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The Afterlife of Austria-Hungary
The Image of the Habsburg Monarchy in Interwar Europe
Adam Kozuchowski
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013
The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 was just one link in a chain of events leading to World War I and the downfall of the Austro-Hungarian empire. By 1918, after nearly four hundred years of rule, the Habsburg monarchy was expunged in an instant of history. Remarkably, despite tales of decadence, ethnic indifference, and a failure to modernize, the empire enjoyed a renewed popularity in interwar narratives. Today, it remains a crucial point of reference for Central European identity, evoking nostalgia among the nations that once dismembered it.

The Afterlife of Austria-Hungary examines histories, journalism, and literature in the period between world wars to expose both the positive and the negative treatment of the Habsburg monarchy following its dissolution and the powerful influence of fiction and memory over history. Originally published in Polish, Adam Kozuchowski’s study analyzes the myriad factors that contributed to this phenomenon. Chief among these were economic depression, widespread authoritarianism on the continent, and the painful rise of aggressive nationalism. Many authors of these narratives were well-known intellectuals who yearned for the high culture and peaceable kingdom of their personal memory.

Kozuchowski contrasts these imaginaries with the causal realities of the empire’s failure. He considers the aspirations of Czechs, Poles, Romanians, Hungarians, and Austrians, and their quest for autonomy or domination over their neighbors, coupled with the wave of nationalism spreading across Europe. Kozuchowski then dissects the reign of the legendary Habsburg monarch, Franz Joseph, and the lasting perceptions that he inspired.

To Kozuchowski, the interwar discourse was a reaction to the monumental change wrought by the dissolution of Austria-Hungary and the fear of a history lost. Those displaced at the empire’s end attempted, through collective (and selective) memory, to reconstruct the vision of a once great multinational power. It was an imaginary that would influence future histories of the empire and even became a model for the European Union.
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Agnes Heller
A Moralist in the Vortex of History
John Grumley
Pluto Press, 2005
Agnes Heller is one of the leading thinkers to come out of the tradition of critical theory. Her awesome intellectual range and output includes ethics, philosophical anthropology, political philosophy and a theory of modernity and its culture.

Hungarian by birth, she was one of the best known dissident Marxists in central Europe in the 1960's and 1970's. Since her forced immigration she has held visiting lectureships all over the world and has been the Hannah Arendt Professor of Philosophy at the New School in New York for the last twenty years.

This introduction to her thought is ideal for all students of philosophy, political theory and sociology. Grumley explores Heller's early work, elaborating her relation to Lukacs and the evolution of her own version of Marxism. He examines the subsequent break with Marxism and the initial development of an alternative radical philosophy. Finally, he explains and assesses her mature reflective post-modernism, a perspective that is both sceptical and utopian, that upholds a critical humanist perspective just as it critiques contemporary democratic culture.
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The Bathers
Jennette Williams
Duke University Press, 2009
Jennette Williams’s stunning platinum prints of women bathers in Budapest and Istanbul take us inside spaces intimate and public, austere and sensuous, filled with water, steam, tile, stone, ethereal sunlight, and earthly flesh. Over a period of eight years, Williams, who is based in New York City, traveled to Hungary and Turkey to photograph, without sentimentality or objectification, women daring enough to stand naked before her camera. Young and old, the women of The Bathers inhabit and display their bodies with comfort and ease—floating, showering, conversing, lost in reverie.

To create the images in The Bathers, Williams drew on gestures and poses found in iconic paintings of nude women, including tableaux of bathers by Paul Cézanne and Auguste Renoir, renderings of Venus by Giorgione and Titian, Dominique Ingres’s Odalisque and Slave, and Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. By alluding to these images and others, Williams sought to reflect the religious and mythological associations of water with birth and rebirth, comfort and healing, purification and blessing. She also used copies of the paintings to communicate with her Hungarian- and Turkish-speaking subjects—homemakers, factory workers, saleswomen, secretaries, managers, teachers, and students. Working in steam-filled environments, Williams created quiet, dignified images that evoke not only canonical representations of female nudes but also early pictorial photography. At the same time, they raise contemporary questions about the gaze, the definition of documentary photography, and the representation and perception of beauty and femininity, particularly as they relate to the aging body. Above all else, her photos are sensuously evocative. They invite the viewer to feel the steam, hear the murmur of conversation, and reflect on the allure of the female form.

A CDS Book
Published by Duke University Press and the Center for Documentary Photography

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Budapest Blackout
A Holocaust Diary
by Máriá Mádi, edited by James W. Oberly
University of Wisconsin Press, 2023
Mária Mádi (1898–1970) was a Roman Catholic Hungarian physician living in Budapest during World War II. Stuck in the city, she vowed to become a witness to events as they unfolded and began keeping a diary to chronicle her everyday life, as well as the lives of her Jewish neighbors, during what would be the darkest periods of the Holocaust. From the time Hungary declared war on the United States in December 1941 until she secured an immigrant’s visa to the US in late 1946, she wrote nearly daily in English, offering current-day readers one of the most complete pictures of ordinary life during the Holocaust in Hungary. In the form of letters to her American relatives, Mádi addressed a wide range of subjects, from the fate of small countries like Hungary caught between the major powers of Germany and the Soviet Union, to the Nazi pogrom against Budapest’s Jews, to family news and the price of food.

Mádi’s family donated the entire collection of her diaries to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. This edition transcribes a selection of Mádi’s writings focusing on the period of March 1944 to November 1945, from the Nazi invasion and occupation of Hungary, through the Battle of Budapest, to the ensuing Soviet occupation. While bearing witness to the catastrophe in Hungary, Mádi hid a Jewish family in her small flat from October 1944 to February 1945. She received a posthumous Righteous among Nations Medal from Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center.

Editorial commentary by James W. Oberly situates Mádi’s observations, and a critical introduction by the Holocaust scholar András Lénárt outlines the wider sociopolitical context in which her diaries gain meaning.
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The Clinical Diary of Sándor Ferenczi
Sándor Ferenczi
Harvard University Press, 1988
In the half-century since his death, the Hungarian analyst Sándor Ferenczi has amassed an influential following within the psychoanalytic community. During his lifetime Ferenczi, a respected associate and intimate of Freud, unleashed widely disputed ideas that influenced greatly the evolution of modern psychoanalytic technique and practice. In a sequence of short, condensed entries, Sándor Ferenczi’s Diary records self-critical reflections on conventional theory—as well as criticisms of Ferenczi’s own experiments with technique—and his obstinate struggle to divest himself and psychoanalysis of professional hypocrisy. From these pages emerges a hitherto unheard voice, speaking to his heirs with startling candor and forceful originality—a voice that still resonates in the continuing debates over the nature of the relationship in psychoanalytic practice.
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Coloman, King of Galicia and Duke of Slavonia (1208-1241)
Medieval Central Europe and Hungarian Power
Márta Font
Arc Humanities Press, 2019
A figure of crucial importance to scholarship on western and eastern Europe alike, King Coloman (1208–1241) here receives long-overdue scholarly treatment as a key figure of the thirteenth century. The Árpád prince ruled over a vast area in Central Europe which remained largely affiliated to the Western Church, territories that comprise modern-day Hungary, Slovakia, Croatia, and Bosnia. This study draws on Hungarian and other research that is inaccessible outside the region and places Coloman at the crossroads of Latin Christendom, Eastern Orthodoxy, and the Mongol Empire.
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Constitutional Judiciary in a New Democracy
The Hungarian Constitutional Court
Laszlo Solyom and Georg Brunner, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2000
Two in-depth essays and a selection of twenty-seven of the most important decisions present the Hungarian Constitutional Court as one of the most important actors of the transition into democracy in a post-communist country.
How was it possible that a new Court established in 1990, in a country just released from forty years of Communist rule, was able to enforce a Constitution, maintain the rule of law, and protect the freedom of its citizens in a way comparable to the U.S. Supreme Court? This new Court has issued decisions on topics ranging from the establishment of democracy and a market economy--privatization, compensation for the nationalization of property, and retroactive criminal legislation--as well as such issues as the constitutionality of capital punishment, abortion, freedom of speech and the media, and the separation of powers.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer provides the foreword and introduces the two essays that begin the book. In the first essay, Georg Brunner explains how the Court was set up and what its procedures are. In the second, Lázszló Sólyom describes systematically the emergence of the case-law of the Court and its jurisprudence on constitutional rights and on the powers and procedures of the other branches of government. The models followed by the Court are outlined, and its contribution to global constitutionalism explored.
Lázszló Sólyom is President of the Constitutional Court of Hungary and Professor of Law, ELTE University of Budapest. Georg Brunner is Professor of Law, University of Cologne, Germany.
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Elegant Hungarian Tortes and Homestyle Desserts for American Bakers
Ella Kovacs Szabo
University of North Texas Press, 2023

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Elite Women as Diplomatic Agents in Italy and Hungary, 1470–1510
Kinship and the Aragonese Dynastic Network
Jessica O'Leary
Arc Humanities Press, 2022
This book explores the diplomatic role of women in early modern European dynastic networks through the study of Aragonese marriage alliances in late fifteenth-century Italy and Hungary. It challenges the frequent erasure of dynastic wives from diplomatic and political narratives to show how elite women were diplomatically active agents for two dynasties. Chapters analyze the lives of Eleonora (1450-1493) and Beatrice d'Aragona (1457-1508), daughters of King Ferrante of Naples (1423-1494), and how they negotiated their natal and marital relationships to achieve diplomatic outcomes. While Ferrante expected his daughters to follow paternal imperatives and to remain engaged in collective dynastic strategy, the extent of his kinswomen's continued participation in familial projects was dependent on the nature of their marital relationships. The book traces the access to these relationships that enabled courtly women to re-enter the diplomatic space after marriage, not as objects, but as agents, with their own strategies, politics, and schemes.
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The Evolution of Agrarian Institutions
A Comparative Study of Post-Socialist Hungary and Bulgaria
Mieke Meurs
University of Michigan Press, 2001
The Evolution of Agrarian Institutions studies the unexpectedly slow and uneven growth of private agriculture in postsocialist East-Central Europe. Comparing developments in Hungary and Bulgaria, Mieke Meurs offers an explanation for this slow growth and examines its implications for efficiency and income distribution in postsocialist agriculture.
With the collapse of the state socialist regimes in East-Central Europe, it was widely expected that collectivized agriculture would quickly be remade in the glowing image of China--a patchwork of small, privately run farms yielding rapid increases in output and incomes. However, the European experience has been quite different; while socialist collective farms have disappeared, collective forms of organization have persisted, and private farming has been slow to emerge. Meurs argues that an understanding of the causes of the slow emergence of private farming is essential to effective policy intervention in agriculture. This book contributes to such an understanding through analyzing variations in farm organization and rural market development and comparing agricultural restructuring in Hungary and Bulgaria.
The Evolution of Agrarian Institutions is unique in its combination of original survey data, published data on land use, and published historical data. It also tests two institutionalist explanations for the pace and direction of change in agricultural organization. This book will be of interest to economists, political scientists, sociologists, scholars working in the area of rural development in emerging countries, and anyone with an interest in transitional economics.
Mieke Meurs is Associate Professor of Economics, American University.
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Genius Belabored
Childbed Fever and the Tragic Life of Ignaz Semmelweis
Theodore G. Obenchain
University of Alabama Press, 2016
The fascinating story of Ignaz Semmelweis, a nineteenth-century obstetrician ostracized for his strident advocacy of disinfection as a way to prevent childbed fever

In Genius Belabored: Childbed Fever and the Tragic Life of Ignaz Semmelweis, Theodore G. Obenchain traces the life story of a nineteenth-century Hungarian obstetrician who was shunned and marginalized by the medical establishment for advancing a far-sighted but unorthodox solution to the appalling mortality rates that plagued new mothers of the day.
 
In engrossing detail, Obenchain recreates for readers the sights, smells, and activities within a hospital of that day. In an era before the acceptance of modern germ science, physicians saw little need for cleanliness or hygiene. As a consequence, antiseptic measures were lax and rudimentary. Especially vulnerable to contamination were new mothers, who frequently contracted and died from childbed fever (puerperal fever). Genius Belabored follows Semmelweis’s awakening to the insight that many of these deaths could be avoided with basic antiseptic measures like hand washing.
 
The medical establishment, intellectually unprepared for Semmelweis’s prescient hypothesis, rejected it for a number of reasons. It was unorthodox and went against the lingering Christian tradition that the dangers of childbirth were inherent to the lives of women. Complicating matters, colleagues did not consider Semmelweis an easy physician to work with. His peers described him as strange and eccentric. Obenchain offers an empathetic and insightful argument that Semmelweis suffered from bipolar disorder and illuminates how his colleagues, however dedicated to empirical science they might have been, misjudged Semmelweis’s methods based upon ignorance and their emotional discomfort with him.
 
In Genius Belabored, Obenchain identifies Semmelweis’s rightful place in the pantheon of scientists and physicians whose discoveries have saved the lives of millions. Obenchain’s biography of Semmelweis offers unique insights into the practice of medicine and the mindsets of physicians working in the premodern era. This fascinating study offers much of interest to general readers as well as those interested in germ theory, the history of medicine and obstetrics, or anyone wishing to better understand the trajectory of modern medicine.
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The Geographical Encyclopedia of the Holocaust in Hungary
Randolph L. Braham, Foreword by Elie Wiesel
Northwestern University Press, 2013

Winner of the 2013 National Jewish Book Award

The illustrated three-volume Geographical Encyclopedia of the Holocaust in Hungary is a definitive, authoritative, and magisterial resource, thorough and exhaustive. It documents and chronicles the wartime fate of the Jewish communities in that country where virulent antisemitism is anything but dead, even today. With scores of detailed maps and hundreds of photographs, this reference work is organized alphabetically by county, each prefaced with a map and a con­textual history describing its Jewish population up to and into 1944.

Entries track the demographic, cultural, and religious changes in even the smallest communities where Jews lived before their marginalization, dispossession, ghettoization, and, finally, deportation to labor and death camps. The encyclope­dia endows scholars and lay researchers with both panoramic and microscopic views of the virtually last-minute destruction of most of the Jews of Hungary, until then the last sizable sur­viving Jewish community in occupied Europe.

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A House Divided
Orthodoxy and Schism in Nineteenth-Century Central European Jewry
Jacob Katz
University Press of New England, 2005
Eminent social historian Jacob Katz examines the rise and transformation of Jewish communal leadership in Central Europe. It is a story of fragmentation and polarization that sheds light on the tensions within the 19th-century Jewish community in Central Europe as it struggled to respond to the promises and perils of modernization.
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Hungarian Film, 1929-1947
National Identity, Anti-Semitism and Popular Cinema
Gábor Gergely
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
What does it mean for someone or something to be Hungarian? People in Hungary grappled with this far-reaching question in the wake of the losses and transformation brought by World War I. Because the period also saw the rise of cinema, audiences, filmmakers, critics, and officials often looked at films with an eye to that question, too. Did the Hungary seen on screen represent the Hungary they knew from everyday life? And-crucially-did the major role played by Jewish Hungarians in the film industry make the sector and its creations somehow Jewish rather than Hungarian? Jews, it was soon decided, could not really be Hungarian, and acts of Parliament soon barred them from taking major roles in cinema production. This book tells the troubled story of that period in Hungarian cinematic history, taking it up through World War II.
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The Invisible Jewish Budapest
Metropolitan Culture at the Fin de Siècle
Mary Gluck
University of Wisconsin Press, 2019
Budapest at the fin de siècle was famed and emulated for its cosmopolitan urban culture and nightlife. It was also the second-largest Jewish city in Europe. Mary Gluck delves into the popular culture of Budapest’s coffee houses, music halls, and humor magazines to uncover the enormous influence of assimilated Jews in creating modernist Budapest between 1867 and 1914. She explores the paradox of Budapest in this era: because much of the Jewish population embraced and promoted a secular, metropolitan culture, their influence as Jews was both profound and invisible.
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Italy and Hungary
Humanism and Art in the Early Renaissance. Acts of an International Conference, Florence, Villa I Tatti, June 6–8, 2007
Péter Farbaky
Harvard University Press, 2011

In the later fifteenth century, the Kingdom of Hungary became the first land outside Italy to embrace the Renaissance, thanks to its king, Matthias Corvinus, and his humanist advisors, János Vitéz and Janus Pannonius. Matthias created one of the most famous libraries in the Western World, the Bibliotheca Corviniana, rivaled in importance only by the Vatican. The court became home to many Italian humanists, and through his friendship with Lorenzo the Magnificent, Matthias obtained the services of such great Florentine artists as Andrea del Verrocchio, Benedetto da Maiano, and Filippino Lippi. After Matthias’s death in 1490, interest in Renaissance art was continued by his widowed Neapolitan queen, Beatrice of Aragon, and by his successors Vladislav I and Louis II Jagiello.

The twenty-two essays collected in this volume provide a window onto recent research on the development of humanism and art in the Hungary of Matthias Corvinus and his successors. Richly illustrated with new photography, this book eloquently documents and explores the unique role played by the Hungarian court in the cultural history of Renaissance Europe.

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Karolyi & Bethlen
Hungary
Bryan Cartledge
Haus Publishing, 2009
White aster flowers, on sale on the streets of Budapest on the eve of All Souls' Day, are made the symbol of a revolution which brings Mihály Károlyi (1875-1955) to power at the head of a National Council. Károlyi concludes an armistice which leaves large areas of Hungarian territory under occupation by French, Romanian and Serbian forces. Following the King-Emperor's abdication in November 1918, Hungary is declared an independent republic with Károlyi as its President. He sets about meeting Hungary's most pressing social need, for land reform. But Károlyi's liberal regime is soon beset by strong opposition from the right and from the left. The Allies seal Károlyi's fate by refusing to end the economic blockade of Hungary and by imposing, even in advance of a peace settlement (Hungary is denied an invitation until the Conference is virtually over), even harsher armistice terms. Károlyi flinches from opposing these measures by force. The small socialist element in his government of well-meaning aristocrats defects and forms an alliance with Hungary's fledgling Communist Party. Károlyi resigns and chooses exile. The Communists, led by Bela Kun, take power. Kun raises a Red Army, which defeats a Czech invasion but fails to stem the Romanian advance, which enters Budapest in defiance of orders from Paris and engages in an orgy of pillage and destruction. The Peace Conference despatches a British diplomat, Sir George Clerk, to Budapest to broker a Romanian withdrawal. Clerk succeeds in forming a coalition government of right-wing parties, with token representation for the centre-left, which he recognises in the name of the Peace Conference and invites to send a delegation to Paris. It includes Counts István Bethlen (1874-1946) and Pál Teleki, both future prime ministers. The delegation is presented on arrival, on 6 January 1920, with the draft peace treaty for Hungary which the expert committees of the Conference have produced and which the Council has approved without amendment. The Hungarians are appalled to find that the treaty will deprive their country of two-thirds of her territory and over half of her population. The injustice of the Treaty will drive Hungary into the arms of Nazi Germany, a fatal alliance which will doom Hungary's Jews to annihilation and Hungary to defeat and destruction in the Second World War.
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Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
Biographical Writings
Louis Kaplan
Duke University Press, 1995
Marking the centenary of the birth of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946), this book offers a new approach to the Bauhaus artist and theorist’s multifaceted life and work—an approach that redefines the very idea of biographical writing.
In Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Louis Kaplan applies the Derridean deconstructivist model of the "signature effect" to an intellectual biography of a Constructivist artist. Inhabiting the borderline between life and work, the book demonstrates how the signature inscribed by "Moholy" operates in a double space, interweaving signified object and signifying matter, autobiography and auto-graphy. Through interpretative readings of over twenty key artistic and photographic works, Kaplan graphically illustrates Moholy’s signature effect in action. He shows how this effect plays itself out in the complex of relations between artistic originality and plagiarism, between authorial identity and anonymity, as well as in the problematic status of the work of art in the age of technical reproduction. In this way, the book reveals how Moholy’s artistic practice anticipates many of the issues of postmodernist debate and thus has particular relevance today. Consequently, Kaplan clarifies the relationship between avant-garde Constructivism and contemporary deconstruction.
This new and innovative configuration of biography catalyzed by the life writing of Moholy-Nagy will be of critical interest to artists and writers, literary theorists, and art historians.
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A Little Hungarian Pornography
Peter Esterhazy
Northwestern University Press, 1997
An extraordinary montage of sex and politics, Péter Esterházy's innovative novel can be seen to prefigure the liberation of Eastern Europe. Written under what the author calls "small, Hungarian, pornographic circumstances," A Little Hungarian Pornography exists in a context of official falsehood and misinformation, of lies of the body, the soul, and the state, perpetuated in the duality of language.

In a state where the lack of democracy was called socialist democracy, economic chaos a socialist economy, and revolution an anti-revolution, the notion of speech and obscenity becomes equally distorted and skewed. Under these circumstances, the author considers the shackles inherent in the vocabulary of oppression and contrasts this with the freedom of the body in sex. A kaleidoscopic digression on perversion and politics, A Little Hungarian Pornography is both satire and critique, trifle and tract, and further support for Esterházy's status as one of the best writers in Europe today.
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The Making of an American
The Autobiography of a Hungarian Immigrant, Appalachian Entrepreneur, and OSS Officer
Cathy Cassady Corbin
University of Tennessee Press, 2018
Martin Himler emigrated from Hungary to America in 1907, and he arrived in New York City with no money and no plan other than to find work. From these impoverished beginnings, Himler persevered to become a self-made new American. As a coal mining entrepreneur, he established the Himler Coal Company—a bold experiment in a worker-owned mine—founded the small town of Himlerville, Kentucky—a town almost completely populated by Hungarian immigrants—and founded and edited a weekly newspaper, the Magyar Bányászlap (Hungarian Miners’ Journal). During WWII, Himler was called by the United States government to work for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Colonel Himler arrested more than 300 Nazi war criminals and interrogated 40 himself.

Himler’s autobiography tells in Himler’s own words his life story as it evolves into the American dream, wherein hard work results in success. Himler captivates readers from his earliest memories of his childhood in Hungary to his experiences with the OSS.

Following Himler’s death, the manuscript of the autobiography was passed down among Himler family members and then donated to the Martin County Historical and Genealogical Society, Inez, Kentucky, in 2007. Editor Cathy Cassady Corbin’s annotations enhance Himler’s words, while the introduction by scholar Doug Cantrell provides historical context for Himler’s migration to Appalachia. Finally, Charles Fenyvesi’s foreword analyzes Himler’s courageous OSS work.
 
 
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Michael Polanyi and His Generation
Origins of the Social Construction of Science
Mary Jo Nye
University of Chicago Press, 2011
In Michael Polanyi and His Generation, Mary Jo Nye investigates the role that Michael Polanyi and several of his contemporaries played in the emergence of the social turn in the philosophy of science. This turn involved seeing science as a socially based enterprise that does not rely on empiricism and reason alone but on social communities, behavioral norms, and personal commitments. Nye argues that the roots of the social turn are to be found in the scientific culture and political events of Europe in the 1930s, when scientific intellectuals struggled to defend the universal status of scientific knowledge and to justify public support for science in an era of economic catastrophe, Stalinism and Fascism, and increased demands for applications of science to industry and social welfare.
 
At the center of this struggle was Polanyi, who Nye contends was one of the first advocates of this new conception of science. Nye reconstructs Polanyi’s scientific and political milieus in Budapest, Berlin, and Manchester from the 1910s to the 1950s and explains how he and other natural scientists and social scientists of his generation—including J. D. Bernal, Ludwik Fleck, Karl Mannheim, and Robert K. Merton—and the next, such as Thomas Kuhn, forged a politically charged philosophy of science, one that newly emphasized the social construction of science.
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Mothers, Families or Children? Family Policy in Poland, Hungary, and Romania, 1945-2020
Tomasz Inglot
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022

Mothers, Families, or Children? is the first comparative-historical study of family policies in Poland, Hungary, and Romania from 1945 until the eve of the global pandemic in 2020. The book highlights the emergence, consolidation, and perseverance of three types of family policies based on “mother-orientation” in Poland, “family orientation” in Hungary, and “child-orientation” in Romania. It uses a new theoretical framework to identify core and contingent clusters of benefits and services in each country and trace their development across time and under different political regimes, before and after 1989. It also examines and compares policy continuity and change with special attention to institutions, ideas, and actors involved in decision making and reform. As family policies continue to evolve in the era of European Union membership and new governmental and societal actors emerge, this study reveals mechanisms that help preserve core family policy clusters while allowing reform in contingent ones in each country.

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Network and Migration in Early Renaissance Florence, 1378-1433
Friends of Friends in the Kingdom of Hungary
Katalin Prajda
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
This book explores the co-development of political, social, economic, and artistic networks of Florentines in the Kingdom of Hungary during the reign of Sigismund of Luxembourg. Analyzing the social network of these politicians, merchants, artisans, royal officers, dignitaries of the Church, and noblemen is the primary objective of this book. The study addresses both descriptively the patterns of connectivity and causally the impacts of this complex network on cultural exchanges of various types, among these migration, commerce, diplomacy, and artistic exchange. In the setting of a case study, this monograph should best be thought of as an attempt to cross the boundaries that divide political, economic, social, and art history so that they simultaneously figure into a single integrated story of Florentine history and development.
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The Object of Labor
Commodification in Socialist Hungary
Martha Lampland
University of Chicago Press, 1995
Did socialist policies leave the economies of Eastern Europe unprepared for current privatization efforts? Under communist rule, were rural villages truly left untouched by capitalism? In this historical ethnography of rural Hungary, Martha Lampland argues not only that the transition to capitalism was well under way by the 1930s, but that socialist policies themselves played a crucial role in the development of capitalism by transforming conceptions of time, money, and labor.

Exploring the effects of social change thrust upon communities against their will, Lampland examines the history of agrarian labor in Hungary from World War I to the early 1980s. She shows that rural workers had long been subject to strict state policies similar to those imposed by collectivization. Since the values of privatization and individualism associated with capitalism characterized rural Hungarian life both prior to and throughout the socialist period, capitalist ideologies of work and morality survived unscathed in the private economic practices of rural society. Lampland also shows how labor practices under socialism prepared the workforce for capitalism. By drawing villagers into factories and collective farms, for example, the socialist state forced farmers to work within tightly controlled time limits and to calculate their efforts in monetary terms. Indeed, this control and commodification of rural labor under socialism was essential to the transformation to capitalism.
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One Must Also Be Hungarian
Adam Biro
University of Chicago Press, 2006

The only country in the world with a line in its national anthem as desperate as “this people has already suffered for its past and its future,” Hungary is a nation defined by poverty, despair, and conflict. Its history, of course, took an even darker and more tragic turn during the Holocaust. But the story of the Jews in Hungary is also one of survival, heroism, and even humor—and that is the one acclaimed author Adam Biro sets out to recover in One Must Also Be Hungarian, an inspiring and altogether poignant look back at the lives of his family members over the past two hundred years. 

A Hungarian refugee and celebrated novelist working in Paris, Biro recognizes the enormous sacrifices that his ancestors made to pave the way for his successes and the envious position he occupies as a writer in postwar Europe. Inspired, therefore, to share the story of his family members with his grandson, Biro draws some moving pictures of them here: witty and whimsical vignettes that convey not only their courageous sides, but also their inner fears, angers, jealousies, and weaknesses—traits that lend an indelible humanity to their portraiture. Spanning the turn of the nineteenth century, two destructive world wars, the dramatic rise of communism, and its equally astonishing fall, the stories here convey a particularly Jewish sense of humor and irony throughout—one that made possible their survival amid such enormous adversity possible. 

Already published to much acclaim in France, One Must Also Be Hungarian is a wry and compulsively readable book that rescues from oblivion the stories of a long-suffering but likewise remarkable and deservedly proud people.

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front cover of The Political Economy of Dual Transformations
The Political Economy of Dual Transformations
Market Reform and Democratization in Hungary
David L. Bartlett
University of Michigan Press, 1997
In the early 1990s, scholars voiced skepticism about the capacity of Eastern Europe's new democracies to manage simultaneous political and economic reform. They argued that the surge of popular participation following democratization would thwart efforts by successor governments to enact market reforms that imposed high costs on major elements of post-Communist society. David Bartlett challenges the conventional wisdom regarding the hazards of "dual transformations": far from hindering marketization, democratization facilitated it. Bartlett argues that the transition to democracy in East Central Europe lowered the political barriers to market reforms by weakening the ability of actors most vulnerable to marketization to manipulate the existing institutional structure to stop or slow down the process.
Although the analysis focuses on Hungary, whose long history of market reforms makes it an ideal vehicle for assessing the impact of institutional change on reform policy, the author shows how his findings call into question the use of "shock therapy" and arguments, based on the experience in East Asia, that economic development and democratization are incompatible.
This book will appeal to economists, political scientists, and others interested in transition problems in formerly communist countries, democratic transitions, and the politics of stabilization and adjustment.
David L. Bartlett is Assistant Professor of Political Science, Vanderbilt University.
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Queer Budapest, 1873–1961
Anita Kurimay
University of Chicago Press, 2020
By the dawn of the twentieth century, Budapest was a burgeoning cosmopolitan metropolis. Known at the time as the “Pearl of the Danube,” it boasted some of Europe’s most innovative architectural and cultural achievements, and its growing middle class was committed to advancing the city’s liberal politics and making it an intellectual and commercial crossroads between East and West. In addition, as historian Anita Kurimay reveals, fin-de-siècle Budapest was also famous for its boisterous public sexual culture, including a robust gay subculture. Queer Budapest is the riveting story of nonnormative sexualities in Hungary as they were understood, experienced, and policed between the birth of the capital as a unified metropolis in 1873 and the decriminalization of male homosexual acts in 1961.
 
Kurimay explores how and why a series of illiberal Hungarian regimes came to regulate but also tolerate and protect queer life. She also explains how the precarious coexistence between the illiberal state and queer community ended abruptly at the close of World War II. A stunning reappraisal of sexuality’s political implications, Queer Budapest recuperates queer communities as an integral part of Hungary’s—and Europe’s—modern incarnation.
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front cover of The Radiant Past
The Radiant Past
Ideology and Reality in Hungary's Road to Capitalism
Michael Burawoy and János Lukács
University of Chicago Press, 1992
Communism, once heralded as the "radiant future" of all humanity, has now become part of Eastern Europe's past. What does the record say about the legacy of communism as an organizational system?

Michael Burawoy and Janos Lukacs consider this question from the standpoint of the Hungarian working class. Between 1983 and 1990 the authors carried out intensive studies in two core Hungarian industries, machine building and steel production, to produce the first extended participant-observation study of work and politics in state socialism.

"A fascinating and engagingly written eyewitness report on proletarian life in the waning years of goulash communism. . . . A richly rewarding book, one that should interest political scientists in a variety of subfields, from area specialists and comparativists to political economists, as well as those interested in Marxist and post-Marxist theory."—Elizabeth Kiss, American Political Science Review

"A very rich book. . . . It does not merely offer another theory of transition, but also presents a clear interpretive scheme, combined with sociological theory and vivid ethnographic description."—Ireneusz Bialecki, Contemporary Sociology

"Its informed skepticism of post-Communist liberal euphoria, its concern for workers, and its fine ethnographic details make this work valuable."—"àkos Róna-Tas, American Journal of Sociology
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Remembering Cold Days
The 1942 Massacre of Novi Sad and Hungarian Politics and Society, 1942-1989
Arpad von Klimo
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018
Between three and four thousand civilians, primarily Serbian and Jewish, were murdered in the Novi Sad massacre of 1942. Hungarian soldiers and gendarmes carried out the crime in the city and surrounding areas, in territory Hungary occupied after the German attack on Yugoslavia. The perpetrators believed their acts to be a contribution to a new order in Europe, and as a means to ethnically cleanse the occupied lands.

In marked contrast to other massacres, the Horthy regime investigated the incident and tried and convicted the commanding officers in 1943-44. Other trials would follow. During the 1960s, a novel and film telling the story of the massacre sparked the first public open debate about the Hungarian Holocaust.

This book examines public contentions over the Novi Sad massacre from its inception in 1942 until the final trial in 2011. It demonstrates how attitudes changed over time toward this war crime and the Holocaust through different political regimes and in Hungarian society. The book also views how the larger European context influenced Hungarian debates, and how Yugoslavia dealt with memories of the massacre.
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Seed of Sarah
Memoirs of a Survivor
Judith Magyar Isaacson
University of Illinois Press, 1990
This gripping and highly acclaimed account of a young woman's experience in concentration camps now includes a final chapter, "A Time to Forgive?" detailing the author's trips back to her former forced labor camp in Germany.
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Social Medicine in Eastern Europe
The Organization of Health Services and the Education of Medical Personnel in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland
E. Richard Weinerman
Harvard University Press, 1969
This book reports on the health services and medical education system in eastern Europe as observed by the author during a three-month study in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland in the spring of 1967. As an experienced internist and health care administrator, Dr. Richard Weinerman observed directly the clinical care of patients and appraised the similarities and differences among the three nations and their variations on the Soviet model. Each health program was viewed in its historical, political, and cultural contexts.
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Strictly from Hungary
Ladislas Farago
Westholme Publishing, 2004
“Rich in humor, confidence men, and charm."—New York Times
Known for his best-selling military histories, Ladislas Farago also wrote a witty tribute to his homeland, Strictly from Hungary. Noting that Hungary has produced some of the world's most renowned artists, scientists, and financiers as well as its share of world-class con-artists, charlatans, and rakes, Farago sets out to explain just how one tiny country can be responsible for so much talent, both good and bad. Using stories from his days as a struggling writer in the bustling café scenes of Budapest and New York City, Farago demonstrates the Hungarian knack for remaining irrepressible and optimistic even in the face of catastrophe. Here we meet Zoltan, a fellow Bohemian who presents his astonished benefactor with a play "about nothing," a theme later made famous by another writer of Hungarian descent, Jerry Seinfeld. Farago also introduces us to "Baby Kiss," a vivacious Hungarian beauty queen, and the story of how she ended up in Fort Worth, Texas; Orkeny, a double agent for America at the height of the Cold War who "spiced up" his reports to keep everyone happy, and the author's own experience getting mustered into the supposedly non-existent Royal Hungarian Army. Farago's reminiscence validates what most Hungarians believe: that Hungary is the center of the world and that everyone has some connection to the land of the Magyars. In that spirit, Farago learns that George Washington himself was "strictly from Hungary." This edition is introduced by the author's son, who shows that the same vibrant spirit described by his father remains the hallmark of the Hungarian temperament.
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Surviving in Silence
A Deaf Boy in the Holocaust, The Harry I. Dunai Story
Eleanor C. Dunai
Gallaudet University Press, 2002

Izrael Zachariah Deutsch was born on March 15, 1934, in Komjata, Czechoslovakia. The second youngest child, Izrael lived a bucolic existence with nine brothers and sisters on a farm, differing from them only in that he was deaf. When he was six, his mother took him to Budapest, Hungary, and enrolled him in a Jewish school for deaf children, where he thrived. Soon, however, the Nazi regime in Germany and the Arrow Cross fascists in Hungary destroyed Izrael’s world forever.
       Izrael realized that by being both Jewish and deaf, he faced a double threat of being exported to the gas chambers in Poland. But at every lethal junction, he found a way to survive, first by buying and reselling pastries for extra money that later saved his life in the Budapest ghetto. Still, Izrael was close to death from starvation when he was liberated by Russian soldiers on January 18, 1945.
​       Izrael survived the war only to learn that his parents and two brothers had been murdered by the Nazis. The rest of his brothers and sisters scattered to distant parts of the world. Forced to remain in Budapest, Izrael finished school and became an accomplished machinist. He avoided any part in the Hungarian uprising in 1956 so that he could secure a visa to leave for Sweden. From Sweden he traveled throughout Europe and Israel, using an amazing network of Holocaust survivors, relatives, and deaf friends to ease his journey. He finally settled in Los Angeles, where he married a deaf Jewish woman he had met years before. Along the way, he changed his name from Izrael Deutsch to Harry Dunai.

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Tangible Belonging
Negotiating Germanness in Twentieth-Century Hungary
John C. Swanson
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016
Winner, 2019 HSA Book Prize

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.
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The Value of Labor
The Science of Commodification in Hungary, 1920-1956
Martha Lampland
University of Chicago Press, 2016
At the heart of today’s fierce political anger over income inequality is a feature of capitalism that Karl Marx famously obsessed over: the commodification of labor. Most of us think wage-labor economics is at odds with socialist thinking, but as Martha Lampland explains in this fascinating look at twentieth-century Hungary, there have been moments when such economics actually flourished under socialist regimes. Exploring the region’s transition from a capitalist to a socialist system—and the economic science and practices that endured it—she sheds new light on the two most polarized ideologies of modern history.
            Lampland trains her eye on the scientific claims of modern economic modeling, using Hungary’s unique vantage point to show how theories, policies, and techniques for commodifying agrarian labor that were born in the capitalist era were adopted by the socialist regime as a scientifically designed wage system on cooperative farms. Paying attention to the specific historical circumstances of Hungary, she explores the ways economists and the abstract notions they traffic in can both shape and be shaped by local conditions, and she compellingly shows how labor can be commodified in the absence of a labor market. The result is a unique account of economic thought that unveils hidden but necessary continuities running through the turbulent twentieth century. 
 
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Victim of History
Cardinal Mindszenty, a biography
Margit Balogh
Catholic University of America Press, 2022
“Victim of history,” “a martyr from behind the Iron Curtain,” “the Hungarian Gandhi” – these are just some of the epithets which people used to describe Cardinal Mindszenty, archbishop of Esztergom, who was the last Hungarian prelate to use the title of prince primate. Today, Mindszenty has been forgotten in most countries except for Hungary, but when he died in 1975, he was known all over the world as a symbol of the struggle of the Catholic Church against communism. Cardinal Mindszenty held the post of archbishop of Esztergom from 1945 until 1974, but during this period of almost three decades he served barely four years in office. The political police arrested him on December 26, 1948, and the Budapest People’s Court subsequently sentenced him to life imprisonment. Based on the Stalinist practice of show trials, one of the accusations against Mindszenty, referring to his legitimist leanings, was his alleged attempt to re-establish Habsburg rule in Hungary. He regained freedom during the 1956 revolution but only for a few days. He was granted refuge by the US Embassy in Budapest between November 4, 1956 –September 28, 1971. In the fifteen years he spent at the American embassy enormous changes took place in the world while his personality remained frozen into the past. When in 1971 Pope Paul VI received the Hungarian foreign minister, he called Mindszenty “the victim of history”. His last years were spent free at last, but far away from his homeland. In Hungary, the Catholic believers eagerly await his beatification.
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The Workers' State
Industrial Labor and the Making of Socialist Hungary, 1944–1958
Mark Pittaway
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012
In 1956, Hungarian workers joined students on the streets to protest years of wage and benefit cuts enacted by the Communist regime. Although quickly suppressed by Soviet forces, the uprising led to changes in party leadership and conciliatory measures that would influence labor politics for the next thirty years.

In The Workers’ State, Mark Pittaway presents a groundbreaking study of the complexities of the Hungarian working class, its relationship to the Communist Party, and its major political role during the foundational period of socialism (1944–1958). Through case studies of three industrial centers—Újpest, Tatabánya, and Zala County—Pittaway analyzes the dynamics of gender, class, generation, skill level, and rural versus urban location, to reveal the embedded hierarchies within Hungarian labor. He further demonstrates how industries themselves, from oil and mining to armaments and textiles, possessed their own unique labor subcultures.

From the outset, the socialist state won favor with many workers, as they had grown weary of the disparity and oppression of class systems under fascism. By the early 1950s, however, a gap between the aspirations of labor and the goals of the state began to widen. In the Stalinist drive toward industrialization, stepped up production measures, shortages of goods and housing, wage and benefit cuts, and suppression became widespread.

Many histories of this period have focused on Communist terror tactics and the brutal suppression of a pliant population. In contrast, Pittaway’s social chronicle sheds new light on working-class structures and the determination of labor to pursue its own interests and affect change in the face of oppression. It also offers new understandings of the role of labor and the importance of local histories in Eastern Europe under communism.
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Working Difference
Women’s Working Lives in Hungary and Austria, 1945–1995
Éva Fodor
Duke University Press, 2003
Working Difference is one of the first comparative, historical studies of women's professional access to public institutions in a state socialist and a capitalist society. Éva Fodor examines women's inclusion in and exclusion from positions of authority in Austria and Hungary in the latter half of the twentieth century. Until the end of World War II women's lives in the two countries, which were once part of the same empire, followed similar paths, which only began to diverge after the communist takeover in Hungary in the late 1940s. Fodor takes advantage of Austria and Hungary's common history to carefully examine the effects of state socialism and the differing trajectories to social mobility and authority available to women in each country.

Fodor brings qualitative and quantitative analyses to bear, combining statistical analyses of survey data, interviews with women managers in both countries, and archival materials including those from the previously classified archives of the Hungarian communist party and transcripts from sessions of the Austrian Parliament. She shows how women's access to power varied in degree and operated through different principles and mechanisms in accordance with the stratification systems of the respective countries. In Hungary women's mobility was curtailed by political means (often involving limited access to communist party membership), while in Austria women's professional advancement was affected by limited access to educational institutions and the labor market. Fodor discusses the legacies of Austria's and Hungary's "gender regimes" following the demise of state socialism and during the process of integration into the European Union.

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