Abstract
World War I and its aftermath produced a particularly vulnerable group of child victims: war orphans. This group included children whose fathers had fallen in battle, who had disappeared, or who had not (yet) returned home. Most of Europe’s war and postwar societies witnessed the massive presence of these child victims, and responded in various ways to rescue them and secure their future survival. This article offers an exploration of the ways in which the Hungarian part of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, and then later the post-imperial Hungarian state, became invested in providing care and relief to Hungarian war orphans. In contrast to other groups of child victims, whose parents were blamed for neglecting their parental duties, war orphans as the offspring of ‘war heroes’ profited from the public appreciation of their fathers’ sacrifice for the war effort and the Hungarian nation. The public discourse in the contemporary Hungarian media offers a glimpse into the emergence of a new public visibility of these child victims and of a new recognition of the societal obligation to care for them. Exploring World War I and its aftermath as a telling example of political transformation in the 20th century, the article showcases how war orphans were taken to personify essential notions of war- and postwar destruction, while also capturing visions of postwar recovery. It furthermore examines how welfare discourses and relief practices for Hungary’s war orphans were embedded in contemporary gender norms, notions of proper Christian morality and ethnic nationalism. On this basis, the article assesses the ways in which the case of Hungary’s war orphans not only mirrors the professionalization but also the fundamental transformation of child welfare in the aftermath of World War I.
Highlights
World War I and its aftermath produced a vulnerable group of child victims: war orphans
The Hungarian state had been involved in the care for orphans officially since 1898,3 it was the period of World War I and its aftermath which triggered a new scale of abrupt orphanhood
Hungary went through several political crises: a Bolshevist Revolution led by Béla Kun in spring 1919 and a period of White Terror between 1919 and 1921
Summary
The condition of Europe’s war orphans is the quintessential representation of the war’s invasion into private lives and how it compromised futures. While the borderlands in Central and Eastern Europe especially saw a growing number of orphans, towns and cities in the region were challenged by fatherless children roaming the streets They witnessed the presence of children whose physical appearance captured the war’s and the post-war crises’ impact on civilians. Mischa Honeck and James Marten argue that both World Wars manifested the ‘complex and seemingly contradictory relationships between children and armed conflict’: as children, on the one hand, they were supposed to be sheltered from the war; on the other hand, they were actively drawn into the war effort and directly and indirectly affected by the violent conflict.[25] When it came to the impact of the war on children’s need for additional care, Lydia Murdoch argues in the case of Britain that the Great War ‘ brought a different population of children into state and charitable institutions’, namely, orphaned children who had often belonged to the better-off families and those who had lost (parts of) their families. Victim status was confined to the war-disabled veterans and to all those widows who had become sole breadwinners for their families, and all those children who had lost their fathers or mothers, or both
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