A Case Study on Trianon

The l9th-entury British historian Edward Augustus Freeman (1823-1892) defined history simply as "past politics."¹ Although nowadays we tend to regard history as much more than that, we cannot deny the role of politics therein-not only of past politics, but of current politics as well. And this is true regardless of the specific school of history or orientation one tends to be associated with. Ideally, the discipline of history ought to be detached from party politics and ideological influences of one kind or another. In reality, however, it is generally influenced by numerous outside factors, including the background, the personality and the ideological convictions of the historian himself, as well as by his immediate cultural, economic and political environment.

While these external influences are generally present, their relative influence upon the profession and upon historians does tend to vary from region to region, and from period to period. Not counting instances where historians and their craft are controlled by totalitarian systems and by obligatory ideologies, these outside influences are most acutely felt during periods of national revivals and at times of great national crises. When a nation is in the process of emerging from historical obscurity, it needs the psychological stimuli derived from an allegedly great and glorious past. This also holds true in instances when a nation has been shaken by a major crisis or national catastrophe, and is in need of such stimuli in order to regain its will to live.

One could cite many examples of such phenomena from world history. In Europe such examples are especially plentiful in the history of those small nations in the continent's central and southeastern regions that have emerged or re-emerged from various levels of obscurity in the course of the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. Some of these nations are still trying to find their places in history through myths and various officially sponsored ideological props that require the mixing of history with generous doses of make-believe and current politics.²

Although the Hungarians and Poles were probably the very first among the nations of East Central Europe to become conscious of their nationhood and to go through a complex process of national, cultural and political revival, they too had to pass through various levels of romantic daydreaming, and they too had to witness the intrusion of political-ideological considerations into their historical writings. The most obvious and well-known examples of this phenomenon were the "mirage-chasing" historical works of Adam Paloczi-Horvath (1760-1820), Istvan Horvat (1784-1846) and a few others of similar bent during the early nineteenth century, when Hungarian nationalism mingled freely with Romanticism.³

This tendency declined and yielded its place to sober, scholarly historical research carried out by detached historians. Had the position of the Hungarian nation not changed in 1918, and had the Hungarian state not been mutilated and the nation dismembered and shaken to its very roots by the Treaty of Trianon, this trend toward scholarly detachment would undoubtedly have continued. But Trianon, which was immediately regarded as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, national catastrophe in the Hungarians' millennial history in the Carpathian Basin, had shaken basically all Hungarians, irrespective of their social standing, economic status, level of learning or political orientation. Certainly, no Hungarian historian who lived through those tragic events could remain unaffected by them. In fact the impact of these events upon the Hungarian mind was so thorough and pervasive that it has rightfully been called an intense "psychological shock."⁴

The historians who labored during and immediately after Hungary's geographical mutilation and who represented a goodly portion of the "conscience of their nation" were probably more affected than anyone else-with the possible exception of the most noted and sensitive poets and other men of letters. The historians were of course used to "living in the past." They had studied, restudied, and even "re-lived" psychologically the ups and downs of their nation's history. The shock effect of these developments was all the greater as this new disaster came hand in hand with the long sought-after national independence.

The nature and magnitude of Trianon's psychological shock upon contemporary Hungarian historians was best expressed by Gyula Szekfu (1883-1955), the dominant figure of interwar Hungarian historiography and the "father" of the likewise dominant new

Hungarian Geistesgeschichte School."⁵ Szekfu gave vent to his feelings in the agonizing introduction to his first post-Trianon work, the noted Harom nemzedek [Three Generations]. "This book had to be written. This book is my personal experience," wrote Szekfu, Then he continued:

In the midst of those trying events into which the catastrophe of October 1918 the collapse of Austria-Hungary had thrust us ... , I felt ... that I would never be able to recover my strength and inclination for work until haying taken account of the [causes of the ] decline that had led us to this disaster, I simply had to confront myself with the forces that have dragged my nation out of a stream of healthy evolution, Thus did I come to write this work, and ... thus did I redeem my soul.⁶

To Szekfu, the writing of the Three Generations constituted a spiritual catharsis through which he was able to release some of the psychological pressures that have accumulated within him. Not every Hungarian historian was able to produce a work of such proportions and such significance, Yet, virtually every historian worthy of the designation has written his own "Trianon book," or at least a "Trianon pamphlet."

Others, particularly amateur historians and other men of letters with less self-discipline than professional historians, lost their direction completely. They began to wander off in the direction of myth-seeking and self-delusion. Some of the most visible manifestations of this trend was the rebirth of the "mirage-chasing" historiography of Istvan Horvat that sought the roots of the Hungarians among the great civilizers of the ancient world (e.g. the Sumerians, Egyptians, Hittites, Etruscans, Indians, etc.), and the rise of a new wave of Turanism that rejected communion with the "faithless" West, and found solace in a hazy Pan-Turanian dream. The latter went so far as to try to purge Hungarian Civilization of its millennial Christian culture and faith, and to replace it with an artificially re-created "pure" Hungarian culture and religion. Szekfu rightfully called this phenomenon a new paganism" that all civilized Hungarians ought to reject.⁷

Although bitter and dejected about this trend toward self delusion, Szekfu did not really have to launch a major crusade against this unusual post-Trianon craze. Most Hungarian thinkers

rejected this irresponsible toying with the Hungarian past and future. Yet, at the same time, virtually all Hungarian intellectuals, irrespective of their ideological leanings, were extremely bitter about Trianon, and for a while most of them suffered from the so-called "Trianon syndrome." That this was so is best demonstrated by the fact that even such left-leaning cosmopolitan thinkers as Oscar Jaszi (1875-1957), associated with the progressive journal Huszadik Szazad [Twentieth Century], and the literary critic and publicist Hugo Ignotus (1869-1949) of the similarly progressive journal Nyugat [The West] wrote their own "Trianon books."⁸

Just as their fellow intellectuals in related fields, Hungarian historians of the post-Trianon period also suffered from the Trianon syndrome. This was rather natural, as they were subjected to a diverse number of psychological, ideological, social and political pressures. As catalogued recently by Ferenc Glatz in his book on the relationship between the historian and politics in Hungary, these pressures stemmed from a number of sources.⁹ They included: The loss of the familiar "historical stage" which served as the scene of many of the great and sad events of Hungarian history; the loss of much of the written and unwritten sources of this history; the loss of a goodly portion of the educated reading public, who were either cut off by the new borders, or became pauperized and thus unable to buy works of history; and finally the loss of a whole intellectual-ideological "medium," represented by a society and a state on the move-the kind of society Hungary had been before 1914. But Trianon also meant to these historians the end of a relatively secure socio-economic existence, the comfortable way of life that they and their reading public used to know. Thus, from the vantage point of the Hungarian historians, Trianon had turned out to be much more than a major national catastrophe. It was also a personal catastrophe of unusual proportions that undermined both the material and the psychological well-being of historians, and this was bound to affect their relationship to their discipline.

Already during World War I Hungarian historians were aware

that Hungary's multinational composition, as well as the prospect of defeat, would make the country's mutilation inevitable. This is clearly evident from a series of studies written by respected historians as early as 1916, which tried to prove the Hungarians' sole historical right to the Carpathian Basin.¹⁰ As a matter of fact, arguments based on historical rights became the number one weapon in the arsenal of post-Trianon Hungarian irredentism, which also explains the unusually significant role of historians in the Hungarian campaign for revisionism. Naturally, proponents of revisionism made use of a number of other arguments as well. These included references to historic Hungary's natural geographical and economic unity, to the cultural pre-eminence of the Hungarians in the Carpathian Basin, as well as to the ethnic principles that have been violated by the transfer of 3.5 million Hungarians (one-third of the nation) to the new successor states.¹¹ The latter argument, however, was much less frequently used, for it could only have resulted in a partial revisionism. Not so the historical argument, which was aimed at restoring the territorial integrity of historic Hungary.

The most popular and most commonly used historical argument was that the Hungarians were the first to establish a lasting and viable state in the area of Greater Hungary; a state which became the bastion of Western Christianity against eastern barbarism, and which was destined to keep the equilibrium between the large Germanic and Slavic worlds. How this was to be done by such a small nation was never discussed. But these views gradually penetrated the whole historical profession, and then began to appear as guiding principles in the works of most historians during the interwar years. Some of these early works were small political pamphlets only inspired by the immediate needs of the moment. Others, however, were serious historical works that came to constitute the very backbone of interwar Hungarian historiography.

Among the numerous early political pamphlets written with the intent to head off the impending catastrophe of Trianon, those put out by the Hungarian Academy and the Hungarian universities were all written by first-rate historians. Thus, the Academy's appeal to the "civilized world" was composed by David Angyal (1857-1947),¹² a noted professor of Hungarian history at the University of Budapest (1909-1929). Similar appeals by the Universities of Budapest, Pozsony and Debrecen-although not published under the names of the authors-were written by Jozsef Holub (1885-1962), Antal Hodinka

(1865-1946) and Istvan Rugonfalvi-Kiss (1881-1957) respectively, all of them significant historians connected with these universities.¹³

The University of Budapest's publication La Hongrie (1918)¹⁴ described Hungary's multinational composition in the course of the l2th-14th centuries, pointing out the low proportion of the non-Hungarian nationalities, and then detailed how the number of these nationalities grew through constant immigration during the following period, particularly during the Turkish and the post-Turkish era in Hungarian history. The University of Pozsony's Publication Pro Hungaria (1918)¹⁵ concentrated on the Slovak question and tried to demonstrate how Hungarian leniency and liberalism assured their survival as a nationality throughout the centuries. This same work also tried to convince the Slovaks that they had much less to fear from Hungary, a country that had protected and preserved them for a whole millennium than from the projected Czechoslovak state, where they were bound to lose their national identity.

This Hungarian leniency and tolerance was also emphasized by the University of Debrecen's clarion call to "the universities of the civilized world."¹⁶ Like those issued by its sister institutions, this work also tried to gain sympathy for the Hungarians by pointing out that Hungary had always served as Western Civilization's bulwark against the intrusions of the Orient, and that the Hungarians are in effect the victims of their role as the defenders of Christianity. This pamphlet described the Hungarians as a "nation of mediators" and Hungary as a "link" between the East and the West. Historic Hungary was also characterized as a "community of nations" that are bound together by common history, common traditions and common interests.¹⁷

These four pamphlets produced under the auspices of Hungary's top four scholarly institutions (only the University of Kolozsvar was left out) all contain some of those basic features that will characterize much of the better-quality Hungarian revisionist literature of the interwar period. They were written by historians, they were structured around historical arguments, and they all emphasized the Hungarians' primary historical rights in the Carpathian Basin, as well as Hungary's unique role as the defensive bastion of Western Christianity.

The first historian to tackle the problem of Hungary's dismemberment (or rather, possible dismemberment) from the point of view of historical rights was Janos Karacsonyi (1858-1929), a Titular Bishop

of the Catholic Church and a Professor of Church History at the University of Budapest. He did this as early as 1916 in a book entitled: A magyar nemzet torteneti joga hazank teruletehez a Karpatoktol le az Adriaig [The Historical Right of the Hungarian Nation to Our Country's Territory from the Carpathians to the Adriatic].¹⁸ This work appears to have been written as a direct response to Arnold Toynbee's politically motivated work, The Nationality and the War, which appeared in 1915.¹⁹ Already at that early stage of the war Toynbee called for the mutilation of the Central Powers and for the dismemberment of Hungary on the basis of ethnic considerations.²⁰ While trying to apply the principle of national self-determination to Britain's adversaries in the war, however, Toynbee was reluctant to do so in the case of the Entente states and their allies. In the latter case, political and economic considerations seem to have taken precedence over ethnic matters.

Toynbee's work and other similar studies by scholars on the Entente side naturally called for response on the part of Hungarian historians, and Karacsonyi's above cited work was only the first of such responses. Although his study was obviously written with a specific goal in mind, it was not a political tract, but a work of historical scholarship. Karacsonyi based his arguments-as did most subsequent Hungarian scholars-on certain known or presumed facts of history. His main thesis was that the Hungarians, and only they held full historical rights to the territory of Greater Hungary. He pointed out that when they captured the Carpathian Basin in the 9th century, the area was basically a no man's land, with only the fragmentary remains of some of the transitory people who had lived there for shorter or longer periods and then were absorbed by the conquering Hungarians. Thus by the end of the 12th century, in spite of additional settlers invited by Hungary's kings, Hungary was basically populated only by Hungarians. Karacsonyi even denied the presence of the ancestors of the Slovaks in 9th-century Hungary. In his view, the latter had nothing to do with the ephemeral and obscure "Great Moravia." Rather they were latecomers who began to infiltrate Hungary only at the end of the 11th century, and then came in increasing numbers during the Hussite Wars of the 15th century. Moreover, while during the Turkish Conquest the Hungarians were decimated, the Slovaks "multiplied happily in their mountains" and thus Slovakized much of Northern Hungary. Although a number of Hungarian scholars did not accept Karacsonyi's view concerning

the Slovaks' origins, they all agreed basically that the latter did indeed increase considerably at the expense of the Hungarians.

Karacsonyi also dealt at some length with the Romanians, and true to the generally accepted scholarly view in Hungary and in the West, he too rejected the so-called Daco-Roman origins of the Romanians. He claimed-this time on the basis of generally accepted scholarly foundations-that the latter were likewise newcomers to the area, who began to move into Transylvania from the Balkans only in the late 12th and early 13th century. Prior to that they lived in the mountains of the Balkans, and their language evolved in the vicinity of the Illyrian speaking Albanians.

Unlike the ancestors of the Romanians, the Croats were viewed by Karacsonyi as people who had settled in Croatia before the Hungarian conquest. But Croatia in those days was basically limited to the Adriatic lands, and the area between the Save and the Drave Rivers was solidly Hungarian-inhabited right up to the Turkish period. Karacsonyi also had something to say about the nature of the Hungaro-Croatian union which, he claimed, was based on conquest. Indeed, he asserted that not until the 17th century did Croatian historians begin to talk and write about various alleged conditions to this union (i.e. the Pacta Conventa of 1102). From the historical point of view, then, even the rights of the Croatians were thought by Karacsonyi to be based simply on subsequent concessions granted by the Hungarian Crown.

Karacsonyi also devoted some attention to the other nationalities of the Hungarian Kingdom (e.g. Serbians, Ruthenians, Germans, Bulgarians, Vends, Armenians, Albanians, Poles, Jews, Gypsies, etc.), as well as to ethnic groups that had been absorbed centuries earlier (e.g. the Pechenegs, Cumans, Jases, Tartars, Czechs, etc.). He concluded his study by reasserting his belief that only the Hungarians possess full-fledged historical rights to Hungary, and consequently they have the right and duty 'to cling to this country, and to view every attack against the integrity of their homeland as treason. By doing so, "all the Hungarian nation does is to defend its millennial rights."²¹

That Karacsonyi's work was generally regarded as a good and effective summary of the Hungarian view of Hungary's history is best demonstrated by the fact that in 1920 it also appeared in a shortened English version.²² In the following year it was republished in Hungarian,²³ and subsequently it became the number one source for

many of the better quality works of Hungarian irredentism. The authors of the latter works also based their arguments almost exclusively on the Hungarians' unique historical rights, and pointed out that Hungary's existing nationality problems are in effect the result of Hungarian generosity in having welcomed national groups in periods when their national existence was threatened. While willing to give credit to the nationalities for their contributions to the Hungarian state, they denied that the latter had the right of separation. In agreement with Karacsonyi, they were unable to perceive the future of the people of the Carpathian Basin in any other way except in a "common Hungarian homeland."²⁴

The ever-increasing number of "Trianon books" that followed the appearance of Karacsonyi's pioneering study represented numerous disciplines and rather diverse levels of scholarship. Whether written by historians, economists, geographers or simply publicists, whether evincing a high level of scholarship or simply propaganda, the authors of these works all strove to emphasize the unique historical rights of the Hungarians to the territory of historic Hungary.²⁵

As an example, this emphasis is quite evident in the works of the constitutional historian Bela Ivanyi (1878-1964) of the University of Debrecen, who concentrated on the Slovak question. In his work Pro Hungaria Superiore (1919)²⁶ he tried to buttress Karacsonyi's contention that the Slovaks had nothing to do with the Slavs of Great Moravia, and therefore with the Czechs and the Moravians of the later centuries. In his view the Slovaks were really Wends (Windisch) from the upper Odera region, who began to move across the Northern Carpathians only in the 13th century. As such, they had no pre-conquest historical rights in the Carpathian Basin, as claimed by most of the Slovak national historians.

Similar works, emphasizing the Hungarians' historical rights, were also authored by such "grand old men" of Hungarian historiography as Vilmos Fraknoi (1843-1921), David Angyal (1857-1943) and Henrik Marczali (1856-1940), as well as by such younger notables as Sandor Domanovszky (1877-1955), Jeno Horvath (1881~1950), Balint Homan (1885-1952), and Gyula Szekfu. Some of these scholars-e.g., Fraknoi, Angyal and Horvath-concentrated largely on demonstrating Hungary's innocence in the origins of World War I and on the consequent injustices of the Treaty of Trianon.²⁷ Marczali devoted his A beke konyve [The Book of Peace] (1920)²⁸ to summarizing the history of the Hungarians in such a way as to make it

into "a mission to spread culture and freedom" in the lands of the Hungarian Crown. While discussing Hungary's history in these terms, Marczali also appears to have agreed with the French historian, Louis Eisenmann, who declared that "to preserve themselves, they [the Hungarians] must dominate the whole of Hungary ... [and then] transform their 'historical' state into a 'national' state."²⁹ That this situation did not come about in the half century after Eisenmann's statement, according to Marczali, was the result of the fact that social and economic questions in Dualist Hungary were decided on the basis of party and personal considerations, and not on the basis of national interests.

While Marczali concentrated on emphasizing the special mission of the Hungarians in the Carpathian Basin, the younger Sandor Domanovszky, who was the most important exponent of the Hungarian Kulturgeschichte School, with a distinct agrarian orientation, returned again to stressing his nation's unique historical rights to the area.³⁰ His first contribution to this question was a short work entitled A magyar kerdes torteneti szempontbol tekintve [The Hungarian Question from the Historical Perspective] (1920),³¹ which was written specifically for the non-Hungarian reader. Domanovszky basically followed the path outlined by Karacsonyi, and began his work by describing the region's ethnic composition in the period between the 9th and the 13th centuries. He claimed that the ethnic fragments found by the Hungarians at the time of their conquest were all assimilated in the course of the next three centuries, along with most of the new settlers of the early Christian period (i.e. the Pechenegs, Cumans, as well as most of the German, Italian, French, and Spanish burghers of the 11th and 12th centuries). In his view, the nationality blocks along the country's frontier regions came into being later as a result of specific settlement policies of the Hungarian kings, who invited the latter for economic and defensive purposes. The ancestors of the Slovaks, the Ruthenians and the Romanians all came to Hungary in this manner, and then multiplied in their less-exposed mountain regions at the expense of the Hungarians. Domanovszky was also at pains to point out that up to the 17th century there was no nationality question in Hungary. In his view this is quite evident from the fact that the oft-recurring peasant revolts were purely social conflicts, wherein it is impossible to tell the national identities of the combatants. Hungary's nationality problems began to arise only in the 18th century, when the expulsion

of the Turks was followed by a Habsburg-initiated policy to settle the vacated and depopulated lands with various newcomers. These included Serbian settlers in Southern Hungary, more Vlach peasants in Transylvania, and various German and French elements in Trans-Danubia and the Great Hungarian Plain. Simultaneously with this settlement policy, the Habsburgs also began to apply the policy of divide et impera, which gave birth to various separatist movements among Hungary's ever more numerous national minorities. But these separatist movements had nothing to do with any real or alleged nationality oppression in Hungary, which, in so far as there was any, was the product of certain mid-and late-19th-century developments. Domanovszky closed his study with the conviction that Hungary's territorial mutilation-carried out to a large degree in violation of the very principle of self-determination which was used as a pretext for its dismemberment-could only result in ever more conflict in the destabilized Danubian lands. In this prognosis Domanovszky was proved to be correct.³²

Although one of the most apolitical of interwar Hungary's prominent historians, Domanovszky authored several related studies as well. Moreover, he also incorporated his views into his short Die Geschichte Ungarns [History of Hungary] (1923),³³ which likewise reflects his emphasis upon social, as opposed to political, developments in Hungary's millennial history.

The course taken by Karacsonyi, and then by Ivanyi and Domanovszky, was also followed by the respected medievalist Balint Homan, whose subsequent involvement in politics and rightward drift cannot alter the fact that prior to the 1930s he was a prominent scholar, whose related works are still highly regarded today.

Homan's first essay on the subject of Hungarian territorial right "The Settlement of the Hungarians" (1920),³⁴ was basically a summary of his views expressed in an earlier work entitled "The Settlement of the Conquering Tribes" (1912).³⁵ In this work he tried to reconstruct the general geographical dispersal of the conquering Hungarian tribes, while at the same time taking account of the various peoples they may have found in the Carpathian Basin in the 9th century. In his view the latter included the remains of the Avars and the related Hungarian speaking Szekelys (Szeklers) of Eastern Transylvania, various Slavic tribes (including some of the ancestors of the Slovaks), as well as various Turko-Bulgarian, Dacian and

Gepidan remains, but no Vlachs (i.e. the ancestors of the Romanians, who still lived in the Balkans). Where Homan disagreed with Karacsonyi, Ivanyi and Domanovszky was the Slovak question, though he too believed that with a few exceptions, by the late 12th century most of these pre-Conquest peoples have been assimilated into the Hungarians, and that by the year 1200 about ninety percent of Hungary's population was Hungarian speaking and thus largely homogeneous. Like his fellow historians, Homan explained Hungary's subsequent multinational composition in the modern period by pointing to several waves of new immigrations, particularly during and after the Turkish period.

Although obviously dejected as was virtually every Hungarian, Homan ended his essay of 1920 on a positive note by professing his faith in the unique destiny of his nation in the lands conquered by their ancestors: "In the course of the fifteen hundred years that preceded the Hungarian conquest, about thirty nations have conquered ... various regions of our country. Yet, none of them was able to establish a lasting rule. ... Hungary may be dismembered, divided and truncated, its political unity may be shattered, but the country's natural geographical and economic unity, and its people's cultural unity, which is the product of a long historical evolution, are indissoluble. For this reason, its political unity is bound to be restored within a short period by the mighty powers of the laws of nature and of history."³⁶

These hopeful views enunciated by Homan in 1920, which may have been the result of forced optimism, became part of the post-Trianon Hungarian historiography just as much as the emphasis upon the Hungarians' historical rights put forth by Karacsonyi four years earlier. Whether out of true conviction, or simply out of desperation, professing the natural, and therefore basically indissoluble, geographical, economic and cultural unity of the Lands of the Hungarian Holy Crown became a guiding principle in much of interwar Hungarian historiography. It also penetrated the related works of geographers, economists, and various other men of letters. And while belief in this principle came to dominate much of contemporary Hungarian historical thinking, the exponents of post-Trianon Hungary's cultural policy also undertook a conscious effort to prepare the Hungarian nation for the prophesized reunification of Greater Hungary and for the position of cultural pre-eminence and

political leadership in that hoped-for reunited "Land of Milk and Honey."³⁷

As indicated above, the disorientation and the subsequent reorientation of Hungarian historians and Hungarian historical thinking was a direct result of historic Hungary's dismemberment. The reorientation of the institutional and ideological base of the historical profession, on the other hand, was done consciously and in a premeditated manner by Count Kuno Klebelsberg (1878-1932), Hungary's Minister for Culture during the first half of the interwar period (1922-1931).³⁸

Klebelsberg is rightfully held to be the greatest of interwar Hungary's cultural politicians. He was responsible for the total reorganization of the Hungarian educational system from the lowest to the highest level, as well as for the introduction of state support for scientific and scholarly research-a phenomenon that was basically unknown in Hungary prior to World War I.

Before Trianon, i.e. before Klebelsberg's appearance on the Hungarian cultural scene, most historical research was basically the result of individual efforts and initiatives that had been carried on by college and university professors, archivists, librarians, and to a lesser degree by some of the better secondary school teachers. The profession as a whole, however, was under the influence of the Hungarian Academy's Historical Commission, founded in 1854, and the Hungarian Historical Association established thirteen years later (1867). This influence, however, did not mean financial support beyond certain publishing opportunities; these institutions, then were dependent exclusively on foundation money and on private funds. State support was completely absent. This did provide of course an unusual degree of independence for the profession, but it left historians and their organizations dependent upon the good will of well-to-do donors, mostly aristocrats, with all the implications that their support implied.

Klebelsberg was well aware of this system's shortcomings already in the years before Trianon. Thus, when in 1917 he was elected to the presidency of the Hungarian Historical Association (1917-1932), while already serving as State Secretary in the Ministry of Culture, he immediately went to work to elaborate a detailed plan for state support for historical research.³⁹ This was to include scholarships, research and publication grants, as well as the eventual establishment

of a series of state-funded historical research institutes and other centers of Hungarian learning, both at home and abroad.

In line with this policy, as soon as political conditions permitted such measures, Klebelsberg revived the Hungarian Historical Institute in Rome (established by Vilmos Fraknoi in 1885), strengthened the Hungarian Institute at the University of Berlin (established in 1916), and-what is much more significant-in 1920 he laid the foundations for the highly influential and prestigious Hungarian Historical Research Institute of Vienna.⁴⁰ Although located abroad, the Viennese Institute became perhaps the most significant center for Hungarian historical research. Being close to the important archives of the former imperial city, which held so much of the sources of Hungarian history, the Institute became a magnet for many of the country's noted researchers, and at the same time it also came to serve as the primary post-doctoral training center for the most promising young Hungarian historians.

The foundation of the Hungarian Historical Research Institute of Vienna was soon followed by the establishment of a series of other Hungarian studies centers abroad. These included the Collegium Hungaricums of Vienna, Berlin and Rome, as well as dozens of Hungarian institutes, professorships and lectureships attached to some of the most prominent universities in Europe and the United States.

In 1922 Klebelsberg took several other steps toward increasing the state's financial support for historical and related studies. These steps included the administrative centralization of the country's most important centers of historical research and learning, and the initiation of a series of publication ventures. The aim of the first step was to expedite and coordinate historical research, while the goal of the latter was to make available to researchers the most important sources of modern and recent Hungarian history, and thus, hopefully, present a more balanced view of Hungary's recent past than the one that had been formed and disseminated by the country's critics during the early part of the century. Undoubtedly, this was a political goal; but a goal that in the mind of its author was meant simply to correct a distorted picture, and thus restore truth, justice and a degree of objectivity to the one sided assessment of Hungary's and the Hungarians' recent past. The most important of these publication projects initiated by Klebelsberg was the so-called Fontes [Sources] series, which, true to the needs of the times, placed an unusual emphasis

upon the sources of the nationality question in 18th and 19th-century Hungary.⁴¹

While establishing the institutional base of a renewed and reoriented historical profession, Klebelsberg was also at work in formulating the main ideological foundations of interwar Hungarian historiography. Known as neo-nationalism, this ideology switched the attention of the Hungarians from the state to the nation, and from their former political pre-eminence to their current and hoped-for continued cultural pre-eminence in the Carpathian Basin. In a sense, this switch was an unavoidable by-product of the new realities that had constricted Hungarian political control to only a small central section of the former Kingdom of Hungary and placed over one-third of the Hungarian nation under foreign rule.

A Case Study on Trianon