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Between the two world wars, the dominant trend in Hungarian history writing was Geistesgeschichte, as represented by the works of Gyula Szekfû, Bálint Hóman, Gyula Kornis, Tibor Joó, József Deér, and Péter Váczy. Fully versed in the works of Ranke, Meinecke, Dilthey and Lamprecht, Gyula Szekfû, the most outstanding of these historians, was also the one to conclude that Hungarian history would lend itself admirably to a consistent synthesis.
In his A magyar állam életrajza (1918), and in his Bethlen Gábor (1929), Szekfû expressly models his approach on Meinecke's, and tells the entire story from the vantage point of raison d'état and the national point of view. This meant that for him, the central issue of Hungarian history was the territorial integrity of historic Hungary, the Hungary of St. Stephen. This particular outlook is even more evident in Szekfû's Három nemzedék (1920), the veritable Bible of the period. Here, he depicts the nineteenth-century Hungarian liberals responsible for the disintegration effected by Trianon. Blinded by the political tradition of the nobility's struggle for Hungarian independence throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries-ran Szekfû's indictment of the liberals-they construed the word "freedom" to mean "independence from the Habsburgs", and failed to realize that the territorial integrity of historic Hungary (i.e., Hungarian rule over the nationalities) could be maintained only with the support of an outside great power, namely, the Habsburg Empire. (This correlation was something that Széchenyi had recognized, and Szekfû, accordingly, esteemed him as by far the greatest Hungarian.)
One finds the same train of thought in all the sections that Szekfû wrote of Magyar Történet (Hungarian History, 1929--1933), a seven-volume synthesis he published together with Bálint Hóman. (Szekfû authored the period stretching from King Matthias Corvinus and the Renaissance to the date of publication). In the final analysis, at every stage of Hungary's history, we find him dividing the leading politicians into two groups: those who believed in "Small Hungary" and those who believed in "Greater Hungary". The "small Hungarians" were those whose primary goal was national independence from the Habsburgs. But this aspiration of theirs, he maintained, was motivated not by some lofty ideal, the love of freedom, for example, but by selfish "class interest" (the nobility's determination to protect its privileges), coupled with a passion for dissension and upheaval inherited from their Eastern ancestors. Another name for this "passion" was Protestantism, which, as Szekfû saw it, was ab ovo inspired by the resolve to spark denominational conflict and create disorder.
The "great Hungarians", on the other hand, had always appreciated that the great power status of the Habsburg Empire was a historical necessity. They recognized the need for political compromise, and strove to promote social reform, and the nation's material improvement and intellectual progress (naturally, with Habsburg support). Szekfû's synthesis presents the Baroque culture of the eighteenth century as the zenith of Hungarian history, a time when the country's territorial integrity had been more or less restored, when religious (Protestant vs. Catholic) and political (Estates vs. absolutism) in-fighting no longer undermined the unity of the nation, when the country's economic and cultural development picked up momentum, and its resettlement began.
Even in the late '30s, Szekfû was very much preoccupied by matters of external politics and national sovereignty. In his Állam és nemzet (State and Nation, 1942), he rejected both the French notion of a political nation and the German "ethnic nation" concept, and presented a uniquely Hungarian notion, one rooted in St. Stephen's tolerance toward the "foreigners". It was a nation concept which guaranteed the country's minorities a high degree of autonomy, while its raison d'etre was to safeguard, and/or to restore Hungary's territorial integrity.
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"A népiség története" (Ethnohistory) written in 1931, was the most comprehensive formulation Mályusz would ever give of his program. The study starts with a definition of the notion of "the ethnic". As opposed to "the national", the conscious expression of a people's cultural and political aspirations, "the ethnic" was shorthand for the spontaneous ways and cultural preferences of a particular people. The best way to get started in ethnohistorical research, he went on to say, was to write "synthetic" local and/or county histories. By "synthetic" he meant just the opposite of the village by village approach of the prewar county histories: the historian was to focus on the small, organically-related historico-geographical units-estates, valleys, plains, and so on-units he would later call "cultural regions", and whose study he expected to reveal an entire network of Southern, Eastern and Northern cultural contacts.
Mályusz honed his theory by clashing swords with proponents of the most powerful historical ideology of his time. Taking a direct stab at Geistesgeschichte, its preoccupation with Western cultural influences and its exclusive reliance on the evidence of the written word, he set ethnohistory the task of concentrating on "spontaneous" cultural elements such as roads, means of transportation, architecture, systems of local political and administrative organization, and "anthropological" data of every kind that might serve to give an accurate picture of the day-to-day life of the people.
Mályusz's views on the nature and techniques of ethnohistory, were thus fully developed by the time he came to give his "Introduction to Ethnohistory" course (i.e., the series of lectures that form the core of the volume under review) in the 1936--37 academic year. (As the editor makes clear, only the lectures delivered in the second semester have been found among Mályusz's extant papers.) One of the issues addressed in the lectures was the matter of the "auxiliary disciplines" which Mályusz proposed to "modify" with a view to making them integral parts of the science of ethnohistory. He was particularly enthusiastic about the potential of ethnography and of linguistics, attaching great importance to the study of dialects (and their exact geographic mapping), and to tracing the origins of place names and personal names. He was also keen to have his students learn to use questionnaires, and to set up the institutional framework of ethnohistorical research.
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Mályusz's ethnohistory was the revival of the positivist traditions of the nineteenth century. The legacy of positivism, as his contemporaries were quick to point out, was evident in his preoccupation with the collective, and with the law-like regularities of development, and in his concentration on cultural history. But ethnohistory proposed to give an account of cultural development with full regard to its grounding in economic history and historical geography. Instead of political and administrative units, it took organically related historical and/or geographic regions for its units of analysis, and investigated them at all levels and with all the tools that we have come to associate with microhistory and microgeography.
So far, so good. The picture is tainted, however, by the fact that the contemporary inspiration of Mályusz's ethnohistory was the Volkstumskunde associated with Aubin, Kötzschke, Keyser, and Spamer in the inter-war years. Volkstumskunde itself harked back to the nation concept espoused by Herder, Arndt, Fichte and the brothers Grimm, which posited race and ethnicity as the basis of nationhood, and defined national affiliation in terms of a community of descent, language and culture. It was an approach humanist in inspiration, but wide open to racist exploitation. Thus it was that by the turn of the century, the pan-German movement had made it into an ideology of world domination, oneserving to substantiate their doctrine of the Germans' racial superiority over the Slavs. Allied with Ostforschung, another fin-de-siecle intellectual trend, Volkstumskunde came to present German history as essentially a crusade to spread German culture (the German "cultural ground"), principally toward the east. Empire building and "civilizing"-founding cities, introducing the German legal system, organizing churches-was, on this view, at the very heart of German history, as was the struggle for pan-German unification. (Paradoxically, for all its chauvinism, Volkstumskunde proved to be a highly fruitful trend in German historiography. As opposed to the tradition represented by Troeltsch, Meinecke, and Below - concentrating on the state, the history of ideas and "great personalities" - Volkstumskunde explored collective phenomena and material culture for sources of historical evidence, and encouraged a basically interdisciplinary approach.)
Considered purely as a methodology, Volkstumskunde, like Mályusz's ethnohistory, would have had the potential for providing relatively impartial, in-depth depictions of particular segments of the past. There is, however, no way to disregard their political and ideological thrust. Mályusz's introductory lecture to the second semester of his course on ethnohistory (pp. 19--46) leaves absolutely no doubt as to his explicitly political agenda. His studies of the early 1930s on the new German nationalism bear this out. Post-war Europe, he noted (and would continue to reiterate for another decade), had given rise to a new kind of nationalism, one predicated not on state formations, but on ethnicity.
Perhaps the most problematic aspect of Mályusz's concept of an "ethnic nation" was that it necessitated his precluding the country's Jews from the body politic. "Let us exclude the Jewry from our nation", he wrote; "let us dismiss, in amicable accord, all those who do not, in their heart of hearts, feel that they are thoroughly Hungarian". Admittedly, Mályusz was not a racist: he did not believe that history was, in essence, the struggle of the various races for Lebensraum, with the superior races winning. In fact, in his "A népiség története" of 1931, he criticized German historians for identifying "culture" with German culture. The task facing Hungarian historians, he insisted, was to preserve for posterity what the Magyars had achieved jointly with the Slavs in the way of culture.
Mályusz's cultural nationalism was anti-German in several respects. For one thing, his very emphasis on the autonomy of Hungarian culture implied resistance to Hitler's attempts at expansionism. But there was also another side to it. Mályusz's cultural nationalism-as he himself admitted-was meant to lay the groundwork for revisionism. His resolute underscoring of the strength and autonomy of Hungarian culture was meant to provide an alternative to Szekfû's vision of a Hungary whose fortunes were irrevocably tied to that of the Habsburgs. Given the opportunity, Mályusz was suggesting, Hungary would be capable of carrying through a territorial revision on its own.
All in all, however, Mályusz might most equitably be judged as having posited-as opposed to Szekfû's concept of nation as state - the concept of nation as culture. For all its manifest ideological and political bias, in respect of methodology, ethnohistory anticipated our current approach to social history. In publishing Mályusz's lectures for the first time ever in book form, the editor of the volume under review has enabled non-historians, too, to draw their own conclusions about the more universal lessons of ethnohistory. The lesson might prove as timely as the German revisitation of Volkstumskunde has proved to be.