NOVA University of Newcastle Research Online nova.newcastle.edu.au Davis, S. E. “Competitive civilizing missions: Hungarian Germans, modernization, and ethnographic descriptions of the Zigeuner before World War I”. Published in Central European History Vol. 50, Issue 1, p. 6-33 (2017) Available from: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0008938917000012 Accessed from: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1352549 1 Competitive Civilizing Missions: Hungarian Germans, Modernization, and Ethnographic Descriptions of the “Zigeuner” before World War I Sacha E. Davis In the late nineteenth century a new generation of scholars, many from Hungary’s German minorities in Transylvania and the Banat, focused on what they identified as Zigeuner culture.1 This interest coincided with strong Magyarization pressures on minorities. Following the 1867 Ausgleich, in which Hungary absorbed Transylvania and became autonomous within the Habsburg Empire, Magyar nationalists elided Hungarian citizenship with Magyar ethnicity in their pursuit of a modern, unitary nation-state. Liberal reform threatened Transylvanian Saxon corporate privileges while Magyarization offered historically unprivileged Banat Schwabs opportunities for social advancement. Consequently, German responses to Magyarization were divided. Whereas some Germans embraced Magyarization, others competed with the Hungarian modernizing project by asserting their own German nationalist civilizing mission in East Europe. Still other individuals, indifferent to nationalism, identified with prenational collectives such as estate, religion, and locality. Hungarian and German elites alike placed themselves at the apex of an ethnic hierarchy ordered by level of “civilization,” thereby legitimizing participation in public life. Simultaneously, they castigated Zigeuner and other subaltern cultures as primitive Naturvölker, denying those interpolated the right of reply.2 Both Magyar and German elites perceived Zigeuner as threatening public order and the general good, thus legitimizing reform efforts. By writing about the Zigeuner, scholars 2 therefore either asserted competing Magyar and German models for modernization and reform, or rejected modernization by embracing the romantic image of the Wanderzigeuner (“nomadic Gypsy”). This article examines three prominent Hungarian-German scholars: the historian Johann Schwicker (1839-1902), the ethnographer Anton Herrmann (1851-1926), and the folklorist Heinrich von Wlislocki (1856-1907). Whereas Schwicker, a passionate German nationalist, asserted a German mission to civilize Hungary itself, Herrmann willingly embraced Hungarian nationalism, while Wlislocki rejected all nationalist modernizing efforts as a threat to his romantic visions of Transylvania’s vanishing past. These three scholars collectively illustrate the range of Hungarian-German responses to nationalist modernization. All three also played leading roles in the study of Transylvanian and Hungarian Zigeuner. Historians have explored how Hungarian-German scholars reinforced the European image of the Zigeuner as an uncultured, Oriental Naturvolk, alternately symbolizing romantic freedom or desperately needing reform.3 Few consider these descriptions as responses to the demands of the Hungarian state, however. The exception, Marian Zăloagă’s examination of how Hungarian-German nationalists used the Zigeuner to assert their culture’s alleged superiority over Hungarian nationalism, has been of great assistance in writing this article.4 Certainly, Schwicker called for the Zigeuner to assimilate into Hungarian and Romanian culture, arguing that Germanization was beyond their reach, thereby asserting German culture’s alleged superior status as the culture of the educated elite. Conversely, however, Herrmann urged the Magyarization of the Zigeuner to strengthen the Hungarian nation-state and denigrate the role of German and Romanian culture. Finally, Wlislocki presented the Zigeuner as the romantic symbol 3 of the premodern age, and as a critique of the modernizing projects he opposed. Whatever their differences, Schwicker, Herrmann, and Wlislocki all underline the role of national disputes in shaping Zigeunerkunde (“Gypsy Studies”). Racial identities do not resemble some underlying objective reality, of course, but are constructed through the process of enactment.5 Schwicker, Herrmann, and Wlislocki’s Zigeuner bore limited resemblance to Romani lived experience. For that reason, this article uses the term Zigeuner to refer to the objects constructed in the stereotypical discourses of non-Romani writers, and refers to the individuals these stereotypes claimed to portray as Roma. 6 The first part of this article examines German responses to Magyarization, outlining the Hungarian modernizing project and the demands it made of Hungarian Germans. It then considers the responses made by Transylvanian Saxons and Banat Schwabs at the communal level, before examining Schwicker, Herrmann, and Wlislocki’s individual responses. Communal attitudes did not dictate individual responses but did determine what institutions scholars could draw upon to support their views. The second part of this article focuses on the impact of nationalist modernizing projects in Zigeunerkunde, outlining first the Romani population of Hungary, their social marginalization and increasing state efforts at surveillance and control, which, in turn, motivated growing scholarly interest in the Zigeuner. Schwicker, Herrmann, and Wlislocki were inconsistent in which Zigeuner they described, but tended to focus on Transylvania and the Banat, where Zigeuner culture was considered most “pure” (and problematic for Hungary’s continuing development). The following analysis of the Roma therefore also focuses on the regions of eastern Hungary. It then examines, in turn, 4 Schwicker, Herrmann, and Wlislocki’s discursive deployment of the term Zigeuner in support of their views on modernization, shaping Zigeunerkunde in Hungary. Collectively, their representations discredited attempts by Roma to integrate into mainstream society, marking them as insufficiently “civilized” while simultaneously denying authenticity to all but a vanishingly small fraction who supposedly met an impossible ideal. Consequently, by the outbreak of World War I, Hungarian-German scholars increasingly viewed the Zigeuner as irredeemable and “dying out.” The article concludes with an analysis of how the function of the Zigeuner stereotype changed after World War I, when Romanianization replaced Magyarization in former eastern Hungary. Considered incorrigibly “Oriental,” Zigeuner no longer stood as a discursive subject of reform, but rather as one of the last symbols of an increasingly fragile German social mastery. Magyar Nationalism and the Hungarian Modernizing Project Under the 1867 Ausgleich, those in Hungary who spoke Hungarian speakers as a first language constituted less than half of the population of Hungary: 46.6 percent in 1880; this rose to 51.4 percent in 1900 and 54.5 percent in 1910. (Even this narrow majority was achieved only by excluding semiautonomous Croatia-Slavonia from the census figures.7) Other widely spoken mother tongues were Romanian (17.5 percent in 1880, falling to 16.1 percent in 1910), Slovak (13.5 percent in 1880, 10.7 percent in 1910) and German (13.6 percent in 1880, 10.4 percent in 1910).8 Conversely, Roma (classed ethnically rather than linguistically) constituted approximately 1.6 percent of the 5 population in 1893.9 These demographics provoked considerable anxiety for Magyar nationalists. Late eighteenth century Hungarian nationalists had hoped to transform the estate- based natio Hungarica of the nobility into a modernized Hungarian nation unified by shared institutions, rather than shared language. In the first half of the nineteenth century, however, nationalists increasingly embraced a specifically Magyarist conception of Hungarian nationalism, linking the Hungarian nation with the Hungarian language and advocating the assimilation of non-Magyars. Simultaneously, Magyar nationalists laid claim to the non-Hungarian speakers in Hungary. Unlike German, which draws (inconsistent) distinctions between Ungar (Hungarian; an inhabitant of Hungary) and Magyar (Magyar; a speaker of Hungarian), the Hungarian language uses Magyar for both.10 This lack of distinction aided Magyar nationalists in arguing that all citizens of the country were members of the Magyar politikai nemzet (Hungarian political nation). As such, however, all citizens were to consider themselves Hungarians (Magyarok) and speak Hungarian. The nation thus simultaneously included all inhabitants and was specifically Magyar. For Magyar nationalists, this contradictory position legitimized Magyarization, a necessity if the state was to be based on an ethnolinguistic nation.11 Magyarization was closely bound up with modernization. Most national activists in the Habsburg Empire considered their movement to be the agent of progressive reform.12 Magyar nationalists believed the Ausgleich had finally freed Hungary from Austrian colonization, enabling it to fulfil its destiny as a modern European state. Magyar nationalist parliamentarians sought a French-style monolingual liberal nation-state by introducing universal laws and a common state language. Liberal nationalist politician 6 Belá Grünwald (1839-91) claimed, for example, that Hungarian non-Magyars were incapable of independent advancement; it was the destiny of Magyardom to assimilate them, thereby elevating them to a “civilized” status.13