TOL STORE BY COUNTRY "Hungary"

The Gold Train : The Destruction of the Jews and the Looting of Hungary

At the onset of World War II, a large percentage of Hungarian Jews were fully assimilated and many were staunch Magyar nationalists. For the most part, they had been spared the rabid anti-Semitism so prevalent in Germany and Poland. Once hostilities began, the Hungarian strongman, Admiral Horthy, consistently resisted the efforts of his ostensible ally, Germany, to include Hungarian Jews in the Final Solution. In 1944, however, extreme right-wingers bowed to German pressure and ousted Horthy; Jews were stripped of their property and the deportation began. Zweig, a senior lecturer in Modern Jewish History at Tel Aviv University, recounts the Hungarian Jews' sad fate with eloquence and compassion, the slow but steady erosion of their security unfolding like a prolonged nightmare. The search for their stolen riches has the elements of a first-rate thriller. This work will be a fine addition to Holocaust collections.

In 1919, Hungarian Communists aid the Bolsheviks' defeat of Czarists, the Whites. Near the Volga, a monastery and a field hospital are held by one side then the other. Captives are executed or sent running naked into the woods. Neither side has a plan, and characters the camera picks out soon die. A White Cossack officer kills a Hungarian and is executed by his own superiors when he tries to rape a milkmaid. At the hospital, White officers order nurses into the woods, dressed in finery, to waltz. A nurse aids the Reds, then they accuse her of treason for following White orders. Red soldiers walk willingly, singing, into an overwhelming force. War seems chaotic and arbitrary.

Read more about Miklós Janscó at CER: Miklos Who?

The Smell of Humans : A Memoir of the Holocaust in Hungary

Primarily a piece of creative writing and autobiographical literature of a very distinctive Central European kind, this detailed and imaginative short memoir is also an important document of the Holocaust in Hungary in 1944. Written by a master of twentieth-century Hungarian literature, it describes life for the Jewish population of German-occupied Budapest--the constant fear of deportation overshadowing the daily trials of living in the ghetto--before concentrating on the writer's own internment in a labor camp during the first weeks of rule by the extremist Arrow Cross regime. The experiences of those nineteen days spent in the camp are both harsh and disturbing, yet throughout his memoir Szép manages to maintain an extraordinary degree of compassion and detachment, even humor. Published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the events described, this is the last of Szép's many literary works to appear in English.

Socialism: An Analysis of Its Past and Future

In this short, but rich piece of work, Erzsebet Szalai offers a neo-socialist alternative to socialism and neo-capitalism. Drawing upon the rich tradition of left-wing Hungarian Social Science, she offers her own theory of transitional society, suggesting that socialism was not an independent formation, but instead a society in transition. She relocates Soviet-type societies on the semi-periphery of the capitalist world system.

In addition she offers a critique of capitalism that pivots on the two connected issues of over production and ecological crisis. She makes the distinction between an anti-globalism critique and a globalization critique, locating herself in the latter. This work offers reader the opportunity to engage in a critique of capitalism that is organized along a new understanding of socialism itself.

Meddling in Middle Europe: Britain And the Lands Between, 1919-1925

Addresses the much-ignored history of British policy towards Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland following the creation of nation states in Central Europe at the end of the First World War. Lojko convincingly argues that the absence of trust in the new political settlement and the discrediting of the tradional channels of diplomacy resulted in British influence in the region.

Revolution in Hungary: The 1956 Budapest Uprising

Erich Lessing's landmark photographs of the Hungarian Revolution, published to mark the 50th anniversary of the uprising.

On October 23, 1956, what began as a mass rally in Budapest quickly evolved into the Hungarian Revolution. Within days, millions of Hungarians were supporting the revolt. It lasted until November 4th when it was crushed by Hungarian Security Police and Soviet tanks and artillery. Between 25,000 and 50,000 Hungarian rebels and 7,000 Soviets were killed, thousands were injured, and nearly a quarter of a million people left the country as refugees.

Erich Lessing was the first photographer to arrive in Hungary, and he documented the short-lived uprising and its aftermath in a series of world-famous photographs, reproduced here in stunning duotone. They bring to life once more the hope and euphoria of the first days of the revolt, so soon to be followed by the pain and punishment of its brutal suppression. 230 duotone illustrations.

Jews at the Crossroads: Tradition And Accommodation During the Golden Age of the Hungarian Nobility

Examines the social and political history of the Jews of Miskolc-the third largest Jewish community in Hungary-and presents the wider transformation of Jewish identity during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It explores the emergence of a moderate, accommodating form of traditional Judaism that combined elements of tradition and innovation, thereby creating an alternative to Orthodox and Neolog Judaism. This form of traditional Judaism reconciled the demands of religious tradition with the expectations of Magyarization and citizenship, thus allowing traditional Jews to be patriotic Magyars.
By focusing on Hungary, this book seeks to correct a trend in modern Jewish historiography that views Habsburg Jewish History as an extension of German Jewish History, most notably with regard to emancipation and enlightenment. Rather than trying to fit Hungarian Jewry into a conventional Germano-centric taxonomy, this work places Hungarian Jews in the distinct contexts of the Habsburg Monarchy and the Danube Basin, positing a more seamless nexus between the eighteenth and nineteenth century. This nexus was rooted in a series of political experiments by Habsburg sovereigns and Hungarian noblemen that culminated in civic equality, and in the gradual expansion of traditional Judaism to meet the challenges of the age.

Situated on the geographic margins of two nations, yet imagined as central to each, Transylvania has long been a site of nationalist struggles. Since the fall of communism, these struggles have been particularly intense in Cluj, Transylvania's cultural and political center. Yet heated nationalist rhetoric has evoked only muted popular response. The citizens of Cluj--the Romanian-speaking majority and the Hungarian-speaking minority--have been largely indifferent to the nationalist claims made in their names.

Based on seven years of field research, this book examines not only the sharply polarized fields of nationalist politics--in Cluj, Transylvania, and the wider region--but also the more fluid terrain on which ethnicity and nationhood are experienced, enacted, and understood in everyday life. In doing so the book addresses fundamental questions about ethnicity: where it is, when it matters, and how it works. Bridging conventional divisions of academic labor, Rogers Brubaker and his collaborators employ perspectives seldom found together: historical and ethnographic, institutional and interactional, political and experiential. Developing further the argument of Brubaker's groundbreaking Ethnicity without Groups, this book demonstrates that it is ultimately through everyday experience--as much as in political contestation or cultural articulation--that ethnicity and nationhood are produced and reproduced as basic categories of social and political life.

The Romani Movement: Minority Politics And Ethnic Mobilization in Contemporary Central Europe

"The Roma (Gypsies) are traditionally dispersed, possess few resources and are devoid of a common 'kin state' to protect their interests. They have often suffered from widespread exclusion and institutionalized discrimination. Politically underrepresented and lacking popular support amongst the wider populations of their host countries, the Roma have consequently become one of Europe's greatest 'losers' in the transition towards democracy." Against this background, the author examines the recent attempts of the Roma in Central Europe and their supporters to form a political movement and to influence domestic and international politics. On the basis of first-hand observation and interviews with activists and politicians in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia, he analyses connections between the evolving state policies towards the Roma and the recent history of Romani mobilization.

The EU's Transformative Power: Europeanization through Conditionality in Central and Eastern Europe

Between 1989 and 2004, the EU's conditionality for membership transformed Central and East Europe. The EU had enormous potential power over the whole range of domestic politics in the candidate countries. However, the EU was able to use that power at a few key points in the process leading to their accession. The EU's long-term influence worked primarily through soft power and through voluntary rather than coercive means. During the membership preparations, the EU built many different routes of influence into the candidate countries' domestic policy-making through 'Europeanization'. The Central and East Europeans voluntarily took on the Union's norms and methods, guided by the European Commission, in a massive transfer of policies and institutions. However, the EU missed important opportunities to effect change as well. The EU's Transformative Power explores in detail how the EU used its influence to control the movement of people across Europe, through both coercive use of conditionality and voluntary methods of Europeanization.

Women Migrants from East to West documents the contemporary phenomenon of the feminisation of migration through an exploration of the lives of women who have moved from Bulgaria and Hungary to Italy and the Netherlands. The research is based on the oral histories of eighty migrant women and thirty additional interviews with ‘native’ women in the ‘receiving’ countries. The research assumes migrants to be active subjects, creating possibilities and taking decisions in their own lives, as well as being subject to legal and political regulation, and the book analyses the new forms of subjectivity that come about through mobility. Part I is a largely conceptual exploration of subjectivity, mobility and gender in Europe. The chapters in Part II focus on love, work, home, communication, and food, themes which emerged from the migrant women’s accounts. In Part III, based on the interviews with ‘native’ women – employers, friends, or in associations relevant to migrant women – the chapters analyse their representations of migrants, and the book goes on to explore forms of intersubjectivity between European women of different cultural origins. A major contribution of this book is to consider how the movement of people across Europe is changing the cultural and social landscape with implications for how we think about what Europe means.

Ethnic Bargaining: The Paradox of Minority Empowerment

Ethnic Bargaining introduces a theory of minority politics that blends comparative analysis and field research in the postcommunist countries of East Central Europe with insights from rational choice. Erin K. Jenne finds that claims by ethnic minorities have become more frequent since 1945 even though nation-states have been on the whole more responsive to groups than in earlier periods. Minorities that perceive an increase in their bargaining power will tend to radicalize their demands, she argues, from affirmative action to regional autonomy to secession, in an effort to attract ever greater concessions from the central government.

The language of self-determination and minority rights originally adopted by the Great Powers to redraw boundaries after World War I was later used to facilitate the process of decolonization. Jenne believes that in the 1960s various ethnic minorities began to use the same discourse to pressure national governments into transfer payments and power-sharing arrangements. Violence against minorities was actually in some cases fueled by this politicization of ethnic difference.

Jenne uses a rationalist theory of bargaining to examine the dynamics of ethnic cleavage in the cases of the Sudeten Germans in interwar Czechoslovakia; Slovaks and Moravians in postcommunist Czechoslovakia; the Hungarians in Romania, Slovakia, and Vojvodina; and the Albanians in Kosovo. Throughout, she challenges the conventional wisdom that partisan intervention is an effective mechanism for protecting minorities and preventing or resolving internal conflict.

Trimming the Sails: The Comparative Political Economy of Expansionary Fisal Consolidation

Fiscal consolidation has significant short term costs which dampen economic growth. Benczes’ multidisciplinary analysis of the relatively new concept of expansionary fiscal consolidation aims to find out whether it is possible to have fiscal consolidation and experience economic growth, even in the short run. This theory is tested on a difficult case. Whether Hungary, which has had the highest deficit in the European Union, has a chance to experience short term growth in times of adjustment?

Divide and Pacify: Strategic Social Policies and Political Protests in Post-Communist Democracies

Despite dramatic increases in poverty, unemployment, and social inequalities, the Central and Eastern European transitions from communism to market democracy in the 1990s have been remarkably peaceful. This book proposes a new explanation for this unexpected political quiescence. It shows how reforming governments in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic have been able to prevent massive waves of strikes and protests by the strategic use of welfare state programs such as pensions and unemployment benefits. Divide and Pacify explains how social policies were used to prevent massive job losses with softening labor market policies, or to split up highly aggrieved groups of workers in precarious jobs by sending some of them onto unemployment benefits and many others onto early retirement and disability pensions. From a narrow economic viewpoint, these policies often appeared to be immensely costly or irresponsibly populist. Yet a more inclusive social-scientific perspective can shed new light on these seemingly irrational policies by pointing to deeper political motives and wider sociological consequences.

Narratives Unbound: Historical Studies in Post-Communist Eastern Europe

The first work to cover post-Communist developments in historical studies in six Eastern European countries (Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria) from a comparative and critical perspective, written by scholars from the region itself. It is a building block for scholars of the history of European and global historical studies, and a useful pedagogical tool for classes on the history of historical studies. Each individual chapter is in itself a guide to further research through a wealth of detailed notes and references.