Asszimiláció és disszimiláció az önéletírásban (Fest Imre és Edmund Steinacker esete
Assimilation and Dissimilation in Autobiographies: The Cases of Imre Fest and Edmund Steinacker

Summary/Abstract: Assimilation in 19th–20th century Hungary affected, besides Jews, the German ethnic group the most. This article examines how assimilation can be researched via autobiogra-phies as historical sources, on the basis of the memoirs of two autobiographers who be-longed to this ethnic group and participated in the assimilation process; My Memories (Meine Memorien) by Imre Fest, under secretary of state for transport (1817–1883) and the memoirs (mainly the Lebenserinnerungen) of Edmund Steinacker (1839–1929), a Ger-man ethnic politician. On the basis of these autobiographies it is possible to analyse rele-vant questions related to assimilation, such as language usage, social relations, integration into the existing structure and the traces of earlier identity shifts. Both autobiographers, though to a different extent, participated in the processes of assimilation, in the four di-mensions of Milton M. Yinger’s model of assimilation: the sub processes of (biological) amalgamation, (psychological) identification, (cultural) acculturation and (structural) in-tegration. In the case of Imre Fest this evolved into a double identity, Hungarian patriot-ism with a Zipser German ethnic consciousness; this is the reason why he did not consider it important to reaffirm his (ethnic) identity from time to time. In the case of Edmund Steinacker the conflict between ethnic consciousness and patriotism that rooted in the as-pirations for creating a modern national identity was resolved by taking on the German na-tional identity; therefore in his case we can talk about dissimilation. The differences in the identities of the two autobiographers can be explained not only by the generation gap but also by the difference in the strength of their group ties.

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