This collection of essays delves into European historiography, examining how overlapping national histories shape the understanding of contested areas through various conflicting perspectives. Sponsored by the European Science Foundation, it is part of the larger Writing the Nation project, highlighting the complexities of historical narratives across Europe. The volume offers a unique insight into the interplay between national identities and historical interpretation.
This is a social history of refugees escaping Hungary after the Bolshevik-type revolution of 1919, the ensuing counterrevolution, and the rise of anti-Semitism. Largely Jewish and German before World War I, the Hungarian middle class was torn by the disastrous war, the partitioning of Hungary in the Treaty of Trianon, and the numerus clausus act XXV in 1920 that seriously curtailed the number of Jews admitted to higher education. Hungary’s outstanding future professionals, whether Jewish, Liberal or Socialist, felt compelled to leave the country and head to German-speaking universities in Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Germany. When Hitler came to power, these exiles were to flee again, many on the fringes of the huge German emigration. Emotionally prepared by their earlier threatening experiences in Hungary, they were quick to recognize the need to uproot themselves again. Many fled to the United States where their double exile catalyzed the USA into an active enemy of Nazi Germany and stimulated the transplantation of European modernism into American art and music. To their surprise, the refugees also encountered anti-Semitism in the USA. The book is based on extensive archival work in the USA and Germany.
A celebrated art historian and scholar of Japan, G. G. Zerffi also had a secret life as a well-paid Austrian secret agent. More than a biography of Zerffi, this book offers a rare glimpse into the secret service of the nineteenth-century Habsburg monarchy -the precursor of all modern secret services in Europe and beyond -while also serving as a guide to the history of the Hungarian revolution, the war of independence of 1848-49, and the international exile of European revolutionaries. Through the example of Zerffi's life, Tibor Frank examines how the secret police were used by the state to repress individual rights through intimidation and coercion, and by way of tracing Zerffi's rise as a scholar, also provides a survey of the possible ways and traps of nineteenth-century intelligentsia.
