Managing the Past in Urban Portraitures in fin-de-siècle Saxon Transylvania

Abstract

The article addresses the cultural appropriation of multiethnic provincial urban spaces in Dualist Hungary. Scholarly topographies of towns experienced a boom at the turn of the century and were produced and marketed in the framework of collaborative enterprises, whether in the shape of state-sponsored committees or societies organized on voluntary basis. In Transylvania, the oldest academic institutions dedicated to such work were primarily the so-called Landeskunde (in Hungarian: honismeret) societies. The article explores the ways in which the social background, the target audience, and the material resources of the societies determined the outcome of the urban mapping by focusing on the multiethnic Transylvanian city Hermannstadt (in Romanian: Sibiu, in Hungarian: Nagyszeben). Here ethno-linguistic affiliations created the most fundamental dividing line that cut across the intellectual milieus during the time under scrutiny. The resulting urban mono-cultural topographies were part of shaping national historiographies, which in the Saxon case emphasized the cultural distinctness of the Transylvanian Lutheran Germans, and played down the difference between the towns and countryside.