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Description

Ethnographic Map of Hungary Published in 1940 with Manuscript Annotations Relevant to the Redrawing of National Boundaries According to Ethnicity on the Eve of the Second World War.

Highly evocative World War II-era ethnographic map of Hungary known in three examples, of which this is one. This map, already highly important in its own right due to the extensive research it displays and the political atmosphere in which it was published, is substantially enriched by its extensive contemporary annotations. These annotations reflect internal boundaries and count the populations of leading ethnic groups in border regions. Within the context of the mostly unilateral redrawing of Romanian and Slovakian borders along ethnic lines in the two years prior to the start of Operation Barbarossa, this map represents a governmental or academic attempt to understand the true limits of the distribution of ethnically Hungarian populations.

Specifically, these annotations divide the Kingdom into both its historical pre-1920 counties as well as some of its then-current World War II era boundaries. Annotations count the Romanian, Slovakian, and Hungarian populations of these many regions, focusing on the most populous or the two most populous ethnicities.

The printed map was published after the reinstatement of the majority of Hungarian territories lost at the end of World War I, and shows the extent of "historical Hungary," that is, Hungary before it ceded large tracks of land in the 1920 Treaty of Trianon. Following the two Vienna Awards of 1938 and 1940--awards of land made unilaterally by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy that mostly benefited their ally, Hungary--Hungary gained large amounts of territory from Czechoslovakia and Romania. During these periods of expansion, which sometimes erupted into open warfare, and the Hungarian casus belli relied on proving that they were only taking territory where Hungarians were ethnically dominant. Up until 1940, the only available information on border regions was the outdated 1910 Hungarian census. The present map updates the ethnic distribution along the border regions and allowed for those responsible and the government-related public to understand how justified the claims leading to the land grabs were.

The printed map represents an important point in the history of Hungarian ethnography, as it was published when issues that had been repressed for twenty years were exploding into open conflict. Following the example of an important predecessor, the "Red Map" by Pal Teleki, which shows Hungarian populations in red, this map draws in the eye using large amounts of red to show the distribution of the Hungarian population. However, unlike the earlier Teleki map, this map gives the exact location of various populations as well as their relative proportions in population centers, which was of increased governmental use.

This fascinating map was published in 1940 by the Hungarian Statistical Society's Institute of Political Science, a governmental organization in charge of census and population studies. Since the territory of the pre-Trianon Kingdom of Hungary had been divided between four different countries, this map draws on a variety of not only Hungarian, but also Austrian, Yugoslavian, Romanian, and Czechoslovak sources. The map is published in French, a language that was commonly used for academic purposes in Hungary at the time.

On the map, the colors of each dot represent an ethnicity. These include: Hungarians, Romanians, Slovaks, Germans, Ruthenians, Serbs, Jews, and Croatians. Each small dot represents a thousand inhabitants, making the map remarkably accurate. Larger dots represent ten thousand inhabitants, and the large circle around Budapest represents the population of this city in an area proportional to the smaller circles. Differentiating between ethnic groups relies both on the government survey, but also on other indicators such as first language where that data is not available.

Manuscript Annotations

The map contains a plethora of contemporary handwriting which adds novel information to the map. Firstly, in pencil on the map, the historic counties of Hungary are outlined. Then, in red, further divisions are shown. In Hungarian regions, they appear to be city-level divisions that correspond to the territorial subdivisions that existed from 1941 to 1944. However, in regions of the map not controlled by Hungary during the war, such as in the southeast, the meaning of these red divisions is unclear. 

The map also contains copious annotations of numbers in the upper and right margins of the map. These are presented in four different colors corresponding to the Hungarian, Romanian, and Slovakian ethnic groupings. The annotations are composed of the name of one of the historic counties of Hungary followed by the population (in thousands) of the dominant or the two dominant ethnicities in that region. Several other annotations appear, for example, one that updates the calculated percentage of ethnic Hungarians to the third decimal point.

These manuscript annotations spatially delimit the ethnographic detail published, and thus represent a very important way of looking at the map. The focus on only three major ethnic groups suggests that this map was used as a source for an academic or governmental agent to understand how the redrawing of boundaries over the pre-war years compared to the true distribution of ethnic groupings now that the information was available.

Accounting for the Map's Jewish Population

The legend in the lower right accounts for just over two hundred thousand Jews in historical Hungary, which understates the nation's true Jewish population by about fourfold. The explanation for this lies in the note: "Jews. There are some in Slovakia, Subcarpathia, and Transylvania." Historically, Jews in Hungary had been considered Hungarians, rather than Jews, and were not counted differently on government surveys. For example, in 1919, the famous ethnographer Pal Teleki, who would be the prime minister of Hungary in 1940, had stated that "from a social point of view, the Hungarian Jews are not Jews any more but Hungarians."

Of course, as the country tightened its ties with Nazi Germany, the Jewish population became more oppressed in Hungary. However, deportations and the strictest oppressions were reserved for those who did not hold Hungarian citizenship, for example, some of the first mass killings of the war were perpetrated against Slovak Jews in territories conquered by Hungary.

This map follows the ethnographic standards of the day by differentiating between those who are Jewish but Hungarian and those who are Jewish but not Hungarian. Only the latter are shown as grey circles summing 210,000 inhabitants, while the former are considered part of the red, Hungarian, circles. This differentiation would be fatal to many non-Hungarian Jews.

The Vienna Awards and the Little War

The Kingdom of Hungary grew in four iterations in the prewar period. As a natural alley of Germany and Italy due to its losses in the First World War, Hungary had positioned itself favorably in order to attempt to gain territory during the land grabs of the late 1930s, as follows:

  1. In November 1938, the First Vienna Award allowed Hungary to push the Slovak border northwards. Slovakia was pressured into accepting these terms in return for promise of protection.
  2.  In March 1939, Hungary invades Slovakian territory in the Hungarian-Slovak or Little War. Germany declines to protect Slovakia, and Hungarian expands its territory substantially to the northeast.
  3. In August 1940, the Second Vienna Award grants large parts of Romania to Hungary. In order to maintain German goodwill, Romania accepted the terms of the treaty without any return benefits.
  4. In April, 1941, Hungary invaded Yugoslavia and annexed territory in the border regions.

The reasons given for each of these periods was growth was similar to that given by Nazi Germany--the need for the reunification of ethnically Hungarian peoples.

An Update to the Red Map of Pal Teleki

Considered one of the most important maps of Hungary ever published, Pal Teleki's map reconfigures the traditional ethnographic map immediately following the end of World War I as a protest to the Treaty of Trianon. Traditional ethnographic maps, many of which had been already produced of this ethnically complex part of central Europe, tended to color in each area according to the dominant ethnicity of said area. This led to populations that had small pluralities in sparsely populated areas appearing more populous than they really were. However, Teleki decided that, in his map, the area represented by each color would be directly proportional to the total population of each ethnic group. This meant that regions with high populations, such as Budapest., would get a "fair representation," spilling into neighboring regions, while underpopulated areas would be left blank.

Pal Teleki would become Prime Minister of Hungary by the time when this map was published. While Teleki's map was republished into the 1920s, it would eventually become outdated. This map is extremely important as it updates Teleki's map to the eve of the Second World War, while maintaining Teleki's idea to show the pre-war boundaries of Hungary. Additionally, by using proportionally sized colored circles, this map ensures that red--the color of the Hungarian ethnicity--is still the most prevalent on the map.

Rarity

We note two examples of this map, at the Zentralbibliothek Zurich and one at the Warsaw Institute of Geography. The manuscript annotations make this a unique object.

Condition Description
Folding map. Taped on verso and around intersecting corners on the front. Fold toning and some dampstaining.