2011 marks the celebration of the bicentennial of the birth of Hungary’s most famous composer of classical music in history–probably its most famous classical musician, composer Franz Liszt (1811-1886), or as he is known in Hungarian, Liszt Ferenc. Yet his identity as a Hungarian musician is also problematic, both biographically and musically. From a biographical standpoint, Liszt left the country at a young age and never spoke the language fluently. From a musical standpoint, many musical aesthetes–in particular Béla Bartók, history’s second most famous Hungarian composer–viewed Liszt’s most overtly Hungarian works, the Hungarian Rhapsodies, as among his more “trivial.” Moreover, in his 1859 book Des bohémiens et de leur musique en Hongrie, initially conceived as an essay-length introduction to the Rhapsodies, he had the temerity to attribute the Hungarian style on which they were based to the Gypsy musicians who performed it. But although the Hungarian Rhapsodies are the best known of Liszt’s “Hungarian” works, other works, particularly the oratorio Die Legende von der Heiligen Elisabeth, also have Hungarian identity at their core, and represent a new image of what “Hungarian music” should sound like. In this paper, I discuss the issues in Liszt’s biography and writings that made him controversial. I then show how Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies exemplify the conventions of “Hungarian-Gypsy style” within a brilliant pianistic context. Finally, I illustrate both the moving use of those conventions and the reconception of what musical Hungarianness might sound like in Elisabeth.

This paper explores a topic that has not yet been well-researched, that is, the “return” of second and third-generation Hungarians to the ethnic homeland. My presentation will focus on a qualitative study that formed part of my Ph.D. dissertation. It involved 10 participants who were born or raised in New Jersey and who decided to return to Hungary for an indefinite period of time. My informants were either born in New Brunswick or grew up in the Passaic community; nevertheless, all of them had a strong connection to New Brunswick. Based on this case study, I will try to answer the following research questions: what means “home” for these returnees, and to what extent could they integrate into the homeland? Did the participants experience a shift in their ethnic identity? Was there any change in their language use, especially in the family, with their children? My findings fit into the scholarly literature on diasporic return migrants and point to the general disillusionment that people experience upon moving to the land of their ancestors.

1867. A year which had a considerable significance and life-changing consequences on the formation of national identity both for Canadians and Hungarians, too. The Canadian Confederation and the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of the same year were turning points in Canada’s and Hungary’s respective histories and generated unique social, cultural, political, and economic destinies for their populations. They went on a long journey that created a nationally and culturally specific self-definition, which determined who they are today. Since then, Hungarians and Canadians continue to create spaces to exert their own particular agencies.
In my paper, I intend to provide a contrastive analysis of the long-lasting repercussions of these two transformative events on the evolution of the Hungarians and Canadians’ national collective identities. They all have a sense of who they are in relation to their larger communities, and based on race, ethnicity, religion, language, and culture, they distinguish themselves from other groups. By comparing the major Canadian and Hungarian historical and political developments since 1867, I seek to detect some similarities and differences between their identification processes in the modern era. In doing so, my ambition is to raise awareness, challenge and deconstruct some petrified stereotypes that define and box in the perception of nations.

Many Hungarian writers, historians, sociologists have asked the question, who is Hungarian. A possible answer to the question is given in the title of this presentation. That is, who can be considered a Hungarian citizen by the Hungarian State or by the Hungarian authorities?
After the Compromise with Austria in 1867, the need emerged in the Kingdom of Hungary that the state should regulate who qualifies to be viewed as a Hungarian citizen, as previously Austrian law and customary laws had been applicable. “Hungarians” still had to wait another 12 years to adopt the first Hungarian citizenship law, but three laws had also addressed the issue of the so-called “Village residence” before.
These may be considered essentially the precedence of the citizenship law. This presentation analyzes the 1879 Citizenship Law, which was valid until 1948. Thus, during all the great cataclysms of the Hungarian history – the Trianon Peace Treaty, the Holocaust and the population exchanges – the law had to be interpreted and applied. We shall show how the application of the law was implemented by the Hungarian Ministry of the Interior, especially if decisions had to be applied using the narrowest definitions. We shall also address how other laws overwrote the Citizenship Law during and after the Second World War, like for example to justify the deportation to Kamenets-Podolsk and/or the forced population exchanges after the war. The presentation addresses, amongst others, which departments dealt with citizenship issues within the Ministry of the Interior and also the activities of the National Central Authority for Controlling Aliens (NCACA, well-known Hungarian abbreviated name KEOKH), established in 1930. The timeliness of the topic is based on the event that NCACA’s successor organization will hand over its documents to the National Archives in 2017.

Nearly 200,000 people crossed the borders of Hungary during and after the Revolution of 1956. What were their motives: escape from punishment for their role in the revolution, taking advantage of loosened borders to infiltrate the West as spies, an opportunity to see the world, or in many cases a complex combination of motives? Crossing into Austria, the immigrants faced a further decision about their second leap, whether to move on to a third country, settle in Austria itself, or return to Hungary. The screening interviews of immigration authorities and intelligence services, the impressions of journalists, the contemporary interview project at Columbia University that is now available online through the Open Society Archive, later oral histories, and life stories all offer sources for an analysis of motivation. Between the first leap and the second, the further course of “the Hungarian crisis” and the policies of the host countries would influence the options and the ultimate decision of the immigrant.

Why would it be essential to carry out a systematic research on the estate of the world-wide known feminist and peace activist, Rosika Schwimmer (1877, Budapest–1948, New York)? Why has her figure been neglected by the Hungarian historiography and what kind of sources are there in the collection? In the presentation, I will seek answers to these questions relying on the latest researches on the Rosika Schwimmer Papers (592 boxes, 160 linear feet, almost 50 linear meter), preserved in the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library. Apart from discussing the genesis, importance, and complex structure of the collection – on which Hungarian historians have not implemented a systematic investigation prior to my work – I will also delineate the possibilities of writing a scientific biography on Schwimmer. Furthermore, I aim to address the challenges, which historians, who intend to study the life and career of Schwimmer, have to face while conducting a research in this field.

The paper examines the concerted efforts of Hungarian magnates, Catholic hierarchs, and the Habsburg court to convert a predominantly Protestant society to the Catholic faith. The focus will be on the conversion campaigns of the 1660s and 1670s that culminated in the systematic confiscation of churches, the closure of congregational schools, and the mass expulsion of the Protestant clergy. I will argue that these campaigns failed for four principal reasons: the resilience of the county nobility, the resistance of peasants and townsmen, the mass defection of Protestant soldiers, and the proximity of the Ottoman border. This unique combination of resistance and border location distinguishes the Hungarian case from other Habsburg territories (such as Austria, Bohemia, and Silesia) and neighboring Poland. In the final analysis, Hungarian Protestantism would probably not have survived without the Ottomans who provided refuge and protection to persecuted communities. What England was for Dutch Protestants during the sixteenth century the Ottoman Empire became for Hungarian Lutherans and Calvinists during the seventeenth century: a safe-haven from which military invasions were launched to overthrow Habsburg power and restore the Protestant faith.
My paper takes issue with the current state of research on the Hungarian Counter-Reformation, particularly with recent contributions by Antal Molnar and Istvan G. Toth. Most importantly, I think that historians have insufficiently addressed the violent overtones of the Hungarian Counter-Reformation and its traumatic impact on local society. While undoubtedly achieving great successes on the surface--large territories without Protestant clergy, the establishment of Catholic parishes, and mass conversions—these achievements were only temporary. They quickly evaporated in the face of local resistance and rebel incursions from Ottoman territory. Rather than relying on the reports and letters of Catholic missionaries—the mainstay of recent interpretations—or Protestant martyrologies and polemics—the basis of Protestant historiography--I draw on previously unstudied documentary records from the Austrian State and Hungarian National Archives. These records reveal the Hungarian Counter-Reformation as an unmitigated failure that deeply alienated society and crucially contributed to large-scale popular revolts well into the eighteenth century.

William Turner minden idők egyik leghíresebb és legeredetibb művésze; akinek a festészetével kapcsolatban a szakirodalom többsége szuperlatívuszokban fogalmaz. A művészettörténetben a „fény őrültjeként” emlegetik, „aki valóságos katalógusát adta a fenségesnek”, és aki „a végsőkig kifinomult ábrázolásaival ajándékozott meg minket”. Kevesen tudják azonban, hogy Turner munkássága és hagyatéka nemcsak képzőművészeti, de lírai alkotásokat is tartalmaz – amint erre elenyészően kevesen, de az utolsó ötven év kutatásai közül többen is felhívták a figyelmet. A festő lírai életművének legnagyobb hányada a vizuális alkotások mellé írt ekphrasztikus költeményekből áll, azonban a kutatások többnyire elsiklanak Turner irodalmi ambíciói felett, és csak a festmények interpretációira koncentrálnak. Az előadás elsődleges célkitűzése, hogy bemutassa, miért célravezetőbb, ha a lírai alkotásokat nem szigeteljük el a képektől, hanem inkább olyan olyan keretként kezeljük őket, amelyek a festmények határait és jelentésmezőit szélesítik ki azzal, hogy kihangosítják a képi felszín mögött húzódó rejtett tartalmakat. A kép-szöveg kapcsolati dinamika termékeny együttműködésének bemutatásához William Turner Thomson’s Æolion Harp (Thomson Æolhárfája) című 1809-ben alkotott festményének és a hozzá kapcsolódó 32 soros versének (magyar nyelvű fordítására és) értelmezésére vállalkozom. Az előadás egyrészt szeretné elhelyezni Turner-munkásságát egy másik művészeti ágban is: a romantikus korszak angol költészetének művei között, másrészt szeretné megismertetni az eddig perifériára került verseket a hazai publikummal is.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, Transylvania was known as Fairyland (Tündérország), a name that is today evoked in praise of the region’s natural beauty. However, it was not Transylvania’s natural splendor that had earned it this moniker, or even a belief in the eponymous mythical beings, but rather the principality’s reputation for political inconstancy and internal feuding. It is against this backdrop of mercurial politics owing to the Habsburg dynasty’s expansionist aspirations and Turkish dominion in parts of Hungary and its neighbors in the Balkans that the first witch trials and executions took place in Transylvania. The witch persecutions began in the Kingdom of Hungary in the mid-16th century, a good century later than in Western Europe, and began to reach their peak toward the end of the 17th century, although never taking on the horrifically formidable dimensions they did in the French and German regions. What prompted the wheels of the judicial system to spring into action against accused witches? What led people to make such allegations in the first place? How did the accused fare once formally charged and convicted? I aim to address these questions and more by examining individual cases as well the social and cultural context in which these trials took place, with a special focus on the rich system of magical beliefs and rituals in a world in which witchcraft was a fundamental reality and permeated every aspect of daily life.

War Crimes Trials began in Hungary in January 1945, before the end of the war in the West. These trials tried to distance the nation from the deeds of its fascist leadership. Small fry trials delved deeper into the stench of wartime behavior, and spread its tentacles into the parishes, threatening politicians, priests/pastors, schoolteachers, as well as the local thugs of communities. At the time, the trials were understood and feared by the Hungarian majority population as Jewish revenge. Yet, death or severe sentences were comparatively small.

War Crimes Trials are being roundly criticized as setting the stage for the Purge Trials just a few years later. This paper will argue, the trials also served to water down, systematize and distance the public from guilt. The trials reassured Hungarian Jews of the possibility of re-assimilation. Surviving Hungarian Jews were more likely to decide not to emigrate. Increasingly, Jewish survivors came forward as defense witnesses in rather dubious circumstances. The trials defined the new social ethos; the narrative of the trial transcripts developed defenses of the “hard working.” A quick switch of party, especially Communist party membership, washed away the past. The trials also seem to have served as a social palliative, establishing the accepted social narratives (and silences) regarding World War II for the coming 50 years.

In my paper I would like to focus on three important characters in Péter Nádas’s monumental novel: János Kovách (also known as Hans von Wolkenstein), Ágost Lippay-Lehr and András Rott. The three of them are close friends, having spent a significant part of their lives abroad. All three of them work for the Hungarian counter-intelligence service, and are themselves secret agents. Because of their profession and family background and connections, they are privileged members of the nomenklatura. These three men are in many ways strangers to Hungary; they speak Hungarian with a foreign intonation, and have a disdain for ordinary Hungarians. What complicates their situation is that one of them (Kovách) is of aristocratic birth, and the other two are Jewish-born or half-Jewish. Yet Hungary is their home. There are important and highly interesting reflections in the book about the state of mind of these and other communist “internationalists”, so I would like to explore their “displaced” “internal exile” status.

One of the more likeable characters in the novel is an architect of great promise, Alajos Madzar, who is half Hungarian and half sváb, i.e., ethnic German, and forever wavers between his two identities. During his youth in the 1930s he planned to immigrate to America, but it didn’t happen, and he never became an important architect either. He remained a “would-be émigré”. Then there are the holdovers from the prewar elite and middle-class Budapest Jews who did not leave the country after the war or in ‘56. These people are either comforted by the past or tormented by it; what they cannot do is find their place in the present.

1938, Shanghai. Drained by Western colonization, China is suffocating in Imperial Japan’s grip. Its government fled to the mountains; the foreign elite is being evacuated on ships. The East Asian metropolis is flooded by destitute peasants chased by the frontlines and Jews who left everything behind in Hitler’s Europe. Paul Komor, the Budapest-born China Hand businessman who had been assisting his needy compatriots for decades, is now deprived of his precious citizenship by Hungary’s antisemitic legislation. While his national identity is questioned, he builds on his family’s charity traditions, and with the American JDC’s first female overseas social worker, they organize aid for Shanghai’s nearly twenty-thousand Jewish refugees. Situated in a seemingly “exotic” and “far” East, the events described in this non-fiction book deal with sensitive questions such as East-Central European Jewish assimilation, Hungarian nationalism, the agency of Hungary’s wartime government, and the relationship of the emigrant communities with their homeland. Punctuated with underground crime, love affairs, and political intrigue, the story takes the reader to the twilight of the colonial world before the dawn of New China.

This presentation introduces the recently published book A cserben hagyott hazafi. Zsidómentés a háborús Sanghajban (Budapest, Könyv Népe: 2023), currently rendered in English as “Patriot Left Behind. Rescuing Jews in Wartime Shanghai,” a non-academic work by an academic. Using multilingual archives from three continents, this rigorously researched non-fiction is based on parts of the author’s doctoral dissertation he submitted at New York University.

Miklós Jósika a Transylvanian baron devoted himself to literature in his forties; foundling the historical romance in Hungarian literature with his first published novel Abafi in 1836. His merits as a novelist were instantly recognized and awarded in Hungary, the reading public and the critics too were delighted by his novels, which followed one another with rapidity. The Revolution/ War of Independence in 1848 could be seen as a line of demarcation in his literary activity. On account of his role as member of the Honvéd Government he was forced to go into exile, eventually he settled down in Brussels. His estates were confiscated and he himself was condemned to death by the vindictive Austrian Government, fact being satisfied by burning him in effigy. Brussels became his foreign but free homeland where he lived entirely by his pen.
The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of this Hungarian writer’s ways of preserving national values and identity abroad, his efforts of making a living from writing in a foreign linguistic, cultural, and political context by mapping the steps of a successful career from recommencement to gradual fade. Miklós Jósika as a functional name was a prestigious representation label in the Hungarian literary field, but after 1849 it was prohibited. The emigree writer managed to reconnect with his Hungarian readership, when his publisher Heckenast had helped him to get printed in Pest anonymously his first novel of the exilic period Eszther in 1853. Since then almost for a decade Jósika had been using a pen name to sign his novels, „by the author of Eszther”. The paper also analyses the dualistic approaches to his literary work.

In my previous AHEA papers I discussed the opposition of two editors to Kossuth and the Hungarian War of Independence 1848-49: Francis Bowen, editor of the North American Review, and Orestes Brownson, editor of Brownson’s Quarterly Review. The third member of the trio of editorial opponents was James Watson Webb, of the New York Courier and Enquirer (Q&E). The Q&E was a commercial paper, which Webb had edited since the late 1820s. Although Q&E mostly consisted of advertisements and business news, a considerable space was devoted to foreign news by the 1840s.

Webb was appointed by President Zachary Taylor to be Charge d’Affaires to Vienna in 1849. (He believed his early support of Taylor earned him a diplomatic post and was disappointed to be appointed to what was considered a minor post). However, Webb neglected to wait for confirmation by the Senate, and took up residence in Vienna. When the Senate rejected his appointment by a 34-7 vote, an embittered Webb was obliged to return to the United States. The public reason given was that the Senate intended to keep the post vacant as a “punishment” for Austria’s brutal suppression of the Hungarian rebels after their defeat in August 1849. A secondary (or perhaps primary) reason was that Webb, an outspoken, pugnacious character, had many political enemies. Upon Webb’s return, the Courier’s coverage of Hungary and Kossuth turned negative. Although he was one of the invited speakers at New York City’s Municipal Dinner for Kossuth in December 1851, the crowd shouted down the unpopular Webb both times as he attempted to give his speech. Webb’s opposition lasted throughout Kossuth’s time in the United States, and when Kossuth returned to Europe in July 1852, Webb claimed to find incriminating documents that Kossuth left behind.

Book Summary:

Seventeen and in love with a girl he'd never even spoken to, a young Hungarian is forced to fight for the Germans, then flee his homeland after Romania allies with the Soviet Union and wins control of northern Transylvania, liberating it from Nazi rule. A refugee in his own country, he soon finds love in the ruins of Budapest. But life under the ever-watchful eyes of "Father" Stalin and the notorious Hungarian secret police is a new kind of terror. When peaceful protests erupt into violence in October 1956, he joins the uprisers battling the mighty Soviets in one of the most important and tragic events of the Cold War.

In this award-winning debut, Elizabeth Lukács Chesla travels back and forth across time to tell the story of her father, a Freedom Fighter who escapes after the Soviet Union's brutal suppression of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Weaving together stories, poems, historical documents, and memoir, she attempts to make sense of the twelve days that defined her father and his homeland. From the history and folklore of Transylvania where her father was born, to the first shots fired on the peaceful protestors sparking the revolution, to the history of the Molotov cocktail, Chesla explores the causes and consequences of the revolution to keep the memory of her father--and the nearly 3,000 rebels and civilians killed in the revolution--alive.

New technology in web presentation has resulted in an explosion of availability of material that formerly could only be found in libraries. This has included projects such as the Hungarian Academy’s Film Library Database Archive of Folkdance (Néptánc Adatbázis Filmtár).

These projects have been met and matched by the efforts of amateur folk dancers and musicians developing their own libraries on the popular website, YouTube. Many take as their goal to reproduce and experience the dances and events of Hungarian villagers in Transylvania and other rural Hungarian areas during the mid-Twentieth Century and before, under the rubric of táncház.

Whereas in the late 20th century, táncház enthusiasts passed tape cassettes and files among themselves to share records of great folkdancers and musicians and learn from them, now these films are posted on the web, joined by demonstrations and lessons by teachers and interpreters. Also available are performances by contemporary dancers, musicians, and dance groups. A new category of material has emerged as well—videos created by participants to convey their personal meanings and experience of folk music and dance through content and presentation.

This paper will explore the range of material relating to Hungarian folkdance posted on YouTube, discussing the sorts of questions that can be explored though this rich source. YouTube collections offer us a way to assess contemporary creativity within a revival movement and changes in attitudes toward aspects of dance while building a picture of the significance and specific meanings within social dance in current practice.

Zoltán Béky (1903-1978) was a native of Abauj County, experienced the end of Dualist Hungary, and graduated from the Reformed high school and seminary in Sárospatak in interwar Hungary. He came to the United States as a postgraduate student at the New Brunswick Theological Seminary and was then in 1928 was elected pastor of the Free Magyar Reformed Church in Trenton, New Jersey. He served this congregation for 37 years, rising to Dean and then Arch Dean of his denomination. In 1958 the denomination adopted its present name, Hungarian Reformed Church in America, and elected Béky its first bishop. He represented his church in assemblies of the World Council of Churches, and from 1964 presided over the Hungarian Reformed Federation of America in Washington, DC. The Free Magyar Reformed Church was one of several Protestant denominations in the US with Hungarian congregations, but the only one with an exclusively Hungarian character. The presentation proposes to examine the course of Béky’s career and that of his church in the light of his papers, which are preserved in the Hungarian Heritage Center in New Brunswick, and the freely available digitized issues of the FMRC’s newspaper, Magyar Egyház. Both resources have been largely neglected by historical scholarship. We will seek to understand how Béky’s leadership affected the independence and the increasingly ecumenical orientation of the Hungarian Reformed Church in the United States.