Partners, allies or enemies? Asymmetrical dependencies and the fate of the German and Jewish minorities in Hungary, 1918-1947.

Type of Abstract (select): Paper presentation

Abstract (max. 250 words):
Austria-Hungary was a multiethnic empire, in which the dominant ethnic groups, the Germans in
the Western half of the Monarchy (Austria) and Magyars in the East (Hungarians) constituted
less than 50 percent of the population. Regarding political power, wealth, job opportunities, life
chances and social status, there existed a strict hierarchy: in Hungary, the Magyar elite and
middle class dominated state and society before 1918. The two favored minorities, the Jews and
ethnic Germans were welcome as businesspeople and professionals. According to an unwritten
assimilations social contract, the members of these minorities could make money and achieve
fame and fortune as manufacturers, bankers, doctors, lawyers, engineers and other free
professionals; however, unless they switched their language from German to Hungarian;
converted (in the case of Jews) to Catholicism or Protestantism and altered their names and
identities (i. e. they had fully assimilated), even Jews and Germans could not easily gain access
to high-status jobs, such as army officers and civil servants. Lower on the ethnic and “racial”
scale, Serbs, Slovaks and Romanians had to accept their fate as physical laborers or small
merchants and put up with their continued exclusion from political life.
My presentation will examine how this ethic and “racial’ hierarchy, underpinned as it was by
asymmetrical dependencies in the economic, social cultural and political realms, changed after
the First World War. For the first time in it long history, Hungary came to resemble an ethnically
homogeneous nation state after 1918. My presentation will explain how the relationship between
the two surviving minorities (Jews and ethnic Germans) on the one hand, and the dominant
Magyar group, on the other hand, changed in the interwar period. The conference paper will
focus on job opportunities and life chances, as well as on the increased hostility towards these
two groups, as manifested in the numerus clausus law of September 1920, and the anti-Jewish
laws of the late 1930s and early 1940s, as well as in the intense press campaign against ethnic
Germans after 1933. The final part of the presentation will look at the shared ideological and
political origins of the Jewish genocide in Hungary in 1944 and the expulsion of ethnic Germans
in the country in 1946.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Born in Vásárosnamény, Hungary, Prof Béla Bodó attended the Universities of Debrecen and Toronto, and received his PhD from York University in 1998. He taught at several universities in Canada and the U.S. He was tenured at Missouri State University. Since 2015 he has been on the faculty of the department of Eastern European History at the University of Bonn. His most recent monograph, Black Humour and the White Terror, was published by Routledge in 2023.