Hungary

Hungary

Hungary

The ethnic name ‘Magyar’ first appears in Arabic sources from the 9th and 10th centuries and can be traced back to the Old Hungarian form ‘mogyeri’, whereby the first syllable, ‘mogy’, means ‘brotherhood’ in the Ugric languages, whilst the syllable ‘eri’, which is of Finno-Ugric origin, means ‘person’ or ‘man’. The foreign term (H)ungarus spread from the Slavic languages into other European languages and can be traced back to the Bulgar-Turkic term ‘onogur’, referring to a tribal confederation with which the Magyars coexisted in the 7th and 8th centuries. The ‘H’ in the Latin ‘Hungarus’ stems from a humanistic etymologisation referring to the Latin name for the Huns, ‘Hunni’. In modern usage, ‘Hungary’ usually refers to the country, whilst ‘Magyars’ (‘Madjars’) refers to the people.

Hungary is a landlocked country situated between^45° 48' and^48° 35' north latitude, stretching 320 km from north to south, and between^16° 05' and^22° 58' east longitude, with an east-west extent of 520 km. 84 per cent of its territory, covering 93,036 square kilometres, lies at an altitude of around 200 m above sea level, whilst only two per cent of its area lies above 400 m. Situated in the Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by the Carpathians to the north and east, the Eastern Alps to the west, and the Dinarides to the south. With a few exceptions, the country’s border, which is 2,242 km long in total, does not follow any natural boundaries.

Along the Danube, which forms the backbone of the river network in the Carpathian Basin, three types of relief can be distinguished:

a) Low-lying and flat plains. Of particular note here are the Alföld, covering 52,000 square kilometres, the Great Plain to the east of the Tisza River, and the Kisalföld, covering 9,000 square kilometres, the Little Lowland in north-western Hungary, south of the town of Raab/Győr.

b) The Transdanubian hills, covering an area of around 17,000 square kilometres, which adjoin the final foothills of the Eastern Alps (including the Geschriebenstein, 882 m, on the Austro-Hungarian border near Ödenburg/Sopron) and is bounded to the south by the Drava, to the north by Lake Balaton and to the east by the Danube. The area between the Danube and the Tisza forms a largely flat transitional zone between the Transdanubian Hills and the Great Plain.

c) The two Hungarian low mountain ranges, both of which extend in a west-east direction: the Transdanubian range to the north of Lake Balaton, 200 km long and 30 km wide, covering an area of around 7,,000 square kilometres, and, on the other side of the Danube, the Northern Low Mountain Range, also approximately 200 km long, comprising the Bükk and Matra ranges, which reach a height of 1,018 m and form the northern boundary of the Alföld.

Historical Hungary comprised the basin of the Danube, Tisza, Drava and Sava river systems, bounded by the Carpathian Mountains, including the Transylvanian Highlands, with an area of 322,310 square kilometres (with a population of 17.3 million in 1890), of which 279,759 square kilometres were accounted for by Hungary proper, including Transylvania, and 42,551 square kilometres by Croatia, Slavonia and Fiume/Rijeka. With the Treaty of Trianon on 4 June 1920, the national territory was reduced to one third of its previous size, namely to 92,963 square kilometres (with a population of 7.6 million). Under the First Vienna Award of 2 November 1938, Hungary received 12,009 square kilometres from Slovakia (with one million inhabitants). In March 1939, Hungary annexed Carpatho-Ukraine, comprising 11,085 square kilometres (0.5 million inhabitants), and a further 1,700 square kilometres of eastern Slovakia. Under the Second Vienna Award of 30 August 1940, Hungary received Northern Transylvania from Romania, comprising 43,104 square kilometres and 2.6 million inhabitants. With the territories annexed at the end of 1941 following the collapse of Yugoslavia(a total of 11,417 square kilometres with one million inhabitants, specifically Bačka, the Baranya Triangle, the Zwischenmur and Übermur regions/Prekmurje), Hungary covered 172,149 square kilometres with a population of 14.6 million. Under the Treaty of Paris of 10 February 1947, Hungary was reduced to its present-day borders.

The early history of the Magyar people is reflected even in the etymology of the terms by which Hungary is known, both to itself and to others. Following the break-up of the Finno-Ugric confederation between 1000 and 500 BC, the ancestors of the Magyars, a nomadic people who raised livestock, migrated from Western Siberia across the Urals to the southern Russian steppes north of the Caucasus. There they came into contact with many peoples, such as the Iranian peoples of the Scythians and Sarmatians, or Turkic-speaking peoples such as the Khazars in the 8th and 9th centuries. In Hungarian tradition, this settlement area is referred to as Levedia. In 894, the Turkic Pechenegs crossed the Volga and drove the Hungarian tribal confederation into the inter-river region known as Etelköz, situated between the Sereth/Siret and the Pruth/Prut. In order to assist the ruler of the Great Moravian Empire, Svatopluk I (reigned 870–894), in his conflict with the East Frankish King Arnulf of Carinthia (reigned 887–899), a Hungarian military force led by the princes Kurszán (d. 904) and Árpád (d. 907) crossed the Carpathians in 895 and settled on the upper Tisza. After the inadequately defended encampments at Etelköz had been raided by the Pechenegs, the Magyars fled across the Southern Carpathians to Transylvania. Following Arnulf’s death, the Magyar tribes conquered Pannonia (present-day Transdanubia) and extended their territory as far as the Enns. With their victory on 4 July 907 at Pressburg over a Bavarian army led by Margrave Luitpold (d. 907), the Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian Basin was complete and had become irreversible.

As the small indigenous population was insufficient for the development of the country – in particular the economic development and utilisation of the vast royal estates – Stephen, and to an even greater extent Géza II (reigned 1141–1162) and his successors invited settlers, primarily from German-speaking regions, to the country. In the second half of the 12th century, this led to the emergence of the settlement areas of the Transylvanian and Spiš Saxons, with the name ‘Saxons’ serving as a collective term for the immigrants, who came mainly from the Rhineland, Moselle Franconia, Flanders and Luxembourg, Thuringia and Lower Saxony. They were granted extensive rights of autonomy, meaning they could govern themselves according to their own laws and elect their own leaders, who were directly subordinate to the king and paid him taxes, providing military assistance only in the event of defence. They were also granted the right to establish their own church system, with self-government and the election of their own clergy.

Following the Mongol invasion of 1241, which had devastated many settlement areas, the Hungarian kings Béla IV (reigned 1235–1270), Charles I Robert (reigned 1308–1342), Louis I (reigned 1342–1382) and Sigismund (reigned 1387–1437) focused on strengthening the country’s economic development and defence by founding and fortifying towns dedicated to crafts, trade and mining. To this end, new settlers were recruited and towns situated in locations favourable both strategically and in terms of trade were encouraged through the granting of privileges. Along the Carpathian arc, primarily near the mountain passes, a chain of predominantly German trading towns emerged, stretching from Pressburg/Bratislava via Tyrnau/Trnava, Trentschin/Trenčín, Sillein/Žilina, Käsmark/Kežmarok, Leutschau/Levoča, Kaschau/Košice and Bergsaß/Berehove to Transylvania, to Bistritz/Bistriţa, Brașov and Sibiu, and in places even extended beyond the Carpathians (Lviv, Baia, Siret, Suceava, Akkerman/Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi, Câmpulung in Wallachia). In the ore- and salt-rich regions of northern Hungary, the Lower Hungarian mining towns emerged (Schemnitz/Banská Štiavnica, Karpfen/Krupina, Kremnitz/Kremnica and Neusohl/Banská Bystrica), whilst the Upper Hungarian mining towns were established in the Lower Zips region (Göllnitz/Gelnica and Schmöllnitz/Smolník), in the east of the empire, Frauenbach/Baia Mare and Rodenau/Rodna Veche at the foot of the Maramureș Mountains, and Offenburg/Baia de Arieș and Kleinschlatt/Zlatna in the Transylvanian Ore Mountains. In the interior of the country, supported and led by a patrician class of both German and Latin (originating from the Romance-speaking world) descent, trade and commerce flourished around administrative or ecclesiastical centres: Ofen/Buda and Pest, Güns/Kőszeg, Raab/Győr, Stuhlweißenburg/Székesfehérvár, Gran/Esztergom, Waitzen/Vác, Fünfkirchen/Pécs, Großwardein/Oradea, Klausenburg/Cluj-Napoca. In the south of the country, Agram/Zagreb, Warasdin/Varaždin and Esseg/Osijek in particular developed into important, predominantly German towns in Croatia and Slavonia.

Two distinct periods can be identified in the colonisation of the Kingdom of Hungary. During the first period, which lasted until the Mongol invasion of 1241, Germans settled exclusively on royal estates, partly in large, more or less self-contained units: in the settlement areas of the Transylvanian and Spiš Saxons, and to a lesser extent in scattered settlements, as evidenced by the Németi settlements (German settlements) established in the 11th century. The establishment of Vizsoly County is attributed to Queen Gertrud of Andechs-Merania (1185–1213), who, upon her marriage to King Andrew II (reigned 1205–1235) in 1203, bringing a large group of Bavarian colonists with her to Hungary as part of her retinue and settling them in the fertile Hernád Valley south of Košice. Her ten villages were granted their own self-government within the county, which was first documented in 1215.

In the second period, which began with the reconstruction of the country following the Mongol invasion of 1241 and lasted until the mid-14th century, the country’s secular and ecclesiastical barons increasingly emerged as the driving forces behind colonisation, consolidating their rule on the estates granted to them by the king by establishing new villages. The peasants of this second wave of colonisation were settled within the framework of private manorialism; their villages were scattered amongst those of other ethnic groups. This precluded the formation of compact German settlement blocks, as had been characteristic of the first period.

The settlement movements of both the first and second periods were characterised by new colonisation methods as well as new forms of contract in the form of previously unknown civil liberties. These included: economic freedom (exemption from customs duties, market rights), the exercise of their own customary law through their own judges, and the practice of their religion in their own language, secured also by the right to elect their own pastors. The settlers’ fundamental obligation – namely, loyalty to the king and the crown – included contractually regulated levies, defence services and the recognition of royal jurisdiction as the highest authority. During the second wave of immigration, however, the allegiance of the settlers – known as ‘hospites’ (guests) – shifted from the King to the feudal lord. The landlord, however, could not grant more freedoms than he himself possessed; that is to say, whilst he could partially exempt his settlers from manorial dues, he could not exempt them from their obligations towards the King. The scattered German settlements of the first period passed from royal to private ownership through grants, but the settlers retained their social status as hospites and continued to hold jurisdiction over minor matters and the right to elect their parish priest, thus remaining in a better position than the inhabitants of local villages. Compared with the Transylvanian and Spiš Saxons, who largely escaped such ‘privatisation’, this entailed primarily economic disadvantages, namely the payment of dues to the king, the Church (tithes) and the landlord. This did not, however, apply to urban settlements, which gained particular significance during the second period. Nevertheless, it was true of all German immigrants – whether in the towns, in their villages, or in their enclosed settlements in Spiš and Transylvania – that they were unable to influence the country’s politics; the Hungarian king, on the other hand, granted them a generous degree of autonomy in their internal affairs. The Germans were integrated into the country’s political structure as self-governing units. Largely peaceful relations developed between the colonists – whose settlements were mostly situated in terra deserta and only rarely displaced existing inhabitants – and the local population, eventually leading to a coexistence that stimulated and mutually enriched both sides economically and culturally, particularly as, in the second phase, locals were also able to attain the status of privileged hospites. The settlers, whether peasants or townspeople, proved to be important pillars of the state, particularly of the king, whom they regarded as a guarantor of their acquired rights. Through the colonisation of the country by settlers from Central and Western Europe, Hungary was drawn into the process of structural harmonisation associated with European land development. On the one hand, this took place in the economic sphere, as the West’s ‘agrarian revolution’—with its technical innovations—was transplanted to the East; on the other hand, it occurred through the colonists’ rights, which, with their autonomously organised spheres of freedom, also benefited the local population.

The fall of Belgrade/Beograd in 1521 marked the beginning of the Ottoman conquest of Hungary, which was sealed by the capture of the fortress of Buda/Ofen in 1541. The election of two kings at the end of 1526 – the Transylvanian voivode Johann Szapolyai (reigned 1526–1540) and the Habsburg Ferdinand I (King of Hungary 1526–1564, King of the Romans and German King 1531–1564 and Emperor from 1556), and the Ottoman occupation of the central and southern regions, the kingdom remained divided into three parts until 1686/90. Politically, this period was characterised by Habsburg–Ottoman rivalry over Transylvania and constant border wars with Ottoman troops. These political conflicts were, however, inextricably linked to religious ones, namely through the rapid spread of the Reformation, to which a clear majority of both the landowning nobility and the urban middle classes professed their allegiance. The struggle for religious freedom – for the free practice of the Lutheran faith, the ‘German religion’, which was particularly entrenched in the German towns, as well as the Calvinist denomination, predominantly espoused by the nobility, was intertwined with resistance to the confessional absolutism of the Habsburg rulers and their centralising ambitions. This struggle repeatedly escalated into uprisings by the noble opposition, known as the ‘Kurucs’, who sought to exploit both the Habsburg–Ottoman and the Habsburg–French rivalries to their advantage, albeit with only short-lived success, if any. The last of these uprisings, led by Franz II Rákoczi (Prince of Transylvania 1704–1711) from 1703 to 1711, came to an end with the Peace of Sathmar/Satu Mare, which brought the country a long-lasting period of internal peace through a generous amnesty for the “rebels”.

After more than a decade of passive resistance, the collapse in 1859–60 of the system of neo-absolutism established in 1849, and the defeat at Königgrätz/Hradec Králové in 1866 to pave the way for the reorganisation of the Habsburg Monarchy in 1867, known as the ‘Compromise ’. This was replaced by the personal and real union of ‘Austria-Hungary’, comprising two independent and equal states: the monarch, Franz Joseph I, remained the joint Emperor and King (k.u.k.) (1848–1916), who exercised almost unrestricted authority over foreign policy and the army, and an economic area linked by a customs union and a common currency, which enabled both parts to enjoy exceptionally strong economic momentum and increasing prosperity. The latter utilised the hegemonic position of the Germans in the western half of the empire and of the Magyars in the eastern half—a position established by the Compromise—to build a highly centralised nation state, whilst Cisleithania developed into a federalist-structured multi-ethnic state. The Hungarian government granted equal rights to the peoples and their languages exclusively to the Croats in the Hungarian–Croatian Compromise concluded in 1868. The Nationalities Act, passed in the same year, on the other hand, established Hungarian as the official language and denied the nationalities any recognition as equal nations with their own self-government in ethnically structured territories, as the nationalities had demanded. Their members were recognised only individually as equal members of the indivisible, unified Hungarian nation and were permitted to use their languages only at the lowest administrative level. They were also excluded from political participation because the suffrage, restricted to six per cent of the population, ensured that the dominance of the landowning nobility and the governing parties led by them was maintained, with the result that broad sections of the population, such as workers, peasants and the nationalities, were virtually unrepresented in Parliament. It was only the far-reaching provisions on autonomy granted to the churches and their schools in 1868 that enabled, above all, the Serbian and RomanianOrthodox and the Lutheran Church of the Transylvanian Saxons, in particular, to preserve a strongly denominational identity, underpinned by their own church-organised education system. In contrast, both the Catholic and Protestant churches supported the government’s policy of Magyarisation, with the result that, between 1869 and 1905, Germans outside Transylvania – as, incidentally, did the Slovaks – lost around two-thirds of their schools where lessons were taught in their mother tongue. Thus, in the Banat in 1912, there were only 31 schools with German as the language of instruction for some 387,000 Germans, and in the neighbouring Batschka, there were 19 schools for some 190,000 Germans during the wartime school year of 1914–15. The process of Magyarisation had an even more drastic effect on the grammar schools, which were crucial for the education of the elite; in the 1905/06 school year, only 16 of these – that is, eight per cent of all grammar schools (out of a total of 205) – still taught in the languages of the nationalities (whilst the ethnic minority population accounted for around 50 per cent). Only in Transylvania were eight German grammar schools able to survive, and some German parents therefore sent their sons there to be educated from within Hungary.

Whilst the Transylvanian Saxons were also recognised as a nationality by the Hungarian government, the ‘German Hungarians’ – as they described themselves – living in the rest of Hungary had no contiguous settlement area and therefore no sense of group identity extending beyond their locality or settlement region. This can be attributed to a whole range of factors, of which only a few will be mentioned here. A key factor here was the scattered nature of their settlements, which meant that although Germans were to be found in 90 per cent of all the country’s districts, they only accounted for more than ten per cent of the population in eleven main settlement areas. The German-Hungarians lived in a linguistically and ethnically-confessional melting pot alongside many other nationalities and the Magyars; they were fragmented across various denominations and had no common vernacular or media that could have facilitated intra-ethnic communication. This diversity of small German groups, united locally or regionally, is further accentuated by their differing histories and patterns of settlement continuity. The predominantly Protestant Germans of Spiš, Transylvania and also Western Hungary, the towns of Upper Hungary and cities such as Pressburg/Bratislava and Ödenburg/Sopron were able to draw on a culture of remembrance and tradition dating back to the Middle Ages. This gave them a historically grounded identity of long standing, which distinguished them fundamentally—both mentally and in terms of denomination—from the considerably younger forms of identity of the predominantly Catholic generations of settlers in the 18th century. Consequently, a pluralism of regionally or locally rooted forms of identity can be observed, often with blurred boundaries vis-à-vis the Magyars; this was linked to a regionally or locally defined particularism of socio-economic interests, within which ethnic demarcations played, if at all, only a subordinate role. This particularism was gradually abandoned under the pull of the formation of the Hungarian nation-state in favour of a Hungarian national-liberal concept, which, by breaking free from the previously dominant ‘Kantönli’ spirit, offered entirely new and existentially appealing opportunities and prospects, and massively promoted the ‘Magyarising’ transition into the new bourgeois society of the Hungarian nation-state. In conjunction with the social changes brought about by industrialisation and urbanisation, as well as the government’s nationalising policies, these components of social and mental heterogeneity listed here prevented, right up until 1918 – in contrast to the other nationalities in the Kingdom of Hungary – from the outset any form of cross-regional political mobilisation appealing to a national commonality or identity, in the sense of group formation, a national movement or a ‘German movement’. For the sense of commonality with the Magyar environment was stronger and had a more integrative effect than any fictitious commonality amongst these highly diverse small German groups. Linguistic Magyarisation, which was only associated with a gradual shift in identity in subsequent generations, was perceived by these small groups as an opportunity for social advancement wherever socio-economic interests required the development of social loyalty, not towards their own – because it was imaginary and could not be experienced – but towards the Magyar group, in order to demonstrate that those concerned were good Hungarians, indeed German-Hungarians, and wished to remain so. This was not seen as a contradiction to the sense of belonging of the local small groups of Germans to a particular municipality or region, because these were subsumed within the symbiosis with the larger Hungarian group and remained integrated within it until 1914. This is why all attempts by Edmund Steinacker (1839–1929) and Rudolf Brandsch (1880–1953) to mobilise the Germans in Hungary politically at the national level, including through the Hungarian German People’s Party founded in the Banat in 1906. The ideological and emotional proposition of a ‘collective guarantee’ for all Germans in Hungary, or even a ‘people’s community’, only began to become attractive and effective once, after 1918, Central Europe – and with it the traditional way of life familiar for centuries – collapsed, and a fundamental reorientation proved unavoidable. For the small groups, now definitively separated by newly drawn borders, required a cross-border sense of community in order to be able – following the loss of Hungarian citizenship – to see themselves as a large German group and to mobilise politically.

Table 1: The ethnic composition of Hungary, excluding Croatia and Fiume, 1880–1910, by mother tongue^[2]

Table 2: Overview of demographic trends amongst Germans and Jews in Hungary, 1720–1960, within the respective historical borders^[3]

¹⁾ According to religious affiliation

²⁾ By declaration of mother tongue

³⁾ By nationality

Table 3: Number of established minority self-governing bodies following the local elections of 1994/95, 1998, 2002 and 2006^[5]

*) Following the local elections in December 1994, by-elections were held in early 1995.

The political upheaval of 1989–90, brought about by ‘Round Table’ negotiations between representatives of the ruling party – which was dissolved on 8 October 1989 – and representatives of the opposition, the adoption of a fundamentally revised constitution on 23 October 1989, the free elections in March and April 1990, which resulted in a democratically elected government, and finally, the country’s accession to NATO on 12 March 1999 and to the European Union on 1 May 2004, as well as the smooth transfers of power following the parliamentary elections of 1994, 1998, 2002 and 2010, are the most significant turning points in the history of the last two decades. Another such turning point was the adoption of the Nationalities Act in the summer of 1993, which guaranteed national and ethnic minorities – as state-forming factors – not only political participation in matters affecting them, but also self-government at local and regional level. The dynamic development of local self-government between 1994 and 2006 shows that these bodies were able to successfully fulfil their role as representatives of the interests of their communities.

• Holger Fischer, with the collaboration of Konrad Gündisch: A Brief History of Hungary. Frankfurt am Main 1999 (Edition Suhrkamp 2114).
• Jörg K. Hoensch: History of Hungary 1867–1983. Stuttgart 1984, 2nd ed. 1997.
• László Kontler: History of Hungary. Millennium in Central Europe. Basingstoke et al. 2002.
• László Kósa (ed.): The Hungarians: Their History and Culture. Budapest 1994.
• Miklós Molnár: History of Hungary. Paris 1996 (Nations of Europe).
• Günter Schödl (ed.): A Land on the Danube. Berlin 1995 (German History in Eastern Europe).
• Gerhard Seewann: History of the Germans in Hungary. Vol. 1: From the Early Middle Ages to 1860. Vol. 2: From 1860 to 2006. Marburg 2012 (Studies in East Central European Research 24/1, 2).
• Peter F. Sugar, Péter Hanák (eds.): History of Hungary. Bloomington 1990.

• Pál Engel: The Realm of St Stephen. A History of Medieval Hungary 895–1526. London et al. 2001.
• Charles W. Ingrao: The Habsburg Monarchy 1615–1815. 2nd ed. Cambridge 2000 (New Approaches to European History 3).
• Carlile A. Macartney: The Habsburg Empire 1790–1918. London 1969.
• István Deák: The Legitimate Revolution. Lajos Kossuth and the Hungarians 1848–1849. Vienna et al. 1989.
• Péter Hanák: Hungary in the Danube Monarchy. Problems of the Bourgeois Transformation of a Multi-Ethnic State. Vienna et al. 1984 (Publications of the Austrian Institute for Eastern and South-Eastern Europe 10).
• László Katus: Hungary in the Dual Monarchy, 1867–1914. Boulder, Colo., 2008 (East European Monographs 738).
• Ignác Romsics: Hungary in the Twentieth Century. Budapest, 1999.
• Klaus-Detlev Grothusen (ed.): Hungary. Göttingen 1986 (Handbook of South-Eastern Europe 5).
• Árpád von Klimó: Hungary since 1945. Göttingen 2006 (UTB History 2855; European Contemporary History 2).
• Rudolf Tökés: Hungary’s Negotiated Revolution: Economic Reforms, Social Change and Political Succession, 1957–1990. Cambridge et al. 1996 (Cambridge Russian, Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies 101).
• Herbert Küpper: The New Minority Law in Hungary. Munich 1998 (Studies in Contemporary South-Eastern European History 36).

• www.ungarisches-institut.de/ (Hungarian Institute at the University of Regensburg with an online library; publisher of the *Ungarn-Jahrbuch* [1969 onwards] and the *Studia Hungarica* series)
• www.forost.ungarisches-institut.de/volltext.htm (collection of source texts relating to the 20th century)
• Transylvanian Institute at the University of Heidelberg with an online library
• Institute for Finno-Ugric and Uralic Studies at the University of Hamburg
• Database of journal articles with notes on digitisation
• Database of sources on the history of Hungary, including a chronological list of all laws in full text
• mol.arcanum.hu/ (Inventory of the Hungarian State Archives)
• Database of Budapest libraries
• mpgy.ogyk.hu/ (Database of the Parliamentary Library)
• mnb.oszk.hu/ (Database of the National Bibliography of the Hungarian Széchenyi National Library)
• mek.oszk.hu/ (database of digitised books)
• epa.oszk.hu/ (Database of digitised journals)
• keptar.oszk.hu/; www.kepkonyvtar.hu/ (Databases of digitised portrait and image collections)

[1] The crown sent by the Emperor is by no means identical to today’s Crown of St Stephen, as the latter was not fashioned until the second half of the 12th century.

[2] László Katus: Nemzetiségi adatsorok a dualizmus korában [Data on Nationalities during the Dualist Era]. In: Ferenc Glatz (ed.): Magyarok a Kárpát-medencében. Budapest 1988, p. 195.

[3] Source for 1720: Dávid Zoltán: 7 1715–20. évi összeírás [The census of the years 1715–1720]. In: József Kovacsics (ed.): A történeti statisztikai forrásai [Sources of Historical Statistics]. Budapest 1957, pp. 145–199; for 1805 and 1840, József Kovacsics: The Population of Hungary from 1878 to 1870. In: Historical Demography of Hungary (896–1996). Herne 2007, pp. 217–248, here p. 247; for the subsequent years, Friedrich Gottas: The Germans in Hungary. In: The Habsburg Monarchy 1848–1918, Vol. 3,1: The Peoples of the Empire. Vienna 1980, pp. 340–410, here p. 345; Yehuda Don, George Magos: ‘The demographic development of Hungarian Jewry’. In: *Jewish Social Studies*, Autumn 1983, pp. 189–216, here p. 208; Norbert Spannenberger: The League of Germans in Hungary 1938–1944 under Horthy and Hitler. Munich 2002 (Publications of the Federal Institute for Culture and History of the Germans in Eastern Europe 22), p. 431; The 1941 Census. Vol. 3a: Anyanyelv, nemzetiség, nyelvismeret [The 1941 Census. Vol. 3a: Mother Tongue, Nationality, Language Proficiency]. Budapest 1983, p. 14.

[4] Rudolf Braham: The Politics of Genocide. The Holocaust in Hungary. Vol. 1.2, New York 1981 (revised edition 2001).

[5] Ferenc Eiler: The Minority Self-Governance and its Experiences, p. 231; regarding 2006: www.valasztas.hu/onkval2006/hu/10/10_0.html (accessed 28 November 2012).

Gerhard Seewann: Hungary. In: Online Encyclopaedia on the Culture and History of Germans in Eastern Europe, 2012. URL: ome-lexikon.uni-oldenburg.de/p32642 (accessed 15 February 2021).