Empty Signs, Historical Imaginaries: The Entangled Nationalization of Names and Naming in a Late Habsburg Borderland by Ágoston Berecz (review)

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• Empty Signs, Historical Imaginaries: The Entangled Nationalization of Names and Naming in a Late Habsburg Borderland by Ágoston Berecz
• Andrew Behrendt

Ágoston Berecz, Empty Signs, Historical Imaginaries: The Entangled Nationalization of Names and Naming in a Late Habsburg Borderland. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2020. 350 pp.

Erudite and ingenious, Ágoston Berecz’s Empty Signs, Historical Imaginaries lends new vigor to the historiography of nationalism in East Central Europe. It takes hold of a frustratingly understudied subject, “nationality policies and national conflicts” in Hungary between 1867 and 1914; adds another that is notoriously difficult to source, namely ground- level responses to nationalist activism, especially among peasants; and jointly explores both through the methodological innovation of applying linguistic analysis—particularly onomastics, the study of proper names. The “borderland” of the subtitle refers to Transylvania and the Banat, where an ascendant, assimilationist Magyar elite pursued various means of undermining its rival Romanian and Saxon/pan-German nationalisms. Berecz draws our attention to the importance of personal, familial, and geographic names in this uneven three-way competition whereby they became “sites of memory” in nationalist metanarratives and “projection screens for visions of national history” (8–9). The result is a rich, multifaceted book whose prismatic examination sheds light on countless details of nationalization as a fluid process more than it delivers wholesale revelations of some settled outcome.

Berecz sets out with an exceptionally compelling introduction, which, in conjunction with the largely summative conclusion, readers may find useful as a kind of conceptual atlas as they make their way through this dense text. Of particular note is Berecz’s critique of the modernist school of nationalism studies (to which I confess myself a disciple), as it not only offers a reasonably persuasive case for the ethno- nationalist school but is also simply a more substantive discussion of applied theory than is typical for the field.

The book is split into three parts, each corresponding to what Berecz dubs a “level of analysis” (19) and each containing three chapters that are [End Page 107] thematically mirrored by a chapter in the other parts. The first section, “Peasants,” dedicates three chapters to the conventions of that social class when assigning first names to their children, defining or changing their family names, and understanding the place- names and etymologies of their home communities. Using the ELITES08 and Historical Population Database of Transylvania datasets as well as Frigyes Pesty’s 1864 toponymical survey, Berecz finds that “prenational peasant culture” (82), comfortable with ancestral and religious tradition, was very slow to respond to nationalists’ exhortations to adopt “historically” Romanian or Hungarian names. It also worried little about why their village was called what it was or how it might prove precedence of ethnic settlement. Nonetheless, Hungarian political and social hegemony did, eventually, leave its mark—until World War I and the breakup of the empire dashed it apart.

Nationalist intellectuals and the striving bourgeoisie, however, cared a great deal more about these affairs. They are the subjects of the second part, titled “Nationalisms.” One of the dominant themes here is what Berecz helpfully calls the “myth of submerged Magyardom” (9) to articulate the Hungarian nationalist preoccupation with detecting and reclaiming erstwhile ethnic confrères who had sunk, and were thus “lost,” to Romanian culture. Thus, Hungarian activists combed the Transylvanian countryside, supposedly revealing occluded Magyar villagers based on optimistic philology (e.g., the last name Băcălete being “actually” Bekeletye, 93) and Magyar alpinists insisted on granting Hungarian names to landscape features (or, as they put it, “recovering” those names). Romanian nationalists, for their part, engaged in much the same activity by digging up connections to the Daco- Roman past, or lampooning name- changers as fickle pseudo- Hungarians. However, Berecz shows that Magyarization (and its converse, Latinization) was neither as coerced nor as widespread as its opponents have long presumed, except perhaps among “humble public employees like railwaymen and gendarmes” (110), and that the Habsburg military showed little patience for the “passéist fantasies of any nationalist vanguard” in refusing to acknowledge the amateurs’ toponymics (145).

In the third and weightiest section, “The State,” Berecz turns at last to the Dualist Hungarian state, which took...