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This article examines the child-relief activities of the American Red Cross in Hungary in the aftermath of the Great War, offering an insight into the workings of humanitarianism in interwar Europe. A close look at this one Central European ‘playground’ of transatlantic intervention helps us understand the logic and the underlying political, economic and ideological motives behind Allied humanitarian aid to ‘enemy’ children. Analysis of the ways in which the war’s aftermath affected children, their bodies and their relief throws light on the relationship between violent conflicts, children in need and humanitarian intervention. The article looks particularly at the role of the child’s damaged body and its photographic representation, making it what Cathleen Canning calls an ‘embodied experience of war’. Exploration of the humanitarian discourse around the suffering child helps us identify the humanitarian reaction to the unforeseen social consequences of wartime confrontation. The article argues that the harmed body of the ‘enemy child’ served to mobilise transnational compassion that challenged the war’s deeply anchored ‘friend–foe’ mentality. The child turned into a means of configuring and translating human suffering beyond ideological and political borders. At the same time humanitarian child relief helped to further consolidate asymmetric international power relations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the social upheaval surrounding the 1919 Communist Hungarian Revolution and subsequent establishment and collapse of the Hungarian Soviet Republic through an examination of the nation's domestic sphere. The author sees political activity and class conflict as having been carried out within Hungary's domestic sphere. They ways in which domestic work carried out by women helped to inform middle class identity and uphold class divisions are explained. It is argued that a focus on domestic relations allows women to be seen as political actors during the conflict.

Postwar Hungarian Communists wanted to construct the history of 1919 as an instance of a usable past and establish the First Hungarian Soviet Republic as the praefiguratio of their own regime. In this attempt they could benefit from previous Soviet exercises in historical typology, which identified episodes in the past as models for contemporary political action. Nonetheless, the thirtieth anniversary of the Hungarian Bolshevik regime in 1919 was not only an occasion for creating a historical interpretation adequate for the objectives of Sovietization. The ceremonies did not merely aim at making their conception of history authentic, but also to induce a particular politicized relationship to historical time. Yet, the ceremonies Hungarian Communists carefully designed to disseminate their political agenda failed in fulfilling these goals. Their failure calls the attention to that the relationship of cautiously executed political rituals and the credibility of ideological messages is far from being unambiguous. The case of the thirtieth anniversary of First Hungarian Soviet Republic provides the opportunity to examine how historical festivals function and what are the criteria of successful political rituals. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In interwar debates about Hungarian modernity, the countryside played a prominent symbolic role. For conservative nationalists, the Hungarian countryside became a symbol and source of authentic, 'traditional' Hungarian national culture, unchanging, hierarchical, ordered society and stable community, and national uniqueness. Entertainment films of the 1930s provided alternative representations of the countryside that upheld the possibility of modernising traditional Hungary. According to the films, modern Hungary would be created at the intersection and out of the cooperation between rural and urban, modern and traditional. The films questioned and challenged the idea that the rural was 'pure', authentic, untainted, but they also rejected the idea that it was shameful, hopelessly backward, or unable to change. Showing the countryside as both traditional and part of modern mass culture, as both nostalgically stable and an exotic vacationland, the films offered an integrative vision of Hungary which destabilised assumptions of both liberals and conservatives. Popular films used the countryside to provide a unique and alternative vision of modern Hungary that was integrative and reconciliatory; they provided an outlet for a liberal, democratic, capitalist perspective unavailable elsewhere in the public sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses everyday life as an analytical type of social category. The author explains that material forces can determine the optional ways of life both for individuals and their categories. Factors which make up preliminary conditions include the world of work, income differences and the location of residence. The author presents the identification of social categories through examples taken from documents on the history of mentality during the reign of Hungarian leader Miklós Horthy de Nagybánya.

The article discusses how a revival of Hungarian folk dancing through the táncház, or dance house, movement illustrated attempts to promote folk national cultivation in Hungary between World War I and World War II. Ethnographer István Györffy proposed a plan to promote folk culture as a way of strengthening the Hungarian cultural identity. The author suggests Györffy's plan draws on collective memory and comments on the role of dancing in nation-building and the formation of states. She suggests the népi movement served as folk critiques that helped define Hungarian identity and that the dance house movement of the 1970s was the actualization of Györrfy's plan.