Hungarian Cultural Studies

The Impact of Johnson–Reed in Hungary

2025-02-10T16:40:44-05:00

This paper serves as an introduction to the thematic cluster “The Impact of Johnson–Reed in Hungary: Changing Trajectories and Perceptions” that includes four papers discussing various aspects of US-Hungarian relations from the mid-1920s to the 1970s. Three papers (written by Tibor Glant, Zoltán Peterecz, and Máté Gergely Balogh) were originally presented at the 2024 conference organized by the University of Debrecen and AHEA on the global impact of US restrictions introduced in the 1920s and are accompanied by a fourth article (by Soma Rédey) offering a fascinating example of post-quota Hungarian immigration. The selected articles introduce not only changes in migration patterns per se but also in mutual perceptions, individual careers, the daily work of American officers in Hungary, and the Hungarian-American community at large due to new regulations related to immigration.

Government Propaganda in Interwar Hungarian Male Juvenile Travel Writing

2025-03-17T04:11:36-04:00

The Trianon Treaty of 1920 forced new realities upon Hungarians living in both what was left of Hungary and in the United States, while rising anti-immigrant sentiments in the New World culminating in the passing of the Johnson–Reed Act of 1924 further complicated the situation. With hundreds of thousands of ethnic Hungarians resettling into smaller Hungary from the territories forcefully ceded to the successor states, Budapest was not interested in large-scale remigration from the US. At the same time, American immigration restriction drastically cut off the flow of Hungarian migrants to the New World communities established at the time of the “new immigration.” American popular culture (especially music, movies, and pulp fiction) took Hungary by storm and further strengthened the overtly positive image of the Transatlantic Promised Land. Travel writing continued to play a dominant role in shaping mutual images, and a new subgenre, juvenile male travel literature, emerged. Taking a closer look at the works of Lola Réz Kosáryné, Andor Kun, and Gedeon Mészöly I explain how tourism, romanticized images of the “Other,” and government propaganda mingled in these texts in what seems to be a concerted attempt to help young Hungarians come to terms with interwar political realities.

The Rise of the Sun Queen: Mária Telkes’ Early Years in the United States (1925-1953)

2025-02-17T02:09:52-05:00

Mária Telkes achieved outstanding results in the utilization of solar energy. Only thirteen years after her arrival in the US in 1925, she was accepted to work at MIT's Solar Energy Research Group, as the only female participant on the team. During the period she spent at MIT between 1939 and 1953, the number of female students and professors was insignificant, just below 1%. Mária Telkes never felt discriminated against; in all the hardest situations she found her way to keep on the scientific track of solar research. She achieved several patents and publications during these years and became known nationwide. The paper focuses on the circumstances: both social and technical challenges she faced. Based mostly on primary documents available at MIT Libraries' Distinctive Collections, details of her application process or her development of solar stills during the Second World War give us a sophisticated image not only of the challenges Telkes faced, but of the social characteristics of the era as well.

The Aftermath of Johnson–Reed: John F. Montgomery and Jewish Immigration from Hungary in the 1930s

2025-02-15T12:24:21-05:00

The Johnson-Reed Law was a milestone in the history of immigration to the United States, and has been analyzed from various angles, especially how the legal measure dramatically decreased the inflow of immigrants from these places. The article investigates how one American minister in Hungary, John F. Montgomery (1933–1941), reacted and dealt with the new measure. From the mid-1930s in particular, the number of Hungarian Jewish people who wanted to immigrate to the United States grew, which caused frustration to the then American minister in Budapest. Therefore, a closer examination will be made of Montgomery’s work and attitude regarding would-be Jewish immigrants. This case study will broaden our understanding of the aftermath of the Johnson-Reed Law of 1924.

The “New Majority” and the White Ethnics – The Involvement of László Pásztor in Richard Nixon’s Reelection Campaign in 1972

2025-02-15T12:11:07-05:00

The support of the “white ethnic” population was instrumental in Richard Nixon’s landslide presidential victory in 1972. Whereas traditionally, urban, working-class Catholics had been voting mostly for Democratic candidates, in 1972, the majority of them defected to the Republican Party. One of the most important ethnic organizers was the Hungarian 1956 émigré, László Pásztor. Pásztor was the director of the Heritage Groups (Nationalities) Division of the Republican National Congress, and his work among the volunteers strongly contributed to the result. But from the perspective of the Nixon campaign, Pásztor was not the ideal ethnic—he was critical of détente and was actively promoting ethnic interests such as ethnic hirings. Whereas the Nixon campaign wanted to focus on the urban, working-class ethnic demographic referred to as the “New Majority,” Pásztor was representing the anticommunist, captive nations narrative. Pásztor was predicting that this shift was going to hurt the Republican Party electorally, as the anticommunist ethnics would feel that their interests were ignored.

Selected English-Language Bibliography of Interest for Hungarian Cultural Studies: 2024–2025

2025-08-15T16:41:06-04:00

This bibliography mostly straddles 2024–2025, covering the period since the summer 2024 publication of last year’s bibliography in this journal. Each year’s bibliography may also be supplemented by previously published items earlier not included. Although this bibliography series can only concentrate on English-language items, occasional items of particular interest in other languages may be included. For a more extensive bibliography of Hungarian Studies from about 2000 to 2014, for which this is a continuing update, see Louise O. Vasvári, Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek, and Carlo Salzani. “Bibliography for Work in Hungarian Studies as Comparative Central European Studies.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture (published by Purdue University) (2011): http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweblibrary/hungarianstudiesbibliograph

A Note from the Editor-in-Chief

2025-08-18T06:36:00-04:00

The Life and Times of Fiorello's Sister, Gemma La Guardia Glück

2025-03-08T08:36:47-05:00

Gemma and Fiorello La Guardia were born in New York to a Jewish mother from Austro-Hungarian Trieste and an Italian Catholic father. The impoverished family returned to Europe when the siblings were teenagers, where both ended up having sustained relationships with Budapest (where their mother is buried to this day). As a youth Fiorello worked for the American Embassy in Budapest and in Fiume, while Gemma married a Hungarian Jew and lived for 26 years in interwar Budapest, from where her family was deported in June 1944. This study aims to treat the La Guardia family's (mostly obfuscated) Jewish origins and Gemma's memoir, which is an important if too scant testimony of her interwar life in Budapest and to the deportation and destruction of an unusual Hungarian Jewish family, as well as an early documentation to the horrors of Ravensbrück. Nevertheless, details of the Gemma's life in Budapest, as well as about the probable causes of her brother's decades-long strained relationship with her are obfuscated in her memoir. Through interwar Hungarian and U.S. newspaper records from 1930's I document the problems caused for Fiorello in his American political life by his sister having revealed details of their family origins.

Good Citizens or Nazi Spies?

2025-03-07T10:58:09-05:00

The United States entered the Second World War following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. During the war, Japanese Americans faced persecution and even imprisonment due to their national heritage. The primary objective of this paper is to highlight that it was not only U.S. citizens of Japanese or German descent, but also Hungarian Americans, who could become targets of American authorities, albeit not to the same severe extent. The wartime atmosphere was so tense that the FBI responded to even the slightest rumors, launching investigations against law-abiding citizens who had no intention of undermining the American war effort. This paper examines the case of one Hungarian immigrant family—the Gondos family—as an illustrative example of how U.S. wartime intelligence targeted American citizens of “enemy alien” descent based solely on unsubstantiated rumors. Analyzing this case offers valuable insight into the experiences of wartime minorities in the United States. Therefore, the findings contribute to the historiography of twentieth-century American history, Hungarian migration history, and the academic field of American Studies.

Slavic Loanwords in the Speech of Transcarpathian Hungarians as a Result of the First One Thousand Days of the Russo-Ukrainian War

2025-03-12T00:26:55-04:00

Transcarpathia is one of the westernmost counties of Ukraine with a Hungarian minority population consisting of more than 151,000 people, based on the last official census data from 2001. The local Hungarian language variety is different from standard Hungarian, spoken within the borders of Hungary, mainly in terms of vocabulary. The reason for this is that local Hungarians frequently borrow words from the language of the dominant nation of the country, i.e., Ukrainian. The number of Slavic loanwords has been increased by sociopolitical changes resulting from the Russo–Ukrainian war. In the present study, borrowings which are directly connected to the antecedents and consequences of the armed conflict are summarized on the basis of the Termini Hungarian–Hungarian Dictionary and Database. The aim of this paper is to present how a minority language variety can be influenced by the dominant language of the country in a few years of sociopolitical turmoil. In an international context, this might facilitate our understanding of the connection between language change, lexical borrowings, and military conflicts.

Sándor Hevesi’s experimental staging of Shakespeare in the 1910s

2025-05-24T23:48:20-04:00

Today, with major archaeological discoveries in Southwark, Marvin Carlson’s study on the semiotics of theater architecture, and insights from the reconstructed (New) Globe, it is increasingly clear that Shakespeare’s “plays were written for the space in which they were to be performed: and that therefore to understand Shakespeare, one should understand his playhouses” (Stern 21). Sándor Hevesi, one of the most important yet still somewhat overlooked figures in early-twentieth-century Hungarian theater, was among the first to recognize that Shakespeare’s plays did not naturally suit the proscenium stage. A critic-turned-director and dramaturg, he recognized that it was the architecture of nineteenth-century European theaters that necessitated the radical editorial and dramaturgical interventions, often infamously substantial textual cuts, characteristic of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Shakespearean productions. This recognition fueled his devoted explorations into the workings of the Shakespeare stage. In Hevesi’s time, little was known about the original dimensions and staging conditions of Elizabethan playhouses. In a 2023 paper, I argued that by 1923, through his staging of The Taming of the Shrew, Hevesi believed he had discovered the real Shakespeare. This paper explores the starting point of that journey to assess the significance of Hevesi’s anticipatory ideas.

Spaces of Memory in Documentary Film

2025-05-31T01:10:09-04:00

Born in Auschwitz is Cseke and S. Takács’s first full-time documentary film that follows the story of Angela Orosz, who was born in Auschwitz in December 1944 and survived miraculously. The article asks how various visual representations of space are combined in the film to document Angela Orosz’s survival in the past and her relationship with her daughter in the present. The paper claims that Born in Auschwitz plays with the film lexicon of Holocaust documentary films in that it constructs visual representations of spaces related to the Holocaust by involving diverse modes of graphic spatial constructions along with traditional settings and frames. At the same time, the film also advances its female protagonists’ ability to reflect on their relationship to the Holocaust and realize the ways it is present in their daily lives 70 years later. The film not only documents but arguably also triggers an intergenerational healing process of reflection on the legacy of the Holocaust in the protagonists’ daily interactions.

National Identity and Architectural Expression

2025-03-25T01:33:07-04:00

The interior design of a building provides critical insights into its historical and cultural context. This study examines the architectural and symbolic relationships among two Nationality and Heritage Rooms in the Cathedral of Learning—the Yugoslav and Hungarian Rooms. The research explores how the Hungarian and Yugoslav Rooms illustrate the influence of nation-state formations after the First World War, emphasizing the relationship between national identity and architectural expression. Particular attention is given to the underrepresentation of ethnicity in the decision making and the interior design of the Yugoslav Room, and the integration of folk and neo-baroque elements in Hungarian architecture in case of the Hungarian Room. This research was conducted within the framework of a Fulbright Scholarship and was initially presented at the University of Pittsburgh’s Hungarian Heritage Room. Further findings were shared at the forty-eighth conference of the American Hungarian Educators Association at Rutgers University, where the study was awarded the Research Presentation Award.

Lénárt, András. Mozgóképes múlt – Közelítések a film és a történelem kapcsolatához [Cinematographic past. Approaches to the relationship between film and history]. Pécs: Kronosz. 2024. 250 pp.

2025-04-14T08:16:05-04:00

Tóth, Miklós Bálint. Az ideológiától a nosztalgiáig. Barangolások Koestlerrel és Máraival [From Ideology to Nostalgia. Excursions with Arthur Koestler and Sándor Márai. Translated by Ákos Farkas]. Budapest: MCC Press. 2023. 246 pp.

2024-11-12T12:48:15-05:00

Fenyvesi, Anna and Réka Bakos, eds. Óhazából az Újvilágba: A személyes történelem nyomában [Hungarian roots and American dreams: Tracing personal history]. Szeged: Americana eBooks, 2024. 283 pp.

2025-01-04T17:37:41-05:00

Pataky, Adrienn. A hangzatkától a szonettkoszig. A magyar szonett történetéről és nagy pillanatairól [On the history of the Hungarian sonnet and its great moments]. Budapest: Ráció, 2021. 291 pp.

2025-07-11T06:53:53-04:00

Kecskés, Gusztáv D. Globális humanitárius akció a hidegháború idején - Az 1956-os magyar menekültek nemzetközi befogadása [Global Humanitarian Action during the Cold War: The International Reception of the Hungarian Refugees of 1956]. Budapest: HUN-REN Bölcsészettudományi Kutatóközpont, Történettudományi Intézet; Nemzeti Emlékezet Bizottsága, 2025. 320 pp.

2025-07-25T15:16:02-04:00

Ablonczy, Balázs. Pál Teleki (1874-1941): The Life of a Controversial Hungarian Politician [Translated by Thomas J. and Helen D. DeKornfeld]. Reno: Helena History Press, 2024. 288 pp.

2025-08-08T11:46:18-04:00

Hardi-Kovács, Gellért. Géza Soos: The Man Who Tried to Stop the Hungarian Holocaust. Strängnäs: Gelko Förlag, 2024. 143 pp.

2025-08-08T11:39:02-04:00

Lovra, Éva. A miskolci modernizmustól New Yorkig: Bőhm Viktor építészete [From Miskolc Modernism to New York: The Architecture of Viktor Bőhm]. Miskolc: Észak-Keleti Átjáró Egyesület, 2023. 264 pp.

2025-07-15T05:20:54-04:00