Category Archives: Germany

by | 13 December 2023 · 6:23 am

Buda and Pest Under Maria Theresa

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 102-104:

The relative peace and stability of Maria Theresa’s reign brought growing prosperity, and living conditions in the twin towns improved, though slowly. Some municipal services began running fairly well. From the 1770s the water supply in large parts of both Buda and Pest were built – first with wooden and then lead pipes. The first postmark in Buda dates from 1752 and the first post office opened in 1762, opposite the Matthias Church in Buda. A music conservatory, a veterinary school and a botanical gardens opened in Buda in the 1780s. In the 1730s in Pest there were very few stone buildings; most were made of puddled clay with thatched roofs. By 1765 453 of the 1,146 known buildings on the Pest side of the river were made of stone, and by 1790 around three-quarters of the 2,250 buildings were.

But there was no boom for business, and no lines of credit available to start one. The Hungarian nobles – the lesser and higher – had a disdain for commerce and trade that the British gentry had lost sometime in the seventeenth century. The few financiers, manufacturers, large-scale traders and better-off artisans of both Buda and Pest invariably came from non-Magyar families, which in any case formed the majority of the twin towns’ population. The earliest, almost immediately after the siege of Buda ended, were a number of Greek families who saw an opportunity – as well as escape from Turkish rule – and established businesses in Pest. Their names, Magyarized from around the 1730s onwards, became well known: Haris, Sina and Nákó for milling and foodstuffs, Sacelláry, Lyca and Mannó for textiles, leather and timber, Agorasztó and Muráthy for the wine trade. Then more came from further afield: Gregerson (Norwegian) and Ganz (Swiss) for clothes; the Swiss traders Aebly, Haggenmacher and several Serbs – Petrovics, Vrányi, Grabowski, Bogosich, Mosconyi – for assorted trades from metalwork to carpentry. Few Magyars were setting up businesses. The real problem, in Buda especially, was that comparatively few people engaged in any kind of trade or industry – according to contemporary economists who studied census figures, just one in eighty-nine people in Hungary at the end of the eighteenth century, compared to one in fourteen in Austria and one in nine in the Lombardy region.

The British naturalist Robert Townson visited Budapest in 1790, as few of his compatriots did then. Pest and Buda were definitely not on the Grand Tour at that time. The Turkish baths of Buda fascinated him; they were not strictly segregated as they would be from the middle of the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, but were more gender-neutral.

…

The animal fights in Pest, involving bears, cocks and dogs, horrified him. His journal mentions many times how diverse the towns were, with Greek, Balkan and Jewish traders crowding the marketplace. He mentioned one type of business that as much as any other was the defining feature of the Habsburg lands, and crucial to the culture of the city that would become Budapest. Kemnitzer’s was the progenitor of all the coffee houses in the golden age of Budapest and it became an instant success. It was the creation of Johann Kemnitzer, a master tanner, who had done well in his trade and built a large, three-storey house at the Pest side of the pontoon bridge, where Vigadó Square meets Deák Street today. In 1789 he opened the ground floor as a café and within a few months it was the most famous coffee house east of Vienna, with spacious rooms, marble columns, stucco on the arched ceilings, four crystal chandeliers, ornately gilded fireplaces and a fine kitchen.

Townson went there every day during his stay to listen and watch, surprised at the varied clientele who frequented the place: ‘All ranks and both sexes may come; hairdressers in their powdered coats, and old market-women come here and take their coffee or drink their rosolio as well as Counts and Barons…it is an elegant house and very comfortable dinners may be had.’

Another thing that surprised him was that the main language he heard on both sides of the river was German, spoken by Hungarians, Germans, Slavs and Jews on the streets. He almost never heard the sound of Magyar.

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Filed under Austria, economics, Germany, Greece, Hungary, language, migration, religion, Yugoslavia

by | 10 December 2023 · 6:09 am

Ottoman Rule in Budun

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 64, 67-69:

Almost every time I visit Budapest, the first place I go is a quiet, out-of-the-way section of old cobbled streets, halfway up Rózsadomb (Rose Hill) on the Buda side of the river. Here is the graceful white mausoleum of Gül Baba, a Dervish Muslim holy man of the sixteenth century, a favourite of Suleiman the Magnificent, who oversaw the Bektashi order of monks entrusted with the spiritual welfare of the Janissaries. Mid-morning there is usually nobody about in the surrounding lanes – Ankara utca, Mecset (mosque) utca, Török (Turk) utca, Gül Baba utca – one of the most expensive residential neighbourhoods in Budapest. In April, after the frosts have melted away, the graceful stone tomb is surrounded by the scent of violets. A month or so later come the roses of Rózsadomb, pink damascenas mainly, said to have been brought to Buda by Gül Baba. Whether that is true or not, the flowers and their scent, along with bath houses, paprika – and of course coffee – are the few remaining physical reminders of the 150-year-long occupation of Buda by the Turks. Not a bad legacy when you consider the ways other imperial masters who conquered Hungary have left their mark on Budapest – Hitler’s Nazis, say, or Stalin’s commissars. Sitting on a bench at Rózsadomb gazing at the sweep of the Danube is a healthy place for a historian to loaf and think.

…

Christians and Muslims (for much of the time the majority of the Hungarian population left in the town) rubbed along reasonably well. In the market, pork and wine were sold in the Christian-owned stalls, lamb, sherbet and coffee in the Turkish ones. The latter was one of the few things that the ‘infidel’ non-Muslims took a liking to straight away, though at first it was expensive; this was the birth of the Middle European coffee house that later would become so supremely important in the culture of Budapest.

In general, trade in everything was poor, for demand was so low. Vineyards in the Buda Hills rotted, so locals learned to use varieties of vegetable, for example corn, which flourished from the sixteenth century on. The main problem was that Buda’s population fell continuously over the 150 years of Ottoman occupation: the birth rate went down sharply, and over generations families left in order to better themselves, whether to Royal Hungary or to Transylvania. The drop was dramatic immediately after Mohács, and continued. Turkish figures registered a fall in tax-paying households throughout their Hungarian domains from 58,742 in 1577 to only 12,527 in 1663. At one point in the 1620s the German and Magyar population of Budun was not much more than 2,000. The Turkish garrison rose and fell depending on military operations in the Balkans, but the average was around 4,000. There were never more than 1,000 Turkish officials, traders and craftsmen living in the town. Besides the pashas, who were army commanders, magistrates and chief executives rolled into one, the most important Turkish official was the defter – the tax collector. As time went on, during the occupation they learned to be flexible. They did not wish to destroy the westernmost and most prosperous colony in Europe, but wanted to profit from it. They had no interest in overturning habits and customs.

One group benefited greatly from Ottoman rule. The Turkish occupation brought benefits for the Jews. Many sought refuge from the neighbouring Habsburg lands, where pogroms were common – or Transylvania, where Calvinism grew strong and the Jews were treated equally badly, if not worse. Many families had come from much further away in the Balkans, which were even poorer. In the 1580s the Jews formed around 20 per cent of Buda’s ‘Hungarian’ population. By the 1680s there were more than 1,000 Jews in Buda. The Turks allowed them freedom to worship – there were three synagogues in Buda by the middle of the seventeenth century – freedom to form communal groups and a measure of legal autonomy. The Ottomans, though, demanded high taxes, even higher than the Christian rulers had imposed. The Turks used the Jews for commerce; they ran the lucrative trade routes along the Danube eastwards from Buda across Turkish domains. The pashas of Buda often intervened on the side of Jews in cases where they had been wronged by Hungarian Christians. Jews would repay the Turks by aiding their defence of Buda against the Habsburgs in sporadic attempts to retake the town. And when the Austrians eventually succeeded, the Jews would pay a heavy price.

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Filed under Austria, economics, food, Germany, Hungary, migration, military, nationalism, religion, Turkey, USSR

by | 17 October 2023 · 6:29 am

Bessarabian German Fates

From Bessarabia: German Colonists on the Black Sea, by Ute Schmidt, trans. by James T. Gessele (Germans from Russia Heritage Collection, 2011), pp. 1-5:

The Germans in Bessarabia were the last of an emigrant band that resettled in Russia over the course of an eighteenth–nineteenth century state-sponsored colonization effort. After Russia’s defeat of the of the Turks in 1812, Czar Alexander beckoned foreign colonists to his country to “peuplate” the deserted southern expanse of the newly conquered province of Bessarabia and to bring about economic development of the region along the Black Sea’s northwestern coast. Over a span of 125 years, the foreign settlers predominantly from Southwestern Germany established more than 150 thriving communities and daughter colonies on a fertile but otherwise desolate plain. They were planted in the middle of a multi-ethnic population where they managed to lead a life of peaceful coexistence.

At the close of World War I, the lives of Bessarabian Germans took a different turn than that of their other German-Russian brethren. Their region fell under Romanian authority in 1918, not under Soviet rule. The Bessarabian Germans—at that time almost eighty thousand people—now were part of the German ethnics of Greater Romania, a population segment that in the years between the two world conflicts came to encompass roughly 750,000 Germans, translating into about 4 percent of Romania’s total population.

Bessarabian Germans, Bukovinian and Dobrujan Germans, Transylvania (Siebenbürgen) Saxons, Banat and Satu Mare (Sathmar) Swabians—all openly differentiated themselves in their history of origin and settlement as well as denominational and social composition, in cultural mintage, in ways of doing business and in mentality. Unlike in Transylvania, an urban middle-class culture had not come into its own in the relatively short settlement period of the Bessarabian Germans. Up until the resettlement of 1940, farming defined their way of life; they always looked upon themselves as “colonists.” In a rural, pietist-steeped culture, playing a leading role were pastors, teachers, as well as academics and other notables.

The history of German settlement in Bessarabia came to an abrupt end in 1940. A Soviet ultimatum in late June that year compelled the Romanians to clear out of the region within three days. On June 28, 1940, the Red Army marched into Bessarabia and North Bukovina. The premise for the Soviet annexation was the less than year-old Non-Aggression Treaty of August 23, 1939—the so-called Hitler-Stalin Pact—drawn up between the National Socialist German Reich and the Stalinist USSR. An appending “secret protocol” to this treaty contained agreements between both countries concerning limits on their spheres of political influence in Eastern and Southeastern Europe. The protocol’s German representative, Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, made clear his government’s “total political disinterest” in Bessarabia.

The Soviet Union’s occupation now fully realized in June 1940, Bessarabia’s German population (about 93,500 people) faced expulsion from their homeland. Based on a September 5, 1940 German-Soviet resettlement accord regarding Bessarabian and North Bukovinian Germans, as early as October–November 1940 the evacuation had been completed by members of the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle (Ethnic German Liaison Office of “VoMi”) and the SS. The resettlers endured transport on Danube boats to interim camps in Yugoslavia [Serbia] and then by rail to almost eight hundred different “observation camps” in the “Old Reich,” in Austria and the Sudetenland. After extended encampment, the Bessarabian Germans—as Germans from the Baltic States, from Volhynia and Galicia before them—were resettled 1941–42 for the most part in German Wehrmacht-occupied Poland. Not long after, in January 1945, they—like millions of refugees from other countries of origin—fled westward from an approaching Soviet army. Thus the Bessarabian Germans were equally resettlers and refugees, for prior to their episode of flight, by being uprooted from their homeland they had experienced a massive breakdown of connectedness which was then followed in 1945 by a greater, catastrophic fall.

Landing in postwar Germany, most Bessarabian Germans were drawn to Swabia, the one-time home to most of their forefathers. Others settled in  the British Occupation Zone, mostly in Lower Saxony. Many fugitive Bessarabian Germans, whose arduous sojourns became bogged down in northern and central Germany, remained as refugee Neubauer* [*small farmers in the Soviet Occupation Zone who were settled on limited, newly created 5- to 8-hectare plots carved out of expropriated but uncompensated private estate land] in the Communist East Zone of that time, where so-called democratic agrarian reform appeared to foster a resumption of their rural way of life. Nevertheless, the laboriously restored farms were lost again in the wake of the German Democratic Republic’s agrarian collectivization in the 1950s and 1960s. Not a few Bessarabian Germans emigrated overseas in postwar years, mostly to Canada and the U.S., in search of a new home.

Though Bessarabian German integration into German Federal Republic (West Germany) society was accompanied by almost complete occupational reorientation, it has long since been deemed a success. All the same, it demanded an extreme measure of adaptability from resettlers originally cast in a rural environment and now catapulted into a postwar industrial society. Because the Bessarabian Germans dared not view their circumstances as temporary—unlike for other refugees and expellees, any hope of return to the former homeland was ruled out—they had no other choice that to build a new way of life under the given conditions as quickly as possible. In this process, they were aided by the idea that they, having taken a long historic detour, really had come full circle and were returning to their ancient homeland.

Today the former German Bessarabian settlement area is split in two and belongs to Moldova and Ukraine [and Transnistria].

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by | 16 October 2023 · 4:15 am

Soviet Occupation of Bessarabia, 1940

From Bessarabia: German Colonists on the Black Sea, by Ute Schmidt, trans. by James T. Gessele (Germans from Russia Heritage Collection, 2011), pp. 305-308:

The people of Bessarabia heard the news of a Soviet ultimatum on radio the evening before the invasion. It created profound shock in the German villages that soon paralyzed the entire country. It appeared that the Germans in Bessarabia would now meet the very same fate that they had escaped in 1918 by a stroke of luck. For years their friends and relatives on the other side of the Dniester kept them meticulously informed of the catastrophic effects of Soviet agrarian policies, collectivization and kulak persecutions, about famine and massive dying, political repression and deportation. The uncertainty over their future was enormous.

Gradually it leaked out that the German government was negotiating an evacuation, intending to transfer Germans in Bessarabia and North Bukovina to the German Reich. A precedent had been set in the fall of 1939 with the evacuation of about 67,000 Baltic Germans from Estonia and Latvia. In the winter of 1939–40, German resettlement commandos had removed an additional 130,000 Germans from Volhynia, Galicia and the Narev region towards the West across the new demarcation line.

In fact, a German delegation, residing in Moscow since July 22, 1940, was negotiating over the transfer of the population. On September 5, 1940, the “German-Soviet Russian Agreement Regarding the Resettlement of Germans from Bessarabia and North Bukovina” was signed. As news of this reached the German communities, it was greeted with an overwhelming sigh of relief. Meanwhile, during a better than two-month interval of excruciating uncertainty, it became clear to most of the Bessarabian Germans that the Soviet invasion meant the end of independent farming and a colonist culture founded on it for over five generations. as they had come to know it.

Agreeing to resettlement from their trusted home to a highly uncertain future required of the Bessarabian Germans a difficult decision. Especially for the older ones, evacuation meant a fundamental interruption to their way of life as they knew it that would demand of them and their families even more difficult adjustments ahead. On the other hand, they had no alternative if they wanted to avoid living in a Soviet sphere of power and partaking in the fate of other German colonists in the remaining Black Sea region—collectivization, deprivation of rights and deportation.

All the same, officers of the invading troops had generally treated the German population correctly. The promise of security that Molotov had made to the German government was largely adhered to. That was not true for the other nationalities. While the Germans were hardly bothered by the Soviet secret police (GPU)—except for isolated harassment or arrest—they were forced to observe how their affluent Russian, Jewish or Bulgarian neighbors were hauled off to interrogations—mostly at night—and often never heard of again. The German pastor, Erwin Meyer of the Leipzig, Bessarabia parish, wrote in his April 1941 personal essay:

“Almost none of the Germans were deported—many of the Russians, Bulgarians and well-to-do Jews were, however, taken away. Nothing was done to us, the pastors, but the Orthodox clergy had to immediately remove their vestments, cut their hair and shave off their beards—as was the case in Ismail. None of us Germans were evicted from our homes, but other nationalities were. German property was either not seized or returned immediately, but not in the case of others. Factories, mills and churches were not nationalized until shortly before our departure. We have German protection to thank for this.” (Jachomowski 1984, 61–62)

Not just fear of harassment from the Soviet secret police, but also the grave changes in everyday life in the wake of the Soviet occupation spurred on in the German villages a willingness to resettle. Shortages, mismanagement, deprivation of personal liberties and reprisals were on the horizon. Within a short time, consumer goods such as fabrics, notions, leather goods, sugar, salt, kerosene and tobacco were in short supply or available only at ever-increasing prices. The German community officials were dismissed and new village soviets formed. Local committees were placed under the jurisdiction of regional committees in which Russian communists set the agenda. The business world was also restructured. All private business was dissolved. Larger industrial firms and commercial enterprises remained largely intact but were placed under new managers. Even the German Commercial Association in Artsiz was reorganized after a Soviet model.

In contrast to this creeping dispossession, the property of German farmers, including large estate farmers, was not touched for the moment. They continued going about their work but were under the supervision of the village soviets. Soviet officials insisted that the harvest still be brought in before resettlement and, using absurd measures and harassment, often pressed hard against the work tempo and farming methods. The imposed and arbitrarily fixated taxes frequently exceeded the farmer’s proceeds but still had to be paid. Quickly, the accusation of sabotage came into play. Relatives and neighbors banded together to help out those farmers who had gotten into difficulties.

Church life and Stundist Brethren gatherings went mostly unhindered. Of course, holidays falling on work days were banned and, during the harvest, work had to be done on Sundays, too. In light of the profound disruptions in the lives of the German communities, Pastor Erwin Meyer came to the conclusion in his previously mentioned essay that “all rules and concepts, order and traditions and self-evident assumptions in living together with people” had been “turned upside down in the Soviet state.”

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by | 15 October 2023 · 6:18 am

Soviets Annex Bessarabia, 1940

From Bessarabia: German Colonists on the Black Sea, by Ute Schmidt, trans. by James T. Gessele (Germans from Russia Heritage Collection, 2011), pp. 304-305:

Soviet government officials never relinquished their claim to the region between the Prut and Dniester Rivers, for them a strategic area given up to Romania in 1918 because of Russia’s military weakness at the close of World War I. Indeed, Bessarabia was a fertile hinterland to the Black Sea harbor of Odessa, a checkpoint at the mouth of the Danube and bridgehead for a Soviet presence in Southeast Europe.

Providing a crucial premise for the Soviet’s seizure of Bessarabia was the non-aggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union. It was signed on August 23, 1939, in Moscow by representatives of both countries. In the course of agreeing to “delimitation of bilateral spheres of interest in East Europe,” established in a Supplemental Secret Protocol in the accord, German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop accepted that Estonia, Latvia and Finland should be added to the Soviet sphere of influence. He went on to declare Germany’s “total political disinterest” in Bessarabia.

After the Moscow agreements, the USSR’s annexation of Bessarabia was only a matter of time. On June 26, 1940, Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov presented the Romanian envoy in Moscow an ultimatum in which he demanded that the Romanian government relinquish Bessarabia as well as the northern part of Bukovina to the USSR and leave the country within three days. The Romanian government was forced to bow to the Soviet demand after its petition for help in Berlin had been turned down.

On June 28 the Red Army marched into Bessarabia and North Bukovina. Even though the Romanian government had feared a Soviet offensive for some time, it was surprised by the invasion. By the first day, the quickly advancing Soviet vanguard had occupied the most important cities—Cetatea Albă in the south, Chișinău in the center and Chernivtsi (Chernowitz) in the north—and plunged the retreating Romanians into hopeless confusion. Fleeing Romanian government officials and armed forces feverishly took to their heels. Along the way, they grabbed at any sort of transportation—horses and teams—they could get their hands on in order to get themselves and their heavily loaded wagons to safety on the other side of the Prut. Romanian squadrons in retreat were constantly overtaken by Russian parachutists and tanks. In the chaotic retreat there were isolated attacks from bands of civilians. The invading, crack Soviet troops soon had everything under control.

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by | 14 October 2023 · 6:14 am

Bessarabian German Food Names

From Bessarabia: German Colonists on the Black Sea, by Ute Schmidt, trans. by James T. Gessele (Germans from Russia Heritage Collection, 2011), pp. 382-83:

Arbuse, harbus (Turkish/Russian) = watermelon

Baklashan, patletshane (Turkish/Russian), blue patletshane = eggplant (In some places tomatoes were referred to as red patletshane.)

Bliny (Russian) = blintzes, leavened pancakes

Borsch (Russian) = Russian cabbage and vegetable soup (red, white or green borsch)

Brynza (Romanian/Russian) = sheep’s milk cheese

Kalva, halva, “halvik” (Turkish/Russian) = sweet made from pressed hazelnuts or sesame seed with honey

Kolbasa, kalbas (Russian) sausage (“kolbasniki” = Russian nickname for Germans)

Makhorka, “makhorke” (Russian) = strong tobacco

Mamaliga, mamalig, mamlik (Romanian) = corn meal gruel, polenta

Maslina, masline (Russian) = olive

Pirogi, piroshki (Russian) = meat-filled pastries

Plachinta, plachenta (Romanian) = flat cake, baked dough with fruit filling (e.g., pumpkin, “pumpkin plachinta“)

Pomidori, pomadoren (French/Italian/Russian) = tomatoes

Popshoi, popshe (Romanian) = corn (popshoi pratzeln = to shell corn)

Shassla (French) = a wine variety (chasselas)

Tsibeben (Arabic/Italian) = raisins

Varenye (Russian) = fruit preserves, marmalade

Vereniki (Russian) = crescent pocket dumplings filled with meat, berries or curd cheese, also Maultaschen

Zakuska (Russian) = snack, hors d’oeuvre

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by | 12 October 2023 · 12:50 pm

Bessarabian German Invectives

From Bessarabia: German Colonists on the Black Sea, by Ute Schmidt, trans. by James T. Gessele (Germans from Russia Heritage Collection, 2011), pp. 384-85:

Baba (Russian) = old woman, mommy, grandma—also translated as a lethargic person: “Des isch doch a alte Baba … (That’s a tired old grandma.)”

Bagash (French/Russian) = baggage—also translated as riffraff: “Des isch a Bagasch! (What a bunch of riffraff!)”

Barysh, “barisch” (Turkish/Russian) = profit— “Der hat sein Getreide mit gutem Barisch verkauft. (He sold his grain at a good profit.)”

Besplatno (Russian) = free of charge— “Des mache mir ihm besplatno … (I’ll do that for him free of charge.)”

Bog (Russian) = God (deep sigh): “Bozhe moi” = “Mein Gott (My God!)”

Burshui (French/Russian) = rich burgher, bourgeois, teasingly used against a well-to-do colonist— “Isch des a Burshui. (What a bourgeois he is.)”

Chakai malka (Bulgarian) = “Halt mal!” “Wart mal!” (“Wait. Hold up.”)

Chërt (Russian) = the devil— “Chërt znaet! (Only the devil knows!)” or “Chërt vozny! (The devil take it!)

Dozhd (Russian) = rain— ” ‘S doschdelt. (It’s raining.)”

Fladira, fladiere (French) = to flatter, to court a girl— “Meinst Du, ich fladier ‘Dich …? (Do you think I’m flirting with you?)”

Gor’ko (Russian) = bitter (At weddings people shouted “gor’ko” and the bridal couple had to kiss.)

Gulyat’ (Russian) = play, celebrate, living devil-may-care, dawdle, waste money— “Wir haben g’hulait. (We really caroused.)”

Heide! Hei! (Turkish) = Come! Go! Forward!

Karaul, karavul (Turkish/Russian/Yiddish) = a call for help— “No han i aber Karaul g’schrie … (That’s when I called for help.)”

Khlopochnik (from Russian verb khlopotat’) = to bustle about = busybody— “Die klaportiert den ganzen Tag. (She’s constantly puttering around.)”

Khlopoty, “klapott” (Russian) = troubles, difficulties— “Mit dem hat sein Klapott” (He causes us nothing but trouble.)

Kryschka (Russian) = an end or a limit, in the sense of “Basta” or “That’s enough.” (When one has talked too long or made clumsy excuses, one says, “Nu kryschka!”)

Mamlik (Romanian) = cornmeal mush (also translated as “a weak-willed person”): “Des isch a Mamlikhaufa … (What a bunch of cowards!)”

Moire(s), “Mores” (Yiddish) = fear, dread— “Er hat Moires … (He has his anxieties.)”

Muzhik (Russian) = peasant, a simple person— “Des isch halt a Muschik … (What a simpleton.)”

Passleta(n) (French) = waste of time, a pastime

Plencha (Romanian) = to cry— “Was plenscht Du scho’ wieder …? (What are you crying about again?)”

Podruchik (Russian) = arm-in-arm— “Er isch mit dem Mädle podrutschik ganga … (He walked arm-in-arm with the girl.)”

Poshol (Russian) = Forward!— “Poschli! (Let’s go!)”

Prost, prostoi (Russian) = simple, ordinary; “proste Leut” = ordinary people— “Bei mir geht es halt prost zu … (My life is really ordinary.)”

Semechki (Russian) = sunflower seeds (also translated as trivialities, meaningless details— “Des sin mir sematschki … (Those are mere trifles to me.)”

Shutka, shutke (Russian) = joke or prank— “Er versteht kei’ Schutka … (He has no sense of humor.)”

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by | 17 September 2023 · 5:43 am

Cold War Gymnastics

From Nadia Comaneci and the Secret Police: A Cold War Escape, by Stejarel Olaru (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 46-48:

More than two decades later, in 2001, Nellie Kim was to recall the Montréal Games and her clash with Nadia Comăneci in an interview with Jean-Christophe Klotz, the presenter of Les Grands Duels du Sport on the Franco-German Arte channel. Even after so many years the disappointment Kim had felt at the time obviously still rankled when she said that while Nadia was a great gymnast and almost perfect, she was by no means superior to anybody in the Soviet team. ‘I can’t say that she was better than we were. Her routines were as difficult as those of Turishcheva, Korbut and myself. On a few apparatuses she was better than Turishcheva and Korbut, but on others, not quite. But the press turned her into the “goddess of gymnastics”,’ she said, suggesting that it was not so much Nadia’s performance that had counted, but the influence of Western journalists, who deliberately exaggerated her prowess.

Kim’s opinion is only partly justified. Given that the Cold War was still at its height, Western journalists must have felt a bias towards anybody able to rock the myth of Soviet sporting invincibility. This had been the case of Olympic, World and European champion Věra Čáslavská, who at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics was done an injustice by the judges: the Czechoslovak gymnast had been forced to share the top of the podium with Larisa Petrik of the U.S.S.R. and had bowed her head and turned it to the right when the Soviet national anthem was played. Čáslavská was protesting not at the unfairness of the scoring to which she had fallen victim during the competition, but at the fact that her country had fallen victim to an invasion by the Soviet army just weeks before.

And the Western journalists loved her for it. But four years later, they also fell in love with little Soviet gymnast Olga Korbut at the Munich Olympics, recognising even then the decisive rôle she was to play in gymnastics. They dubbed her ‘the darling of Munich’, so captivating was her performance, which gives us to believe that regardless of political circumstances or personal sympathies, the international press was still able to preserve its objectivity in the face of obvious talent.

By the time of the 1976 Montréal Olympics, Romania had indeed gained its own separate image internationally, as Czechoslovakia had in 1968. The country was part of the Communist bloc, but a number of past political gestures on the part of Nicolae Ceauşescu had created the impression that Romania distanced itself from and sometimes even defied Moscow, an impression that was also bolstered by Bucharest’s closer and closer ties with Washington and other Western capitals. Which is why the sympathy towards Nadia Comăneci on the part of both press and public could be viewed as all the more genuine.

But political circumstances could have no influence on how Nadia’s performance was judged, where technique and artistic elements that were all that counted, and journalists could not award points in place of the judges. It was the fullness of Nadia’s performance that was her secret, and it distinguished her from the Soviets, as Cathy Rigby remarked in her commentary for ABC: ‘Oh look at that amplitude!’ Nadia controlled her body in a way that stood out, without any tremor to betray hesitation, and with the ambition to control her balance to the utmost degree. She was fast, but at the same time elegant and certain, which made some of her movements seem unreal. The elements in the routines that won her scores of ten were achieved with flawless poise, seamlessly combined, in a style that Nadia was to make uniquely her own.

The International Gymnastics Federation’s scoring code for the uneven parallel bars now includes the Comăneci Salto and Comăneci Dismount, named after the moves Nadia pioneered at Montréal. In the first, ‘the gymnast begins in a support position on the high bar. She casts away from the bar and performs a straddled front somersault and regrasps the same bar’ – an element deemed to be of an extremely high level of difficulty. In the second, the ‘gymnast begins in a handstand on the high bar and then pikes her feet onto the bar and does a sole circle swing around the bar. She then releases the bar first with her feet and then with her hands as she performs a half-twist immediately into a back somersault dismount.’ Such moves are only a few of those that were to inspire future generations of gymnasts, leading them to tackle elements of increasing complexity and even risk. In Munich in 1972, Olga Korbut had done the same thing. Likewise, Japanese gymnast Mitsuo Tsukahara revolutionised gymnastics with the spectacular vault that now bears his name. To this day, each generation of gymnasts takes inspiration from the daring of their predecessors.

The impact around the world of Nadia Comăneci’s achievements at Montréal was remarkable. The popularity of the sport suddenly increased, and Nadia became an inspiration not only for younger gymnasts and even those of her generation, but also for countless little girls who dreamed of becoming like her. Some of those little girls went on to become champions, such as Mary Lou Retton, who watched Nadia at Montréal on television and was electrified by her refinement and natural grace.

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by | 20 August 2023 · 5:32 am

Denmark Becomes a Nation-State

From The Rise and Fall of the Danish Empire, by Michael Bregnsbo and Kurt Villads Jensen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), Kindle pp. 330-332:

The cession of the duchies [Schleswig, Holstein, Lauenburg] in 1864 meant that Denmark now became a nation-state. A nation-state is defined as a state where there is one common culture, one common language, one common history, etc. There were certainly still other nationalities within the Danish empire, namely Icelanders, Faroese, and Greenlanders along with the nationally and ethnically diverse population of the West Indies. However, the relationship cannot be compared at all with the Danish-German united monarchy. When tallied both separately and together the above-mentioned groups represented such a small proportion of the inhabitants of the empire, whereas those that were German-affiliated had made up a third of the inhabitants in the united monarchy. On the other hand, this did not mean that all Danes lived in Denmark. There were around 200,000 Danish-minded southern Jutlanders in Schleswig, who after 1864, became German citizens against their will.

For Prussia, 1864 had been a stepping-stone in a longer process towards a united Germany under Prussian rule. This goal was met in 1870 when Germany became a unified, centralized empire. This put the Danish state in a completely new historical situation. Previously it had been a medium-sized European state, and while Germany had been an empire or later a confederacy, it was relatively decentralized and consisted of many different and both large, medium, and small states. The Danish empire had been larger than many of these German states. Now the balance of power was markedly different: Denmark had in 1814 and even more so in 1864 become a smaller state, while Germany had become the continent’s largest power. Denmark’s position was thereby extremely vulnerable and threatened. For Denmark, there was nothing to do but pursue a policy of neutrality, but in practice take extensive account of its overpowering neighbor. During World War I in 1914–1918, Denmark managed to remain neutral by adapting to its great neighbor to the south.

Internally in Denmark, 1864 represented a trauma that had an effect on Danish politics and the general way of thinking for a very long time. Together with Germany’s unification in 1870, widespread concern was raised about the extent to which it would ultimately be possible to preserve Denmark as an independent state.

The nation-state of Denmark was the successor to a much larger empire. Copenhagen remained the capital. It was a legacy of the far greater empire that this smaller state should be organized as a highly centralized state with all of its important institutions gathered in the capital rather than following a federal state structure with considerable independent, regional decision-making power. When virtually all nationwide institutions and organizations of importance were also located in Copenhagen after 1849, and that Copenhagen is by far the largest city in Denmark, was a result of Copenhagen’s status in the empire transferring to the smaller state of Denmark’s capital. It can thus be compared to an overcoat that is several sizes large. The historian Steen Bo Frandsen has written on these conditions: “The construction of a national economy placed Northern Jutland in the role of supplier of raw materials and of people for Copenhagen’s expansion. Denmark was designed entirely on the capital’s premises and Copenhagen became, if possible, even more than ever the Danish state … Everything of importance was located in Copenhagen. Industrialization strengthened the city’s dominance” (Frandsen 1996, 566).

A new constitution was adopted in 1866.

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by | 19 August 2023 · 6:17 am

Rise of Nationalism in the Danish Empire

From The Rise and Fall of the Danish Empire, by Michael Bregnsbo and Kurt Villads Jensen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), Kindle pp. 272-274:

It appears that distinctive Norwegian and German (Holstein) identities can be traced during this period. Furthermore, an unmistakable Danish identity arose in the second half of the eighteenth century. The government in Copenhagen at the time of Frederik V was, as before, dominated by many foreign-born who had entered the service of the Danish king. The majority of the members of the King’s Council as well as the heads of the administration and at the court were born outside the Danish king’s kingdoms and countries, especially in Germany. Often they did not speak Danish at all. This internationally oriented aristocratic elite, which formed the leadership of the state, pursued an ambitious and cosmopolitan cultural policy. This included convening foreign-born cultural personalities to hold illustrious positions in Denmark (i.e. the educator Basedow and the poet Klopstock). Furthermore, it awarded civilian and military posts as well as business privileges to foreign-born protégés. This international orientation had been the case for a long time, but it was increasingly perceived by the growing middle class, especially in Copenhagen, as an omission and oversight of local talent. The middle class was growing, and as it became more involved in foreign trade, it gained increased weight in society during the flourishing trade period, particularly in opposition to the great aristocratic landowners. After the middle of the eighteenth century, the middle class began to cultivate the Danish language, culture, and history as a protest against the internationally oriented aristocratic state leadership. The German-born Struensee, who in his short reign from 1770 to 1772 introduced radical reforms, which, however, had been ill-prepared and revealed his lack of knowledge of Danish conditions and traditions, just as his relationship with Queen Caroline Mathilde had aroused public indignation. His actions further fueled the development of nationalism. Unlike Struensee, his successors, Frederik V’s Dowager Queen Juliana Maria, her son, the king’s half-brother, Prince Frederick and her closely connected statesman, Ove Høegh-Guldberg, understood that they had to appeal to public opinion and to win the favor of the frustrated urban middle class.

Immediately after coming to power, they made Danish the administrative language for Denmark and Norway rather than German, and the following year Danish was made the command language in the army and in 1775 Danish was made a formal subject in the grammar schools. The crown jewel of their efforts was the Naturalization Act of 1776, which stated that only those who were born within the Danish king’s kingdoms and countries, i.e. the empire, could in the future hold public offices. This law seems to have been met with spontaneous enthusiasm in Copenhagen and other cities across the country. How should this Danish identity be interpreted? The question is whether the Danish-German national antagonisms that tore apart the entire Danish state in the nineteenth century can be traced as far back as the eighteenth century. Perhaps in the eighteenth century it was first and foremost a matter of contradictions between an aristocratic and internationally oriented upper class and a more domestically oriented bourgeoisie (middle class), whose importance in social and economic was growing. Germans made up approximately a fifth of the capital’s population, a representation of the fact that Copenhagen was the center of the entire empire and not just the kingdom of Denmark. Yet, the Naturalization Act was not aimed against these people since it was applying to everyone in the empire and was aimed at foreign-born, in practice Germans, but—significantly—not at German-speaking Danish citizens from the duchies or Copenhagen. In 1790, however, a heated debate unfolded: the so-called “German feud.” The German-speaking fellow citizens and their alleged dominant position were conceptualized as a threat. The feud, however, ceased again, presumably because other problems on the political agenda took precedence, such as agricultural reforms. These national identities ultimately led to the dissolution of the empire, but the question is whether secession from the empire was an idea that originated in the eighteenth century or, whether the dispute at that point solely concerned the distribution of rights, duties, burdens, and privileges between the various nationalities within a perennial empire. There was not necessarily anyone at the time who thought nor desired that these schisms would eventually lead to dissolution, although in hindsight it may certainly seem the case. The development towards an identification with those whose nationality, language, culture, and country one shares, rather than identification by status and as a subject in a particular territory under a particular prince, and where the language was secondary, was an expression of the unitary state. Here, as in the conglomerate state, the empire was not held together by the subjects’ duty of obedience to their prince, but by the loyalty of the citizens to their fatherland, state, and nationality (Feldbæk 1992).

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