Nemzetiségek a nemzeti történelemben
Ethnic Minorities in National History

The Representation of Ethnic Minorities in Hungarian Historical Surveys in the Age of Dualism

Summary/Abstract: The study examines the representation of ethnic minorities in historical monographs written by Ignac Acsady, Lajos Baroti, Vilmos Fraknoi, and Henrik Marczali in the Age of Dualism (1867–1918), as well as in the series edited by Sandor Szilagyi to commemorate the thousand-year anniversary of the Hungarian Kingdom in 1896. It focuses primarily on the historical vision stemming from the two main trends of the question of minorities – united political nation versus homogeneous nation state – as seen through the debate of Bela Grunwald and Michal Mudroň. The study continues with the marked role of the same issue in the programmatic texts of the increasingly institutionalising national historiography. After examining the careers of the selected historians and the circumstance of writing their works, the study analyses the representation of ethnic minorities in the narratives of the Magyar conquest of the Carpathian Basin and the 1848–1849 War of Independence, mainly focusing on the implicit definitions of the nation and the constructs formulated in opposition to minority narratives. Although there are differences between attitudes towards specific ethnic minorities, especially discernible in narratives about the War of Independence, the findings of the study suggest that the narratives correspond with those of the theoreticians of the nation state idea: they identify the concept of nation with ethnic and linguistic Hungarianness and represent ethnic minorities as passive participants in Hungarian history. It is, however, incorrect to label all the historians examined as wildly chauvinistic.

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