Authors:András Ludányi Pages: 1 - 10 Abstract: This keynote address on Trianon was to be presented at the treaty’s 100th anniversary in 2020 at the Pécs Conference of AHEA. Because of Covid 19 the conference was not held. It was organized a year later in 2021 via virtual internet presentations. Thus, the new title for the keynote became “Trianon: 101 Years Later.” The address focuses on the historical background of this event and on the demographic, cultural, economic and political consequences for Hungarians and East-Central Europe. The analysis begins with the punitive nature of this dictated and imposed treaty and sets out to look at the causes which made this a lasting decision. Without attempting to blame solely the major powers or the immediate neighbors of Hungary, which became the successor states, the analysis also focuses on the major blunders of Hungarian leaders on the Left and on the Right. The devastating consequences for all the peoples of the region, but particularly for the Hungarians who became minorities in their own homelands in the successor states, requires a look at exit strategies from this quagmire. During the past 101 years nationalists, communists, fascists and liberal capitalists have all proposed solutions but to this day the problems remain. Although the root causes of the problem have been described by such outstanding scholars as Pál Teleki, Zsombor Szász, C.A. Macartney, and more recently Nándor Bárdi, Balázs Ablonczy, László Szarka, Zoltán Kántor and many others, the political will to work for solutions has not been present. The intent of this keynote is not to rehash the past but to provoke a re-thinking about the entire region’s interests and future. PubDate: 2022-07-19 DOI: 10.5195/ahea.2022.461 Issue No:Vol. 15 (2022)
Authors:Erzsébet Dani Pages: 11 - 16 Abstract: Although the eighty-year-old writer defines the genre of his work as an essay, it is a work that pushes genre boundaries genre, as it is at once an autobiography, oral history in written form, political history, a family novel, and an entertaining read, rich in humorous stories. Ludányi, a documentarist, names specific dates, people and events, thus adding color to the American and Hungarian events of the second half of the twentieth century through his lived historical experiences. His memoir is substantial, rich in personal and historical data, and provides interested readers with a valuable documentary source. PubDate: 2022-07-19 DOI: 10.5195/ahea.2022.462 Issue No:Vol. 15 (2022)
Authors:Anna Fenyvesi Pages: 17 - 32 Abstract: This paper provides an account of the author’s family history in the context of her microhistorical research into the lives of her mostly peasant ancestors living in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Szentes, a small agricultural town in the middle of the Great Hungarian Plain. After becoming a recognized branch of historical research, in the past decade microhistory has made its way into genealogical research, offering an approach and methodology that allows for the piecing together of information about ancestors even when detailed accounts or documents are missing – either because they were lost or because they never existed in the first place. Such microhistories then offer insight into and provide important details for local social history, results that take family history work well beyond the personal scope. PubDate: 2022-07-19 DOI: 10.5195/ahea.2022.456 Issue No:Vol. 15 (2022)
Authors:Angela A. Chong Pages: 33 - 44 Abstract: This paper is the first part of two articles exploring whether and how Hungarian music pedagogues have influenced early childhood music education in the United States. Using less-known publications and archived materials, this study moves beyond the well-documented history of the Hungarian pedagogue, Zoltán Kodály’s influence upon American general music education to focus on Kodály’s early childhood concepts, which form the backbone of the Hungarian philosophy of music education. Through the lives and work of the Hungarian and American music educators, Katinka Dániel, Katalin Forrai, Sister Lorna Zemke and Betsy Moll, I delineate a pedigree of distinguished female Kodály protégés professing a passion for Hungarian early childhood music pedagogy that did not mainstream into US preschools. In words spoken by and about these scholar-educators, my research locates the systemic and cultural factors contributing to the challenge of implementing Hungarian musical ideas in US preschools. To round out a description of the elusive Kodály influence on US early childhood music, this analysis also draws upon my own Los Angeles experience in searching for a quality Kodály education for my young toddlers. PubDate: 2022-07-19 DOI: 10.5195/ahea.2022.463 Issue No:Vol. 15 (2022)
Authors:Angela A. Chong Pages: 45 - 61 Abstract: This article is the second part of a study investigating how Hungarians have influenced early childhood music education in the United States. In Part One, Chong documented the lesser-known histories of four Hungarian and American female scholar-educators who promoted the early childhood concepts at the heart of Zoltán Kodály's approach to music education. In this study, she traces Kodály’s footprints to private, stand-alone baby-toddler music classes in the US. In the 2000’s, baby-toddler music enrichment exploded in popularity as the children’s activity industry became one of the fastest growing sectors of the US market. Only a handful of local programs are explicitly Kodály-based, such as Sing, Play, Move!, at Holy Names University’s Kodály Center. Chong’s search in the Los Angeles area for quality Kodály instruction for her toddlers led to highly lucrative major US providers of baby-toddler music such as Music Together and Kindermusik. These programs share Kodály pedagogical practices, such as that of singing folk music in the children’s mother tongue, but map histories without reference to Hungary and attribute their approaches to American men not known as Kodály protégés. This paper explores whether the impressive profits and musical excellence of these programs can rightly be attributed to Kodály. PubDate: 2022-07-19 DOI: 10.5195/ahea.2022.464 Issue No:Vol. 15 (2022)
Authors:Balázs Venkovits Pages: 62 - 76 Abstract: This paper reconstructs the story of a so far unknown manuscript, a handwritten, personal account detailing a 1927 journey to the United States and Canada with the primary purpose of selling Hungarian wine as part of a more extensive international venture. The article introduces the research that led to the identification of the writer of the manuscript –written on sheets of paper from a Canadian hotel – and outlines the background of a fascinating business project, thereby positioning the text not only as a unique example to be studied with the tools of microhistory but also placing it in the broader, transatlantic historical and political environment of the time. The text is also studied and presented as a piece of travel writing that provides unique insights into Hungarian perceptions of North America in the 1920s and the Hungarian images of Canada and the United States. PubDate: 2022-07-19 DOI: 10.5195/ahea.2022.465 Issue No:Vol. 15 (2022)
Authors:Mátyás Mervay Pages: 77 - 93 Abstract: This paper aims to achieve two goals: the first is to bring a fresh perspective to the Atlanto-centric history of Chinese propaganda while tracing the roots of Sino-Hungarian bilateral approaches and Hungarian Sinology to a time dating some fifteen years earlier than the mutual recognition of the two People’s Republics. This analysis also introduces three actors of different political agendas who applied a similar PR tool of cultural diplomacy to elicit international sympathy for their homeland. After briefly surveying the primary stimuli of cultural diplomacy in interwar Hungary and Republican-Era China, I turn to pre-1949 Sino-Hungarian cultural approaches in the era of no formal diplomatic relations. Such initiatives offer valuable insights into the history of cultural diplomacy while also highlighting significant parallels with the present. Specifically, I introduce the political and cultural agenda of three individuals acting as cultural ambassadors to their homelands. The Shanghai Jewish refugee aid organizer, Paul Komor, and the women’s association president, Theresia Moll, were members of the Hungarian diaspora in China. They introduced the post-Habsburg Central European region to a cosmopolitan community while exhibiting two different foci: Hungarian irredentism and pan-Danubianism. Meanwhile, Zhenya He, a Kuomintang propagandist and the University of Budapest’s first Chinese language instructor during the 1930s, synthesized Hungarian pan-Asian Turanism with Sun Yat-sen’s Tridemism to further Sino-Hungarian exchanges. PubDate: 2022-07-19 DOI: 10.5195/ahea.2022.421 Issue No:Vol. 15 (2022)
Authors:Louise O. Vasvári Pages: 94 - 132 Abstract: The deportation memoir of Biri mama (Irén Reményi) is the third publication byTamás Kieselbach, of a book series he created, Sorsfordulók: a 20. századi Magyarország drámai pillantai [‘Turns of Fate: The Dramatic Moments of Twentieth-Century Hungary’], in which his aim was to illustrate the four historical turning points of the twentieth century: 1919-1920, the Holocaust, 1956, and 1989. My interest in studying Reményi's work is, first, and most briefly, to locate its role in the Kieselbach series. Second, I want to to provide the memoir with richer context, specifically with the aid of later documentation discussing Bergen-Belsen, the Ungarnlager, and the Celle DP camp. Third, I have aimed to create a kind of narrative reconstruction from fragments that I have been able to unearth of her family history to offer a deeper understanding of her family's complex private history as a microhistory that becomes part of macro or public history in the first half of the tortured twentieth century history of Hungary. PubDate: 2022-07-19 DOI: 10.5195/ahea.2022.466 Issue No:Vol. 15 (2022)
Authors:James P. Niessen Pages: 133 - 145 Abstract: This study takes its point of departure from reports of antisemitic incidents among Hungarians in Austrian refugee camps at the end of 1956. These incidents may have been provoked by agents from Communist Hungary who had penetrated the camps and found ground for provocation among the refugees. The author argues their true significance should be sought in the contemporary history of Catholic Hungary and Austria. Special attention is given to the biography of the journalist and historian, Friedrich Heer, and the priest, Leopold Ungar, who challenged the Austrian church to greater openness. An additional analysis is provided of the confrontation with the Catholic Jewish question conducted by Fathers György Kis, John Österreicher, and Alois Eckert. The engagement of Eckert and Ungar with the Hungarian refugees emerges as a prelude to the reconciliation of the Catholic Church with Judaism in the constitution Nostra Aetate of the Second Vatican Council. PubDate: 2022-07-19 DOI: 10.5195/ahea.2022.467 Issue No:Vol. 15 (2022)
Authors:Sarah Lucas Pages: 146 - 151 Abstract: Twentieth-century art music composed by Bartók, Ligeti and Penderecki constitutes a large portion of the soundtrack for Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film adaptation of Stephen King’s novel, The Shining. This music was not written for the film, and the use of these pieces might leave listeners doubtful as to the legitimacy of a connection between them and the scenes in the movie they were used to enhance. However, in the case of the Bartók work excerpted in the film – Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (1936) – an analysis of the subject-position of the music allows for another interpretation. Eric Clarke identifies subject-position in music as “the way in which characteristics of the musical material shape the general character of a listener’s response or engagement,” a definition based on earlier explorations of subject-position in film studies. My analysis of the subject-position of Bartók’s piece and the scenes in which excerpts of the work appear in The Shining reveals similarities in their potential effect on an audience member. PubDate: 2022-07-19 DOI: 10.5195/ahea.2022.468 Issue No:Vol. 15 (2022)
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