Central European Cultures

Content

2024-09-16

Recovered Histories of Priests of Traditional Communities

Florin Cioban — 2024-09-16

Ukraine’s Many Faces: Land, People, and Culture Revisited. Edited by Olena Palko and Manuel Ferez Gil.

Gary Marker — 2024-09-16

Redefining the Boundaries of Humanity. Transhumanism and Posthumanism in the Perspective of Biotechnologies. Edited by Jana Tomašovičová and Bogumiła Suwara.

Adam Škrovan — 2024-09-16

Lesen im Zeitalter der künstlichen Intelligenz. Über den Wandel einer Kulturtechnik [Reading in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. On the Transformation of a Cultural Technique]. By Florian Rötzer.

Máté Bordás — 2024-09-16

An den Rändern der Literatur. Dokument und Literatur in zentraleuropäischen Kulturen. Tracing the Edges of Literature. Docu-mentary Fiction in Central European Cultures. Edited by Milka Car, Csongor Lőrincz, Danijela Lugarić, and Gábor Tamás Molnár.

Svetlana Efimova — 2024-09-16

Blind Spots in Crowds, Masses, and Multitudes

Katalin Teller — 2024-09-16

The brief historical overview comprises an account of classical crowd theories and their contemporary metamorphoses to contextualize the thematic section of the journal. Regarding the proverbial “age of the crowd” of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Europe, a variety of attempts of conceptualization proved controversial but productive. Hyppolite Taine, Scipio Sighele, or Gustave Le Bon approached the phenomenon dominantly in psychological terms foregrounding the destructive elements of mass dynamics. In the interwar period, however, a first wave of differentiation might be detected, insofar as younger academic sub-disciplines, i.e., social statistics, seek to grasp the crowd as a structure with its intricate and partly paradoxical qualities. In recent scholarship, however, the diversification of the concept seems to have become even more complex: by shifting the focus from the “object crowd” to the “subject crowd”, descriptions of the multitude, the network, the swarm, or the assembly reflect the need to think of the crowd as an autonomous agency with emancipatory potentials.

Masterminded Choreographies

Béla Rásky — 2024-09-16

Austrian political culture is rooted in counter-reformation, in a specific Catholic-baroque theatricality. With its marches, parades, pageants, Dionysian art and populist politics, a very distinctive form of showmanship or staging already characterised the last decades of the Habsburg Monarchy. After 1918, the new republic picked up this thread—with less of the ‘Dionysian’ at the fore than the more sublime and solemn. From the mid-1920s onwards, all political camps focused on involving masses in their political manifestations, thus the structured amorphous crowds involved participants marching in rank and file and in military attire and unified mass bodies engaged in choreographed movement, forming images (and messages). However, the authors and organisers of such events often seemed to be more impressed by these performances than the audience or even the participants themselves. Although the ‘mass’ in contemporary phrasing was a ‘feeling’, an ‘experience’, or an ‘emotion’, it still had to be controlled: stadiums and arenas became architectural means of social control, accompanied by a plethora of security and policing measures. But with the advent of new media, the crowd organised itself differently and anew. As a result, both the social democratic, pan-German and Christian-conservative mass festivals in the late 1920s and early 1930s and the staged Austrofascist ‘Tributes to the Youth’ after 1934 quickly lost their appeal, while their audiovisual reproduction in radio or newsreels had no effect either. Even enormous logistical efforts and bureaucratic pressure could not prevent the mass stagings from becoming outdated.

“For Us, Bühne is Everything that has an Audience.”

Marie-Noelle Yazdanpanah — 2024-09-16

In the 1920s in particular, the illustrated Die Bühne magazine claimed to appeal to “everyone” and to be a stage (=Bühne) for the widest possible readership. With an eye on international developments, it offered a mix of topics—from modern theatre, revue and mass media, to sport, the new body culture and leisure activities—and propagated a modern lifestyle overall. The article explores how the slogan “For us, Bühne is everything that has an audience”, proclaimed in the first issue in 1924, manifested itself and its attitude towards mass arts over the years. The editors are examined as well as the intended and actual readers, with a focus on the various strategies used to attract and involve readers and to keep them loyal to the Die Bühne as a product. The provided role models were largely middle class. However, the content indicated that the magazine wanted to appeal to a cross-milieu and thus to a more diverse readership than the promoted lifestyle, consumer products and trendy places may suggest at first glance. At the same time, “everyone” refers to mass or the masses, which is most frequently expressed in articles on leisure culture and in relation to (theatre) audiences. I analyse the contexts and times when this topos is used positively—e.g., in the sense of active, idiosyncratic audiences—and when mass stands for the superficial or the ordinary. The question of the masses is explored in two ways: firstly, as the popular approach of addressing everyone and promoting mass arts, and secondly, as the depiction and representation of various aspects of the masses.

“Why Do People Accept Ideologies that Contradict their Conscious Interests?”

Florian Ruttner — 2024-09-16

For a short time in the mid-1930s, Prague turned into the hub of discussions about the role of psychology in history. Far from being a mere methodological debate, the question why masses act against their conscious interests was seen as a central point of this endeavor. The issue intrigued not only the left-leaning Czechoslovak historians who formed the Historická skupina (the Historical Group) and were influenced by similar attempts in Germany, namely by the Institut für Sozialforschung in Frankfurt am Main, but also psychoanalysts in exile, like Otto Fenichel, who conducted inquiries in a similar vein, all the more as the menace of German fascism grew stronger. The paper sketches the contacts between different groups and presents the main results of their deliberations.

Protesting, Destroying Symbols, Lynching, Onlooking, and Rallying

Éva Standeisky — 2024-09-16

The paper discusses the activities, the behaviour, and the function of the crowd of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Based on contemporary documents, the study shows the characteristics of the mass movements of the 1956 Revolution. The main question is how the crowd, already explored theoretically by social psychology and other sciences, functioned in different settings: what types of gatherings and demonstrations emerged, how the local context and the social composition of the crowd influenced its behaviour, and how this was perceived by bystanders.

Crowd Scenes in Péter Nádas’ Parallel Stories

Anna Kenderesy — 2024-09-16

The article examines the representation of the crowd in Péter Nádas’s Parallel Stories. In the plot, there are multiple scenes including the masses that highlight different features of the phenomenon. I argue that the 1956 Hungarian Revolution appears in the novel as a fundamental experience of society, influencing the nature of people’s gatherings even after its defeat. Firstly, I show that the characteristics of the swarm appear in the cooperation of people foraging for food during the revolution. However, the bread queue represents the extreme behaviour and the aggression of the acquisitive masses, whose collective action is always directed at acquiring something. Thereafter, I examine the representations of crowd panic in the basement scene of the 1956 cannonade and of the 1957 railway station gathering. Finally, I scrutinise two scenes with the seemingly liberated and intoxicated crowd. The analysis focuses on the relationship between the crowd and the individual, on the narrative representation of the crowd, on its influence on the participants’ perceptions, and the associated attributes.

“Crowds confined into phalansteries built from their own data, human mass regressed into a hedonistic infant body.”

Dorka Keresztury — 2024-09-16

The article examines how László Garaczi’s Weszteg portrays isolation and mass formation in the context of the coronavirus pandemic. In the first part of my essay, I investigate the representation of the “quarantine state.” I argue that in the novel, technology deepens isolation instead of helping to connect with others. In the next section, I examine how the novel depicts the transformation of our relationship with “live” presence, physical proximity, and mass situations due to the pandemic and increasing technological mediation. As I show, physical contact with others and being in a crowd appear exclusively as inconvenient, frustrating, or threatening experiences in the novel. Thereafter, I analyze the dystopian images of violent, barbaric crowds in the text. I claim that they condense collective fears arising from the pandemic, and the novel sensitively points out the mechanisms of scapegoating in times of crisis. Finally, I argue that the novel also vividly portrays a mass experience that is not connected to physical presence. The “virtual crowd,” organized with the facilitation of mass media, is depicted as a multitude of lonely, isolated individuals. I scrutinize the characteristics of this crowd, as well as the role of biopolitical power and mass media—especially aggressive news streams—in organizing the masses and maintaining isolation.

Medical Metaphors in the Thirteenth-Century Sermon Collection of Pécs

Annamária Kovács — 2024-09-16

The Pécs University Sermons were composed at the end of the thirteenth century in Hungary, probably at a studium generale. The sermons contain many references from classical authors and philosophers. Among other things, they use numerous scientific and natural philosophical citations in their argumentation. This article focuses specifically on the medical quotations.

The use of medical motifs in theological argumentation has a long tradition: both the Bible and the Church Fathers drew an analogy between physical and spiritual healing. In the thirteenth century, however, this biblical tradition was transformed as theologians increasingly supplemented the biblical tradition with medical literature. In my paper, I examine how the biblical tradition and medical literature appear in the Pécs University Sermons and with what rhetorical aim medicine is used. Through the exemplary analysis of selected sermons, I present the different rhetorical situations in which medicine appears, and I argue that medical literature is not only used to complement the biblical tradition but that the medical quotations themselves could be the starting point for medical argumentation. I also examine which sources the author used and show that he quotes a lesser-known anatomical source, the Anatomia vivorum.

’Gypsies’, Natural Monogamy, and Violence Full of Love

Josef Řičář — 2024-09-16

The paper examines modern knowledge about non-human primates in Czech travel narratives concerning Africa and biological journals from the late nineteenth century to the end of the interwar period. Particular attention is given to the way discourse on primates and anthropological discourse mutually influenced each other. Inspired by the intersection of human – animal studies, critical race theory, and gender studies, the paper emphasizes the anthropomorphizing character of biological discourse and popular travel narratives. At the time, presentations of primates created a specific anthropological resource and, in addition, helped to naturalize the dominant racial and gender ideologies. In the context of the Austrian–Hungarian and Czechoslovakian relative inability to obtain colonial possessions in the way western powers did, the representations of anthropomorphized non-human primates can also be interpreted as a specific field where Czech colonial fantasies about dominance were expressed.

Presence – Donation – Event

István Dobos — 2024-09-16

The Helikon Publishing House has published (2006–2018) Sándor Márai’s (1900–1989) diaries in eighteen volumes of eight thousand pages under the title The Complete Diary. After Márai left the country for good in 1948 and went into exile, the communist regime eliminated him from the history of Hungarian literature, and generations grew up without reading his books or hearing about him in their literary studies.

The diary is a testament to the existential vulnerability of the writer in exile. This major piece of work has four layers: the first is made up of notes on regular readings, the second is about recent Hungarian history, the third is personal memory, and the fourth is the material for the absorption of the host country’s culture.

The Complete Diary changes our view of Márai, whose vision of Hungarian history is disturbing. He sees Hungary as a failed attempt to create a modern bourgeois nation. What is unique about Márai’s diary is the way it fuses memories of the personal past with reflections on the present. The recording of daily events goes beyond the genre of the diary: on the one hand towards the essay, on the other towards the novel.