Symposium A3: Foreigners in the Habsburg Monarchy
Organisers: Károly Kókai & Andrea Seidler
Thursday, August 25, Department of Jewish Studies (Judaistik)
10:00–10:30
Brigitta Pesti:
Faszination des Exotischen
Der Vortrag will die Geschichte der visuellen Stereotypie der Orient in der europäischen Kunst und populären Kultur der frühen Neuzeit darstellen und analysieren, die Schwerpunkt liegt dabei auf der Ikonographie der Haremdame, der sog. Odaliske.
Der Orientalismus, das Interesse an den exotischen Themen in Kunst und Kultur stammt bereits aus der Zeit der ersten christlich-osmanischen Auseinandersetzungen, ihre Höhepunkt liegt im Mittel- und Osteuropa allerdings im 18. Jahrhundert. Die ruhige politische Situation, was nach der osmanischen Niederlage bei der zweiten Belagerung Wiens (1683) eingesetzt hat, führte zum wachsenden kulturellen Interesse gegenüber dem Orient und zur vielseitigen Darstellungen des exotischen Feindes. Das Bild der Osmanen wandelte sich vom bedrohlichen Bluthund, vom Schrecken der Christenheit, zum exotischen Fremden.
Als eine Form der imaginativen Weltaneignung wurde also die osmanische Kultur Teil der politischen, wissenschaftlichen, kulturellen und ästhetischen Diskursen Europas, wobei sie anfangs in den meisten Fällen nicht auf der realen Erfahrung von Fremdheit, sondern vielmehr auf Fantasien des Westens vom Luxus und der Exotik des Orients basierten. Das Bild der orientalischen Frau auf westlichen Porträts á la turque war also von Sehnsucht nach Wohlleben, nach freier Liebe und märchenhafter Prachtentfaltung bestimmt und symbolisierte die breite und euphorische Aufnahme und Verarbeitung osmanischer Kultur im 18. Jahrhundert.
10:30–11:00
Andrea Seidler:
Daniel Cornides, philosopher, historian, teacher, journalist - and an almost forgotten actor of the Hungarian Age of Enlightenment.
The contribution deals with the oeuvre of an important scholar of the 18th century who was socialized within the Habsburg Monarchy, spent his student years abroad and later, as secretary of Count Teleki, had several residences within the Empire and acted from there: the historian and heraldist Daniel Cornides (1732-1787). He attended the Protestant Lyceum in Bratislava and studied philosophy and theology at the University of Erlangen, and wrote his dissertation on the topic "De motibus lunae ac phaenomenis inde pendentibus" (Erlangen 1757, 4°). After his return to Hungary, the baroness Polyxena Wesselényi appointed him as the educator of her sons in Transylvania. For fifteen years he led the education of her sons, was at the same time a teacher of the German language at the Reformed Collegium in Cluj-Napoca, and researched Hungarian and Transylvanian history. He then accepted the position of secretary with Count Jos. Teleky von Szék, accompanied him on his travels through Italy, Germany and France, and in the foreign libraries he visited, namely those of Vienna, Göttingen and Gotha, increased his historical knowledge and writings concerning the history of his fatherland. At the same time he appeared publicly with his own works and essays.The lecture deals with questions of Cornides' identity, his political position on the Habsburg Empire and his contribution to the development of a structured historical scholarship in Hungary in the 18th century.
11:00–11:30
Katalin Blaskó:
Excluded and forgotten: Carl Maria Kertbeny
By reviving the national past and old traditions, coupled with the support of national ambitions, an initially philological nationalism emerged in the first decades of the 19th century among the Hungarians as well as among other peoples of the empire, which intensified the contrasts of the nationalities and supported the separatist wishes. At the beginning of the 1930s, a massive suppression process began, in which the thesis was systematically enforced that the Hungarian language was the only criterion regarding the belonging to national literature. The non-Hungarian-speaking authors were forced to assimilate linguistically, otherwise they would no longer have belonged to the Hungarian nation. Some Hungarian-German intellectuals persisted for a while in their position in Hungarian national literature, but they could no longer position themselves as important cultural bearers, mediators and organic parts of the nation, although they still tried to maintain some of their Hungarus identity. The planned lecture is intended to deal with the person and work of Carl Maria Kertbeny, who was one of the most active mediators of Hungarian literature in German-speaking countries in the 19th century and who nevertheless fell victim to the process of repression mentioned above.
Ausgegrenzt und vergessen: Carl Maria Kertbeny (1824-1882)
Durch das Beleben der nationalen Vergangenheit und alter Traditionen, gepaart mit der Unterstützung nationaler Ambitionen, entstand in den ersten Jahrzehnten des 19. Jahrhunderts bei den Ungarn wie auch bei anderen Völkern des Reiches ein zunächst philologischer Nationalismus, der die Gegensätze der Nationalitäten verschärfte und die separatistischen Wünsche unterstützte. Am Anfang der 30er Jahre begann ein massiver Verdrängungsprozess, in dem die These, wonach das einzige Kriteritum in der Frage der Zugehörigkeit zur Nationalliteratur die ungarische Sprache sei, systematisch durchgesetzt wurde. Die nicht ungarischsprachigen Autoren waren zur sprachlichen Assimilation gezwungen, andernfalls hätten sie nicht mehr zur ungarischen Nation gezählt. Einige ungarndeutsche Intellektuelle beharrten noch eine Zeit lang auf ihre Position in der ungarischen Nationalliteratur, sie konnten sich aber nicht mehr als wichtige Kulturträger, Vermittler und organischer Teil der Nation positionieren, obwohl sie noch versuchten, etwas von ihrer Hungarus-Identität aufrecht zu erhalten. Der geplante Vortrag soll die Person und das Werk von Carl Maria Kertbeny behandeln, der im 19. Jahrhundert einer der aktivsten Vermittler der ungarischen Literatur im deutschsprachigen Raum war und dennoch zum Opfer des oben genannten Verdrängungsprozesses wurde.
11:30–12:00
Margit Köves:
The Orient: as attraction, dedication and choice of profession
Hungary being part of the of the Habsburg Monarchy was searching for the specificity that distinguished Hungarian language and culture from Austrian and German culture in spite of all the collaboration and association with the the ruling administration. Johann Gottfried Herder’s ideas, contributed to a great extent to the discussion of the implications of geography for the role of the psyche, national language, and nationhood. These ideas in changed forms have been present in Hungarian intellectual history in the Kingdom of Hungary and defined to a great extent the position of the tolerated Jewry. The connection of the universal, the specific and the particular characterized the engagement of tolerated Jewry who strove to locate themselves in key positions and produced theories of history of conquests, cross-cultural meetings, negotiating political and intellectual power structures with ethnical, religious and cultural differences.
The work of these two generations of intellectuals I am examining shows that at the turn of the century there was a widened view of the world and the two generations of tolerated Jewry incorporated it as their choice of profession or area of attraction in their work.
To substantiate this the paper takes up the work of two generations of Jewish intellectuals to examine the forms of attraction to the Orient. The first generation of scholars like Ármin Vámbéry(1832–1913), Ignaz Goldziher (1850–1921) and Aurel Stein (1862–1943) chose oriental studies as one of the new professions at the time of the institutionalization of academic oriental studies. At the time of the challenges of emancipation and anti-semitism, two contesting movements – the work of the three scholars evolved in the area of relationship between community, nation and state, issues, which also emerged in the context of Jewish emancipation in Hungary. Ignaz Goldziher worked on Arabic sources, elaborating the relationship between the production of material life, ideology, religion, and the state. Aurel Stein as an officer of the British Empire directed excavations in Central Asia and interpreted the early Hun, Sogdian, and Uighur Turkish civilizations in the region.
In the second generation some of the work of Jewish Hungarian intellectuals, Béla Balázs (1884-1949)his tales, diaries and mysteries and Georg Lukács (1885-1971) his essays in Soul and Form, his notes on Dostoyevski and his diary will be taken up to look at their cooperation: figures, images and terms of the Orient, based on their reading of Indian Classics and theosophy that was very popular at the time. Balázs in his tales and Lukács in his early essays used characters from Indian texts like Ganesha, Krishna, Radha and the gopis, and terms and expressions from theosophy like ‘soul’, ‘caste’, ‘astral love’ to enter different concepts of subjectivity.
13:30–14:00
Karoly Kokai:
Comparative literature in times of cultural identity formation
In its entre history untl 1918, Hungary was a pluralistic and multethnic state with regard to culture, languages, laws, religions and inhabitants, a multiculturalism that has repeatedly been the object of scholarly study. This lecture will present a particular comparative literature project that was undertaken in Hungary in the last decades of the 19th century, and examine it within the context of the "establishment of modern national states during the 19th and 20th centuries and the associated ethnical conficts".
The project in queston was the periodical Összehasonlító irodalomtörténelmi lapok – with the sub-ttle “A weekly paper for the comparison of history of literatures” – which was established in 1877 in Kolozsvár and existed untl 1888. This periodical is today considered the frst journal of comparatve literature to have appeared worldwide. The academic discipline of comparative literature has nevertheless not only a long history in Hungary, but a history full of twists and interruptions.
Összehasonlító irodalomtörténelmi lapok existed for more than ten years. Afer its end it took decades to start a comparable project. The conference which triggered the establishment of an associaton for comparatve literature took place in Budapest in 1931. It took again decades afer the second World War to start the stll running book series “Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages”, introduced in 1973 at the Akadémia kiadó of Budapest (Academy Publishing House of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences), and for the Hungarian intellectual Mihály György Vajda to become president of the International Comparative Literature Association from 1982 to1985.
The lecture will give a brief account of the development of the periodical Összehasonlító irodalomtörténet lapok against the background of Hungary following the Austrian-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 and during the preparations for Hungary’s Millenary Celebrations of 1896.
14:00–14:30
Erika Erlinghagen:
Über den Umgang mit Minderheiten bzw. Volksgruppen in Österreich und Ungarn im 20. Jahrhundert (The Treatment of Minorities and Ethnic Groups in Austria and Hungary in the 20th Century)
With the disintegration of the Habsburg Monarchy, the hitherto more or less problematc minority issue became acute in both Austria and Hungary. The paper would like to give an overview of the development of the minority laws in Austria and Hungary, using the example of the Hungarian ethnic group (Ungarische Volksgruppe) in Austria as well as the German minority (Ungarndeutsche) in Hungary. While these two minorities are not fully comparable, their history shows similar cornerstones, while their fate was very diferent, especially in the early 20th century.The aim is to show which different strategies were used in dealing with minorities in the 20th century in Austria and Hungary, how these contributed to the current situaton of the respective minority and to what extent the politcal decisions were decisive for the development of the minorities. In fact, the state exerts massive infuence on its minorities through the respective minority policies, which can range from suppression to instrumentalization to deliberate promotion. In both Austria and Hungary, the goals of politcal leadership have changed over time, which has also directly affected the living and development circumstances of minorities in the two countries. The reasons for this will also be explored in this presentation.
14:30–15:00
Endre Hárs:
Gulliver hat schlecht geträumt. Über Frigyes Karinthys utopisch-dystopische Romane Die Reise nach Faremido (1916) und Capillaria (1921)
The Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy (1887-1938) showed his sense of fantasy several times. In his two short novels The Journey to Faremido. Gulliver’s Fifth Journey (1916) and Capillaria. Gulliver’s Sixth Journey (1921), he created fantasies that deal with current issues and social problems of their time in the best utopian-dystopian tradition. While The Journey to Faremido emerges directly from the traumas of the First World War and focuses on the connection between militarism and technological development, Capillaria offers a not unproblematic counterpart to the emerging utopian-dystopian literature by women. Both are themes rooted in the late period of the dual monarchy and set the scene for a rude awakening in the 20th century.
Literatur
Karinthy, Frigyes: Die neuen Reisen des Lemuel Gulliver. Zwei phantastische Kurzromane im Stile von Jonathan Swift nebst einer freimütigen Korrespondenz an Herbert George Wells. Aus dem Ungarischen von Hans Skirecki. Berlin. Verlag Neues Leben 1983.