From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 120-122:
Many residents in these small-town [Bohemian] communities knew German for the sake of public life, but it stirred no deeper sense of loyalty, whereas Czech was the language of the intimacy of the home. They flocked to spectacles that were extensions of their families’ lives, a “traveling theater nation,” where people sang together, instantly understood allusions, and nodded their heads about things that mattered, comedic or tragic. The punch lines came in rapid succession and served to define the community: Czechs were the people who got the jokes and laughed uncontrollably, while their “betters” stared in befuddlement.
Still, the Czech movement advanced slowly against ideas of respectability and facts of ownership. All the established theaters in Bohemia and Moravia remained in German hands. A barrage of petitions moved imperial authorities to permit the building of a Czech theater at Prague, yet they allotted no money for it. Supporting a “nationalist” undertaking was out of the question, and the authorities wanted the two ethnicities to cooperate as they did in the Estates Theater in Prague, where the same actors appeared in German and Czech operas. But ultimately, no force could stop the dividing of institutions in Bohemia. When Czech patriots got a chance, they separated from the Germans as soon as they could, first in theaters but then on every other stage, whether cultural, scientific, economic, religious, or political.
In the early nineteenth century, theaters also expanded in the Hungarian cities Pest and Pressburg, and Magyar-language productions rapidly displaced German. But by the 1830s, there was little to struggle about. If the Hungarian movement wanted Hungarian theater, the parliament simply decreed it. The gentry political elite that controlled this institution was the national movement, and its prime efforts had moved to the stage of public life: to the most recent speeches of Kossuth, or to debates about political reform between him and more moderate opponents that filled the newspapers.
By the 1830s the Hungarian movement was imagining how to take control of and build the institutions of a nation-state that might stand next to England or France, sharing a point of view that would emerge among Czech politicians only two or three generations later. At this juncture, the Hungarian and Czech movements each desired what the other took for granted. If Czech patriots looked with envy on the museums, high schools, casinos, and theaters sprouting up around the Kingdom of Hungary, Magyar activists looked jealously at the cities and industries, roads, bridges, and urban prosperity of Bohemia, the most economically advanced place in the monarchy.
Bohemia had long stood at the crossroads of commercial routes, and it possessed age-old industries, a diversified and intensive agriculture, and an educated workforce in its innumerable small towns and cities. From the time of Joseph II, we can trace a growth spike that made Bohemia unrecognizable within a generation. The number of linen looms in Moravia went from 8,769 in 1775 to 10,412 in 1780, and 14,349 in 1798. Workers in the Moravian textile industry increased from about 288,000 in 1780 to 504,000 in 1789. Glass, wool, cotton, and stationery manufacturing likewise improved in the late eighteenth century, and agricultural products became more abundant. Such increases in production then fostered the expansion of regional and transregional markets, which in turn promoted the communication and movement of people from villages to growing towns.
At the same time, the transformation from rural to modern was achingly gradual in Hungary, noticeable in reforms accomplished through the strong will of a few workaholics like István Széchenyi, the most spectacular being the Chain Bridge connecting Buda and Pest in 1849, designed by Scottish engineers and financed by Greek capital. Yet Hungary’s vaunted reform parliaments of the 1830s and 1840s did little to advance modernization beyond measures facilitating the litigation of commercial disputes; their major achievement was to firm up the use of Hungarian in the educational system.
Hungary remained overwhelmingly and unproductively agricultural, facing tremendous legal barriers to even the thought of modernization. Seigniorial land could not be bought or sold, and peasants were not a labor force available to emergent industry but instead were bound servants of their lords. Széchenyi understood that agricultural land had to attract credit to prosper, but even after 1848, when seigniorial rights were abolished, Hungary did not bring in much foreign investment. Rather than put their money in the agricultural enterprise of an underdeveloped country, Western credit markets tended to fund transportation and industry in more prosperous regions.
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