Economic Stabilization after the Treaty of Trianon: Challenges and Possibilities

Author(s): Endre Domonkos / Language(s): English Issue: 19/2021

The ‘Great War’ had harmful impacts on Hungary’s national economy. With the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, the former self-sufficient economic unit broke into six different entities, which had far-reaching consequences in Central and Eastern Europe. Economic difficulties were further aggravated by rampant inflation. Finally, the loss of the majority of raw materials by the Treaty of Trianon meant that Hungary was cut off from its sources of supply.The following paper examines the impacts of economic reconstruction in Hungary. The analysis also focuses on the development of industry, agriculture, and trade in the 1920s.

THE ROLE OF BAYAT IN THE TURKISH NATIONAL STRUGGLE PROCESS ON THE AXIS OF LIEUTENANT COLONEL (BAYATLI) ARIF BEY AND KARAKEÇILI NATIONAL REGIMENT

Author(s): Şerife Burcu Kaya,Ümit Ünsal Kaya,Yakup BULUT / Language(s): English Issue: 57/2023

As a result of the National Struggle, which can also be described as the struggle for the survival of Turkishness, the Turkish nation has shown the whole world what they can endure for the sake of an inch of land even under very difficult conditions. In the absence of a regular army during the period of the National Struggle, we see that a number of patriotic formations emerged to protect the unity of the homeland. These formations, called Kuvâ-yi Milliye, mean voluntary militia units that came together against the occupation forces for the independence of the homeland by taking strength from their national feelings. During the National Struggle, Turkish people supported the independence movement in all regions. In this process, Bayat district of Afyonkarahisar, known for its proximity to strategic cities in the National Struggle such as Eskişehir, Akşehir and Afyonkarahisar, was exposed to the occupation attempts of the Greek army in its struggle for independence. Although Bayat was not directly in the hot spot in the Battle of Sakarya and the Major Assault of Turkish Army due to its location, it was a settlement where the necessary military services and Tekâlif-i Milliye orders were implemented for the National Struggle. Lieutenant Colonel Arif Bey, who has not been sufficiently mentioned in the pages of history, came to his hometown Bayat as a result of the arrest warrant issued by the Istanbul Government against him, supported the Kuvâ-yi Milliye movement in the Central Anatolia region and played an active role in suppressing the rebellions that emerged in the immediate vicinity. One of the important works of Lieutenant Colonel Arif Bey in this process is that he united the militia forces around him under his command and established the Karakeçili National Regiment and created an important support force for the National Struggle. In this study, which was created by making use of archival documents, memoirs, researches and information in periodicals, we aimed to make a historical contribution to the understanding of the local and national values of Turkish independence.

Dalekie podróże koleją z Wadowic w czasach młodości Karola Wojtyły

Author(s): Andrzej Nowakowski / Language(s): Polish Issue: 5/2000

W latach 30. Polskie Koleje Państwowe należały do czołówki ówczesnych kolei europejskich, przewożąc w 1938 r. 226 mln pasażerów. Choć linie kolejowe przebiegające przez Wadowice: Bielsko - Kalwaria oraz Trzebinia - Spytkowice - Skawce miały charakter drugorzędny to jednak odgrywały pewne znaczenie gospodarcze i militarne, ze względu na stacjonowanie w mieście 12 pp. Modernizacje linii kolejowych sprawiły, że w latach 30. możliwe były podróże m.in. do Zakopanego czy Warszawy.

Którędy nad morze?

Author(s): Łukasz Zaremba / Language(s): Polish Issue: 2/2022

The article is an attempt to describe the „maritime turn” or „turn to the sea” in the interwar period in Poland from a spatial and visual point of view. The author argues that the Baltic Sea appears in the imagination of the majority of the country’s population primarily through images, and that a careful investigation of popular visual media – outdoor advertising, but most importantly cinema – allows one to capture not only the propaganda and rhetorical dimension of imperial and maritime politics but also the basic remodeling of space that happened in Poland at that time. Using the example of the 1927 movie Call of the Sea (dir. H. Szaro) and in reference to other cinematic productions of the period, the article attempts to characterize the development of ways of showing/seeing and locating the sea on the map and in the social imagination. The key dimensions of this representations are low artistic quality and superficiality, which are interpreted here not in aesthetic terms, but as a testimony to how the sea was present in the lives of the majority of Polish society at that time – namely as decoration, background, fantasy, dream, joke, rather than the experience of a transoceanic journey or even seaside holidays.

Nowa Polska na pustyni i czuły kolonizator

Author(s): Jerzy Stachowicz / Language(s): Polish Issue: 2/2022

The paper examines science fiction literature as one of the sources of Polish colonial discourse. Polish SF literary colonies are not only the result of the intense ideological activity of the Maritime and Colonial League but – like many works of literature of the interwar period – are deeply rooted in the concepts of the 19th century. The literary colonies were frequently variations on the project of rebuilding the Polish state and nation beyond the existing borders, proclaimed, among others, by Piotr Wereszczyński in the1870s. A project that, at least declaratively, was to be a kind of peaceful alternative to bloody national uprisings.

„Tryb życia kolonisty jest bardzo jednostajny”

Author(s): Agnieszka Haska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 2/2022

An important element of the Polish colonial propaganda of the 1930s were the pioneers’ testimonies, which were not only a source of knowledge about the living conditions and countries where they established plantations, but – above all – an important element in shaping the image of the colonizer as a modern hero of the independent Poland – and thus a role model. The issue of “struggle for the Polish type of colonial pioneer” was one of the topics discussed frequently in the press of the period, and the image of the colonizer itself was changing. The initially dominant romantic vision of an emigrant pioneer who tames wild nature was over time often contrasted with the positivist model of a Polish entrepreneur, merchant, employee of commercial and trade companies or a merchant seaman. The article is an analysis of the testimonies of colonizers published in magazines issued by the Maritime and Colonial League. These articles, apart from the informative function, were primarily persuasive, showing the everyday life of these modern heroes of mass imagination, who – despite strangeness and adversities of fate, nature and politics – thanks to their determination and abilities, tried to achieve colonial success for themselves and for the Motherland.

Dzicy, dzieci

Author(s): Zuzanna Sękowska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 2/2022

In this text I propose to look at two texts by Janusz Korczak, "King Matt the First" and "King Matt on the Desert Island". I treat the content of these two parts of Korczak’s dilogy as a starting point for thinking about the presence of colonial themes, phantasmagorical figures of the “wild”/“savage” and the decision to introduce these themes in a book addressed to children.

Bziki tropikalne „białych mużynów”: (anty)kolonialne fantazje międzywojennej awangardy

Author(s): Marta Rakoczy / Language(s): Polish Issue: 2/2022

The Polish avant-garde, as is well known, was eager to activate colonial and racial fantasies. For example, the figure of the “white Negro” was used by the Futurists as a figure signaling – at first glance invisible, but real – foreignness, non-privilegedness and anti-systemicity. “The Negro” in the Futurist narrative was an unidentified Other. His only distinguishing feature was his racial identity associated with a state of uncivilization. From the perspective of today’s sensibilities, shaped by years of development and application of postcolonial theories, this was an ambiguous figure: politically and ethically suspect. In this text, I argue that in order to understand it well and avoid presentist readings, it is necessary to see, if only in a brief and selective approximation, the discursive field of the scientific press and journalism of the time. The avant-garde and, more specifically, Witkacy’s tropical fantasies were provocations whose scale and nature may escape the modern viewer. Therefore, based on the sketchily reconstructed discursive background of the Polish interwar period, and the issues of race and Europe an colonialism present in it, I will attempt to reach the meaning of these provocations at that time and understand the perverse game that the Polish avant-garde undertook with these themes. And against this background – to show the uniqueness of Witkacy, who, unlike his avant-garde contemporaries, showed the political nature of the opposition of civilization and savagery, complicating the colonial imaginary of his own era and formulating catastrophic predictions for the European future.

Kolonizatorzy nie tylko z przypadku

Author(s): Jerzy Stachowicz / Language(s): Polish Issue: 2/2022

Jeszcze w sprawie tragicznych wydarzeń 3–4 września 1939 roku w Bydgoszczy

Author(s): Przemysław Olstowski / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2023

The tragic events of 3–4 September 1939 in Bydgoszcz, which went down in his- tory as ‘The Bloody Sunday of Bydgoszcz’ due to German propaganda, are among the unsolved mysteries of World War II and mark the beginning of the Polish campaign in September 1939. The prevailing view in Polish historiography is that in the morning hours of 3 September, a German sabotage took place in Bydgoszcz, which involved an attack on the retreating troops of the Polish Army, defeated in the so-called ‘Pomera- nian corridor’, by either local Germans or outside saboteurs. According to the opinion prevailing in German historical publications relating to these events, amid wartime panic and anti-German psychosis, as the Polish troops were retreating through the city, they and the armed groups of local Polish self-defence started mutual shelling of one another. The German minority was blamed for this, which resulted in its brutal pacification. For over ten years, a Polish historian Włodzimierz Jastrzębski has been presenting an opinion that differs from the Polish historiography. The present article is a polemic against his latest book on the subject, in which he blames the events of Bydgoszcz and the brutal pacification of the German community in Bydgoszcz and neighbouring towns on local Polish military and civilian authorities who, in his view, sought a crackdown on the German minority. The article addresses errors in his meth- od, criticism of sources and the manner in which they were used, in compliance with a preconceived thesis. The author has also presented his own hypotheses on the origin and the course of the events of 3–4 September 1939 in Bydgoszcz.

Dochodzenia w sprawach o obrazę czci i pamięci Marszałka Józefa Piłsudskiego z lat 1935–1939 (wybrane przypadki)

Author(s): Łukasz Gołaszewski / Language(s): Polish Issue: 2/2023

This article, on the history of criminal law, discusses cases of defamation and slander against the legally protected name of Marshal Józef Piłsudski. Based on prosecution files from Białystok and Lublin, the author presents selected prosecutions of the perpetrators of this type of crime from the perspective of microhistory.

THE KINGDOM OF YUGOSLAVIA AND THE RETURN OF THE “PLANNED ELITE”: THE CASE OF PROF DR ĐORĐE JOANNOVIĆ

Author(s): Milivoj Bešlin,Srđan Milošević / Language(s): English,Serbian Issue: 1/2023

The paper analyses the society of the newly created Kingdom of SCS/Yugoslavia, which aroused great expectations from various members of the intellectual elite. Majority of them, educated in the West as the “planned elite”, returned to the country to help its social development. Nevertheless, the case of the Viennese professor, the influential European pathologist and oncologist Prof Dr Đorđe Joannović (1871-1932), although different from others, can be considered paradigmatic. Returning to the country of his parents and leaving the comfortable life of Viennese scientific circle Joannović devoted himself to building several medical institutions in Belgrade, from the Faculty of Medicine to the Institute of Pathology. However, many who, like Dr Joannović, enthusiastically came to the new country, ready to work and contribute to its overall development, experienced severe disappointment, and even personal tragedy. In this context, the fate of the famous doctor and distinguished Viennese professor, the first Serbian oncologist, one of the world’s pioneers in the study of autoimmune diseases, the founder of many medical institutions and the world-renowned scientist, is one of the paradigms of the Yugoslav society. The strong connection with the students and the support he provided to them, his loyalty to the principles of university autonomy and his reluctance to put himself at the service of the authoritarian and repressive government brought him into conflict with the bearers of the state terror of the Sixth of January regime. From the conflicts and pressures to which he was exposed from the top of the government, the well-known and recognised European scientist seeked salvation in suicide.

The influence of Ludwik Krasiński and Maria Ludwika Czartoryska on Ojców architecture at the turn of the 20th century and between the two world wars

Author(s): Joanna Ziarkowska,Dominik Ziarkowski / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2022

In the second half of the 19th century, a spa was set up in Ojców, a village at the time situated by the southern border of the Kingdom of Poland. With time, it became a fashionable destination for visitors from Warsaw, and from other towns and cities located in the territory of the Russian sector of partitioned Poland. Ojców experienced its heyday early in the 19th and 20th centuries and its spa activities continued also between the two world wars. The Ojców demesne was then owned by Count Ludwik Krasiński and his daughter Maria Ludwika, from 1901 Princess Czartoryska. The latter remained the owner of Ojców until the nationalisation of the estate in the wake of the agrarian reform of 1944. The article attempts to discuss the contribution of Ludwik Krasiński and his daughter Maria Ludwika to the architectural heritage of Ojców. It was their idea to have many buildings, particularly those that catered to the the needs of the local spa, built. Their number includes the Jadwiga and Urocza villas, and the non-extant Goplana hydrotherapy establishment. Moreover, Ludwik Krasiński and later Maria Ludwika Czartoryska ordered works on the ruins of Ojców Castle and development of the Ojców spa park. It was chiefly thanks to their efforts that certain elements of the Swiss spa architecture and subsequently also the Zakopane (Polish highland) style were introduced in Ojców. There are also certain unrealised and partially realised goals worth mentioning, for instance an attempt to restore the castle tower, the initiative to move the historical ­wooden church from Smardzowice to Ojców (ultimately, it was transferred to Mostek, a village in Miechowski County), and the concept of building an immense spa estate reminiscent of a garden city in Złota Góra initiated between the two world wars.

Muzyka epoki hałasu. Recepcja „Odlewni stali” Aleksandra Mosołowa w międzywojennej Polsce

Author(s): Sławomir Łotysz / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2023

The Iron Foundry, a suite by Soviet composer Alexander Mosolov, was premiered in Poland in 1931. The composition belonged to the “Machine Music” popular at that time. Performances of the work elicited strong reactions from the Polish public, not only because of its artistic style but also because of the composer’s ideological background. The issue of music inspired by industrial sounds had also entered the debate about the problem of noise in the human environment.

Memoriał Rektora i Senatu Akademickiego Uniwersytetu Stefana Batorego w Wilnie w sprawie przynależności państwowej Wileńszczyzny w 1921 roku

Author(s): Przemysław Marcin Żukowski / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2023

The article presents in extenso two memoranda concerning the future of the University reborn in Vilnius in 1919, in the context of diplomatic efforts to normalise mutual Lithuanian-Polish relations after the two nations regained the right to self-determi- nation in 1918.

Konfiskaty kosztowności w świątyniach różnych związków religijnych w Mińsku i Białoruskiej Socjalistycznej Republice Radzieckiej w świetle dokumentu z maja 1922 roku. Przyczynek do realizacji bolszewickiej polityki ekonomicznej i wyznani

Author(s): Andrzej Gil / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2023

In the article, the author presents selected aspects of the Bolshevik policy of confiscating valuables stored in the temples of religious associations on the territory of the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1922. The article is complemented by the report of the Central Belarusian Commission for Confiscation of Church Valuables on the territory of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Belarus written in May 1922, kept in the National Archive of the Republic of Belarus.

Wybrane przejawy sowietyzacji Ukraińskiej Socjalistycznej Republiki Radzieckiej na początku lat trzydziestych XX wieku w rozpoznaniu Oddziału II Sztabu Głównego Wojska Polskiego i władz politycznych II RP — część I

Author(s): Tomasz Landmann / Language(s): Polish Issue: 4/2023

The aim of this article is to present selected facts and tendencies proving the increasing sovietization of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in the early 1930s. The analysis is based on archival material collected in the Józef Piłsudski Institute of America and current scientific literature. A thesis was put forward that the sovietization phenomenon of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic appeared in various forms and proved harmful to the implementation of Ukrainian national slogans in the early 1930s. The presented arguments allow to conclude that at the turn of the 1920s and the 1930s sovietization replaced the earlier policy of Ukrainization in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The sovietization tendencies were reflected in economic reforms (especially in agriculture and industry), political and administrative transformation, or changes in the spirit of socialist society. The sovietization of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, as an important postulate implemented by the communist authorities, was one of the forms of opposition to nationalist slogans that indicated the need for reconstruction of Ukraine independent of the Soviet Union.

A Nemzetiszocialista Tanár Szövetség működése München – Felső-Bajorországban a hatalomátvétel után (1933–1937)

Author(s): Zénó Kisling / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 1/2021

The situation and duties of German public-school teachers changed drastically after the period of national socialist takeover. They became more important for the state since the new ideology relied more on elementary schools, folk customs, and sports compared to the Republic and Empire before it. Knowledge and culture took a back seat, and physical education and instilling a sense of community became the focus of early education. It was the job of elementary school teachers to introduce these changes to society by raising the new national socialist generation in this spirit. To achieve this the regime first had to win over and retrain the teachers to be able to do their job effectively and in accordance with the ideology. The question is how the teachers reacted to this effort? What social and economic problems they had to face, and to what extent these problems could move them towards national socialist beliefs? What was their relationship like with the state? What kinds of organisations they had? This study aims to find the answer to these questions within the theoretical framework of professionalization by examining how the National Socialist Teachers League operated. The Munich City Archive was the primary source for this research, which granted insight into the local operations of the National Socialist Teachers League, and through that the changes in the teachers’ everyday lives.

Az Országgyűlési Múzeum vezetői (1923–1949)

Author(s): Judit Villám / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 3/2021

„Budapest nem tud méltó elhelyezést biztosítani”. Első világháború utáni menekült tisztviselők Pest-Pilis-Solt-Kiskun vármegyében

Author(s): Balázs Ablonczy / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 2/2023

The study examines the issue of flight at the end of the First World War in two cross-sections of the largest county in the Kingdom of Hungary in terms of area and population. The first part of the study looks at the policies that the state administration used to supply and employ refugees, and at the strategies that refugee officials employed to seek jobs and flats. The second part, based on a specific sort of the county administration’s papers, seeks to trace the background and career paths of the individual officials who remained in the county. This is all the more important because the analysis reveals that there are more similarities between the late Dualist period and the early Horthy regime (and between the Károlyi administration and the Republic of Council in between) than one might think. The change was then brought about by a centralised state refugee policy, with housing schemes and centralised social politics: while the state administration, overly bloated with refugee officials, was in 1922 pushed in large numbers from the state administration into the private sector or among the pensioners.