rather on the process of giving meaning to categories. This perspective reveals the agency that each person had and has to comprehend and define his or her identity and his or her sense of belonging. By not treating Germans as a real group—and instead problematizing the category of German—it becomes evident that people understood German in multiple ways. This realization is essential for any valid explanation as to how the meaning changed throughout the long twentieth century. As Prasenjit Duara has argued, the self is constituted neither primordially nor monolithically but within a network of changing and often conflicting representations.¹⁶

CATEGORIES

Even though the central characters in this book are the half-million German speakers of inner Hungary from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century, the underlying subject is the act of categorizing and the process of choosing an identity that affects all people in our modern world. I start from the premise that nations, minorities, and any such groups are not real in an organic (a priori) sense but that they function as real groups in social practice. They are variables, not constants. It is the nationalists and those who fall into their trap who treat such groups as internally homogeneous and externally bounded and portray such entities as the main actors in history. In the chapters that follow, all groups are treated not as things in the world but as perspectives on the world.¹⁷ I am telling the story of Hungarian Germans, but I am really narrating the contest to give meaning to being German.

Scholars and nonscholars alike use categories to define identities because categories provide structure for societies’ mental images. As George Lakoff argues, without the ability to categorize, we could not function at all, either in the physical world or in our social and intellectual lives.¹⁸ But each category is imbued with multiple meanings. Brubaker contends that we often rely on official (or top-down) categorization, which rarely portrays the understanding of ordinary people:

Studies of official categorization practices generally argue or imply that the ways in which states and other organizations count, classify, and identify their subjects, citizens, and clients have profound consequences for the self-understanding of the classified. This is no doubt often the case, but the connection between official categories and popular self-understandings is seldom demonstrated in detail. And the literature on classification and categorization in everyday life shows that the categories used by ordinary people in everyday interaction often differ substantially from official categories. The categorized are themselves chronic categorizers; the categories they deploy to make sense of themselves and others need not match those employed by states, no matter how powerful.¹⁹

In order to comprehend official and everyday categorizations in their interconnectedness, as well as the individuals doing the categorizing, we need to decipher the negotiations that took place on the everyday level among the rural German speakers and between them and other, more official constituencies over the meaning of categories and how those negotiations provided identity to individual people.

THE IDEA OF TANGIBLE BELONGING

The narrative in the following chapters begins in 1867 with the Compromise Agreement—the Ausgleich—that reconceptualized the Austrian Empire as two halves, and it ends with the first minority legislation in democratic Hungary, in 1993. By covering the long twentieth century of Central European history—a century often associated with the Second World War—I can present the story of how the meaning of being German in Hungary has changed over time. The German speakers may have always considered themselves German, but the significance of that expression has always been in negotiation.

The question I pose is not the typical one. Instead of asking when or how the nation was constructed or imagined, I want to know what it meant to be German. Did being German signify belonging to a nation, a Volk, a minority, a family, a village? By inverting the question, I am able to engage with the rural dwellers (the German speakers of Hungary) and their perception of Germanness, as well as to better decipher how rural German speakers understood their identity as Germans or as something else. What did and do these categories represent?

This book is therefore not about peasants into Germans—a linear path that led premodern people to become national or led early forms of identity to become racial.²⁰ At first glance the story could be described as a metamorphosis of German-speaking Hungarians into Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans), but what was taking place was not a transformation; it was not about gaining national consciousness. Ideas concerning belonging were continually being negotiated. A changed context might have altered the terms of that negotiation, but while it encouraged some people to redefine their understanding of being German in a certain way, it influenced others to defend a different interpretation. It is this struggle over being German that underlies the narrative in the chapters that follow.

The main thesis of this book is that the majority of German speakers in Hungary had—and maintained well into the twentieth century—a local, tangible understanding of being German, even while confronted with numerous alternative ideas offering much more abstract forms of Germanness. Other scholars have emphasized local and regional identities in Central Europe, often in contrast with more national ones.²¹ However, at least in the case of the Hungarian Germans, that local identity was not antithetical to being German; on the contrary, it was German. German referred to a tangible belonging in this case, denoting a mental construct that is derived from the tactile environment of an individual: objects, activities, and beings that are experienced through the various senses of vision, sound, smell, touch, and so forth. This identity, however, should not be thought of as more real than abstract ideas of national belonging based on views of large groups of individuals and vast expanses of land that one cannot personally explore. I am still referring to products of the mind, although they are closely related to the immediate environment.²²

Tangible belonging also implies thinking in terms of a center (a vertical or hierarchical organization of the world) compared to thinking in terms of borders (a horizontal organization).²³ When people describe themselves as looking out from the center, they frequently characterize themselves as subjects of a local landlord, as villagers, as rural dwellers, as residents of a particular community, or even as inhabitants of a specific house.²⁴ Their identity is centered in a place, and their relationship with others is understood in relationship with that place—that center. In contrast, thinking with borders (even if only cultural and not physical borders) looking in usually implies membership in a larger, more anonymous entity and draws much clearer distinctions between those inside the borders and those beyond them. Focus on a center often implies physical, tangible connections, whereas thinking in terms of borders implies a move toward more abstraction. Abstract perspectives are associated with what Benedict Anderson refers to as the time when people began to think the nation, although in this case it is how they think German, at least how they think German in a new way.²⁵

Tangible belonging, as I have conceived the term, is not a return to the cultural stuff that Fredrik Barth hoped to steer us away from in his introduction to the 1969 collection Ethnic Groups and Boundaries.²⁶ Instead, my use of the term refers more to how people understand the relationship between themselves and what they see and experience—how they understand the place in which they live. In thinking about this, I was most influenced by the story of József Kakas, a boy in Átány, who remembers when as a child he stood in the village church and thought that he and his friends must be in the center of the world, since in their minds the church was in the center of the village, the village in the center of the country, and the country in the center of the world.²⁷ Anna Stallenberger, in a letter to the German ethnographer Alfred Cammann, also seems to be referring to the same notion when she quotes a poem about a father who tells his son that their homeland is everything that the eye can see: the mountains, the valleys, the rivers, and the vineyards.²⁸

Forms of tangible and centered belonging are perhaps most associated with the premodern world—a world with reduced mobility (compared to today)—in which fewer players competed to control identity. This association creates the danger of interpreting the kind of self-understanding that I am describing here as an anachronistic identity that persisted in the modern world.²⁹ Yet a dyadic approach that opposes premodern (traditional) and modern attitudes is problematic in itself, since it implies mutually exclusive opposites and a teleological view of history. Tangible (centered) belonging was not simply a remnant of the premodern past; it existed and also thrived in the modern world (a more secular, literate, economically and politically liberal, industrial world). Terms such as premodern, modern, and traditional are not used here to emphasize progress, a linear development, or to compare forms of modernity, but rather these terms assist the reader in orienting changes across time, as well as constants across time.³⁰ I try to avoid giving these designators of historical periods qualitative meanings. As will become obvious in the conclusion of this book, some sense of tangible belonging is even present today.

Negotiations between tangible (centered), abstract (bordered), and other forms of identity were and are ongoing; as events and processes repeatedly reframe the discussion (or at least encourage something new), the competition over the meaning of categories such as German intensifies.³¹ Perhaps one of the most significant structural and cultural transformations during the twentieth century was the rise of modern, homogenizing societies (and nation-states). Scholars of nationalism such as Benedict Anderson, E. J. Hobsbawm, and Ernest Gellner argued—decades ago—that novel forms of communication and social conditions (beginning around the time of the French Revolution) caused new forms of national identity (and nationalism) to occur. Eugen Weber, in Peasants into Frenchmen, describes the impersonal factors of modernization that changed people’s relationship with the nation in the late nineteenth century.³² Kate Brown, in a very sophisticated biography of no place, highlights how local, rural, culturally complex communities were upset and then destroyed by modern states. She places a great deal of emphasis on the homogenizing consequences of modernity. Historians such as Keely Stauter-Halsted do not necessarily stress the impersonal power of the modern world but instead demonstrate how rural elites embraced more national identities (increasingly prominent in the modern era) as a vehicle for social and political change.

It is hardly disputable that modernity established conditions that encouraged standardization, thereby championing identities defined by ever larger, more homogeneous groups. I also agree that individuals (not just elites) chose these broader identities in order to enjoy social mobility. Yet the transition to modernity did not immediately result in less culturally complex societies. Instead, the addition of other possible (in this case, mainly more abstract) ideas concerning belonging led to various identity crises, as well as competition for control of the categories that were used to describe different forms of belonging. One such struggle took place over what it meant to be German.

Confrontations between different ways of understanding categories like German or Hungarian were common throughout the twentieth century.³³ German-speaking villagers in Hungary navigated their lives and their sense of identity between the local, phenomenal world they inhabited and the growing impersonal influences brought to the villages by contact with various representatives of the Hungarian state, Germany, and the Hungarian-German leadership in Budapest. The villagers’ tangible understanding of Germanness was now in competition with various other forms of an abstract, imagined sense of Germany and Hungary (or Germandom and Hungariandom)—entities understood by some as the German speakers’ motherland or fatherland, respectively.

The changes associated with the advent of the modern (more mobile, more closely connected) world intensified the competition over the meaning of all categories, and especially between tangible (centered) belonging and various newer abstract (often bordered) perspectives. The competition or negotiations culminated in the interwar period, as the dominant form of thinking across Europe emphasized internally homogeneous and externally bounded nations, ethnic groups, and races. During this period, tangible belonging did not disappear; it was weakened. Not until the end of the Second World War (at least for the German speakers of Hungary) were the terms of the contest radically altered and the tangible, local identity essentially eliminated, when half the German population was expelled from their homes and villages to an unknown and alien Germany. (For the Germans who remained, being German became taboo.)

The Hungarian Germans illustrate the new competition that developed in many places regarding the meaning of such categories, as the transformation of modernity took place. This competition is one between cognitive positions—positions concerning how people understood being German—what Brubaker so aptly refers to as perspectives on the world.³⁴ This work may be the story of Hungarian Germans, but in its key aspects it is also the history of most people in twentieth-century Central and Eastern Europe. The transition affected virtually everyone; identities were defined anew and in multifarious ways. The act of identification was really a process of negotiation between individuals (and imagined groups) concerning different ideas regarding belonging. And for many rural people, particularly the German speakers of Hungary, tangible belonging endured and struggled against many new, more abstract forms of belonging.

Image: FIGURE I.2. Winter pilgrimage, Máriakéménd, Baranya county. Photo courtesy of Ottó Hoffmann.

LOGISTICS

Telling this story—the story of the German speakers in rural Hungary—requires an innovative approach to sources, since the protagonists themselves left us very few documents. There are numerous printed sources from the perspective of the Hungarian government—the national government and local county, district, and community officials—and from the Hungarian-German leadership. There is also material from Reich German organizations and individuals who visited and studied the Swabian villages. These more official sources I read with a critical eye in order to determine how the local population reacted to various ideas and concepts brought to them from outside the local community. I also consulted a number of church logbooks, in which the parish priests—in closer contact with the peasants and artisans—present different, more local views. (These are essentially journals written by the parish priests chronicling activities in the communities. They vary in length and detail.) In addition, I interviewed numerous elderly Hungarian Germans, both in Hungary and in Germany. These varied sources allow me to at least partially re-create the world in which the struggle over being German occurred during the twentieth century.

The narrative in the chapters that follow is constructed in multiple layers. Each chapter begins with an ethnographic discussion that introduces particular sources (both written and oral) and suggests the main theme for the time period under investigation (the rural world for the pre-1918 period, cultural contact for the post–First World War era, minority making for the 1920s, and so on). The subsections that follow serve as snapshots of different layers of understanding that highlight how various individuals and groups (the Hungarian state, the Hungarian-German leadership, the German mother country, and the different rural linguistic groups) not only understood the meaning of Germanness vis-à-vis the German speakers of Hungary but also competed for control over what it meant to be German. (If a subsection concentrates on outside influences, such as the Hungarian state, for example, it ends with a discussion of how those outside views affected rural German speakers and begot their escalating identity crisis.) The narrative is therefore not driven by straightforward cause-and-effect relationships but by an episodal structure that encourages the reader to experience the various viewpoints simultaneously.

I seek to understand how the rural German speakers thought German—what being German meant for them—at different times. In order to be honest to the endeavor, the first person frequently appears in the text, as do time shifts from past to present when appropriate. The book, in many ways, reflects my conversation with the sources. I cannot avoid being part of the story, as I am the one newly interpreting the documents and piecing them together to re-create an image of the past, introducing my version of order in the midst of chaos. I try to let various voices speak for themselves, but they always speak through me. In this way, I have become an ethnographer, searching for Germans but trying to let the Hungarian Germans tell me what German meant for them and how they put their understanding of being German into practice. German is treated more as a category of practice rather than a category of analysis, as I try to decipher the competing meanings of the expression during the twentieth century. My position as an American scholar, speaking both German and Hungarian, traveling frequently between the United States and Europe, makes me critical of rigid ethnic and national categories, which in many ways continue to inform our discussions of identity, especially in the United States. In this book, I—the historian-become-ethnographer—describe the world that has come to life through my research, my notes, my conversations, and my thoughts. No narrative is completely objective: this is my attempt to tell the history of the German speakers in Hungary.

CHAPTER 1

A Rural World, before 1918

The Hungarian-German Swabians were a faithful mirror image of their former south-German and west-German Heimat.

— Rudolf Hartmann, Deutsche Volkskunde in Ungarn (1934)

The presumption that the Germans living here [in Hungary] have some kind of connection with their former homeland, which they left more than two hundred years ago, is completely erroneous.

— A village priest speaking to his companion, from the novel Winterlamm (1992), by Márton Kalász

INTERVIEWING ANTAL WEISZ

I met Antal Weisz, an elderly farmer in the southern Hungarian village of Nagynyárád, in early 2002.¹ He was one of my first interview partners in a former Hungarian-German village. (Most of my interviews until then had been with former villagers now living in more urban areas.) My hope was that these various discussions would allow me to move beyond the archives and to better comprehend how Hungarian Germans live and how they remember the decisions that defined them before, during, and after the Second World War.

On a cool January morning I traveled by bus from the city of Pécs to Bóly (known as Németbóly—meaning German Bóly—before 1945). Gábor Gonda, a history student at the University of Pécs and a friend of mine, picked me up in a Russian-made Lada and drove the five kilometers to the village of Nagynyárád, where the Gonda family and Antal Weisz resided. Tóni bácsi (Uncle Tóni, the familiar nickname that everyone used to address Herr Weisz) was a friend of Gábor’s family. Gábor had already interviewed Tóni bácsi for his master’s thesis on the expulsions of Swabians from Nagynyárád in 1946. For my interview with Tóni bácsi, Gábor accompanied me. We walked the winding, peopleless roads from the Gonda home—a renovated, modern house—through the village, passed the large baroque church, descended to a newer road, and finally arrived at the farm of Antal Weisz.

We entered through the rear door, the same one used by his family and the farmhands. His daughter let us in. Tóni bácsi had been expecting us, yet we had to wait while he finished getting dressed. (I have met with Tóni bácsi many times since, and he always seemed to be wearing the same green, fatigue-type outfit.) Tóni bácsi is blind; he lost his sight as an adult. Without any known reason, his ability to see slowly diminished, and at this point he does not detect anything.

In an interview I learned to let the person say what he or she wants to tell me. With Hungarian Germans, as pointed out in the introduction, the conversation invariably starts and ends with the expulsions: the forced removal of about half the German-speaking population from Hungary in the aftermath of the Second World War. When their need for sharing the trauma somewhat subsides, I ask them to tell me about life in the village before the war. I followed the same strategy with Tóni bácsi. For this conversation, I asked him to speak German; in later interviews we spoke Hungarian. I