Abstract
As to the relations between majority (dominant) nation and ethnic minorities in general, there exists a venerable ideal, according to which the majority nation amd the minority groups would live in a happy co-existence, each party preserving its own ethnic identity and respecting that of the other. Reality, however, presents a less rosy picture. Most commonly, there is an eternal struggle between the two groups, whose objectives are so hopelessly different, indeed vastly opposed to each other. In the main, the majority nation’s ultimate goal is to integrate all the different ethnic groups into a single, coherent unit whose structure and character is molded by the former. This is aimed at national unity and solidarity, so essential to the existence of a viable state. The kind-conscious ethnic minorities — and it must be remembered that only these people qualify as ethnic minorities — as a rule resist assimilation by all means and try to preserve as much of their national identities and particularities as possible. They know very well that the loss of the latter amounts to the loss of their nationality. In short, what the state wants is integration, and what the kind-conscious minorities want is a form of segregation.
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Macartney, Hungary, A Short History, pp. 189, 190. The role of Germandom in building up the Hungarian middle class, both quantitatively and qualitatively, cannot be stressed enough. However, since it was precisely the middle class German who was prone to be Magyarized most easily, he was the one who was first lost to his kinsmen, the latter mostly in the peasant stratum. This is why emphasis in this study is placed on the peasant aspect of Hungary’s Germandom.
There was a strong view existing in Hungary according to which the nationalities problem in Hungary could be just as well regarded as a problem in immigration since it resulted mainly from the eighteenth century Austrian policy in question. Count Paul Teleki, the noted Hungarian geographer-statesman, said: “This forced immigration contributed much toward the misunderstanding of the whole matter by the Hungarians. Especially was this true because the Hungarians considered the policy purely a measure of the Austrian imperial government against their state and nation. ... The vision of the Hungarian politicians was clouded. They saw only the fact that the Austrians colonized Hungary with aliens. Therefore, they did not see the situation as it was. They looked backward, and not forward. They neglected measures in both of these respects-first, to enlarge and codify the rights of the alien nationalities; and secondly, at that time, when it would have been possible, in the eighteenth century, they missed the opportunity to spread the Magyar language and unify the land. Together with other old institutions they even preserved Latin and the parliamentary language, and so it remained until 1848.” Teleki, op. cit., pp. 84, 85.
Macartney, Hungary and Her Successors ... pp. 451–52. There were counter currents, too. Some obscure (Magyar) societies of the inter-War period, such as the Magyar Fajvédök Szövetsége (Association of Magyar Race Conservationists) and the Törzsökös Magyarok Szövetsége (Association of True-Born Magyars) nourished rather nebulous aspirations according to which true and supreme leadership in Hungary should gradually be taken over by racially pure Magyars only. It should be stressed, however, that although these societies have had at times quite a few influential persons in their membership, whose tactless public utterances and publications provoked understandable resentment among the nationalities and more so among the assimilated new Magyars, yet the above-mentioned ideas never became officially approved by any existing Hungarian government. Small wonder, indeed, that the very same Fajvédök who pressed racial supremacy so much became in time Nazis almost to a man. Their Nazism did not stop them from pursuing their original racial ideas for Magyar supremacy, making them in this respect diametrically opposed to their German comrades in the Third Reich. The Turanists, that is those few Magyars who promoted closer cultural ties with the Turanian family of peoples in Asia, were never numerous or significant enough to influence Hungarian policies in any decisivs way. Yet, many Swabian leaders attributed for some reason great (and to the Germans unfavorable) significance to this small and rather unknown group.
The anti-Magyar policies and intrigues of Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand (whose assassination by a Serb fanatic in June, 1914, triggered the First World War) gave support to this way of thinking. It can, in a sense, be regarded as an instinctive self-defense of the Hungarian government against excessive Habsburg patronage of the nationalities .... “In the eyes of many Magyars, the only complete safeguard against these dangers (Vienna’s age-long histility to Hungarian nationalism and its historic policy of allying itself with the non-Magyars) would have been in Magyarizing the entire population ... there were many [Magyars] who felt that a large measure of Magyarization, something far beyond the provision of schools for a few aspiring civil servants, was a simple and legitimate matter of self-defense.” Macartney, Problems of the Danube Basin ... p. 145.
Cf. von Farkas, Ungarns Geschichte und Kultur in Dokumenten (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassovitz, 1955), p. VIII.
The Magyars, never prolific, have now the dubious reputation of having the lowest birthrate in the world: 13.5 per thousand in 1966.
O. A. Isbert of the German Foreign Institute, an able but much biased student of Hungarian problems and certainly no friend of the Magyars, often referred to the Magyars as the Herrenvolk of the Danube basin in the war time lectures for the German armed forces. (R 57 DAi 304) A unique, and interesting analysis of the Magyar idea in question is expounded by the controversial German philosopher (Count) Hermann Keyserling in his Europe (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Co., 1928), pp.183–220.
Another Magyar particularity, the belief in their cultural superiority (Kulturfölény) over their nationalities (save the Germans) was much more recent in origin and by far not so genuine as their Herrenvolk idea.
This naively conceited view can in a way be compared with the American attitude toward the immigrants. The latter, too, were “elevated” to the status of the native-born once they naturalized and adopted the American way of life. Characteristically the newer states of the United States, Alaska and Hawai, were not (voluntarily) annexed or incorporated but, as the official language puts it, “admitted,” into the Union: in plain English, again, elevated to a superior status.
There should be no mistake. No German peasant ever had any inferiority feelings in the face of a Magyar peasant. On the contrary, on this plane he felt himself somewhat superior to his Magyar companion, with whom he never identified the Herrenvolk. The latter (az urak, i.e., the lords) belonged to the image of official Hungary only, made up of the ruling upper circles and the vast officialdom. Again, it should be remembered that with the advent of chauvinism the great majority of the Hungarian ultra-patriots came not from the still baroque and much fossilized upper-most stratum but from the rank and file of the middle class, many of them only recently Magyarized and even more of them ex-Germans.
Jakob Bleyer, towering figure in the leadership of the German populations in Hungary, born in 1874 in tne Bácska (then Hungary), completed with honors his education under various grants by the Hungarian State, became professor of German Literature of the University of Kolozsvár (Germ. Klausenburg, Rum. Cluj) in 1908, was elected corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Letters, 1910; founder and trustee of the Deutschungarischer Volksrat (German-Hungarian Folk Council) 1919; Minister of Nationalities, August, 1919-December, 1920; founder and trustee of the UDV, 1923; elected member of the Hungarian Parliament, 1926; died after a short illness in Budapest in 1933. There are many biographies of Dr. Bleyer; the best of these is perhaps Hedwig Schwind, Jakob Bleyer, ein Erwecker und Vorkämpfer des ungarländischen Deutschtums, (München: Veröffentlichungen des Südostdeutschen Kulturwerks, Reihe B, Nr. 14, 1962).
For an excellent brief study see Wilhelm Kronfuss, Jakob Bleyer als Vorbild unserer Kulturarbeit (München: Südostdeutsche Heimatblätter, Folge 1/2, 1954).
Macartney, Hungary and her Successors ... p. 48. It was both symbolic and symptomatic that a parallel situation occurred on another crucial occasion some two decades later, when the Germans in Hungary were again confronted with a choice between the loyal-to-Hungary Volksbildungsverein of the same Jakob Bleyer and the radical (Nazi) Volksbund of Franz Basch. It was again the latter which finally-gained the upper hand, a fact for which ultimate responsibility — similar to the events of 1918–1919 — rests not exclusively with the German groups, but at least equally with official Hungary, too. See below, Chapters VIII and IX.
The Germans were not alone. Some Croat villages in the center and south of that region advocated at that time similar ideas. Ibid., pp. 48, 49, 50, inter alia.
“... Where the Germans lived in compact masses, districts (‘Gauen’) were to be formed, in agreement with the non-Germans living in them. Within these districts the German people enjoyed complete legislative and administrative autonomy as regards internal administration, justice, education, and cultural and church questions; the language of communication with the authorities was German, even in ‘common’ affairs not falling within the sphere of their autonomy. For autonomous questions the German nation possessed a National Assembly of its own; for questions of common interest, they were represented in proportion to their numbers in the Hungarian Parliament. A German Ministry was established under a Minister who was to be equally responsible to the German National Assembly and to the Hungarian Parliament, and to sit as an equal member of the Hungarian Government in all common questions ....” Ibid., pp. 49, 50.
Replacing the defunct Ministry for Nationalities Affairs, a new division was established in the Presidium (the office of the prime minister) for that purpose. Its head for more than two decades had been Tibor Pataky, an able bureaucrat, who however was not favored by the Germans. The German Legation in Budapest in its report to the Foreign Office in Berlin on April 8, 1942, describes Pataky as “a person known as an adversary of Hungary’s Germandom” (Inland II g 272). Supplementing the aforesaid office in the Presidium, a new division was established in the Ministry of Education, handling primarily the schooling and religious affairs of the nationalities.
The fact that the entire period from October, 1918 to August, 1919, i.e., the Károlyi Revolution and Béla Kún’s Commune, had been condemned in toto by the ensuing Horthy regime (the regency) proved to be most harmful to the aspirations of the nationalities in Hungary. All concessions given to the latter during the foregoing period were considered by the regency “revolutionary,” i.e., bad moves, which therefore had to be denounced and anulled.
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© 1967 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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Paikert, G.C. (1967). Relations between State and Minorities in the Period Before Hitler. In: The Danube Swabians. Studies in Social Life, vol 10. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-9717-5_6
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