Ágoston Berecz - Empty Signs, Historical Imaginaries: The Entangled Nationalization of Names and Naming in a Late Habsburg Borderland

General Editor: Howard Louthan, Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota

Volume 27
Empty Signs, Historical Imaginaries: The Entangled Nationalization of Names and Naming in a Late Habsburg Borderland
goston Berecz

Volume 26
Men under Fire: Motivation, Morale and Masculinity among Czech Soldiers in the Great War, 19141918
Ji Huteka

Volume 25
Nationalism Revisited: Austrian Social Closure from Romanticism to the Digital Age
Christian Karner

Volume 24
Entangled Entertainers: Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Sicle Vienna
Klaus Hdl

Volume 23
Comical Modernity: Popular Humour and the Transformation of Urban Space in Late Nineteenth-Century Vienna
Heidi Hakkarainen

Volume 22
Embers of Empire: Continuity and Rupture in the Habsburg Successor States after 1918
Edited by Paul Miller and Claire Morelon

Volume 21
The Art of Resistance: Cultural Protest against the Austrian Far Right in the Early Twenty-First Century
Allyson Fiddler

Volume 20
The Monumental Nation: Magyar Nationalism and Symbolic Politics in Fin-de-sicle Hungary
Blint Varga

Volume 19
Tropics of Vienna: Colonial Utopias of the Habsburg Empire
Ulrich E. Bach

Volume 18
Sacrifice and Rebirth: The Legacy of the Last Habsburg War
Edited by Mark Cornwall and John Paul Newman

The Entangled Nationalization of Names and Naming in a Late Habsburg Borderland

goston Berecz

First published in 2020 by
Berghahn Books
www.BerghahnBooks.com

2020 goston Berecz

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Names: Berecz, goston, author.

Title: Empty signs, historical imaginaries : the entangled nationalization of names and naming in a late Habsburg borderland / goston Berecz.

Description: First edition. | New York : Berghahn Books, 2020. | Series: Austrian and Habsburg studies ; vol 27 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019048164 (print) | LCCN 2019048165 (ebook) | ISBN 9781789206340 (hardback) | ISBN 9781789206357 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Names, Personal--Hungary. | Names, Personal--Political aspects--Hungary. | Names, Geographical--Hungary. | Names, Geographical--Political aspects--Hungary. | Names, Hungarian. | Names, Romanian.

Classification: LCC CS2910 .B47 2020 (print) | LCC CS2910 (ebook) | DDC 929.4/209439--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019048164

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019048165

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78920-634-0 hardback
ISBN 978-1-78920-635-7 ebook

My first word of gratitude goes to those who have read all or parts of the manuscript in its various incarnations and have commented on it: Balzs Trencsnyi, Maciej Janowski, Tomasz Kamusella, Judit Pl, Robert Nemes, Monika Bar, Christian Karner and Pieter Judson. I spent parts of the research and writing period in Bucharest and Munich as an International Fellow in New Europe College, in Florence as a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute, and in Leiden on a Doctoral Research Support Grant from Central European University. Further thanks are due to Victor Kardy, Luminia Dumnescu and Tams Farkas for permission to access and use their large research databases, to Nigel Smith and Michael Gnat for polishing my English, to Zsombor Bartos-Elekes for useful suggestions, to the late Mihly Hajd for his copy of Andrs Mezs Adatok, to Nndor Brdi and Gbor Egry for references on interwar Transylvania, to Piotr Kisiel and Justyna Walkowiak for access to their unpublished manuscripts, to Adela Hncu for her native Romanian expertise, to dm Kolozsi and Lily Iuga for hard-to-find material, to Viktor Lagutov for introducing me to QGIS, and, last but not least, to Susan Gal and Irina Marin for warm encouragement. Finally, I recognize the staff of the Szchnyi Library of Budapest, the Central University Library of Cluj, the Academy Library of Bucharest and the Ostlesesaal of the Bavarian State Library in Munich, who humoured my very numerous, unusual and seemingly incoherent requests without a word. All disclaimers apply.

It is fitting to add to a book on names a few clarifications about my own use of names.

I have tried to restore the Romanian names of people who appear under Hungarian forms in the sources, but were to all appearances Romanian. This has led to disputable results at times, but even these I found preferable to keeping the Hungarian name forms. A few people with known double loyalties will figure under double names like Grigore Moldovan/Moldovn Gergely.