Polgári kulturális gyakorlat és nemzeti jelleg a közép-európai sajtóban
Civic cultural practice and national character in Central European press

Summary/Abstract: The essay describes the functioning of Central European societies, which were being modernized and developing middle classes, as a cultural practice in the wider sense. It interprets it as a cultural behaviour in which the world of the middle-class individual appears as a peculiar self-identity, world-interpretation, and life style. All this is grasped through discussing a special type of press product: the illustrated educational-entertaining family weekly. The analysis focuses on the press of the large cities — first of all Budapest and Prague — of the Hapsburg empire, but the nature of the genre, the following of models justifies the analysis of certain German newspapers as well. The popularity index of these papers marked the temporal coordinates, the period beween 1870 and 1910, with an outlook on the second half of the nineteenth century. Introducing and comparing the most popular family weeklies of the era (Gartenlaube, Vasárnapi Újság, Světozor, A Hét, Új Idők, Zlatá Praha), the author is trying to find out what social needs called this genre into existence, how the publishers and editors of these weeklies responded to it, how these weeklies display on themselves the double-faced nature of the economic, social, and cultural development of the region (the relationship between traditionality and modernity), how these papers contributed to the bourgeois development of the Central European region and the strengthening of its national identity. The investigation includes the readers of the weeklies as well. The compositions of the various periodicals are outlined, the public and semi-public places of reading newspapers (cafés, clubs, associations) presented, changes of reading habits and their effects on consumers's habits analyzed.

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