The study analyses the history of the Budapest City Improvement Society (Budapesti Városszépítő Egyesület) – established in 1983 and later renamed as the Budapest City Preservation Society (Budapesti Városvédő Egyesület) – from the beginning to the 1990s, placing it in the cultural apolitical context of the 1980s. The activities of the society are interpreted as early civic activism, which, though not expressly in opposition to the government, was critical of the town planning policy of the Socialist regime. The values they subscribed to and propa- gated, their efforts to preserve landmarks at risk, and the message conveyed by their publications did in many respects push the boundaries of political toler- ance. At the same time, through activities designed to establish civic control and local advocacy, the society became a model for other civil associations and advocacy groups, and consequently indirectly promoted the development of the civil society in late Kádár Era Hungary.The study focuses on the reasons for permitting its establishment, the com- promises that allowed the society to be launched in the early 1980s, and the expected requirements to ensure its operation later. With regard to the rea- sons for and the history of its establishment, the essay highlights significance of contemporary media: the heritage preservation movement was borne out of the publicity of a popular TV show, Our Grandchildren Will Not See This (Unokáink sem fogják látni), which was given its own slot in 1981.In the countries of the Eastern Bloc various similar preservation societies were founded around this time. Parallel to these, the Budapest City Improve- ment Society and other Hungarian organisations occupied a place somewhere between civil society and political opposition. For this reasons, although the regime did not consider preservation movements as such a threat, the move- ment’s figureheads and administrative staff were subject of secret surveillance, primarily because of their connections with opposition movements and groups. The study is based on interviews with the founder of the movement, Mihály Ráday, the publicly accessible episodes of TV shows such as Pleas for the City 1 and 2 (Városvédőbeszédek I-II), the analysis of the society’s printed publications, as well as the surveillance reports and secret police files about the individualsassociated with the society.

The author discusses popular images of Belső-Erzsébetváros, the Inner 7th District of Budapest, between the two world wars, attempting to determine the prestige and reputation of the neighbourhood in the interwar public mind. The neighbourhood – which is often termed “the Old Jewish Quarter” of Budapest today – used to be nicknamed Dobócia after its characteristic street Dob utca (“Drum Street”). Dob utca has been the stereotypical residence of Jewish characters in several classic Jewish jokes, part and parcel of Budapest urban folklore up to this very day; that fact in itself indicates something important about the social and ethno-religious character of the neighbourhood, at least in the historical sense. The main question of the article is how the Inner 7th District related to other districts of Budapest in terms of its reputation, compared especially to those areas which were also noted for their Jewish residents in the 1920s and 1930s; how the position of “Dobócia” was perceived in the intra-Budapest social hierarchy in the interwar period, and how it was represented in Jewish urban folklore. First the author summarizes the results of recent scholarship in urban and social history (including her own research), aiming to characterize the Inner 7th District by its social composition, professional and economic profile and denominational mixture. She also comments on the neighbourhood’s physical condition and residential architecture, relative to the prestige of the area on the real estate market. Relying on the context provided by urban history, the author then presents various images of the Inner 7th District through three different types of narrative sources, namely interwar fiction, short stories and anecdotes written in the late 20th and early 21st centuries which portray interwar Jewish neighbourhoods from a retrospective angle, and a memoir published in the 2000s by a one-time resident. The author argues that the use of such subjective sources combines ideally with classic methods of urban history when recovering the past image of a historic neighbourhood.

Since the democratic political transition in 1989–1990, there have been several debates in Hungary concerning the autonomy, self-representation, and monopolistic position of certain professions. In other cases controversies were sparked about the contents and purpose of professional education. Much less work has been done about the real meaning of professional self-representation, associations and vocational higher education. Whereas in North-Atlantic societies the process of professionalization generated ongoing disputes, and remained a steady issue in social scientific discourse for several decades after World War II, the same debates were largely absent in Hungary before 1990. This was partly due to the socialist regime which objected to autonomies of any kind, including the autonomy of occupational groups; scholarly discourse about the professions was thus discouraged, and attention was mostly focused on intellectuals. The relatively low interest in professionalization was also a consequence of the fact that the professions had never been as centrally important in Hungarian social stratification as they were in Northwestern European and American societies. Following a brief history of professionalization theories and an overview of recent international and Hungarian sociological and historical literature, the classical essay of Harold L. Wilensky is introduced to the Hungarian public.