Debrecen not only lost with Trianon
Debrecen has an economic, educational, cultural and commercial role to play, not only in the Northern Great Plain, but also in the international region from Eastern Slovakia through Transcarpathia to Partium: those with a little interest in local public life can hear this political potential on a weekly basis. The practical implementation is striking in the Orbán governments after 2014: the state spends hundreds of billions on the automotive center of Debrecen, on the scale of the local university and the city, both in terms of population and even in terms of cultural policy.
Speaking of which, it was not presented at the Déri Museum Lajos Lakner Look at us, Endre Ady! , but the book is partly about the concept of Greater Debrecen, which was born in the early 1900s. In the years following the Trianon, Oradea was replaced by Szeged in the competition for the role of the regional center, below the state borders, but this does not matter in the approach, according to which the civic city rings the same bell a hundred years apart. Thus, the book may seem even more exciting, which Róbert Barta – the head of the Institute of History of the University of Debrecen, in our opinion – will be elusive to those interested in the intellectual history of Debrecen, the city and national cultural policy.
It is clear from his recommendation that the 190-page work published under the care of the Déri Museum is divided into three parts. The first is the study of cultural history already flashed in its content, Debrecen plays a regional-national political role. Lakner draws an arc on the subject from 1870 to the 1930s, examining not only the expectations of national political and cultural leaders (such as Kuno Klebelsberg) regarding Debrecen, but also what debates this place has given rise to. The second part of the book is a literary study of literary history, discussing the relationship between local poets and Trianon, while the third is a collection of revisionist, irredenta poems by well-known and forgotten authors related to Debrecen.
Fight for university
The opposition between Budapest and Debrecen – in a cultural sense – can already be felt at the turn of the 20th century. Viktor Rákosi’s 1909 article in the then Budapest Press, which was the government press at the time, indicates the appreciation of the role of the civic city. In the paper, the author argued that the third university in the country should be founded in the urbanizing Debrecen, because the population is the “most Hungarian” there, thus preserving the Hungarian culture the most in Debrecen. From the outside, the voluminous article confirmed the self-image of the Debrecen intelligentsia, which – with the Csokonai Circle at the forefront – asserted with increasing confidence from the end of the 19th century that Debrecen, not the diverse capital, was the home of true Hungarian culture. Lajos Lakner already talked about this in the round table discussion following the book presentation. He added: Until Trianon, the city of Civis had to compete with the more economically and culturally developed, more open-minded Oradea (as Timisoara and Szeged also indicated, they are ahead of the capital of Hajdúság in urbanization). Bizarre, but the loss of territory together with the pain – with the fall of Oradea – opened new opportunities for Debrecen. From a national political point of view, the emphasis shifted from counterbalancing the Romanians to preserving the Hungarians of Transylvania, and one of the most influential politicians of the century, Klebelsberg Kuno in Religious and Public Education (1922-1931), wanted the city to have a border role in
Farm world and modernization
During the already mentioned round table discussion moderated by Róbert Barta, several questions were raised. Regarding the change of revisionism, Lak remarked that in the memory of the affected Debrecen, only the Romanian trauma of the occupation of 1919-20, which could be attributed to the loss of the country, developed among Lajos. Then the local struggle of the traditional and pro-reform forces came to the fore so much that public life in Debrecen did not really catch up with the national memory policy until the end of the twenties.
– In 70% of the areas directly adjacent to the new state border, the quality of life did not deteriorate, or even increased in a quarter, mainly due to the black trade. Some Hungarian scholars have already pointed out between the two world wars that the loss of the country of Trianon was not always a catalyst for the post-World War I economic crisis, but because of the deep, old, outdated structures. They saw the key to moving forward in not blaming Trianon for everything – added the former Zsolt Szilágyi, assistant professor (Institute of History, University of Debrecen).
He remarked that we paint the pain of Trianon at the time based on the narrative of the elite and the middle class, which rhymes with each other. For example, by Magda Szabó, who wrote that she and her parents could not walk through Piac Street in Debrecen without meeting the trembling limb victims of mustard gas, Trianon was perceived as an “open fracture” in everyday life. It is only in peasant society, in the memory of the lower strata, as life-course interviews show, that this feeling is no longer so marked.
Zsolt Szilágyi spoke about the fact that the digital revolution can further nuance the Trianon circle with new approaches. What it means? For example, the fact that the census results of 1880, 1890, 1900 and 1910 have been digitally processed, so that the socio-economic structures behind events and personal stories can be better drawn with a wealth of easily accessible data. On the basis of these, conclusions can be drawn about the effect of these deep-seated, sometimes centuries-old structures on the events themselves or on how the events affected them. Examining the development of Hungary in 1910 – a group of historians – based on the data of approximately 12,000 settlements and more than 20 different factors * – found that most of the mainland areas were more developed than the detached parts, and the “development “Slope”. Strictly from the point of view of economic history, the lost parts were more important only for the periphery and the functioning of the country than the interior of the Carpathian Basin. According to Zsolt Szilágyi, one of the reasons for the economic boom of the 1920s was not only due to the People’s Federation loan, but also to this: the stabilization took place in the more developed areas from the outset.
From the Great Plain, he said that the annexation of the region to Transcarpathia also lost an important economic connection, but the difficulties were already present before Trianon due to overcapacity in the milling industry, water management problems (water scarcity) or racial diversity (all other repressive growth of field culture). He added that the recovery was also accompanied by intellectuals relocating across borders.Reflecting this, Professor Levente Püski (Institute of History of the University of Debrecen) remarked that “intellectual overproduction” had not only positive effects but also consequences, which was already emphasized by political historians. Namely, it is this layer – the representatives of the intelligentsia threatened with existential decline – that is the breeding ground for the extremist political tendencies that leaped into the stems in the 1920s.
Another interesting feature was that the Great Plain was a dynamically developing region during the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, ie from the last third of the 19th century to the beginning of the 1900s, in which homesteads played an important role. With today’s general line of opinion, which is more regrettably, synonymous with poverty to these economies, with the advent of the railways, the structural structure of homesteads from the country to modernization. While Debrecen and its surroundings were the beneficiaries of this process, the narrower farm Nyírség, together with Bereg, was pushed to the periphery within the Great Plain by 1910.
An overwhelmed empire
Answering a student’s question – how long could the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy have survived without the First World War, and why such a destructive peace dictatorship was born against Hungary – Róbert Barta answered. According to the historian, the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy established in 1867, even the Habsburg Empire on the Danube, which became a great power from 1815, exceeded its task.
“The Habsburgs have managed to keep 50 million people together in such a zone for 100 years: far more than can be expected to the extent of the empire. There is widespread agreement with domestic and foreign historians in this. It is my deep conviction that the Monarchy would have disintegrated in all circumstances by the middle of the 20th century at the latest. Another issue is that this process was carried out very painfully, cruelly by a losing World War – serious out.
The other question is easier to answer, he continued, as it can be said on a rhetorical level that Trianon is a “peacemaker peace”, but many people tend to forget about the “strong fact that we lost a war”. “The winner takes it all, the loser expects nothing good: this practice has a history of 30,000 years in human history. The winner wants to maximize the profit, the question is more about how much leeway the loser has. It also has a role to play in historians’ in-depth analysis of why certain ethnic border adjustments have been made, which can be justified for the winners as well, he summed up.
Our ordinary Trianon, or crutch for a better understanding of the Horthy eraThe BORDER LINE exhibition at the Déri Museum until the end of 2021 seeks to show the 1920s and 1930s, the feelings and pains of the period from the “happy times of peace” after the First World War to the time of territorial feedback. personal stories, recollections. Róbert Barta was highlighted in connection with the exhibition’s catalog, while previously the materials of the National Asylum Office – crossing the border due to Trianon was an extraordinary burden for the motherland – were not really processed to a high standard, this was the main direction of the Trianon 100 Research Group. BORDER LINE personifies the world of refugees in several ways, including through the diary of an official from Oradea, Jenő Osváth.
He also interprets a lot in the understanding of Trianon’s levels of the objects of use featuring the exhibition, with a revision representation, from soda bottles to decorative plates. – The message of these tools is that the need for a revision of the peace treaty must be with us day and night, the idea burning into the generations. If we do not know that Tri was present in people’s lives in such an ordinary way, it is difficult to understand the Horthy era, public thinking, the historian pointed out.
* Literacy rate, doctor-defined population mortality rate, proportion of good quality real estate in the settlement, net income per capita: only some of the examined indicators, on the basis of which the development map was compiled.
László Ratalics