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• The Recommendation of Ethnic Diversity in Late Habsburgian State and some Parallels in the Cultural Conception of the EU after 2004

  253-282

  Michael Prosser-Schell

  Views:

  52

  First of all, the article discusses that the ancient Habsburgian state (end of 19th – early 20th century), which had explicitly recommended and fostered ethnic diversity, gains a benevolent interpretation in some important academic presentations nowadays. This seems remarkable because the late Habsburgian monarchy after 1919 until ca. 2000 was examined as a failed state. The article analyses, based on the famous and popular-written applied geography „Die österreichisch-ungarische Monarchie in Wort und Bild“ (called „Kronprinzenwerk“, 1981–1902), how the recommendation of ethnic diversity was framed and expressed in that time. The article especially wants to show the arguments in which the strength of the pluriethnic and pluricultural Habsburgian empire generally had to be reasoned. Furthermore, the paper chooses 3 specific cases of an affirmative regional and ethnic description of the „Kronprinzenwerk“: Ruthens in Galicia, Serbs and Germans („svabians“) in Southern Hungary of that time. Nowadays, we see a strikingly similar argument in the European Union to recommend ethnic and cultural diversity to achieve a consolidated socio-economic grouping. An outstanding and prominent example is the speech of French President Emmanuel Macron in 2017 at Sorbonne University.

• The expulsion as historical turning point in the religious and cultural life of the German-Hungarian village Budaörs/Wudersch?

  87-118

  Viktória Muka

  Views:

  169

  The expulsion of the German minority in Hungary at the end of World War II started on the 19th of January 1946 in the small village Budaörs/Wudersch close to the capital Budapest. The village has become well-known in the interwar period for its flower carpets prepared for the feast Corpus Christi, made by its German-speaking population until over 90% of the inhabitants were forced to leave the country for the American occupation zone of Germany, a moment that has been long established as the historical turning point in the history and culture of the German minority in Hungary. The expulsion thus divides the tradition of making flower carpets for Corpus Christi into two eras. Previous research has often struggled with connecting these two eras with each other, when analyzing the development of the feast. The main goal of the research paper is to describe the situation of the Catholic Church in Hungary in the times of transition to Socialism, both on national and local level and to deconstruct the idea of the year 1946 being the one and only possible turning point when considering the changes in the tradition. A newly found source in the Esztergom Primatial Archives, an album with photos taken of the flower carpet in 1948, a present made for Cardinal Mindszenty, shows that the route of the procession has stayed the same, although changes in the number of observants and the lack of women wearing the traditional costume of Budaörs can be observed. These findings demonstrate a continuity of tradition and village life, straddling the supposed divide, and hence suggest a re-interpretation of the feast’s significance as demonstration of the catholic inhabitants’ resistance to the slowly establishing soviet system.