Empty Signs, Historical Imaginaries: The Entangled Nationalization of Names and Naming in a Late Habsburg Borderland by Berecz Ágoston (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 369 classic works as well as the newest historiography in both English and the languages of Eastern Europe, the author has provided his reader not only with a detailed ‘crash course’ on how the people of Eastern Europe formed nations there, but also with a ‘road map’ for further intellectual immersion. John Connelly’s monograph, therefore, serves as a valuable contribution to the broader understanding of Eastern Europe and an introductory textbook on a geographic space where more good and bad happened during the twentieth century than anywhere else. The Polish Institute of International Affairs Paweł Markiewicz Warsaw Berecz, Ágoston. Empty Signs, Historical Imaginaries: The Entangled Nationalization of Names and Naming in a Late Habsburg Borderland. Austrian and Habsburg Studies, 27. Berghahn Books, New York and Oxford, 2020. xiv + 334 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Figures. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $149.00: £110.00. The summer of 2020 saw the centennial of the Trianon peace treaty. A new memorial was unveiled in central Budapest right across from the Parliament. It features more than 12,000 localities, cities, towns and villages, as listed in a gazetteer published in 1913. They all bear Hungarian names, yet most of them are located in one of the successor states. The monument claims to preserve a feeling of togetherness and cohesion. Playing on the aesthetics of the Vietnam War Memorial, it fosters an atmosphere of nostalgia and mourning. But a random search of ‘Bratislava’ or ‘Sibiu’ yields no results. So where do these names come from? The Magyarization of place names in late Dualist Hungary has not drawn much scholarly attention. Just like the Magyarization of given and family names, the process and the motivations behind it seemed too obvious, too offensive and often too ridiculous to merit substantial study. Ágoston Berecz now shows that, on the contrary, there is much to learn from the politics of naming about the workings and limits of Hungarian nationality politics and how they failed to impose the vision of a golden age of Hungarian history on a partly indifferent and partly alienated population. He starts out from the basic assumption that names are semantically weak, mere tags assigned to a referential person or object. They bear no direct meanings and invite speculations on their etymology, which makes them ideal projection screens of nationalist visions. These visions collided with pre-national practices. In this respect, the focus of the study on historic Transylvania, Banat and the counties of Arad and Bihar (former Partium) proves particularly fruitful, since SEER, 99, 2, APRIL 2021 370 the fairly new imposition of family names since the late eighteenth century and the increasing impact of registering the population collided with traditional practices of patrilineal naming among the predominantly Romanian peasant population. Family names as imposed by the state were new to them, and they were not readily accepted. The entire process of naming was additionally complicated by the fact that the Romanian language was much in flux during the nineteenth century. The Uniate impact of Latinism was still strong, and the gradual transition from the Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet with or without diacritics turned consistent orthography into a challenge. Spelling names was particularly demanding where names intersected closely with Hungarian or German versions, hinting at centuries of contact. Whether a person was registered as Lazăr or Lázár, Mihai or Mihály was not an innocent issue even before Magyarization, to take just one of the less complicated from a highly diverse set of examples that Berecz unearths. Such intersections and influences did not stem from earlier assimilations, as nationalists claimed, and they did not betray an earlier, presumably submerged Magyar, Romanian or German identity. Names had already been markers of religious and social belonging and ethnic borders before the advent of modern nationalism, and this function was not easily obliterated. Peasant society reluctantly reacted to the demands which increasing state activity imposed on their use of given, family and place names. This should not be confounded with national indifference. It rather paved the way for competing nationalist visions that were increasingly connected with naming from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards. In the years before and after the Ausgleich of...