The term “Habsburg borderland” refers to Transylvania—the region within the Kingdom of Hungary whose population was composed of Romanians, Magyars, Germans, Szeklers, and various smaller minorities. This society was to be nationally homogenized as a result of the centralizing policy in Hungary since the 1860s. As one of the many measures for unification, the author focuses on the Magyarization of personal names and the naming of places in the public space with names of Magyar origin. Ágoston Berecz thus turns to a phenomenon that reveals the irrationality of political action in the age of so-called modernization, when the aim was to “relabel” a largely agrarian, polyethnic, and multiconfessional population on the assumption that this would serve the progress of the political collective (“Hungary”).

The author approaches the phenomenon as a linguist and examines the use of first names, the spelling of surnames, and the assignment of names that refer to settings in public space (streets, squares, etc.). To make the change visible, Berecz spans the time from the 1850s to the years of World War I. In view of the sociological situation, it was obvious to focus the first chapter on the farmers (“Peasants”) because the majority of the affected population at that time were still people of rural origin. The second chapter (“Nationalisms”) shows how state policy and social interest began to mix, in that Magyarization was not only based on pressure but also on the offer of social advancement (professions, prestige, etc.) by means of assimilation. The third chapter (“The State”) focuses on the language direction of the Budapest government to subject the region (Transylvania lost the rest of its traditional autonomy in 1876) to a “Grand Toponymic Manoeuver” as far as possible. Place and field names of non-Magyar origin were adapted or favored in public usage. This led not only to name modifications but in some cases also to the downright “fabrication” of names. However, Berecz does not only deal with the linguistic management but also explains with a few examples how the local administration reacted to this—that is, to the responses made to these linguistic-political impulses.

The author bases the conclusion of his quite interesting study on three aspects. He assigns a high degree of importance to the power of names (“uncanny”) because they appeared to be important for identity in a still largely unenlightened society (assignment of meaning to history). However, the question remains open as to what extent the thoroughly educated Hungarian politicians, with their management of names, did not also follow an approach that can be described as unenlightened; namely, to assume that the situation could be improved with “empty signs.” The second aspect relates to the question of whether nationalism can be detected among the farmers. Despite certain signs here and there, however, the author concludes that it was only the years of World War I that triggered a clear turn toward national positioning among the Romanian peasants. The third aspect deals with the balance in Magyar politics: the balance had to be ensured between the nationalist Magyar circles and the largely still nonnational non-Magyar population, and also between the educated elites, who reacted to state policy, and the rural majority, who were only partially affected by the measures of modernization.

There is an extensive appendix at the end of this study. It contains a series of tables with examples of Transylvanian names and place names that have been Magyarized. This is followed by a place name concordance with Romanian, Magyar, and German name variants. The largest part of the appendix is taken up by the bibliography, which reveals that the author has used a long list of specialist literature in English, Hungarian, Romanian, and German. The appendix concludes with a place and subject index.

Although Berecz intends to exemplify the topic using the Romanians and Transylvanian Saxons (Germans) as examples, the focus of his study is clearly on the Romanian part of the population: the Germans are mentioned in between, but there is no concrete comparison that could reveal that the completely different sociostructural profile as well as the identity structure of the two ethnic groups must inevitably lead to different results. Even the title of the book, “Late Habsburg Borderland,” is not plausible, for, on the one hand, Transylvania—in comparison to Galicia, Bukovina, Dalmatia, or Bosnia-Hercegovina—was part of the Habsburg monarchy for far longer and preserved the traditions of Western origin from the Middle Ages until the nineteenth century; on the other hand, the author also draws on data on the Banat, which did not belong to Transylvania and where other parameters prevailed. Even if the author occasionally refers to other settings, it would have done the conclusion good to put the analyzed phenomena for Transylvania in relation to those, for example, about the settlement areas of the Slovaks in northern, Serbs in southern, or Germans in western Hungary to prove the extent to which Transylvania is a special case.