Tarafás Imre

Tarafás Imre

Foglalkozás
történész

Publikációk

Absztrakt
The starting point for the study is the Hungarian translation of Alfons Huber’s Geschichte Österreichs, which, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century was not only translated but also heavily edited by omitting the parts discussing the history of Hungary and by other structural changes. Based on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of cultural fields, the study presents the translation to shed light on larger questions behind the episode. Examining the productive field of the original text, he discusses the contemporary dilemmas of ‘Austrian’ identity through the concepts of Österreich and Österreicher, and presents an overview of the ideological programme prevailing in Austrian historiography at the time. Concerning the field of appropriation, he continues with the contemporary practice of Hungarian translators and the reception of the original text by Huber. Finally, the study analyses the final translated version of the text, highlighting the intended and unintentional implications of the changes made to the text.
Absztrakt
The study examines the representation of ethnic minorities in historical monographs written by Ignac Acsady, Lajos Baroti, Vilmos Fraknoi, and Henrik Marczali in the Age of Dualism (1867–1918), as well as in the series edited by Sandor Szilagyi to commemorate the thousand-year anniversary of the Hungarian Kingdom in 1896. It focuses primarily on the historical vision stemming from the two main trends of the question of minorities – united political nation versus homogeneous nation state – as seen through the debate of Bela Grunwald and Michal Mudroň. The study continues with the marked role of the same issue in the programmatic texts of the increasingly institutionalising national historiography. After examining the careers of the selected historians and the circumstance of writing their works, the study analyses the representation of ethnic minorities in the narratives of the Magyar conquest of the Carpathian Basin and the 1848–1849 War of Independence, mainly focusing on the implicit definitions of the nation and the constructs formulated in opposition to minority narratives. Although there are differences between attitudes towards specific ethnic minorities, especially discernible in narratives about the War of Independence, the findings of the study suggest that the narratives correspond with those of the theoreticians of the nation state idea: they identify the concept of nation with ethnic and linguistic Hungarianness and represent ethnic minorities as passive participants in Hungarian history. It is, however, incorrect to label all the historians examined as wildly chauvinistic.