Another Hungary examines the country's northeastern provinces in the nineteenth century. This region, which has since been divided between Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, and Ukraine was often seen as a negligible backwater of the old kingdom, socially and geographically removed from the modernizing metropolis of Budapest. Robert Nemes wants to challenge this imagery and demonstrate the significance of small towns on the periphery. These places mattered to their inhabitants, who took pride in them and strove to improve them. The author is convinced that this also makes them relevant to modern historians.
Robert Nemes is well-qualified to write this alternative history. In his 2005 study The Once and Future Budapest, Nemes portrayed the social and political transformation of an expanding capital. In his new book, he wants to demonstrate that there was life beyond Budapest, as well as personal dedication and agency. For this purpose, he traces the histories of eight individuals who grew up in northeastern Hungary. Their collective experience illustrates the profound changes that remade provincial Hungary no less than the remainder of Europe during the long nineteenth century.
The individuals chosen for the investigation hail from diverse backgrounds. Count József Gvadányi gained minor prominence as a traditionalist writer. Ráfáel Kästenbaum started as a simple peddler but evolved into one of his county's biggest tax payers, who willed much of his fortune to local schools and institutions. Pál Vásárhelyi left a small town in the Spiš region to become Hungary's chief water engineer. Klára Lövei hailed from an impoverished noble family in what is now Romania's Maramureş region and gained prominence as an educator and political prisoner. Iosif Vulcan established himself as a leading Romanian activist and journalist in Oradea, who at the same time used his strong bonds to Hungarian culture to serve as translator and intermediary. Rabbi Ármin Schnitzer moved from the northeastern Jewish center of Huncovce to western Komárom, where he tried to integrate his small congregation into civic life without surrendering its Jewish roots. Vilmos Daróczi made a name for himself as a major propagator of tobacco, both as a grower and as editor of Hungary's central publication on the subject, the Magyar Dohány Újság, or Hungarian Tobacco News. Margit Kaffka, finally, the daughter of a provincial nobleman from what is today Carei in Romania, evolved into one of the leading female writers of modern Hungarian literature.
Together, these biographies provide fascinating glimpses of nineteenth-century Hungary. Composed in a lively and often humorous tone, the book successfully carries the reader off to a different time and place. Indeed, the study's special strength lies in its ability to make history come to life. The author uses a wide variety of sources to develop an engaging picture of provincial Hungary. This diversity of historical evidence represents both a strength and a weakness, since not much space is devoted to discussing the unique challenges posed by different types of sources. In particular, the role of fictional literature in historical analysis would have deserved theoretical reflection.
Nemes defines his approach as a collective biography, which tells the story of the Hungarian provinces through the lives of loosely linked individuals. As a biographic key to the history of the Hungarian northeast, however, these vignettes face questions about their representativeness. Neither socially, nor culturally, nor religiously do the protagonists form a representative cross-section of the local populace. Most notable is the absence of peasants, who still dominated the area demographically at the time. A number of protagonists also left their provincial home towns in favor of the very metropolis that serves as the study's conceptual counterpoint. In some respects, therefore, the book is a study of middle to upper class Hungarians who left their home districts in the northeast more than a study of provincial society itself.
Another Hungary is a skillful expression of new cultural history. It boldly utilizes diverse sources to develop an alternative historical narrative, which provides profound insights into the social, religious and national transformations of the period. Even if the biographies may not be coherent or representative enough to fully embody Another Hungary, the reader will not regret discovering numerous other Hungaries instead.
