On 2 September 1943 the issue of the Torontál, a Hungarian-language daily newspaper from Veliki Bečkerek/Grossbetschkerek/NagybecskerekFootnote 1, started with an editorial by Géza Dániel, a Roman Catholic priest and president of the local branch of the Banat Hungarian Cultural Federation (Bánáti Magyar Közművelődési Szövetség – BMKSZ)Footnote 2. Dániel’s article posed one of the most controversial questions of Hungarian public discourse between the two world wars: who is Hungarian? The priest’s ideas on the “character of the nation” followed already known clichés. Dániel’s arguments were based on the statute of the BMKSZ, the Hungarian umbrella organization during the German occupation. In particular, the author objected to the statute that stated that “Hungarian is one who declares himself Hungarian” (Dániel Reference Dániel1943). Dániel demanded a stricter, more ethnicist approach. In his view, those who paid the BMKSZ membership fees only for protection, but no longer spoke Hungarian at home, and those who used their Hungarian last names merely for economic gain were not part of the Hungarian nation. In Dániel’s argument, the nature of belonging to the Hungarian nation and the Hungarian community in the Banat had a significant spiritual charge. The priest’s concept of the nation demanded that members work relentlessly for the Hungarian community. “We need only Hungarians and entirely Hungarians”, stated Dániel, without defining the content of “Hungarianness” (Dániel Reference Dániel1943).
On 13 April 1941, as part of Nazi Germany’s occupation of Serbia, the Banat also became a German-occupied territory. The Banat, like other territories annexed from Hungary after the First World War, was part of Hungarian irredentist aspirations. However, Romania also wanted the territory as compensation for losing Northern Transylvania and Southern Dobruja, and as a fulfillment of its First World War territorial goals. To avoid a possible armed conflict between its allies, Berlin decided to occupy the Banat itself (A. Sajti Reference A. Sajti2004, 256–258). Soon after their arrival, German military forces supported the assumption of local power by the local ethnic Germans, who established their headquarters in Grossbetschkerek. The Banat German leadership led by Josef Sepp Janko was by then completely loyal to the National Socialists. (Zakić Reference Zakić2017, 81–83).
Much research has been conducted on the German communities in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe in recent decades. Several of these works have focused specifically on the history of Germans in Yugoslavia, and thus in the Banat, during the Second World War. Regarding the history of the Germans in the Banat during the Second World War, it is important to highlight the book by Ekkehard Völkl (Völkl Reference Völkl1991), which was the first to analyze the history of the occupying German military administration in Belgrade, the ethnic German administration in Grossbetschkerek, and its relationship to the national minorities based on documents of the German Foreign Office. Akiko Shimizu’s book (Shimizu Reference Shimizu2003) examined in detail the workings of the ethnic administration in Banat. Mirna Zakić’s research (Zakić Reference Zakić2017) explored the complex relationship between Yugoslav Germans and National Socialist ideology and showed how, after the German occupation of Serbia, Germans in the Banat became the objects and subjects of this ideology. While these works focused primarily on the German minority, others have looked to the region’s other minority communities. Works published in Hungarian, such as Enikő A. Sajti’s monograph (A. Sajti Reference A. Sajti2004), provided substantial input on the topic, but the book focused primarily on the events in the Bačka after 1941. Linda Margittai’s recent work (Margittai Reference Margittai2023) provided some new insights into the history of the Banat’s Jewish population, but the book’s focus was also mainly on the Hungarian administration of the Bačka between 1941 and 1944. Péter Illésfalvi’s Reference Illésfalvi2008 article illustrated the ambivalent attitude of the Hungarian administration in the Bačka towards the Banat through reports provided by Hungarian intelligence. As can be seen from these fragmented perspectives, comprehensive research on the national minorities in the German-occupied Banat and their relationship to the occupying Nazi German military administration in Belgrade and the ethnic German administration in Banat has not yet been carried out. The present work highlights a chapter of the history of the Banat Hungarian minority under German occupation that so far has been less researched.
With the arrival and support of Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS troops, local Germans began taking over the administrative positions left behind by Serbian officials. In the autumn of 1941, the Serbian governments loyal to the occupying German military administration, settled the legal status of the Germans and the Banat within Serbia. The Decree on the Legal Status of the German National Group in Serbia (Verordnung über die Rechtsstellung der Deutschen Volksgruppe in Serbien) granted collective rights to the Germans and the Decree on the Inner Administration of the Banat (Verordnung über die innere Verwaltung des Banates) provided the legal framework for the ethnic German administration (Zakić Reference Zakić2017, 88). Through these legal acts, the Banat already enjoyed a certain degree of territorial autonomy, a status that was confirmed by another decree in December 1941 (Zakić Reference Zakić2017, 84). Serbia was divided into 14 districts, in which Banat became a distinct district.
After the German occupation of the Banat, the Foreign Ministry in Berlin and its representatives communicated the occupation to their Hungarian counterparts as temporary and held out the prospect of handing over the region to Hungary once international relations had been settled. The actions of the ethnic German administration presented a different picture. The ethnic German proto-government in Grossbetscherek used dictatorial methods to achieve the German nationalization of the Banat. Soon, streets were renamed after Adolf Hitler, Hermann Göring, Prince Eugene of Savoy, and Goethe, while Werschetz, a city in the region’s southeast, was planned to be renamed Hennemannstadt, recalling Johann Jakob von Hennemann, who had successfully defended the city from Ottoman attacks in 1788. In addition, the ethnic German administration and the Volksgruppenführung received substantial support from the Reich and the Serbian state budget. Movement within the region was restricted, as the Tisza River, which served as a new border, was almost impossible to cross. Finally, the region’s economic exploitation began, with agricultural and industrial goods being transported to the Reich. In the summer of 1941, the ethnic German administration, with Reich German help, rounded up the Jews of the Banat and transported them to the Sajmište concentration camp outside of Belgrade.
The Hungarian government and the Hungarian community in the Banat found themselves in a politically and geographically liminal state because of German promises (see Szakolczai Reference Szakolczai2015). In this state of uncertainty, the leaders of the Hungarian minority in Banat had to look for new ways to organize the community and resorted to traditional practices of nation-building. However, they were often dependent on external factors, as they could not rely on state support, unlike the German minority.
In this politically and geographically liminal situation, the Hungarian minority’s position can be described using Rogers Brubaker’s concept of a triadic nexus (Brubaker Reference Brubaker2006). The situation of national minorities can be analyzed within a triadic nexus between the representatives of the nationalizing state, the external homeland, and the national minority. The ethnic German administration, supported by the occupying German military administration in Belgrade, acted as a nationalizing state, and attempted to reshape the Banat according to their National Socialist German ideas. Hungary still operated as an external homeland with support for the Banat Hungarian minority elites. The Hungarian political and cultural elites in the Banat had to rethink the position of the Hungarian minority in this political field. In this context of dependency on the goodwill of both states and the belief of an increasingly distant return of the Banat to Hungary, it became important for the Banat Hungarian elites to present and describe their “Hungarianess” to the Hungarian state and government in Budapest, to the representatives of the German leadership in Berlin and Belgrade, and to their own community. As Pieter Judson (Judson Reference Judson2006) has shown through the example of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy’s language frontiers, these nationalists found themselves in a contradictory position. They never acknowledged the border position of their homeland. However, they believed that because of the imagined “national struggle” on the frontier their national identities were stronger. This ambiguous position raised uncertainty in otherwise over-confident nationalists. In response, these nationalists applied different strategies, including institution-building, educational support, and census agitation, to mobilize their imagined community and to improve their “national” positions (Judson Reference Judson2006; 1–22).
The article argues that the region’s unsuccessful return to Hungary triggered nationalist anxieties in the Banat Hungarian cultural elite. These elites became concerned that both they and the ethnically diverse Banat were less “Hungarian” than the neighboring, more “Hungarian” Bačka, which “returned” to Hungary. To prove their “Hungarianness”, from the autumn of 1941 onwards, the Hungarian political and cultural elite of the Banat took up actions and practices similar to the strategies of the nationalists from other border regions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as described in Judson’s work. Their discourses on “Hungarianness” were for the most part published in the Torontál, the only Hungarian-language newspaper of the period. Here, Hungarian nationalist authors located themselves and the Banat in the “national struggle” typical of border regions. However, as nationalists, they were not willing to admit that the Banat was a border region, since they placed it firmly within the framework of the Hungarian nation-state. Instead, they emphasized only the Banat’s border outwards, towards the Balkans. This imaginary “struggle”, which mostly left out an identifiable “enemy”, was the subject of several articles in the Torontál written by the Banat Hungarian cultural elites. In their interpretation, the Hungarian people of Banat had endured continuous threats since the Middle Ages, from which they emerged stronger and therefore more “Hungarian” – what they meant after this remained unanswered for the readers. As Brubaker and Judson have pointed out, these groups were not homogeneous despite their common goals; and, at the individual level, there was much divergence, disagreement, and tension. The authors who expressed their ideas and plans in the Torontál had different backgrounds and ideological positions, so their writings never coalesced into a coherent program. The discourses agreed on one thing: to give content to “Hungarianness”, to highlight their role in the region, and finally to “nationalize” their community according to their imagined plans.
The first part of the article, after a concise demographic overview, briefly describes the history of the Torontál daily newspaper, its ideological position, and its role in the community. The second part sheds light on the attempt to reposition the region by Hungarian cultural elites. It argues that before the First World War, there were only faint signs of regionalism, as Hungarian historiography envisioned the Banat as part of the “great Hungarian homeland”. Using these concepts of Hungarian historical works on the Banat from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the writings revealed a new position of the Banat. These articles placed the Hungarian minority and the region in the framework of Hungarian nation- and state-building. In terms of their loyalties, they looked (again) towards Budapest as the center. The texts referring to historical events claimed the recognition of the authenticity of the Banat. Historical experiences such as the Ottoman invasion of the Banat or the 22 or 23 years spent under Yugoslav rule were understood as “national struggles” in which the Banat Hungarians always proved their loyalty to the nation, and these struggles made them more “Hungarian”.
The other part of their project was the rejection of borderland status and the repositioning of the Banat as a core region of Hungary, while strengthening the border towards the Balkans according to the Hungarian imperial idea. In the understanding of local Hungarian elites, the Banat was the link between the West and the East. The third part presents the ideas and content of “Hungarianness” through the Hungarian minority’s nation-building plans and attempts envisioned by the Banat Hungarian cultural elite. The section seeks to answer how these authors, in the liminal political and geographical situation, reframed the meaning of “Hungarianness”, and what their ideological sources were. In their imagined struggle, their understanding of “Hungarianness” interlinked with the desire to establish distinct and independent Hungarian institutions. Institution-building served as a path for Hungarian minority nation-building. The section highlights these key institutions that were created in the name of “Hungarianness” and through which the mentioned Banat Hungarian cultural elite tried to shape the Hungarian minority’s group dynamics. Banat Hungarian nationalists’ goal was to foster a renewed self-identification of the community with the nation based on interwar Hungarian political ideas. The article aims to shed light on the history of the Banat Hungarian minority, and how they understood and negotiated both their position in the Banat and their own “Hungarianness” in the shadow of the German occupation.
The Torontál and its “Mission”
The Banat, which once consisted of the three counties of Torontál/Torontal/Torontalska, Temes/Timiș/Tamiška and Krassó-Szörény/Caraș-Severin/Karaško-severinska, was one of the most ethnically complex regions of Kingdom of Hungary Pre-1918. The region’s natural borders were to the west the Tisza/Tisa/Theiß, the Duna/Dunav/Donau to the south, the Maros/Moriš/Marosch, Mieresch to the north, and the Western Carpathians to east (Zakić Reference Zakić2017, 27). The western part of the territory, which became part of Serbia after the First World War settlement, included a large part of Torontál and a smaller part of Temes County in the south. The 1910 Hungarian census, narrowed down to the territory of Banat that became part of Serbia, shows that the region was home to around 580,957 people, of whom 232,009 (40.0%) declared themselves as Serbs, 133,495 (23.0%) Germans, 109,510 (18.8%) Hungarians, 76,398 (13.1%) Romanians and 29,175 (5.1%) other native speakers, including Slovaks, Croats, Bulgarians, and Roma (Kókai Reference Kókai2016, 21-22). Eleven years later, the 1921 census of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes recorded the following ethnic composition: 240,213 Serbs, 126,530 Germans, 98,471 Hungarians, 67,897 Romanians, and 17,595 Slovaks (Kókai Reference Kókai2016, 21-22). Following the occupation in June 1941, the German ethnic group carried out a survey. This, like the previous censuses, was equally distorted, putting the number of Germans at 130,600 and the number of Serbs at 245,000. Opinions were divided on the number of Hungarians. The census carried out by the Hungarian umbrella organization in 1943 estimated the number of Hungarians at 117,121, followed by another census carried out a year later in 1944, which counted 121,452. These figures are also grossly exaggerated, and the BMKSZ’s methods were highly questionable. The estimate made by the German Foreign Office in 1944 put the number of Hungarians at 107,000. Comparing the various data, the number of Hungarians can be set between 90,000 and 100,000 (Völkl Reference Völkl1991, 64).
Following the April War and the break-up of Yugoslavia, local ethnic Germans found themselves split between the Bačka/Bácska/Batschka occupied by Hungary, the Srem/Szerémség occupied by the Independent State of Croatia, and the Banat and Serbia proper occupied by Germany (Zakić Reference Zakić2017, 57). Since the takeover of power in the Schwäbisch-Deutscher Kulturbund (SDKB) the official umbrella organization of the Germans in Yugoslavia, the Erneuerer argued for a stronger presence of, and support for, the German Reich. The Erneuerer were a group of young ethnic Germans whose socialization took place in interwar Yugoslavia, but whose studies took them for shorter or longer periods either to Austria or Germany, eventually making them into ardent supporters of Adolf Hitler. Their ideas varied from broad collective rights for Germans within Yugoslavia to support for a German state along the Danube that would spread from the Schwäbische Türkei in Hungary to the eastern borders of the Banat. (Zakić Reference Zakić2017, 76; Keményfi Reference Keményfi2014a, Reference Keményfi2014b).
After the first weeks of the occupation, Sepp Janko and his circle moved from Novi Sad/Újvidék/Neusatz to Grossbetschkerek, where the occupying German military forces entrusted them with taking over the public administration (Zakić Reference Zakić2017, 77). Through decrees made in the summer and fall of 1941, the Serbian government granted collective rights to ethnic Germans following the Volksgruppe logic that considered the whole community as one large entity. The decree established the Volksgruppenführung as the official legal body of the ethnic Germans. With a decree in December 1941, the Serbian government redefined the internal administration of Banat. The Banat became one of 14 counties (Kreis, okrug) of occupied Serbia with a certain degree of territorial autonomy (Zakić Reference Zakić2017, 84). As a result of these decrees, prominent members of the Volksgruppenführung were named as officials in the new public administration of the Banat. The administration covered all policy areas and worked as a “government” (Zakić Reference Zakić2017, 84-85). The ethnic German administration in Grossbetschkerek sought to present the Banat as a strictly German territory and as part of a future bigger German-led territory. These were closely linked to the ideas of a Southeast European German state that emerged in the interwar period. Some plans envisioned a state stretching from Schwäbische Türkei in Hungary to the Saxon lands in Romania. The plans for this German state bore various names, such as Schwabenland, Donauprotektorat, Reichsfestung Belgrad, or the name which was especially popular among Banat Germans: the Prinz-Eugen-Gau. Berlin did not support these plans, but the cult of Prinz Eugen as a champion of German colonization of the Banat lived on among the Banat Germans. This also meant a strong opposition to the former Hungarian rule of the Banat and a possible return of the Hungarian administration. Sepp Janko and his circle benefited from Germany’s political and economic support, which sought to strengthen ethnic Germans’ position in the region for the future and did not exclude the region from possibly returning to Hungary.
The dictatorial rule of the local Germans soon became a problem for the nationalities. Both Budapest and Bucharest, despite accepting the new status quo, attacked Berlin with complaints. As an example of the discriminatory actions of the German authorities, at the beginning of the occupation branches of the BMKSZ were closed and their operation banned.Footnote 3 To counterbalance these measures the Reich German leadership, at the insistence of the Hungarian side, had the Serbian government impose a regulation on the participation of Hungarians in the administration in October 1941. Ferenc Jeszenszky, a landowner and one of the leaders of the Werschetz branch of the BMKSZ, became deputy vizebanus (deputy to the deputy of the ban – head of the Banovina), and Géza Nagy became deputy mayor of Grossbetschkerek – to highlight only the most prestigious positions (Zakić Reference Zakić2017, 92; Shimizu 128-150). In addition, a further decree regulated the use of official national languages in municipalities in which a third nationality, in addition to Germans and Serbs, had a decisive share (Zakić Reference Zakić2017, 92). The German Foreign Office which was responsible for the occupied Serbia reported several times that the national minorities didn’t want to participate in the local administration to the degree they expected.Footnote 4 In these complex relations within the Axis powers, questions regarding the nationalities shifted from the local and state level to a diplomatic level. The situation of the nationalities now depended on the triadic nexus between the national minorities, the nationalizing state, and the external homeland (Brubaker Reference Brubaker2006).
The leading Hungarian-language daily, the Torontál, was founded in 1872 in Nagybecskerek by Frigyes Balás, a staunch supporter of Ferenc Deák and the Compromise of 1867 who later became a member of the Hungarian parliament. Since its beginnings, the paper was the official gazette of the county (Németh Reference Németh2004, 30). Between the two World Wars, it became the dominant Hungarian press organ of interwar Yugoslavia besides Bácsmegyei Napló (Bačka Diary; as of 1929, Diary) and Délbácska (Southern Bačka; as of 1929, Reggeli Újság (Morning News)). In the interwar period, it had a circulation of four to five thousand copies. After the German invasion, the paper appeared again under its original name (Torontál) but did not support militant opposition or resistance, as it had no opportunity to do so under the ethnic German dictatorial leadership and censorship. Since Hungary had joined the Tripartite Pact and the Banat was promised to Budapest, the newspaper did not need to do so. The paper was a silent supporter of the local government in the shadow of the Axis alliance (Németh Reference Németh, Hornyák and Bíró2016). The Torontál covered the general dealings of the ethnic German administration, but due to the heavy censorship, it did not report, for example, crimes and discriminatory measures that also affected Hungarians, such as the deportation of the local Jewish population, the economic exploitation of the region, and the gradual impoverishment of the local population.
The appearance of programmatic Hungarian nationalist articles published in the Torontál was hardly new. There are many examples of this in the Hungarian minority press of the time. In the interwar period, Híd (Bridge) and Kalangya in Yugoslavia, Korunk (Our Time) and Hitel (the word means “credit” or “trust”) in Romania, and Új Szellem (New Spirit) in Czechoslovakia all published numerous articles in which the local Hungarian elite dealt with the situation of the Hungarian minority (see Török Reference Török2001; Egry Reference Egry2015). Other national minorities living in the mentioned states were no exception (see Wendt Reference Wendt2021). Several analyses examining processes of minority nation-building in the press have been carried out. The basic thesis of these analyses was that minorities could use similar practices as the majority. However, the minority is in a much more disadvantaged position to do so, as it does not have the resources that the nation-state framework can provide for the majority (Kántor Reference Kántor2000). This disadvantage was the case for the Banat Hungarians. The community had a weak intelligentsia and middle class, with the majority belonging to landless rural non-elites (A. Sajti Reference A. Sajti2004, 33).
The authors in the Torontál presented themselves as those who wrote on behalf of a collective “we”, thereby evoking a homogenizing process that created their imagined community (Cs. Gyimesi Reference Cs. Gyimesi1998; Anderson Reference Benedict2016). György László Dániel defined his mission by borrowing a phrase from famous interwar writer Lajos Zilahy. “The writer’s task is to initiate,” wrote Dániel in the autumn of 1942 (Dániel Gy. Reference Dániel1942e; Németh Reference Németh1998, 72). It is difficult to define the range of authors who later published in the paper. School teachers who already published between the two World Wars, such as István Kristály, celebrated writers of Horthy-era Hungary such as Ferenc Herczeg (born as Franz Herzog in Werschetz), and prominent church figures from all denominations – such as the Reformed priest János Gachal and the Catholics István Kovács, Géza Dániel, and József Szentgáli Boday – shared their ideas.
In the new political and geographical liminal situation, and with the temporary insecurity that accompanied it – since Berlin had long communicated to Budapest that the German occupation of the Banat was a temporary one – the cultural elite of the Hungarian community sought to mobilize their community through the writings published in the Torontál. The new borders, their often strictly limited crossing, and the resultant restricted mobility within the region created novel – and often subversive – regional self-understandings (Bindorffer Reference Bindorffer, Kovács, Osvát and Szarka2005, 35). In this context, the Banat Hungarian cultural elite took on the role of national activists, who tried to win over and mobilize the Hungarian community (Hroch Reference Hroch2000; Egry Reference Egry2015, 482; Wendt Reference Wendt2021, 334-335). To do so, they built on existing narratives, seizing on the topics and traditions of the Hungarian political right from the interwar period, rather than creating new and different myths.
Repositioning the Banat
The Banat was part of Hungary’s irredentist plans for regaining the territories lost after the Treaty of Trianon. The integral revision demanded the return to Hungary of all regions lost. Other revisionist plans were drawn up according to different ideological concepts and their perceived political and economic developments sometimes only included the northern part of the Banat, sometimes the whole of the region, but all of them featured Timișoara/Temesvár/Temeschwar as a central aim. For economic and security reasons, some plans left a strip of land to Serbia as a concession to protect Belgrade (Zeidler Reference Zeidler2001, 131-156). In these revisionist plans, the Western Banat or the whole region of the Banat did not enjoy the same prominent position on the mental map of Hungarian public thought as Transylvania or the former northern counties lost to Czechoslovakia (see Kuncz Reference Kuncz1934). Most revisionist plans considered the re-annexation of the territory only after the acquisition of these other two regions. At the same time, the plans considered essential to emphasize that it would be easiest to adjust the border in the Banat and the Bačka, as the Hungarian population largely lived near the border. Between the two World Wars, it was mostly only Timișoara that kept its position in Hungarian thought as one of the former strongholds of Hungarian industrialization. The long-established, sometimes simplifying auto-stereotypes about the region persisted, including the image of endless farmlands and ethnic diversity. Before and after World War I, the Hungarian press, mainly in Budapest, repeatedly criticized the Banat elite, claiming that the centuries after the Ottomans had been defeated were not long enough for a strong regional elite to emerge (Bisztray Reference Bisztray1934, 430-33; Varga Reference Varga2014, 197-198). Such statements caused tensions between central national and regional elites from the turn of the century until World War II.
After the compromise of 1867, several civic associations began to work on the history of the Banat, including the Historical and Archaeological Society of South Hungary (Délmagyarországi Történelmi és Régészeti Társulat). In the absence of historical sources that were destroyed during the Ottoman occupation, Frigyes Pesty, Tivadar Ortvay, and Jenő Szentkláray went back to the Middle Ages, emphasizing the medieval dominance and continuity of the Hungarians in the Banat. At the same time, they did not create a strong regionalist tradition, and the historical research of the southern counties was consciously constructed in line with the “great national historical narrative” and within the framework of a “great national homeland” (Varga Reference Varga2015, 163). In parallel to these efforts, the representatives of other nationalities of the Banat – the Serbs, Romanians, and Germans – also constructed their own historical narratives, emphasizing a similar national exclusivity and particular explanations of the region’s history (Varga Reference Varga2015, 162-163). By the turn of the century, a certain degree of regionalism had developed, but it could not overcome the idea of the region within the “great Hungarian homeland” (Mák Reference Mák2020). Dependence on and loyalty to Budapest, coupled with the lack of a long tradition of regionalism, continued to define the Hungarian elite after 1918 in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. In opposition to the Hungarian political elites, the Hungarian cultural elite in Yugoslavia tried to counterbalance this to some extent by advocating that the Hungarian elites should acknowledge their minority status, refute claims about a lack of regional identity, and focus on creating a framework defined by “local color” and values, a concept developed by the writer Kornél Szenteleky (Bárdi Reference Bárdi, Bárdi, Lőrincz and Filep2015, 147-148; Utasi Reference Utasi1984, 17-18). Szenteleky was one of the main organizers of the literal journal Kalangya launched in 1932. This journal was the first to advocate for Hungarian regionalism in Yugoslavia, stressing the importance of local traditions in the Bačka and the Banat.
Dániel, the journalist and high school teacher, took advantage of this opportunity to express his thoughts relatively soon after the German occupation of the Banat. The fact that his programmatic articles appeared only after the ethnic German administration had consolidated its power, in the summer of 1941, shows the transient state of the Hungarian community and its elite in the initial phase of the occupation. While the press reported the neighboring Bačka’s “return to Hungary” on Easter, which became “filled with joy” for the Hungarian population due to the arrival of the Hungarian soldiers, the population of the Banat warily awaited the arrival of the Wehrmacht troops. The Torontál did not miss out on the opportunity to link the arrival of the Hungarian army in the Bačka and the religious celebration of Easter to the idea of the “Hungarian resurrection”. The longing for the “promised return” remained among the Banat Hungarian elites, which is why György László Dániel tried to reassure the population: “Everybody knew that we failed in the World War with a great ally [Germany] and everybody knows that we will rise again with a great ally. There is no true Hungarian who wants anything other than any son of the great German nation” (Dániel Gy. Reference Dániel1941). The article then quoted Harald Turner, head of the German civilian administration in Belgrade, to calm the tense diplomatic situation regarding the fate of the Banat. Turner argued that the Serbian state should retreat behind the Danube-Sava line. Dániel’s writing ended with the following: “This means that the Hungarian army did not stop at its new border, on the banks of the Tisza, but waits only for tactical reasons that, if a war led in agreement with the allies allows it, it will also occupy the last section of the southern borders” (Dániel Gy. Reference Dániel1941).
The pro-German György László Dániel’s political reasoning was in line with mainstream right-wing Hungarian politics. The local Hungarian cultural elite that emerged after the latest change of borders and regime tried to seize positions that were important to the Hungarian community in the shadow of the emerging ethnic German administration (Dániel Gy. Reference Dániel1942e). In the columns of Torontál, György László Dániel noted with pleasure that with the ban from Yugoslav times dissolved, the paper was no longer constrained to publish only news, but could also shape public opinion (Dániel Gy. Reference Dániel1943). Géza Dániel’s already quoted article spoke in a similar style about the Banat as his journalist namesake. The priest wrote about his narrower homeland as an “ancient [Hungarian] land” (Dániel Reference Dániel1941). Géza Dániel, following the article cited at the beginning of the article, continued to imagine his community based on the well-known themes of Hungarian race protection (fajvédelem) in his article entitled “Christian Hungarian” (Keresztény magyar). The article was full of tendentious race-protecting topoi, fatalistic visions on the death of the nation and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and – in accordance with these ideas – demanded a radical change of direction in the community (Dániel Reference Dániel1943). In Dániel’s imagination, Hungarians could only be Christians. With this view he excluded a part of the Banat Hungarian population from the nation, namely the Banat’s Jews, who in large part had a Hungarian identity. In his plans, he also wanted to take the representative body of the Banat Hungarians, the BMKSZ in this direction. Dániel fled to Germany in the fall of 1944, where he died in 1978 (Kalapis Reference Kalapis2002a, 215).
István Kristály, the principal of the elementary school in Padej/Padé and a recurring author in Torontál, followed the example of the previous contributors. Under the pseudonym György Vető, he had published articles in various newspapers and journals during the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. At first, he wrote smaller prose works, which regularly appeared in Kalangya. In addition to his works of fiction, his name was associated with pamphlets, also written under his pseudonym, which became important for the movement to combat illiteracy (Bárdi Reference Bárdi, Bárdi, Lőrincz and Filep2015, 18). The school principal’s writings on society and the community reached a new level in the period between 1941 and 1944. As a recurring author of Torontál, he dealt in depth with two topics: the situation of the villages and education. A significant part of his publications dealing with the state of Hungarian villages in the Banat explained the situation of the community in the context of the medieval discourse developed at the turn of the century by authors like Jenő Szentkláray. The titles and content of Kristály’s articles constantly referred back to the region’s belonging to the Hungarian state and the Hungarians’ role within it. Among these articles, the description of his tour of northern and central Banat in the summer of 1942 stands out. Based on his experiences in the villages he visited, the series of articles, entitled “Betűország-Meseország” (“Letterland – Fairytale-Land”), reflected the type of village research that was popular among populist writers in the interwar years (Kristály, Reference Kristály1942d, Reference Kristály1942g). In addition to pointing out the critical situation of the Hungarian village population, Kristály further reinforced a narrative about Hungarians’ centuries of continuity in Banat.
For example, he wrote about Kikinda/Grosskikinda/Nagykikinda as the ancient land of Matthias Corvinus and presented the town and its surroundings as a core territory of fifteenth-century Hungary. For his hometown of Padej, he wrote about the settlement standing on the site of a former medieval village in Padej and its continuity ever since then, though he could not cite any specific historical source. In addition to describing the communities, thus strengthening the discourse he fostered in his travelogue, Kristály encouraged the practical exploration of the narrower homeland through trekking, despite the mobility being severely restricted by the authorities. This practice, the virtual and practical discovery of the narrower homeland, was to further strengthen a Banat Hungarian regionalist position imagined within the borders of Hungary (Kristály Reference Kristály1942d, Reference Kristály1942e). In addition to highlighting the Middle Ages, the Hungarian Revolution of 1848, Lajos Kossuth, István Széchenyi, Austro-Hungarian Monarchy’s prosperous years, and Ferenc Deák were equally prominent. In the work of István Kristály, the period after 1867 was given a specific, privileged position. The pictures drawn of villages in his articles, and the abandoned, ruined castles of the Banat became symbols of the Hungarian nobility’s and middle classes’ loss of ground – losses that, according to the author, were only temporary (Kristály Reference Kristály1942e, Reference Kristály1942f). Of course, interwar Yugoslavia enjoyed far less sympathy from the authors. The paper usually referred to the period between the two World Wars as the “last 22/23” years. There was a general agreement among the authors about the discriminatory policies of the Belgrade governments and their aim to suppress the nationalities, liquidate the Hungarian school network, and leave the nationalities out of the agrarian reform.
The authors envisioned a role for the Banat in the new European order, going beyond the existing borders. The argument reflected the well-known leading motives of Hungarian imperial thought (see Romsics Reference Romsics2012 8-9; Varga Reference Varga2020, 1191). István Kristály’s prolific work gives insight into this line of thought as well. In the school principal’s ideas, the Banat represented the connection between Western civilization and the imagined East. In this narrative, Kristály considered it essential to emphasize the Hungarian nation’s state-making capacity along the lines of the defining idea of interwar conservative political discourse: the idea of St. Stephen’s state (Szent István-i állameszme). The idea of St. Stephen’s state was a concept shared among leading conservative intellectuals and politicians in interwar Hungary, which held that the non-Hungarian nationalities living in Hungary would be granted a certain amount of minority rights as long as they would accept the hegemony of the Hungarian ruling classes (Kristály Reference Kristály1942a; Ablonczy Reference Ablonczy and Romsics2009, 179-180; Egry Reference Egry2010, 100-101). As Kristály wrote: “The idea of a state led by the Hungarian nation is more than a thousand years old, [and] is an irreplaceable historical fact in the history of Europe, an inexpressibly great moral perspective, in which the position [of the state] was always based on the highest spiritual values. In this framework, everyone has always won. Wherever we look, we find thousands of proofs of the facts” (Kristály Reference Kristály1943). In Kristály’s view, “Without this great historical role of Hungarians, the Carpathian Basin would be a hideous vortex, the graveyard of Europe. The true future face of the new Europe unfolds in this Hungarian historical role” (Kristály Reference Kristály1942b). In the author’s narrative, the Banat appeared as the “last citadel” of Europe, which was able to survive until now only thanks to the Hungarian leading elite (Kristály Reference Kristály1942b). According to Kristály: “All our [Hungarian] leaders are creative, teaching personalities and educators who retained a moral personality” (Kristály Reference Kristály1942b).
Based on these articles, the self-identification of the Banat Hungarians and their concept of the region of the Banat was rethought and repositioned along three ideas: Banat Hungarians’ and the region’s place in Hungarian nation-building and nation-state-building processes, their place in Europe along the lines of Hungarian imperial thought, and most importantly Hungarians’ place within the region of the Banat. The latter, given the intellectuals’ historical understanding, appeared particularly important, as it highlighted the historical position, continuity, and role of the Hungarian community in the region.
The authors of Torontál emphatically demanded a place for themselves in political discourses during World War II. The articles described themselves and the Hungarian community as an integral part of the “great Hungarian homeland” and decisively attacked statements that put Banat on the periphery. At the same time, a certain degree of regionalism surfaced that emphasized the Banat’s particularity. In their telling, the region’s borderland character was reinforced only externally, according to which the Banat formed a frontier between the West and the East. Like many other borderlands, the region thus became the scene of a unique “national struggle” in which the Banat Hungarians had to regain their “lost positions” (Kristály Reference Kristály1942a; Judson Reference Judson2006, 20-21). The peculiarity of the situation was that this “national struggle” did not appear within the region, as the authors did not present the Banat itself as a border region, but rather as a core territory of Hungary. The Reich German and ethnic German leadership and the other national elites were either left out or only rarely mentioned, praised, or criticized. Due to the Axis alliance, the authors hardly had the permission or courage to do so.
The Banat Hungarian cultural elite’s ideas, sources, and ideological traditions fully adopted the defining themes of dominant political discourses in Hungary. They already saw themselves and the region within the “old country”, which is why Hungarian subsidies were not written about as aid, as in the case of communities living abroad, but as a matter of course, as if the state borders had already changed (“Hogyan…” 1942; Cornwall, Reference Cornwall1994, 923). Another good example of this dynamic is that Hungarian national holidays, such as the birthday and name day of Miklós Horthy, the anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 (March 15), and the Day of St. Stephen (August 20) were also celebrated (Horthy Miklós kormányzó névnapjának megünneplése a Bánátban” 1941; “Horthy-ünnepség Torontálvásárhelyen” 1942; “Horthy-ünnepély Pancsován” 1942; Brubaker Reference Brubaker2001, 62-66). Yet another peculiar example of these regional group dynamics can be found in the names of the Hungarian sports teams of the period, such as the Végvár (Frontier Citadelle) from Pantschowa, or Hunyadi from Tóba, referring to János Hunyadi, who defeated the Ottomans at Belgrade in 1456 (“Sport” 1944). These practices further strengthened the new visions of the region and the community’s belonging to the “great Hungarian nation”.
Reframing the Nation and the Community
In interwar Yugoslavia, Hungarian minority elites made several attempts to organize the community. The Hungarian Party, founded in 1922, had little success. In the 1927 parliamentary elections, the Party managed to get three representatives from the list of Radicals into the Skupština, but it could not achieve any significant improvement in matters affecting the Hungarian minority or the situation of the nationalities more generally (A. Sajti Reference A. Sajti2004, 70). After the introduction of the royal dictatorship and the banning of political parties in 1929, the issue of the national minorities remained unresolved. It was only in 1940 that the opportunity to set up an umbrella organization, the Hungarian Cultural Federation of Yugoslavia (Jugoszláviai Magyar Közművelődési Szövetség – JMKSZ), emerged again (A. Sajti Reference A. Sajti2004, 106). At the same time, cultural associations such as the Népkör (People’s Circle) in Subotica/Szabadka or the Hungarian Cultural Association (Magyar Közművelődési Egyesület) in Petrovgrad became centers of minority self-organization (Bárdi Reference Bárdi, Bárdi, Lőrincz and Filep2015, 146; Várady Reference Várady, Németh and Várady2022b, 88).
After the ethnic German administration was established, Banat Hungarians had to make a new attempt to organize the community. With the occupation, the German leadership banned the operation of the BMKSZ and closed its offices, only allowing it to resume operations after a mandatory name change. The need for a renaming was based on two considerations. The Southern Hungarian Cultural Federation (Délvidéki Magyar Közművelődési Szövetség – DMKSZ) headquarters in Novi Sad, the successor of the former JMKSZ which was established soon after the Hungarian administration took over power in the Bačka in 1941, never acknowledged the split in the organization due to the new borders. This organization continued to think of the branches in the Banat as its own. The German argument was that no organization from a foreign country or receiving external support was allowed in the Banat. The Banat Hungarian organization not only had to change its name, but because of the pressure from German authorities, the Hungarian government’s officials in Budapest decided to appoint a new leadership acceptable to the authorities in Grossbetschkerek and Belgrade in the hopes of improving the situation of the Hungarian minority. The old Banat Hungarian political elite gathered around Imre Várady, a lawyer from Grossbetscherek and a former Yugoslav senator who had good ties to the Hungarian and Serbian political circles, was labeled “too liberal”. According to the Hungarian government’s decision, only Christian ethnic Hungarians could be part of the BMKSZ’s leadership. This also meant a change in the self-perception of the Banat Hungarian elites. With the change in leadership, the new board stated that they no longer thought of themselves as a minority, but rather as a part of the Hungarian majority.Footnote 5
The BMKSZ leadership accepted the Volksgruppe logic, and its membership was now organized according to unitary, corporatist ideas, which meant only Hungarians could be members of the organization. This applied to the other communities as well: only Germans could join the German organization, while only Romanians could join the Romanian organization named Astra. The decision of who was considered part of the given nation was in the hands of each organization’s leadership. After the occupation, several ethnic Germans who were considered Germans in the eyes of the Volksgruppenführung joined the BMKSZ. Their reasons for doing so varied: some joined for their Hungarian identity, some because of their sympathy for the Hungarians or because they were coming from a mixed family, while some joined to escape conscription into the Waffen-SS.Footnote 6 The participation of Banat Hungarians in military units and the labor service was another source of conflict between the Banat Hungarian political elite, the ethnic German administration in Grossbetschkerek, and the Reich German occupation administration in Belgrade.Footnote 7
While the ethnic Germans organized themselves with the support of the Third Reich and exercised power with dictatorial methods, the Hungarians and other national minorities were mainly forced to maintain their organizations on their own. The Banat Hungarians resorted to the usual well-known strategy of minority nation-building via institution building. The local Hungarian political, economic, and cultural elite aimed to set up those institutions that had not yet been established or whose operations were limited in royalist Yugoslavia. These institutions simultaneously sought to return to the Hungarian traditions from before 1918 while taking over new political traditions from interwar Hungary, and they also drew inspiration from the interwar self-organizing methods of the Yugoslav nationalities, especially the Germans.
As of autumn 1941, the BMKSZ became the main force behind organizing the Hungarian community. The op-eds published in Torontál touched on three key issues related to institution building. The issue of the missing umbrella organization as a representative body emerged first. This was followed by highlighting the reorganization of a school network that was liquidated between the two World Wars, and the formation of a network of economic and social organizations that would help the social mobility of the Banat Hungarian community. Different departments of the BMKSZ were responsible for the aforementioned policy issues, but it is still important to examine them separately, since, for example, the issue of education received at least as much attention advocacy for a larger representative organization. How important the BMKSZ was can be seen in the following quote from an article which appeared around the organization re-establishment in October 1941:
It is an encouraging phenomenon that everyone understands why it is necessary to gather in one camp and apply for admission [to the BMKSZ] without being prompted. The importance of the organization lies in the fact that all Christians and individuals who claim to be Hungarian gather in the Federation, and thus not only are all Hungarians included in the Federation’s register, but they are also grouped according to occupations, which makes administration and work very easy when starting a job. The Hungarians of Banat have no problem that the Federation does not deal with. But the Federation goes beyond this, it is not only interested in the issues but also strives to solve them, as long as it can manage this within its competence. We Hungarians from Banat should not count on anyone’s help, but we must try to help ourselves. (“A szervezkedő magyarság“ 1941)
The umbrella organization operating within the new borders had to be reorganized after the occupation of Banat. The articles published in Torontál emphasized the role of the DMKSZ/BMKSZ. They once again saw in the organization of the BMKSZ an opportunity for successful representation of Hungarian interests, which had not been possible since the introduction of the royal dictatorship in 1929 (“Ünnepélyes…” 1941; “A Délvidéki…” 1942). The first head of the BMKSZ was Tibor Tallián, a landowner from Novi Kneževac/Neu-Kanischa/Törökkanizsa. Tallián soon drew criticism from within the BMKSZ for his questionable decisions (Várady Reference Várady2022a, 166-67). For Tallián, the problem at the center of the relations between the Banat Hungarian political elite and the ethnic Germans, as well as the occupying Reich German leadership, was the military and labor service of the Hungarians. Since he was unable to fully resolve these questions or to negotiate the improvement of the Hungarian community’s rights, he was replaced by landowner Ferenc Jeszenszky in 1942. Jeszenszky proved to be more moderate and cautious in his policy.Footnote 8
The BMKSZ as an organization was not only the chief institution for representing Hungarian interests, but the organization’s membership was also a commitment to “Hungarianness”. According to its corporatist conception, membership became a sign of national identity. The organization was only willing to take responsibility for its members and deeply despised national indifference (see Zahra Reference Zahra2010). For example, György László Dániel became involved in a press trial after he questioned the “national loyalty” of the Reformed pastor of Pantschowa, Árpád Baksa, and accused the latter of trying to help the “nationally indifferent” and those Hungarians who no longer spoke the language (Dániel L. Reference Dániel1942c; Várady Reference Várady2013, 15). Baksa’s situation was probably further aggravated by the fact that he openly disliked the celebrated writer of the Horthy Era and contributor to the Torontál, Ferenc Herczeg, and preferred the progressive Endre Ady. Images of the BMKSZ were further colored by the writings of István Kristály. According to the school principal from Padej: “[the] Hungarianness has melted into a single ingot, and this ingot is the DMKSZ [BMKSZ], within the framework of which all true Hungarians must participate, for whom the concept of the nation is sacred and the Hungarian future is precious, who is not our enemy, but our brother, who did not push away itself from the national community” (Kristály Reference Kristály1942a). As can be seen in Kristály’s writings, the nation and the community form one big unit, a single entity, which only the BMKSZ was responsible for managing. The portrayal of István Kovács, a Catholic priest and vicar from Grossbetschkerek, was less categorical. According to him, the key to the survival of the community was the following: “[…] if all of us, on this land of Banat, know, feel and confess ourselves as Hungarians, unite, stick together and cooperate for life and death in the institution that our destiny’s heavenly and its earthly administrators have given us, the DMKSZ [BMKSZ], the Southern Hungarian Cultural Federation” (Kovács, Reference Kovács1941).
The Torontál argued for the organization’s singular importance throughout the war and urged Hungarians to join. These recruitment calls were published in varying quality and quantity, sometimes in longer and shorter forms. Almost every day, a short advertisement could be found in which the population was called upon to assume a social role and responsibility within the framework of the BMKSZ (“A Délvidéki…” 1942). At the same time, the functionaries of the BMKSZ and the journalists of the Torontál – the “national activists” of the region – were extremely strict in their methods. The BMKSZ and the School Fund (Iskola Alap), operated through community support. Paid membership to the BMKSZ was also a confirmation of “Hungarianness”, and those who did not join were not considered part of the nation (“Miért…” 1941). The press regularly reported the number of BMKSZ branch organizations’ members, paying particular attention to the largest organization in Grossbetschkerek. These articles can be considered as informal censuses, with which they tried to legitimize the place and role of the Hungarians within the town of Grossbetschkerek and the region of the Banat (“A Délvidéki…” 1942; Judson Reference Judson1993, 54-55).
Regarding education, October 1941 was a turning point for Hungarian schools in the Banat. On October 10, the Torontál noted that “representatives of three generations sat this morning on the hundred-year-old brown pews of the Piarist church,” and the paper could hardly contain its excitement regarding the resumption of Hungarian education in Grossbetschkerek (A. Sajti Reference A. Sajti1997, 1359-61). In addition to the creation of the BMKSZ, the institutions that received the most attention was schools. After the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes liquidated the Hungarian school network which up until then was funded by the churches. In the region during the interwar years, only elementary education took place in Hungarian, while in Petrovgrad, Hungarian students could enroll in a lower high school (alsó gimnázium) (A. Sajti, Reference A. Sajti2004). Under the new framework, the Banat Hungarian School Inspectorate (Bánáti Magyar Iskolafelügyelőség) and the School Fund (Iskola Alap) faced the challenge of organizing Hungarian-language education. The importance of Hungarian schools was closely intertwined with nation-building and self-organization strategies. The Yugoslav centralization policy, as well as the exclusivist policy of the ethnic German administration after the occupation, which sought to Germanize institutions, appeared in the thinking of the Hungarian elite – as in the case of other minorities on the periphery – as a threat to the Hungarian community (Judson Reference Judson2006, 25; Zahra Reference Zahra2004, 514). The slogans echoed in the membership campaign for the BMKSZ also resurfaced in the case of schools. The Torontál journalist János Selmeczy held the following view of education’s meaning for the nation: “For the time being, the cause, existence and future of the Hungarian schools in the Banat, or the survival of our life and language, still depends on the willingness of the Hungarians here to make sacrifices. The majority of our people understood this duty this year without any particular explanation or pressure, and contributed according to their financial circumstances with Hungarian honesty for the sake of the great goal” (Selmeczy Reference Selmeczy1942).
Selmeczy’s writing also discussed the financing of education. In the absence of the state, the maintenance of education also depended on the community. The model of the Hungarian educational elite was not something that came out of thin air. Before World War I, this practice was employed in many peripheral regions of the Monarchy, and the German community in the interwar years used the same model through the Schwäbisch-Deutscher Kulturbund, bypassing the state framework (Judson Reference Judson2006, 25; Janjetović Reference Janjetović2005, 292). The private maintenance of the school network only strengthened the threefold relationship between the nation, education, and youth for the future of the community (“A magyar…” 1941; “A bánáti …” 1943; Zahra Reference Zahra2004, 514). In the early summer of 1942, at the end of the first school year since the beginning of the occupation, György László Dániel proudly noted again that “twenty-three years have passed since the history of the Hungarian nation was once again included in the graduation subjects in the high schools of Nagybecskerek [Grossbetschkerek]” (Dániel Gy. Reference Dániel1942b). Yet Dániel’s article of cheerful news also rang the alarm bell. As he put it: “Twenty students in Hungarian high schools in Nagybecskerek [Grossbetschkerek] passed the graduation with satisfactory results. Twenty Hungarian promises, twenty Hungarian young lives. It is of great importance what happens to these twenty Hungarian students” (Dániel Gy. Reference Dániel1943). The journalist’s concern did not stop at this simple questioning, as in one of his next articles he subjected the youth to criticism, particularly attacking those who left their homeland: “The Banat Hungarians make enormous efforts to maintain our schools so that our humble but talented children can complete their studies. And these young people, after completing their studies – with few exceptions – let us down miserably” (Dániel Gy. Reference Dániel1943).
In the years before the war, a certain degree of educational migration can be observed among the youth, mainly towards the Bačka and Hungary. After the occupation, the Hungarian government tried to help the students from the Banat in various ways. In addition to students pursuing elementary and secondary school studies, a small group of university students from the Banat studied in Budapest.Footnote 9 It is no coincidence that seeing these, József Szmolenszky a Hungarian state official – who originally hailed from Torontál county, was the county’s last deputy-notary before 1918, and headed the civil department of the military administrative group of the Southern Army during the war – organized a multi-week trip to Budapest for 300 Banat schoolchildren to strengthen their “national consciousness” in the late spring of 1942 and early summer of 1943 (Dániel Gy. Reference Dániel1942a; “Háromszáz…” 1943)Footnote 10.
The mapping and integration of youth into the community received special attention in Torontál. Its authors sought to solve the youth’s vulnerable position in the spirit of self-sacrificing work for the community. Again assuming the role of national activist intellectuals, they argued in favor of a “great Hungarian national past”, Hungarian culture, mostly literature. They saw general social mobility and education as key terms along which they tried to organize the youth as a basis for future of the community. In the words of István Kristály: “The real goal of the school can always and everywhere be only one: to keep the existing actual cultural values intact for today. And above all, handing over our own intellectual and spiritual surplus value” (Kristály Reference Kristály1942a). His ideas evoked the neo-nationalist idea of education formulated by the former Hungarian Minister for Religion and Education, Kuno Klebelsberg, who held that social mobility was to be achieved through education. This would give the Hungarian youth the head start that they needed to fulfill the historical role of the Hungarian community not only in their narrower homeland but also on the European stage (see Ujváry Reference Ujváry and Ignác2009). Therefore, this education could not be just of any kind. Education, be it formal or informal, had to carry national characteristics (Kristály Reference Kristály1942a; Zahra Reference Zahra2004, 506). As the Torontál wrote considering the school curriculum, “I was not thinking about modern and fashionable tangos and nauseating art songs, but about the songs that were born from the imagination and ancient talent of the people” (Dániel L. Reference Dániel1942d). The priest of Novi Becej/Neu-Betsche/Törökbecse József Szentgáli Boday, who had a close relationship in the interwar period with right-wing Hungarian intellectual circles in Novi Sad/Neutsatz/Újvidék (Matuska Reference Matuska2022), lectured Hungarian youth about their duties and responsibilities: “Hungarian boy! Hungarian girl! – do you have the heart to dance today, when our brothers and sisters are fighting the biggest battle, when every day we have, unfortunately, a Hungarian who has died a heroic death and [has become] a war widow and war orphan?! If you are Hungarian, should you feel that it is your duty, or maybe you want to express your deep sorrow and condolences? Away with the dance! Let’s not hurt our Hungarian national self-consciousness” (Szentgáli Boday Reference Szentgáli Boday1943). Returning to the thought of the parish priest from Neu-Betsche, the trauma of the region’s annexation to Serbia was widespread. In Szentgáli Boday’s argumentation, the “World War and the violence of the Treaty of Trianon not only mutilated their country, but also crippled the development of our youth in the spirit of St. Stephen’s idea” (Szentgáli Boday Reference Szentgáli Boday1941).
What followed next, according to Szentgáli Boday was that the teachers were brought up in the spirit of atheism and liberalism. That is why it was particularly important to embrace the youth and to make up for their lack of education. In addition to promoting the social mobility of the young, the authors grouped around Torontál foresaw the creation of a Hungarian middle class that would occupy the key positions of the future. The circle saw the youth as an inexhaustible “national resource” (Zahra Reference Zahra2004, 52). Therefore, it tried to make the nation as attractive as possible based on the concepts and contents of the time. Ferenc Herczeg, who published in the Torontál under the pseudonym Bánáti (Banatian), formulated the goal with sufficient succinctness: “From intellectuals coming from the villages we can expect an increase in the moral standard of the Hungarian middle class in the Banat” (Bánáti Reference Bánáti1943; Németh Reference Németh2001, 1263).
The umbrella organization and the question of education were crucial topics. The issue of the social status of the Hungarian community was less concrete. The Banat Hungarian community’s majority belonged to the landless, rural non-elites. “Each Hungarian village has a different color, a different vitality, a different spirituality, and from the hearts of thousands of Hungarian villages, all the spiritual ability and creative work that our people offered to the Christian civilization of Europe (…) blazes into a single Hungarian life,” wrote István Kristály in his article about Banatska Topola/Banat Topola/Töröktopolya (Kristály Reference Kristály1942c). In addition to István Kristály’s tour in 1942, György László Dániel and György B. Szabó also roamed the Central Banat villages. In line with their colleague from Padej, they brought similarly sad news. The reports were about poverty and the hopeless situation of the Hungarian peasantry. The three authors saw the development of responsible social policy as the third crucial question for the Banat Hungarians. Their plan, which covered all segments of society, aimed at the complete cultural and economic reform of the Hungarian-speaking population (“Oroszlámos…” 1943).
Kristály did not avoid pathetic descriptions and fatalistic pictures of these settlements either, but he generally viewed the future positively. Kristály wrote about the villages as Hungarian castles. Here, not everything was perfect, but no other sites showed more the tenacity and endurance of the Hungarian community. In Kristály’s portrayals, the Hungarian community in the Banat appeared as a national minority that, due to what it had experienced in the ongoing confrontation between nations (about which Torontál consciously stayed silent), was more “Hungarian” and at the same time more loyal to the nation (Kristály Reference Kristály1942c, Reference Kristály1942g). Kristály argued that the future was shaped by service to the community. He demanded teachers, priests, and economic specialists in the villages. Driven by a sense of mission, Kristály presented the following picture of Rusko Selo/Ruskodorf/Torontáloroszi: “I am involved in a crucial case. Does the cradle of Hungarian culture correspond to the spiritual heights and decisive moral requirements of our time, and does the value of both correspond to our thousand-year past and the eternal Hungarian future born in the current struggles” (Kristály Reference Kristály1942e)? A conversation with a local villager further nuanced the picture drawn by Kristály: “We started as a rich village and one day we became beggars. The land was handed over to the dobrovoljac [the South Slav military volunteers in the First World War who received land through the agrarian reforms] … It was as if the cart had stopped in the swirling depths of the terrible Hungarian tragedy: I wonder what else I can learn about the sinking village?” (Kristály Reference Kristály1942e) István Kristály eventually disappeared near Kikinda in the fall of 1944. According to surviving sources, he was the victim of retaliation by partisan troops (Kalapis Reference Kalapis2002b, 194).
Visiting and describing the villages involved not only the recognition and description of the already mentioned conditions. The cited authors noted with painful astonishment the fragility of the Hungarian majority’s settlement network (and in some cases its complete absence), the existence of peripheral communities (szórvány), and the assimilation processes affecting them. According to György László Dániel: “I arrived at settlements inhabited by Hungarians, where no one had ever visited the Hungarian peripheral populations (szórvány) before. When we sang the National Anthem to the youth, they listened bewildered and did not know what it was” (Dániel L. Reference Dániel1942d).
György B. Szabó, a young journalist from Grossbetschkerek who spoke on topics mainly related to culture, expressed a similar opinion. After the war, he became a member of the Yugoslav National Assembly responsible for the new Constitution in 1945 and became a teacher at the Chair of Hungarian Language at the newly founded university in Novi Sad (Kalapis Reference Kalapis2002c, 153–154). During the war B. Szabó published a long article on the assimilation of the Hungarian population. His thorough writing guided the reader into the everyday life of the Hungarians living in villages where other nationalities were the majority. The author visited an unnamed settlement with a Romanian majority, where the Orthodox priest still knew Hungarian, as he was from the “old generation” (B. Szabó, Reference B. Szabó1943). B. Szabó reached his conclusion (when he had problems communicating to Hungarian children whom he saw playing by a well) that Banat Hungarians lived a life in poverty simply because of unpreparedness and disorganization: “We are complacent, as if the fate of the seventy Hungarians [in the village] is not as important as that of the villages that are Hungarian or have a Hungarian majority. We are easygoing, as if we were so numerically superior here that it would be a lot to deal with these Hungarians on the periphery” (B. Szabó, Reference B. Szabó1943).
Conclusions
Contrary to the expectations of the authors who published in Torontál, the Banat did not become part of Hungary again. German promises did not become reality. In return, the nationalities living in the Banat faced the dictatorial rule of the Reich German administration in Belgrade and the ethnic German administration in Grossbetschkerek. The insecurity caused by the German occupation created anxiety among the representatives of the Hungarian minority in the Banat. In response, the cultural elite of the Banat Hungarian minority wrote extensively to analyze and describe their imagined region and community. The Torontál, as the only Hungarian-language daily, provided ample space for this. The authors’ arguments emphasized the Hungarian character and role of Banat in the Hungarian state and followed the “great Hungarian national narrative,” denying the weak regionalism that emerged between the World Wars. In their writings, the Banat was not presented as a historical borderland, but as a core region of the Hungarian state. This idea was based on pre-World War I Hungarian historical works, which also interpreted the Banat as a core area of Hungary. The authors emphasized the continuity of the Hungarian community despite the Ottoman occupation. These pre-World War I Hungarian elites were loyal to Budapest, and so no dominant regionalism emerged in the region. After 1918, and only after a series of political setbacks, the Hungarian minority in Yugoslavia had to rethink its long-term strategies. In response, the Hungarian cultural elite in Yugoslavia proposed a recognition of their minority status and the development of a policy based on local values, which from 1932 onwards was developed by the journal Kalangya. Under the royal dictatorship in Yugoslavia, there was little possibility of realizing the regionalism that had been envisioned. With the return of the Hungarian administration to the Bačka and the German occupation, the Banat Hungarian cultural elite reverted to pre-World War I narratives.
These were reflected in the writings published in Torontál, which emphasized the role of the Banat as a bridge to the Balkans and portrayed the region as a gateway between East and West in the spirit of Hungarian imperial thought. In contrast to the more “Hungarian” Bačka, the key issue was not only to show the Hungarian character of the Banat, but also to prove the “Hungarianness” of the Hungarian community in the Banat. Promoting the identification of themselves and their own community with “Hungarianness”, the Hungarian cultural elite in the Banat adopted the dominant political tropes coming from Hungary. This shift can also be seen in their strongly right-wing politics and their hopes of reconciling with the imperial and ethnic German administration. The change in the BMKSZ, where the old members were replaced by representatives acceptable and trustworthy to Budapest, Belgrade, and Berlin, was needed for this reason. The self-image of the Hungarian elite in the Banat thus presented a more unitary picture. Through their works in the Torontál, the Banat Hungarian cultural elite sought to persuade and mobilize the community in favor of their concept of “Hungarianness”. To do so, they resorted to the strategies of the pre-World War I nationalists, such as institution-building.
The establishment of the BMKSZ, the school network, and the efforts of the socio-economic organization to promote the community’s social mobility were interpreted by the Banat Hungarian cultural elite through the prism of “Hungarianness’”. As part of this, they no longer understood themselves as a minority, but as part of the majority “great Hungarian nation”. The repositioning of the Banat and the rethinking of the Hungarian minority in the region according to Hungarian interwar political tropes during the year of German occupation did not succeed. Yet the ineffectiveness of the plans published by the Hungarian cultural elite in the Torontál points to a much-overlooked history. The political aspirations of the Hungarian minority in the Banat, which unfolded in the triadic nexus between the Banat Hungarian elites, the Hungarian government, and the German administration, illustrate the nationality politics of the Third Reich. Hungary was an ally of Germany, yet the totalitarian ideas of the German administrations left little room for the rights of nationalities.
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