Politics of the past: the use and abuse of history - Socialists ...

A Common Past, a Divided History
181
László Szarka
One of the recurring themes for Central European intellectuals is
that in the area around the Danube several nation-based societies
have for many centuries developed in the closest co-existence. In
common states, under the power of identical rulers and bureaucracies,
they established their linguistic and cultural independence
within similar or even identical educational, cultural and religious
institutional systems. The Austrians thus lived together with regional
communities of five or six other nations in Transleithania, as seen
from Vienna, in other words on the territory of the Kingdom of Hungary.
Romanians, Serbs, Croats, Ruthenes, Germans, and Slovaks
lived there with the Hungarians, who were first the absolute, then
the relative majority.
Right until its dissolution, these common states – the Kingdom of
Hungary and the Habsburg Monarchy – and the identical economic,
social and political conditions of the region of East Central Europe
defined the connection between the Slovak and Hungarian peoples.
They have been connected by blood ties through many hundreds
of thousands of mixed marriages. Through common regional
and local conditions, common institutions – schools, churches,
counties or the army – and the years spent there together, most of
our ancestors had comparable individual experiences, life stories
and therefore a shared historical memory.
Common knowledge was accumulated in shared towns and areas
of ethnic contact, which developed across linguistic borders. Common
historical symbols have very clearly been present in thousands
of Hungarian and Slovak families throughout the 20 th century, and
still are today. I am thinking of bilingualism, borrowed customs, and
the complementary ethno-social structure that became clearly visible
in centres of trade between the highland counties and lowland
regions.
László Szarka is Director of the Research Institute for Ethnic and
National Minorities at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He is also
co-chairman of the Mixed Committee of Hungarian-Slovak Historians.