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Thursday 13 April 2023 11.00 - 13.00
L-6 POL06 Narrating and Representing Habsburg Post-imperial Transitions. Discourses and Historical Markers at the Local and Regional Levels in the Interwar Period
C24
Network: Politics, Citizenship, and Nations Chair: Alison Carrol
Organizer: Ivan Jelicic Discussants: -
Gábor Egry : Symbolic Engineering in the Void? Street Renaming, Nationalization, and Local Traditions in Post-WWI Transylvania
The paper aims to produce an overview of the typology of street renaming in Transylvania after WWI. With the establishment of Romanian sovereignty in the region, the symbolic interventions of the previous decades—intended to highlight Hungarian nationalism—became obsolete. The new power soon initiated changes in this regard, and sometimes local ... (Show more)
The paper aims to produce an overview of the typology of street renaming in Transylvania after WWI. With the establishment of Romanian sovereignty in the region, the symbolic interventions of the previous decades—intended to highlight Hungarian nationalism—became obsolete. The new power soon initiated changes in this regard, and sometimes local leaders even preempted state initiatives. Nevertheless, the outcome was not a uniform change, but rather one which revealed subtle but substantial differences in the approaches of local elites to the question of ‘symbolic engineering’. Focusing on the roles and motives of local elites, this paper argues that new symbolic maps were determined to a great extent by the prior existence or non-existence of a local non-Hungarian symbolic space. For example, if there was no local Romanian tradition, the solution was flipping and mirroring, i.e., the substitution of Hungarian signs for the closest Romanian ones. Even if there was a local Romanian tradition, the regional transition was, however, not straightforward: factors like the presence of non-Romanians, local ethnic politics, and attitudes towards the new center, among others, generated both symbolic maps that were more localized as well as ones that were almost completely devoid of local accents. (Show less)

Anikó-Borbála Izsák : The People of Maramure?: The Symbolism of an Assumed Regional Identity
The notion of a „maramure?ean” landscape is mostly associated with mountains, meadows, little villages with wooden churches, and a vernacular culture. The region of Maramure? in Romania has a specific cultural heritage, one which is described nowadays in albums and other representative publications as an ancient Romanian heritage, and which ... (Show more)
The notion of a „maramure?ean” landscape is mostly associated with mountains, meadows, little villages with wooden churches, and a vernacular culture. The region of Maramure? in Romania has a specific cultural heritage, one which is described nowadays in albums and other representative publications as an ancient Romanian heritage, and which was considered as the cradle of the Romanian national movement in the prewar Hungarian Kingdom. But today’s Maramure? County is not identical with interwar Maramure? County, which in turn was not identical with the former Máramaros County of the Hungarian Kingdom—the latter unit had been divided during the interwar period by a border between Romania and Czechoslovakia. Throughout the long negotiations over the border between the two states (1919–1926), arguments were put on paper that the whole territory of the former Hungarian county should belong to Romania, based on historical, economic, and geographic reasons. At this point the landscape and its population became an element in the argumentative strategies of Romanian politicians, whose actions presumed an inherent connection between regional population and regional landscape, mutually transforming each other into authentic national ones. Thus, this paper asks a key, foundational question: When did the patrimonialization of the „maramure?ean” landscape begin? To address this question, this paper investigates the symbolic meanings and elements of this process of region-specific patrimonialization, based on narrative sources like almanacs, travel guides, and newspapers. (Show less)

Ivan Jelicic : Creating Fiume’s Italianity: Interpreting and Incorporating Local Events Through a National Lens
This paper focuses on street names, monuments, gravestones, commemorative plaques, and celebrations of anniversaries in immediate postwar and interwar Fiume (Rijeka). The long and specific transition of Fiume to the Italian state was made up of various (inter-)national (e.g., D’Annunzio’s occupation, 1919–20, culminating in the ‘Bloody Christmas’) and local (e.g., ... (Show more)
This paper focuses on street names, monuments, gravestones, commemorative plaques, and celebrations of anniversaries in immediate postwar and interwar Fiume (Rijeka). The long and specific transition of Fiume to the Italian state was made up of various (inter-)national (e.g., D’Annunzio’s occupation, 1919–20, culminating in the ‘Bloody Christmas’) and local (e.g., elections for a Free State government and a fascist coup d’état in 1922) political episodes. These episodes were among the central points used by local actors in (re)presenting and creating an imagined, genuinely Italian—and even fascist—character of what had been a multiethnic Royal Hungarian port-city. References to an imagined Italian proto-history—namely recalling Ancient Rome and Venice—were used, despite the fact that the heritage of the latter was almost nonexistent in Fiume. Even the national Italian narrative of victory in World War One was embraced, even though locals’ wartime experiences were mainly linked to those of the Habsburg Empire. Minor local Italian irredentist stances were accentuated by evoking the memory and images of volunteers from Fiume who fought in the Italian army, and recalling Italian figures persecuted by the (Austro-)Hungarian authorities during the war. As such, this historical representation at the local level was received at the (Italian) national level, masking a far more complex political, social, and economic post-Habsburg reality behind a ‘smooth’ Italianity. (Show less)

Ségoléne Plyer : As Heard at the Marketplace. Discourses of Transition and the Northeast Bohemian Countryside in the 1920s.
Northeast Bohemia is a semi-mountainous border region with a mixed Czech-German population. In the 1920s, the local press and the publications of local associations generally presented the young Czechoslovak Republic—established at the end of 1918—on the one hand as a regime that satisfied the legitimate claim of Czechs to sovereignty, ... (Show more)
Northeast Bohemia is a semi-mountainous border region with a mixed Czech-German population. In the 1920s, the local press and the publications of local associations generally presented the young Czechoslovak Republic—established at the end of 1918—on the one hand as a regime that satisfied the legitimate claim of Czechs to sovereignty, and thus to control of the territory, and whose duty it was to increase the ethnic Czech population and to favour economic "bridgeheads", i.e. Czech companies. On the other hand, for the German-speaking population, which was marked by the defeat of the First World War, the Republic was often seen as a regime aimed at weakening or even eliminating German culture from the public sphere, in particular through attacks on the Habsburg past while at the same time weakening the members of the German minority in economic terms.
This paper will compare these printed discourses with a research field that is suitable for analysing the reality of different dimensions of the appropriation of space, that is, rural markets. Seized at the regional level of Northeast Bohemia, the market for agricultural products will allow us to weigh in on the power relations between social groups and between linguistic groups. The market for land will make it possible to critically examine the progress of Czech settlement (especially following the land reform) and the supposed abandonment of rural space by citizens of German tongue. Finally, the local markets allow us to grasp the reality of exchanges between towns and countryside, between Czechs and Germans (it was, for example, on these markets that peasants organised language exchange years for their teenagers so that they could learn the other language of the region) and, through comments recorded by the police during conflicts, certain unpublished representations of opinion on the transition to Czechoslovakia. (Show less)



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