Ethnologia Europaea

Transformation in Eastern Europe

Der Aufsatz beschäftigt sich mit der Entwicklung jüdischer Identität in Ungarn. Es werden aus der Perspektive der historischen Anthropologie die politischen, gesellschaftlichen und sozialgeschichtlichen Umstände beschrieben, die für die kollektive Selbstbestimmung und Selbstdarstellung der ungarischen Juden seit dem 19. Jahrhundert maßgeblich waren. Erlebnisse, Erfahrungen und Folgen des Liberalismus, des Holocaust und des Kommunismus werden nachgezeichnet, um den komplexen Prozeß des Identitätswechsels und der Identitätsaneignung interpretieren zu können. In diesem Zusammenhang werden verschiedene Modelle und Ausrichtungen jüdischer Identität in Ungarn beschrieben, unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Frage nach Integration und Ausgrenzung.

During the first decade following the regime changes in 1989 in East-Central Europe, those regimes that have successfully and peacefully democratized have engaged in some sort of retributive justice punishing wrongdoers and vindicating victims. Other regimes have become even less democratic and engaged in further violence by identifying substitute victims to sacrifice in order to avoid holding actual wrongdoers accountable for their past crimes.The author examines the efficacy of retributive justice through the work of the division of the German criminal justice system responsible for prosecuting “governmental and reunification crime” and of a public commission of vindication. He then compares the German effort with that in select other East-Central European regimes. In order to contribute to democratic legitimacy, he concludes, regimes must studiously avoid seeking substitute victims and instead hold those in the center of the regime accountable for wrongdoing. At the same time, they must make a good faith effort to redress the wrongs of unjustly harmed parties. Effective criminal law establishes the state as a moral agent representing the entire community by reiterating the principles of responsibility and accountability for injustices as part of an attempt to reestablish the dignity of victims. In other words, to avoid a cycle of retributive violence it may be wise to go through a longer phase of retributive justice in the present.

Przemyśl, a smallish city in southeast Poland, close to the Ukrainian border, is the centre in Poland of the recently re-legalised Greek Catholic Church, which is almost exclusively Ukrainian in membership. This paper begins with an outline of this Church’s Jordan rituals, as observed during a recent fieldtrip. This is followed by a sketch of long-term processes of Latinization and the nationalization of religion. This part of Central Europe has in the course of this century lurched from polyethnic empires to monoethnic ‘nation-states’, but contemporary Poland is not quite as monoethnic as was sometimes claimed in the socialist years. The ecumenical and multicultural images generated in Przemyśl by the recently revived Jordan rituals conceal the pressures brought to bear in recent years upon the city’s Ukrainian minority, which was supposed to have been eliminated in 1947. Some of the sharpest post-communist conflicts have concerned the property claims of the Greek Catholic Church. The paper focuses on the controversy that has surrounded just one building in Przemyśl, where the political, legal and even architectural issues are especially complex, in order to highlight more general social and political problems facing European societies, such as the long-term consequences of ethnic cleansing and the compatibility of democracy and multiculturalism. In a few years’ time Przemyśl will become a frontier city of the European Union; does this Europe have space for a religion which, though Christian and Catholic, differs markedly from the western European mainstream? Finally, the paper problematizes the vocabulary currently available in anthropology to address situations such as this, including the concepts of ethnicity/ethnic group and culture itself.