The Politics of National Character

Trencsényi, Balázs

doi:10.4324/9780203806708

Cited by 16 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…While earlier travel writers proposed Transylvania's modernization, from the romantic revival of the 1880s (Blanning 2010,176-181), writers seeking an escape from modernity (Whitfield 2011, 251-253) increasingly imagined Transylvania as a museum of earlier stages of development (Todorova 1997, 11-12). The Romantic tum coincided with East European nationalists taking a new interest in folk culture (Trencsenyi 2012), reinforcing travel writers' focus. Travel writing also shifted from "scientific" texts to more personal travel narratives.…”

Section: Romanticismmentioning

confidence: 97%

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Hospitality networks, British travel writers, and the dissemination of competing Transylvanian claims to civilization, 1830s–1930s

Davis

2018

Natl. pap.

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Hungarian, Saxon, and Romanian nationalist activists in Transylvania disseminated competing claims to “Westernness” by swaying visiting British travel writers' descriptions through hospitality networks that guided what writers saw and heard, assuring that travelers favored the nationalists' classifications of the region's ethnicities. Although the qualities British travelers valued varied depending on individual differences and intellectual currents such as enlightened reform, scientific racism, and the romantic revival, travelers consistently ascribed the qualities they best favored to the nationality on whose hospitality they relied. Wealth and time of travel determined which hospitality networks travelers favored. The Hungarian noble elites hosted most travelers until 1918, when the newly dominant Romanian nobility replaced them. Throughout, peasant voices especially remained marginalized.

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Section: Romanticismmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…Ozanne's very brief descriptions of Transylvania reflected his Regat sources, which portrayed the peasantry as embodying the best of Romania (Trencsenyi 2012). Ozanne (1878, 46-56) considered Transylvanian Romanians the best of Romanian peasants, praising their hospitality especially.…”

Section: Viewing Transylvania From Bucharestmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hospitality networks, British travel writers, and the dissemination of competing Transylvanian claims to civilization, 1830s–1930s

Davis

2018

Natl. pap.

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“…In Germany, the Saxon chieftain Widukind (eighth century AD) was refashioned as the guardian of Germany's indigenous belief system in the face of Charlemagne's destructive Christianisation campaigns, and in Slovenia, the national poet France Prešeren (1800–1849) composed a famous epic poem entitled Krst pri Savici (The Baptism on the Savica, 1836), in which the coming of Christianity is linked to the loss of Slavic authenticity. In Bulgaria, the poet and philosopher Pencho Slaveykov (1866–1912) even went as far as to advocate a messianic return to the pre‐Byzantine, ‘national’ faith – reformulated in the spirit of Nietzsche – in order to shake off the shackles of Christianity, and attain national greatness once more (Trencsényi : 125). The re‐evaluation of pre‐Christian religion was thus a Europe‐wide phenomenon, but it appears to have been of greater significance to national movements which perceived themselves as ‘peripheral’ and ‘suppressed’; they tended to associate the forceful imposition of Christianity with the despotic and feudal rule of the (historical and present) oppressor.…”

Section: Celts and Christianitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Noble heathens: Jón Jónsson Aðils and the problem of Iceland's pagan past

Halink

2017

Nations and Nationalism

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In the course of the nineteenth century, traditional Christian conceptions of Europe's pre‐Christian paganisms made way for a more favourable image of the ‘noble heathen’, inspired by Romantic primitivism and the quest for national authenticity. Poets and philologists in Scandinavia turned to medieval manuscripts containing the remnants of the worldview of the Vikings (Ásatrú), and cultivated them as a repository of topoi and motifs for patriotic art. In this essay, I investigate how this positive reassessment of paganism tied into the national historiography of Iceland, and how it influenced the idea of an Icelandic ‘Golden Age’. For this purpose, the oeuvre of Jón Jónsson Aðils, Iceland's most prolific historian of the early twentieth century, will be scrutinised. This essay demonstrates how Aðils envisioned Ásatrú's role in the formation of Iceland's national character, and addresses the problem of reconciling a glorified pagan past with the nation's contemporary Christian identity. In so doing, it contributes to our understanding of the complex ways in which processes of national identity formation can affect and transform long‐held ideas on religious and spiritual matters.

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“…In Central Europe the process of modernization is inseparable from the difficulties of building nation states including national institutions, rites and identities. While in many Western countries the national identity was complemented by the identities of the bourgeois and the citizen, in Central Europe an obligate concept of the nation emerged (Trencsényi, 2011). Perceived as a metaphysically grounded identity, the nation was beyond criticism, which means that its exact interpretation and its consequences for the social world were not subject to debates based on argumentation and reflection.…”

Section: The Ambivalences Of Hungarian Modernizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Incubating radicalism in Hungary – the case of Sopron and Ózd

Sík

2015

Intersections

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1The paper analyses young people's interpretation of the past, evaluation of the present and political behaviour patterns based on semi-structured interviews (n=60) conducted in two contrasting constellations of modernization, Sopron and Ózd. First the perception of the most pressing social and political problems, second the potential of political and civic actions are compared. Finally an attempt is made to outline a "hopeless" and an "indifferent" idealtype of political culture. Together they create the opportunity for both the birth of antidemocratic tendencies and the space in which they can evolve. In this sense they provide the preconditions for "mainstreaming the extreme" that is the incubation of radicalism in Hungary.

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The Politics of National Character

Cited by 16 publications

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Hospitality networks, British travel writers, and the dissemination of competing Transylvanian claims to civilization, 1830s–1930s

Hospitality networks, British travel writers, and the dissemination of competing Transylvanian claims to civilization, 1830s–1930s

Noble heathens: Jón Jónsson Aðils and the problem of Iceland's pagan past

Incubating radicalism in Hungary – the case of Sopron and Ózd

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