Chapter 8 German and Romanian in Town Governments of Dualist and the

Ágoston Berecz

In this chapter, I will document the presence of the Romanian and German languages in the written administration of Transylvanian and Banat towns with Romanian and German majorities under Dualism. Relying mainly on ar- chival material, it is possible to demarcate the domains where the two lan- guages were typically used and the functions reserved for Hungarian, and to identify possible changes over time. My survey should not be taken as repre- sentative for other regions and other minority languages of Dualist . Town governments controlled by (German-speaking) Transylvanian and seem to have been able to make an exceptionally wide use of the legal space for local tongues, whereas a combination of voluntary and enforced Magyarization and thus a rapid shift of official life to Hungarian was the rule elsewhere. State elites in contemporary Europe may have wished to present their of- ficial or de facto state languages as enjoying universal recognition across their allolingual peripheries. In practice, however, when they tried to enforce its use on local governments, they usually did so with caution and sometimes with remarkable sloppiness. Thus Russian authorities found it easy to introduce Russian into town halls of Congress Poland once they governed them via ap- pointed officials, but the same attempt foundered in Riga on the resistance of German city fathers.1 In the parts of Alsace-/Elsaß-Lothringen an- nexed to the German Empire in 1871, French-speaking communes were tem- porarily exempted from the need of using German in their transactions. The authorities later periodically surveyed local people’s knowledge of German

1 Anders Henriksson, “Riga: Growth, Conflict, and the Limitations of Good Government,” in The City in Late Imperial Russia, ed. Michael Hamm (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 179, 189, and 192–3; Stephen D. Corrsin, “Warsaw: Poles and Jews in a Conquered City,” ibid., 135–6; Edward C. Thaden, “The Russian Government,” in Russification in the Baltic Provinces and Finland, 1855–1914, ed. idem (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 58; Tomasz Kamusella, The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Modern Central Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 393; Darius Staliūnas, Making Russians: Meaning and Practice of Russification in Lithuania and Belarus after 1863 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 189.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004407978_009 136 Berecz and introduced the language wherever they saw fit, but over half of the 423 communes initially exempted were still administered in French in 1914.2 Homogenizing linguistic policies were adopted on the provincial level in post-1869 Galicia. Most Ruthenian (Ukrainian) settlements there transacted their business in Polish and only Lwów (Ľviv/Lemberg), Biala (Biała) and Brod (Brody/Brodi) did (partly or entirely) in German, the latter thanks to a ruling by the Imperial Court.3 In the remaining parts of the Austrian half of the Dual Monarchy, which were emphatically uncommitted to a state nation- alism, linguistic homogenization was as a rule outsourced to leaders of local demographic or legal majorities, whose ingenuity in bullying minorities easily outstripped that of legislators and state bureaucracies.4 In plurilingual cities, where local politics was regularly split along national lines, municipal leaders sought to preserve their power by maintaining or “improving” the ethnolin- guistic balance in favor of their own groups. In this pursuit, they combined the most vicious and narrow-minded policies from the toolkit of state national- isms, from the administrative purging of linguistic landscapes to the selective granting of residence rights.5 By regulating the language of gravestones, some of them crossed a line that was out of bounds even to the most oppressive states of that time.6

1 The Legal Framework and the Political Environment

Section 20 of the Hungarian 1868 Law of Nationalities affirmed the right of “communes” (at the time, all local governments with the exception of royal

2 Paul Lévy, Histoire linguistique d’Alsace et de Lorraine, vol. 2, De la Révolution française à 1918 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1929), 347–8, 355–7, 368, 375 and 432. 3 Jan Fellerer, Mehrsprachigkeit im galizischen Verwaltungswesen, 1772–1914: Eine historisch- soziolinguistische Studie zum Polnischen und Ruthenischen (Ukrainischen) (Cologne: Böhlau, 2005), 135, 150–1; Gerald Stourzh, Die Gleichberechtigung der Nationalitäten in der Verfassung und Verwaltung Österreichs: 1848–1918 (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences, 1985), 116. 4 Lévy, Histoire linguistique d’Alsace et de Lorraine, vol. 2, 237; Jean-François Chanet, L’École républicaine et les petites patries (Paris: Aubier, 1996), 210; Thaden, The Russian Government, 58. 5 Stourzh, Die Gleichberechtigung der Nationalitäten; Jeremy King, Budweisers into Czechs and : A Local History of Bohemian Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Gary B. Cohen, The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague, 1861–1914, 2nd rev. ed. (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2006), 111. 6 Michaela Wolf, Die vielsprachige Seele Kakaniens: Übersetzen und Dolmetschen in der Habsburgermonarchie 1848 bis 1918 (Vienna: Böhlau, 2012), 125; Alfred Manussi Montesole, “Die Adrialänder,” in Das Nationalitätenrecht des altes Österreich, ed. Karl Gottfried Hugelmann (Vienna: Braumüller, 1934), 629; Stourzh, Die Gleichberechtigung der Nationalitäten, 115.