{"id":292,"date":"2017-05-23T11:54:33","date_gmt":"2017-05-23T15:54:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogarchive.utc.edu\/history\/?p=292"},"modified":"2025-05-22T07:15:49","modified_gmt":"2025-05-22T11:15:49","slug":"dr-john-swansons-new-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogarchive.utc.edu\/history\/2017\/05\/23\/dr-john-swansons-new-book\/","title":{"rendered":"Dr. John Swanson’s New Book"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Dr. John Swanson’s<\/a><\/span><\/span> new book,<\/span> Tangible Belonging: Negotiating Germanness in Twentieth-Century Hungary<\/em><\/a><\/span><\/span>, has been published by<\/span> University of Pittsburgh Press<\/a><\/span><\/span>.<\/span><\/strong><\/h3>\n

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\u201cIn this engaging and well-researched study, Swanson tells us not just about the varieties of Germanness in the twentieth century, but also how minority identities are formed. The book is magnificent in its \u2018thick description,\u2019 and one gets a tangible sense of what it was like to be in a German village in interwar Hungary.\u201d \u00a0\u2014 \u00a0Winson Chu, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, author of The German Minority in Interwar Poland<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Tangible Belonging<\/em><\/span> presents a compelling historical and ethnographic study of the German speakers in Hungary, from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century. Through this tumultuous period in European history, the Hungarian-German leadership tried to organize German-speaking villagers, Hungary tried to integrate (and later expel) them, and Germany courted them. The German speakers themselves, however, kept negotiating and renegotiating their own idiosyncratic sense of what it meant to be German. John C. Swanson\u2019s work looks deeply into the enduring sense of tangible belonging that characterized Germanness from the perspective of rural dwellers, as well as the broader phenomenon of \u201cminority making\u201d in twentieth-century Europe.<\/span><\/p>\n

The chapters reveal the experiences of Hungarian Germans through the First World War and the subsequent dissolution of Austria-Hungary; the treatment of the German minority in the newly independent Hungarian Kingdom; the rise of the racial Volksdeutsche movement and Nazi influence before and during the Second World War; the immediate aftermath of the war and the expulsions; the suppression of German identity in Hungary during the Cold War; and the fall of Communism and reinstatement of minority rights in 1993.<\/span><\/p>\n

Throughout, Swanson offers colorful oral histories from residents of the rural Swabian villages to supplement his extensive archival research. As he shows, the definition of being a German in Hungary varies over time and according to individual interpretation, and does not delineate a single national identity. What it meant to be German was continually in flux. In Swanson\u2019s broader perspective, defining German identity is ultimately a complex act of cognition reinforced by the tangible environment of objects, activities, and beings. As such, it endures in individual and collective mentalities despite the vicissitudes of time, history, language, and politics.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dr. John Swanson’s new book, Tangible Belonging: Negotiating Germanness in Twentieth-Century Hungary, has been published by University of Pittsburgh Press.<\/p>\n

Continue Reading <\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":800,"featured_media":294,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[35044,83410,35701],"class_list":{"0":"post-292","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-faculty-news","8":"tag-faculty-news","9":"tag-john-swanson","10":"tag-what-history-teaches-you","11":"entry"},"yoast_head":"\nDr. John Swanson's New Book - History Archive: Jul 2007 - Oct 2025<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blogarchive.utc.edu\/history\/2017\/05\/23\/dr-john-swansons-new-book\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Dr. John Swanson's New Book - History Archive: Jul 2007 - Oct 2025\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Dr. John Swanson's new book, Tangible Belonging: Negotiating Germanness in Twentieth-Century Hungary, has been published by University of Pittsburgh Press. 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