Language, Culture and Identity in the Borderlands: The South Slav Communities of Hungary, from 1949 to the 1990s

This chapter will focus on the cultural politics of the borderlands between Central Europe and the Balkans, where South Slav communities may be found outside coherent Serbian and Croatian-speaking areas. This is the borderland region of Hungary that has been referred to in different historical periods and under different political regimes as: Lower Pannonia, Transdanubia, the Military Frontier (Vojna Krajina), or the Danube Banovina. This work will be illustrated by passages and references taken from Mara Stevanovićʼs book Nebo bez oblaka (1977) which was the only children’s book of short stories in “Serbo-Croat” to be published in socialist Hungary, which well-illustrates the daily lives of children, their parents and grandparents (three generations) from rural, ethnic minority backgrounds, mostly in the Banat region. The time period covered in this paper will be from the socialist period (1948 – 1989) into the Hungarian transition of the 1990s. The chapter will take into account the significance of the 1949 Hungarian Constitution which guaranteed the cultural rights of the South Slav population in Socialist Hungary. It then demonstrates how there was a shift in political interpretation from considering the South Slavs as “atoms of pluralism” (Crowe, 1989) to their being actively supported by the Hungarian government from the 1960s onwards, in terms of the development of minority culture and education.