Unseemly bickering over the “correct” spelling of placenames or family names has long been an occupational hazard in East-Central European studies. Yet such disputes perhaps deserve more serious attention: after all, politicians also squabble over names and naming. Ágoston Berecz's new book analyses such politics in late Habsburg Transylvania, achieving a sophistication and depth hitherto unimagined in the essentially parenthetical discussions of the naming issue which pepper scholarly monographs.
Magyarization looms over Berecz's overall narrative, but individual chapters cluster into three sections. The first section, titled “Peasants,” describes a pre-national world. A second section on “Nationalisms” discusses various patriotic fantasies and political initiatives. The narrative climaxes with a final section on “The State” documenting a series of oppressive assimilationist policies introduced in the final years of the Hungarian kingdom. Each of these three sections contains three chapters: one each on personal names, family names, and placenames. Berecz concentrates primarily on the Magyar–Romanian relationship, but Transylvanian Saxons also feature prominently, mostly by providing a useful point of comparison. Methodologically, the book draws on a wide variety of sources, including government documents, the popular press, personal memoirs, and name databases, framed with insightful comparisons drawn from a wide variety of secondary literature.
In his opening chapters, Berecz concentrates on peasant attitudes. He finds that non-Magyar peasants chose personal names from saints’ names appearing on traditional calendars and experienced the state-sponsored Magyarization of their names as “alien” (167). The politics of family names differs from that of given names partly, in that family names themselves were a relatively recent state imposition. When their nationalization began, Magyars and Romanians, claiming autochthony and precedence in Transylvania, both sought to restore “original” spellings. Berecz dives deep into the philological origins of various surnames, and the great wealth of detail sometimes becomes wearisome. He nevertheless documents resistance both national and nationally indifferent, as well as “rich and unpredictable shades of do-it-yourself identities in reaction to contending nationalisms” (90).
The narrative brings a spectacular wealth of empirical data to one of the great unresolved controversies of Habsburg history: the national feeling of ploughing peasants. Scholars of nationalism have struggled to assess how illiterates responded to the patriotic initiatives of nationalist intelligentsias, because illiterates, by definition, did not contribute to the written record. Databases of personal names, however, provide precious insight into peasant attitudes. Since his research suggests that that “no Romanian villager . . . felt the urge to nationalize their surname” (266), Berecz has little use for social-constructivist contingencies. Nevertheless, he avoids reifying primordial or ethno-symbolist nationalisms, arguing in his conclusion that by 1914 peasants had “unbroken resources to a nationalist line of interpretation of the world . . . which they would occasionally repurpose for their own ends” (264).
The politics of placenames is covered in even more exhaustive detail. Perhaps the book's most interesting vignette concerns a Hungarian mountaineering club, the Carpathian Society of Transylvania (Erdély Kárpát-egyesület, EKE), which sought Hungarian names for placenames along hiking tracks. The only available maps with enough detail to be useful for hikers were military maps published in Vienna. Military maps used, not Hungarian names, but “names used by the local majority” (143), and Berecz describes how EKE members lobbied unsuccessfully for the Habsburg military to use more Hungarian placenames.
The climax of the book examines the work of the National Communal Registry Board, which starting in 1898 both imposed Hungarian names on villages and reformed existing Hungarian names. Several local officials objected. The resulting correspondence enables Berecz to explore the diversity of provincial attitudes. He analyses, from both a linguistic and a historical perspective, how exactly the Registry Board invented new names. He devotes paragraphs to topics such as the simplification of initial consonant clusters and the raising and lowering of vowels (223–224). The political narrative emphasizes the importance of local notables, such as “a chauvinistic school inspector from Bihar county” (207) who foisted Hungarian names on non-Magyar villages with particular enthusiasm, an Orthodox archpriest from the Banat who penned a particularly erudite protest against the Magyarization of his town (2), and local noblemen who “wanted to avoid the erasure of their titles of nobility” (227).
Few studies of nationalism have accounted for national indifference so expertly. Berecz paints a persuasive picture of the pre-national peasantry's disinterest in elite patriotisms and their adaptive strategies in response to assimilationist policies. Habsburg loyalism and religious affiliation receive some treatment, though the monarch and the central bureaucracy overall play only a secondary role in the narrative. Berecz's analysis of the Hungarian government and its sundry officials also discusses non-nationalist motives for name reform, such as the desire to assist the postal service by differentiating identical placenames. Nevertheless, the arrogance of Magyar chauvinism remains impossible to ignore. Characterizing the Magyarization of names “as a form of symbolic violence, the affirmation of an asymmetrical relationship” (268), Berecz's research documents both the injustice and the folly of Hungary's counterproductive policies.
The book is a specialized scholarly monograph; it is probably too dense for undergraduates. Indeed, scholars without a background in linguistics may struggle in parts. Nevertheless, this book remains an outstanding piece of scholarship. Berecz, who previously published a superb study of efforts to Magyarize Transylvanian schools (The Politics of Early Language Teaching [2014]), has established himself not only as an important expert on late Habsburg Transylvania, but as the leading authority on Magyarization.
