Az amerikai magyar múlt emlékei –
Válogatás a Vasváry-gyűjtemény könyveiből és dokumentumaiból

Kiállítással egybekötött gyűjtemény-bemutató az AHEA–konferencia résztvevői számára

2010. június 3. (csütörtök) 17.00-18.00 és június 4. (péntek) 17.30-18.30

Helyszín: Somogyi-könyvtár, Vasváry-gyűjtemény
Kurátor: Kórász Mária
6720 Szeged, Dóm tér 1-4. (3. emelet)

Tel.: (06-62) 425-525

My paper examines at the turn of the 20th century history of Neolog Jewish race theories. I analyze how Neolog Jews were influenced by the race theories of Hungarian nationalism and drew up alternative racial definitions of Jewishness and Hungarianness. I point out how their discourses were multidimensional and even self-contradictory about who is a Hungarian. I document the diversity as well as introduce the framework of Hungarian Jewish discourses of self-understanding with relation to Hungarian nationalism, anti-Semitism, and Oriental Studies. By focusing on the idea of national unity and common origin I am able to go into the subtext of the relationship between Hungarians and Jews. My goal is to draw a portrait of a group and explain their importance. I approach their discourse through an intellectual historiography. In promoting the idea of a race-based identity these scholars imitated European theories of culture and civilization, and also offered their own personal interpretations of the relationship between race and nation, an interpretation, which reflected the particular ethnic condition of Hungary. The examination of their ideas gives us a perspective that is significant for understanding modern Hungary at large and specifically is essential to the understanding of the self-imaginings of a Hungarian minority community.

In 1849, after the Hungarian military surrender to the combined forces of Russia and Austria, a small group of exiles from Komárom under the leadership of Count Lajos Ujházy arrived in the United States. They were accompanied by a gifted young Hungarian-Jewish violinist named Ede Reményi, who, prior to the surrender at Világos, had been an aide-de-camp to General Görgey. The Americans greeted the exiles with extraordinary warmth as their country’s equivalent of America’s founding fathers. New Yorkers greeted them at the boats, and took them into their homes. As Lajos Kossuth’s representative, Ujházy passionately argued the Hungarian cause to the large throngs that greeted the exiles wherever they went, and he met with President Zachary Taylor in the White House to try to secure Kossuth’s release from detainment in Turkey. Throughout their sojourn, the exiles were aided by Reményi, who raised significant sums of money with a series of high-profile benefit concerts in New York, Philadelphia and elsewhere. The following year, Kossuth was released from detention and journeyed to America. Ujházy and his fellow exiles remained in the US, eventually founding the settlement of New Buda in Decatur County, Iowa. Reményi returned to Europe, where he remained active in the Hungarian resistance, perhaps as a spy.
Ede Reményi has peen poorly treated by history. Once a famous concert violinist, he is now known principally for his discovery of a young Hamburg piano teacher named Johannes Brahms. Reményi’s concert tour with Brahms in 1853 paved the way for Brahms’s subsequent “discovery” by Joseph Joachim, Franz Liszt, and, most famously, by Robert Schumann. Reményi’s relationship with Brahms ended badly, with mutual recriminations. As a result, Brahms’s biographers have almost universally dismissed Reményi as being unreliable, of poor character, and a musical charlatan. But is this a true picture? Some of the most respected Brahms biographers continue to write that Reményi never traveled to the United States in 1849, despite easily obtainable proof to the contrary. Slanders of Reményi’s character have been repeated uncritically for more than a century. Reményi was a colorful, flamboyant figure, an enthusiastic Magyar, who spent his entire life and career promoting Hungarian culture in the most far-flung corners of the world. Through his embrace of Hungarian folk and national music, he can be considered an early example of the “crossover artist.” Who was the real Ede Reményi, and what was his true contribution to the cause of Hungarian nationalism? This paper will attempt to establish some of the facts of his early life.

On several occasions, composers György Ligeti (1923-2006) spoke about an early literary memory that he credited with the origins of his meccanico style. He recalled reading a short story by Gyula Krúdy (1878-1933) at the age of five, in which Krúdy supposedly wrote about a widow who lived in an old house filled with constantly ticking clocks. To date, the best Krúdy experts have been unable to identify the story in question, and it is reasonable to assume that in Ligeti's mind, actual elements from the writer's work were freely recombined and reimagined at a time when the compositions partly inspired by the Krúdy experience had already been written.
In addition, there is an aspect of Ligeti's recollection of Krúdy that has not received all the attention it deserves. In his conversations with Péter Várnai, the composer spoke of machines that were working or not working (emphasis mine), and elevators stopping at the wrong floor, or not starting at all. Some of the meccanico works are worth revisiting in search of such “malfunctions” as we try to reimagine the old house where not all the clocks might have been running like clockwork.
This paper proposal is submitted in honor of the 100th anniversary of Ligeti’s birth.

The World Council of Churches (WCC) is a federation of churches that maintain their structural and doctrinal independence while striving for closer cooperation in areas where they can agree. The WCC’s periodic assemblies elect a Central Committee that meets annually in different countries. In 1954 a Hungarian Protestant delegate extended an invitation for the committee to hold its annual meeting for 1956 in Communist Hungary, and this invitation was accepted in 1955. The meeting took place during a nine day period in July 1956 in the mountain resort of Galyatető on Hungary’s northern border with Slovakia, with an estimated 400 participants. A statement was presented for debate entitled “The Churches and the Building of a Responsible International Society” that ended, in the version that received final approval, with an endorsement of freedom of conscience and freedom to travel— on which 200,000 Hungarians would act by fleeing Hungary after the defeat of the Revolution. What did the WCC hope to achieve by meeting in Hungary, and the Hungarian authorities in inviting and hosting it in 1956? Did the meeting have an impact on the epochal events that followed it? I will propose answers to these questions in the light of the WCC Archives in Geneva and the Hungarian archives in Budapest.

The World Council of Churches (WCC) brings together many Christian churches seeking to express their common faith. In 1954 a Hungarian delegate invited the WCC to convene its periodic Central Committee meeting in Hungary, and it took place there July 28-August 5, 1956 following preparatory meetings outside Hungary and with the Hungarian authorities. The 200 attendees included 90 committee members but also many East European guests from Hungary and neighboring countries. In Hungary, WCC leaders engaged discretely with the authorities about the repression of religion, including the fate of Cardinal Mindszenty (though Catholics were not members of the WCC) and Lutheran Bishop Lajos Ordass. During the meeting the delegates debated and promulgated resolutions on “Proselytism and Religious Liberty” and “The Churches and the Building of a Responsible International Society.” The final text of the latter resolution concluded with a statement supporting free movement of populations that anticipates the flight of refugees after the Revolution. During the Revolution, Mindszenty and Ordass were restored briefly to office and the WCC expressed its support for the Hungarian people’s desire for freedom. Later, Communist authorities asserted the WCC helped provoke the Revolution, a charge the WCC denied. In historical perspective we must question both the Communist charges and those of Christian conservatives that the WCC was soft on Communism. The fact remains that the WCC leadership was largely West European and American, and it played a major role in the reception of Hungarian refugees. Sources include the WCC Archives in Geneva.

Hungarian-American conductor Fritz Reiner (1888-1963) held numerous posts in Europe and the US as the musical director of opera and symphony orchestras, as well as a teaching position at the Curtis Institute. While much scholarship has been produced about his precise conducting style, demanding rehearsal techniques, and for his landmark recordings of works by Bartók, Wagner, and Strauss, his own writings—particularly essays and speeches—have received less scrutiny. Based on archival research on Reiner’s papers at Northwestern University, this paper examines several unpublished and published writings by Reiner on a variety of musical topics, such as his interpretation of the works of Wagner, Strauss, and Mahler, and his ideas on creating an effective phonograph recording. At least one of the essays appeared in the syndicated newspaper column “Walter Winchell in New York”, for which Reiner served as a guest writer in 1943, while others were prepared as speeches for various audiences, including his students and major orchestra donors. Through study of these varied writings, scholars and musicians can better understand Reiner’s approach to interpreting the music of major composers, his philosophy of conducting and programming for audiences in the concert hall, on the radio, and on television, his pedagogical goals and outlook on the future of American musical life post-WWII, as well as his attitude toward demands placed on him as a conductor in his positions as musical director of the Chicago and Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestras.

During my presentation, I focus on theatre: the theatre scene has undergone a major transformation in the last few years. On the one hand, the high degree of uncertainty that characterised the cultural industry has deepened as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic, and on the other hand, theatres have been trying to operate beyond their own limits in a period of temporary quarantine culture. In this paper, I will review the terminology of quarantine culture and pandemic.I do this with the intention of taking a provisional sample of the practice of the main, or Hungarian, theatre era through a specific 'filter'. In the remainder of the theoretical introduction, I will present the logic of the main and peripheral cultural industries and briefly describe their characteristics, and outline a narrative of a transformation that has taken place in the cultural industries. Following the introduction, I will organise the paper along these concepts, thereby discussing the phenomena of presence, performance, reception and mediatisation through the solutions of the Hungarian theatre scene in a given period, and show how the theatre field was able to achieve a transformation through a process of mediatisation, which I believe was not organic or 'violent', and which also implied a partial integration into the mechanisms of the main cultural fields.

Béla Kovrig (1900-1962) was a professor of sociology, Christian democratic politician, and a prominent member of public life in interwar Hungary. After confrontation with Communist authorities Kovrig left Hungary in October 1948, and, after a short stay in Italy, emigrated in the United States. He settled in Milwaukee and became a professor of sociology at Marquette Univervsity. Kovrig also actively participated in the American-Hungarian émigré community’s politics. He joined the Hungarian National Committee, the umbrella organization of the Hungarian expatriate community, and helped the work of Ferenc Nagy and István Barankovics.
In 1957 Kovrig started a research among the Hungarian refugees of 1956. He prepared a questionnaire, which was distributed among thousands of refugees in the United States and Canada, and he also made some interviews with certain freedom fighters. He summarized and analized his findings in his manuscript “National Communism and Hungary. The Way of an Idea – A Sociological Account”, which was preserved in the Raynor Memorial Libraries at Marquette University and finally published in Hungarian (Kovrig Béla: Nemzeti kommunizmus és Magyarország. Egy eszme története) in 2016.
In my contribution I introduce Kovrig’s theory, summarize his results and show the historical context of his researches. My presentation is based on archival and documentary material that can be found at Marquette University in Milwaukee, in Országos Széchényi Könyvtár and in the Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security in Budapest.

The paper discusses three different ways of investigating language attitudes towards Hungarian dialects to illustrate what a sociolinguist can do during a pandemic. The first study presents Hungarian villagers’ attitudes by analyzing the enormous archive of the ‘New General Atlas of Hungarian’ project (2007-2012). Data from 197 interviews are built in a corpus and were used to test hypotheses such as: The speakers have negative experiences due to their dialect speech. Nonetheless, they are not ashamed of it. Those who are aware of their dialect background are more tolerant of other regions’ characteristics than those speakers who consider themselves as users of the standard. A second possibility for replacing fieldwork during a lockdown is collecting data online. This study investigates dialect features and the attitudes towards them in social media. Hundreds of random data warn of the presence of prejudice and prescriptive viewpoint that still characterizes mother tongue education in Hungary. The third study used an online survey that was designed for Hungarian voice actors with the cooperation of their labor union to explore their language attitudes. 69 responses were received, which allowed insight into the process of dubbing and reveal some factors that sometimes lead to a lower quality of Hungarian sound track. All three studies were conducted by the presenter, and they were supported by the Bolyai János Research Grant of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and by the ÚNKP-21-5 National Excellence Program of the Ministry for Innovation and Technology from the source of the National Research, Development and Innovation Fund.

Hungary faced great empires on numerous accounts throughout its modern era history: the Ottoman Empire in the 16-17th centuries, the Habsburg Empire in 1703-1711 and later again in 1848-1849, and also the Russian/Soviet Empire in 1849 and 1956. One thing is common among all these wars and freedom fights – the unfulfilled desire for effective military aid coming from Western nations. The feeling of abandonment has been deeply rooted in Hungarian historical memory ever since. Nowadays, Hungary is among the few European nations which consistently reject the idea of providing military support to Ukraine. This paper attempts to resolve this contradiction. In order to do so, it utilizes primary sources from the 16-17th centuries in particular, which illustrate the Hungarian cries for help and the reactions of Western powers. These are compared to present-day political statements on the war in Ukraine given by the Hungarian political elite. By applying the method of discourse analysis, it becomes apparent that Ukraine is receiving the kind of help which Hungary did not get earlier. This phenomenon is a prime example of moral relativism in practice and illustrates that historical memory can be distorted to an extreme extent by the media. Historical awareness therefore remains of key importance both in academia and public discourse when it comes to the relationship between current affairs and national memory.

On April 3, 1655 flames engulfed most of the downtown of Kolozsvár (Klausenburg, Cluj) in the Principality of Transylvania, leaving smoldering rubble in their wake. Consumed by the fire was the town’s first known printshop, never to be rebuilt. What physically remains of the printshop is some of its typeface and some of the books it produced in its more than one-hundred-year existence. Among the surviving books are volumes printed by one of the region’s first known female printers, Zsófia Heltai, the widow of the printer, translator, and Protestant preacher Gáspár Heltai (Caspar Helth). While the Heltai printshop’s importance to the region’s book production and cultural life is widely recognized by historians, a comprehensive study of the widow Heltai’s operation of the printshop (~1574–1582) poses a challenge, owing, in part to a paucity of sources. This paper seeks to contribute to the scholarship on Mrs. Heltai’s multifaceted book-related activities by examining together the two known natural-philosophical texts that appeared under her care, an early herbarium and an astrological prognosticon, both published in 1578, in Hungarian. As a printer serving the reading needs of the wider region, publishing mostly vernacular works that would otherwise be unavailable through importation, her work contributed to the circulation of knowledge, including scientific ideas and practices.

Following the Treaty of Trianon, Hungarian intellectual and literary life developed its own identity in cities such as Cluj-Napoca, Oradea, Arad, Timisoara and Targu Mures within a multiracial and multilingual Transylvania in the newly-created greater Romania. Both Benő Karácsony and Ernő Salamon, though a generation apart, are regarded as solitary figures in Transylvanian Hungarian literature. Benő Karácsony expressed the mood of his generation which, having returned from the trenches was bitter and disillusioned. His characters come from the small town of Alba Julia and his sympathy lies with those, who are at the periphery of society. In comparison to Karácsony, who was a successful novelist and playwright, the much younger Ernő Salamon was a poet of poverty. Salamon believed that there will be a better world and his poems bear a strong link to the poetry of Attila József, as well as to the avant-garde poets of his age. In different ways , both Karácsony and Salamon were nonconformists. Benő Karácsony regarded himself a Hungarian writer who was also loyal to his Jewish roots, similarly to Ernő Salamon, who was much attached to his beloved native region, Gyergyó.

This is intended as a performance presentation, Ildikó Szántó giving an overview of the two writers, with prose and poetry readings by Judit Havas.

The present paper is an attempt to show how the influence of an eminent social scientist can contribute to the overall ”justification” for American internal national integration and purpose in foreign policy on the global level. The paper approaches this issue from the micro-analysis of one American neighborhood: the Birmingham community in Toledo, Ohio and its major media source for self-definition, the weekly Hungarian-American newspaper, Toledo. The focus for the study is provided by the personal journey of Géza Farkas, the editor of the weekly and the syndicated articles chosen by him from the writings of Margaret Mead. The time period for this analysis is World War II and the immediate post-war years when the United States enters the world stage as a victorious atomic super-power. The method of the study is a simple content analysis of Margaret Mead’s articles that appeared in Toledo at that time, combined with the reasons for their friendly reception by Géza Farkas.

Minden nemzet számon tartja azokat a kiválóságokat, akikre büszkén hivatkozik, legyenek azok tudósok, feltalálók, sportolók, történelmi hősök, kiemelkedő államférfiak. Fontos, hogy bárki legyen is az érdemének, helyének, jelentőségének megfelelően értékeljük. Minden vele kapcsolatos tényt, adatot tárgyilagosan korrekt módon ítéljünk meg.
Ezt a szempontot szem előtt tartva előadásomban a jelenleg érvényesülő történelem szemléltet szeretném röviden – néhány példán keresztül – bemutatni. Azt a „kulcsra kész történelmet”, amivel oktatásunk saját képére kívánja formálni nemzettudatunkat.

Hungarian cultural policy after Trianon sought to foster national culture where it existed, and as a result of the Vienna Awards of 1939 and 1940, these policies were extended to re-annexed territories in southern Slovakia, the Banat, and Transylvania. Policies promoting tourism, on the one hand, and reestablishing teacher education programs and libraries, on the other, were two manifestations of rebuilding bridges between Hungarians within and outside of these territories. Relying on recent work by Ablonczy (on tourism) and Sipos (on teacher education and libraries), I will outline these policies, examine points where they intersect, discuss their progress, and review the effect and fate of these policies after 1944.

In the context of newly flourishing nationalistic and ethnocentric ideologies and mutual exclusive nationalisms, as seen in post-1989 East-Central Europe, focusing on ‘cultural contacts’ is even more important today than during the Cold War period (see Corniș-Pope 2016). The returning idea of national monocultures based on traditional family and Christian values mobilizes the “one nation-one language-one territory” ideology. In contrast with the container thinking of national-states, East-Central Europe as “Mutter aller Geschichtsregionen” (Troebst 2010), as a historical in-between territory, merges traces of different national, ethnic memories. In East-Central Europe “the movement of borders over people” (Brubaker 2015) and the layering of maps as political representations resulted in the displacement and the reframing of static spaces and their inhabitants. The intersections and divergences of the concepts of country border and homeland create the geographical space as a symbolic texture “constructed by images and narratives” (Feischmidt 2005, 24). This statement written by a sociologist indirectly also stresses the role of artistic works in relation to understanding spaces, territories and their histories.
In my paper I will re-conceptualize the Hungarian Transborder Literature (határon túli magyar irodalom) and Hungarian Emigré Literature (emigráns/nyugati magyar irodalom) as multilingual literature. The two historical categories are a result of two distinct forms of mobility in Hungarian culture and literary history. ‘Transborder Hungarian Literature’ came to denote works produced in the Hungarian language in the contemporary territories of Romania, Slovakia, Ukraine and Serbia (the former Czechoslovakia, USSR, and Yugoslavia), a result of the post-WW1 redrawing of borders in the region. Literature produced by authors who left Hungary in 1946-48 during the consolidation of state-socialist rule, and in the aftermath of the 1956 revolution came to be known jointly as ’Hungarian literature of the West’ in literary historical discourse. The inherent linguistic otherness, i.e. the coexistence of these literatures with other, surrounding languages dislocates both the traditional descriptive categories Hungarian literary history operates with, and the canon based on the borders of the nation state.
In my paper I will argue that due to the prominence of increasing global mobility and the consequent foregrounding of multilingual literatures, the above two phenomena could be seen in a different light, reinterpreted not only through their belonging into Hungarian literary history, but also through their specifically non-Hungarian aspects, and interactions with neighbors literatures. Being multilingual allows these authors (e.g. Ádám Bodor, István Domonkos, László Kemenes Géfin) to work in embedded into many cultural and linguistic networks and traditions. Their poetic languages create specific “commuting grammars” (Beáta Thomka, 2018) between different languages, transferring, juxtaposing cultural worlds and social experiences as “sites of intercultural negotiations” (Beáta Thomka, 2018).
More specifically I will focus on Transylvanian born Ádám Bodor’s novels The Sinistra Zone (1992) and Birds of Verhovina (2011), which through the interaction of different cultural memories, languages, accents “display and juxtapose divergent and contested memories and create mnemonic multiperspectivity” (Erll 2011). The novels are set somewhere in a Romanian, Ukrainian, Polish and Moldavian border zone that appears to be an interface between real and imaginary worlds. The Hungarian novels as examples for “born translated memories” (Laanes 2021) create a fictitious, re-integrative, intermediate discursive space where the different cultural, multi-linguistic references are saturated with each other in the most natural way. Through the multilingual hybrid characters and place names the novels provoke the monolingual reader. Due to their hybridity, the names can be pronounced in several ways, they have inherently dispersive pronunciation possibilities, therefore the novels implicitly embody their readers as accented. The narration strengthens its consistent poetic tendency that names cannot be appropriated by a single language, and definitely not from a Hungarian perspective.

The collapse of communism in 1989 was a moment of such enormous historical importance that Francis Fukuyama was able to advance his now famous thesis that this change was inevitable, given the existence of a worldwide historical evolutionary trend towards liberal capitalism. In his view, liberal capitalism marks the most desirous “end of history,” the most rational and enlightened way of organizing society. In contrast, contemporary sociological examination of capitalist institutions begins with the observation that there are different paths leading towards capitalism. These not only depend on the endowments of economic actors but also on institutionalized patterns of authority and organizational logic that are historically developed and resistant to change. National markets, then, differ systematically according to the kinds of resources and frameworks that particular national model provides.
This paper analyzes the causes and consequences of the ratification of Bill No IX in 1989 "Role of Sport Organizations" and also pays particular attention to the importance of this Bill on the further development of sport policy in Hungary. Although sport has so often been portrayed as a victim of the transition process, this paper argues that it has been the Hungarian sport community’s action (or lack of action) that has driven the sport policy development process in a particular, later most criticized direction.
The historically close relationship between the state and the sport community would not be eradicated, even by enhanced marketization, democratization, and liberalization. In Hungary the state continues to play a strong role in sport and in Hungary the transition process stimulated the expansion of governing capacities not through the transformation of public-private partnerships but through the configuration of central-local governmental relationship.

By the early 1970s, mainstream Hungarian ethnomusicology possessed an immense ocean of archive field recordings, a worldwide-unique, extensive method of tune-typology, and a pertinent classification system. It also had more than seventy years of expertise in both musicological and cultural-anthropological tune-analysis, efficient fieldwork, and research on complex and abstract phenomena of traditional music within the Carpathian Basin and beyond. This environment provided fertile soil for the sprouting Hungarian revival movement, the táncházmozgalom, whose past 49 years show great success in efficiently grafting traditional music and dance into the urban environment. Now Hungarian ethnomusicology wasn’t only a theoretical think tank--folk music theorists, táncház musicians, and choreographers worked side-by-side exploring still-undiscovered issues of the Hungarian tradition, our ethnic neighbors, and minorities. This atmosphere fostered research of functional aspects in musical and dance folklore and in the Carpathian Basin’s complex inter-ethnic relations, as well as contributing to development in practice-based examination of instrumental music. From the mid-’90s onwards, folk music as a label gradually became an integral part of the Hungarian music industry, and more and more musical projects chose to drift away from pure authenticity in order to discover new paths in traditional-rooted crossover. With the terminal dissolving of the once-firm system of traditional rural societies and as the last old informants pass away, younger folk musicians and scholars, beginning with the generation of the author, must lean on archive field recordings to acquire their skills. This presentation centers on archival, analytical, and practice-based approaches developed within the Liszt Ferenc Academy for the essential preparation of musicians for the range of folk-music applications from revival through the wide variety of cross-over genres that have and will evolve.

I would like to speak about how the collected dances for villages and those in archives - according to the footprints of the local knowledge of the time - become an integral part and building block to a varied cultural heritage for communities who keep them alive. I will demonstrate this with films of old collections and recent archival footage.