In Tangible Belonging, John C. Swanson traces conceptions of “being German” among the rural Swabian (German-speaking) population in Hungary during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In a period of national revival, border shifting, and pan-nationalist movements, Swanson seeks to pinpoint the ways in which rural Swabians identified as Germans and the manner in which conflicting (often contradictory) German and Hungarian government and intellectual forces competed to (re)define this identity.
In the book's six chapters, Swanson outlines the lives of Swabian peasants, starting from their arrival in Hungary during the eighteenth century and ending with the expulsion (and aftermath) of Swabians following World War II. Throughout, Swanson juxtaposes the nationalist movements of both Hungary and Germany as espoused by politicians and intellectuals—each with their own agenda for German speakers in Hungary—with the ways Swabians exhibited and understood their Germanness. To analyze this latter perspective, Swanson looks at church logbooks, texts from contemporary visitors and scholars who studied the Swabian population, and interviews with elderly Swabians living in both Hungary and Germany.
After World War I, as Hungary transitioned from being one half of a multiethnic empire to being a smaller, more ethnically homogenous country, Swabians became the largest non-Hungarian-speaking population in the country. As the interwar government implemented more stringent “Magyarization” policies in language and education—already evident in the years following the Austro-Hungarian compromise—rural Swabians were pressed to assimilate even more into Hungarian society. At the same time, German nationalists (both Hungarian- and German-born) sought to reorient Swabian “Germanness” toward a more abstract conception of being German that would eventually crystallize into the concept of the Volk.
In contrast, the Swabian “tangible” conception of being German centered on local customs and traditions—often a mix of Hungarian and German—including housing, dress, religion, holidays, leisure, language, and seasonal rhythms. It was not until the 1940s and World War II that rural Swabians began to adopt the more abstract conceptions of being German (and being Hungarian). After the war, the Hungarian government forcefully expelled many Swabians—individuals who had spent their whole lives in Hungary and considered themselves to be both Hungarian and German—to live in Germany.
Swanson's argument centers around the concept of “tangible belonging”: a local, place-based understanding of what it means to belong to a specific ethnic category (i.e., German or Hungarian). While he acknowledges that more homogenized versions of these categories eventually replaced the locally based identities of rural Swabians in Hungary, Swanson contends that this process is not one of gaining a national consciousness, but one of negotiating among tangible and abstract concepts of national identity. As Swanson argues, “We need to stop talking about how the people gained national consciousness and instead look at how they adapted to the transition from a local, tangible sense of belonging to one based more on abstract ideas” (127).
Tangible Belonging is influenced by Rogers Brubaker—particularly his work questioning the concept of “groups”—and builds on the work of theorists like Benedict Anderson, Eric Hobsbawm, and Eugen Weber. However, the concept of tangible belonging leaves some unresolved conflicts in relation to contemporaneous influences and actions. For example, in his introduction, Swanson rejects consigning tangible belonging to a premodern outlook (12), yet he attributes the diminishment or elimination of tangible nationalism in part to “the modern world” and its “emphasis on standardization and homogenization” (300), seemingly adapting the teleological hegemony of modern conceptualizations of ethnic categories. Similarly, he notes that more abstract conceptions of nationalism were slow to arrive in the rural Swabian countryside because “many rural German speakers continued to embrace traditions as well as premodern views that tied their identity to local conditions” (183). Such analysis implies a case of delayed modernism in rural Hungary but does little to disentangle tangible national identity from a premodern worldview.
Further, rural Swabians often behaved in a way that adds nuance and complexity to Swanson's narrative of identity-defining clashes between tangible and abstract forms of national belonging. Such is particularly the case in Tangible Belonging’s fifth chapter, “The Volk Triumphant.” As German-speaking Hungarians were navigating competing (racialized) nationalisms during World War II, their choice to identify as Hungarian or German (or both) imply that they were motivated by self-preservation (a desire not to be relocated to Germany or fight in the Waffen SS), opportunism (a desire to benefit from the spoils of war), and pragmatism (a desire to be on the “winningest” side). Such calculations seem to reflect Tara Zahra's depiction of national indifference (“Imagined Noncommunities: National Indifference as a Category of Analysis,” Slavic Review 69 [Spring 2010]: 93-119) and may be useful to examine alongside more tangible notions of national belonging.
Finally, while Swanson's use of interviews represents an important impulse to ensure that “no priority should be given to individuals and groups that left us more sources” (361), he conducted many of these interviews in the early 2000s with elderly inhabitants and former inhabitants of Swabian villages. Some of these individuals lived in Germany for most of their lives and all seemingly have impressions of “Germanness” in Hungary that reflect nostalgia and imply knowledge of the problematic connotations of aligning themselves too closely to German nationalism, particularly during the Nazi era. As such, Swanson's work of connecting firsthand accounts with limited historical documents sometimes requires an uncomfortable level of conjecture and results in insufficiently addressed disagreement with other contemporary accounts.
Tangible Belonging adds to the growing body of literature that places individuals at the heart of the nationalizing narrative. However, in telling the story of individuals who left little written evidence, Swanson sometimes falls back on traditional distinctions and methods of analyzing national movements. Nonetheless, Swanson raises some interesting questions: What is the connection between tangible belonging, national indifference, and (pan-)nationalizing movements? What role does the interplay between these forces have in “minority making” during the twentieth century in Eastern Europe? How are ethnic categories individually constructed and how are they part of a larger worldview? Answering such questions will shed light on the way the concept of belonging highlights an individual's role in nationalizing projects.
