Budapest's Children

Friederike Kind-Kovács

Description

In the aftermath of World War I, international organizations descended upon the destitute children living in the rubble of Budapest and the city became a testing ground for how the West would handle the most vulnerable residents of a former enemy state.

Budapest's Children reconstructs how Budapest turned into a laboratory of transnational humanitarian intervention. Friederike Kind-Kovács explores the ways in which migration, hunger, and destitution affected children's lives, casting light on children's particular vulnerability in times of distress. Drawing on extensive archival research, Kind-Kovács reveals how Budapest's children, as iconic victims of the war's aftermath, were used to mobilize humanitarian sentiments and practices throughout Europe and the United States. With this research, Budapest's Children investigates the dynamic interplay between local Hungarian organizations, international humanitarian donors, and the child relief recipients.

In tracing transnational relief encounters, Budapest's Children reveals how intertwined postwar internationalism and nationalism were and how child relief reinforced revisionist claims and global inequalities that still reverberate today.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION
1. MIGRATION: LIFE IN A DISPLACEMENT HUB
2. HUNGER: STARVING IN THE CAPITAL CITY
3. DEGENERATION: EMBODYING POSTWAR SUFFERING
4. INSTITUTIONS: THE GENESIS OF CHILD PROTECTION
5. INFRASTRUCTURES: MATERIALIZING 'GLOCAL' RELIEF
6. BODIES: FEEDING BUDAPEST'S HUNGRY CHILDREN
7. (INTER)NATIONALISM: THE POLITICS OF MATERIAL AID
8. DISPLACEMENT: THE AMBIGUITY OF CHILD TRANSPORTS
9. EDUCATION: WORKROOMS TO TEACH THE CHILDREN
CONCLUSION: TRANSFORMATION: FROM AID TO SELF-HELP
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX

Sujets

• Children's
• Refugees
• Social Science
• HISTORY
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Hungría
• World War I
• American Relief Administration
• Transnationalism
• Forced migration
• Travel
• Eastern Europe
• Social sciences
• Hungary
• Eastern
• Destruction
• Refugee
• Migration
• Première Guerre mondiale
• Hongrie
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 05 juillet 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253062185
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

BUDAPEST S CHILDREN
WORLDS IN CRISIS: REFUGEES, ASYLUM, AND FORCED MIGRATION
Elizabeth Cullen Dunn and Georgina Ramsay, editors
BUDAPEST S CHILDREN
Humanitarian Relief in the Aftermath of the Great War
Friederike Kind-Kov cs
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.org
2022 by Friederike Kind-Kov cs
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Cover image: School kitchen of the SCIU in Budapest (February 1921), image by Frank-Henrie Julien, Archives Priv es 92.105.79 (3), CH Archives d Etat de Gen ve, Geneva.
All efforts have been made to obtain permissions for use of images. The use of media here is solely for educational purposes. Parts of the work appeared in slightly different form in the following articles:
Kind-Kov cs, Friederike. Compassion for the Distant Other: Children s Hunger and Humanitarian Relief in Budapest in the Aftermath of WWI. In Rescuing the Vulnerable: Poverty, Welfare and Social Ties in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Europe , edited by Beate Althammer, Lutz Raphael, and Tamara Stazic-Wendt, 129-59. New York: Berghahn Books, 2016. Reproduced with permission of Berghahn Books.
Kind-Kov cs, Friederike. The Great War, the Child s Body and the American Red Cross. European Review of History 23, no. 1-2 (2016): 33-62. Reproduced with permission of Taylor Francis Online.
Kind-Kov cs, Friederike. The Other Child Transports: World War I and the Temporary Displacement of Needy Children from Central Europe. La Revue d histoire de l enfance irr guli re 15 (2013): 75-95. Reproduced with permission of La Revue d histoire de l enfance irr guli re.
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing 2022
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN 978-0-253-06215-4 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-253-06216-1 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-253-06217-8 (e-book)
To Gyula, Laura, and Lotte
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Migration: Life in a Displacement Hub
2. Hunger: Starving in the Capital City
3. Degeneration: Embodying Postwar Suffering
4. Institutions: The Genesis of Child Protection
5. Infrastructures: Materializing Glocal Relief
6. Bodies: Feeding Budapest s Hungry Children
7. (Inter)Nationalism: The Politics of Material Aid
8. Displacement: The Ambiguity of the Children s Trains
9. Education: Workrooms to Teach the Children
Conclusion: Transformation: From Aid to Self-Help
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
T HIS BOOK COULD NOT HAVE BEEN WRITTEN WITHOUT the immense support I received in the past decade of my academic career. I would like to express my gratitude for the institutional and financial support of the Department of Southeast and East European History at Regensburg University, the Graduate School of Southeast and East European Studies (Regensburg/Munich), and the Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarianism Studies at TU Dresden. I would like to particularly thank Professor Ulf Brunnbauer, who has been immensely supportive since I started the research for this book in 2010, as well as Professor Catriona Kelly, Professor Paul Hanebrink, Professor Heide Fehrenbach, and the external reviewers who all gave me substantial feedback on the original manuscript. A substantial part of the work was written during my stay at the Imre Kert sz Kolleg in Jena during the 2017-18 academic year and a semester at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Central European University in Budapest in 2019, supported through a Botstiber Fellowship in Transatlantic Austrian and Central European Relationships, for which I am very grateful. Thank you to the various parties that worked on the publication process, including the staff and anonymous reviewers at Indiana University Press. I would like to also thank Kristina E. Poznan and Jon Ashby for their help with revising the manuscript in various stages and Enik Z ller for assistance with images. I am thankful for the 2019 Regensburg Prize for Women in Academia and the Arts from the city of Regensburg, which provided me with substantial financial support to finalize this volume for publication.
The work would have not been possible without the support of many archives and individuals. Combining an extensive body of Hungarian sources with a great diversity of written and visual sources from international archives, the text that follows has a genuinely transnational perspective. The monograph draws on Hungarian primary sources that reconstruct the historical legacy of Hungarian child protection before and after World War I. These sources have been gathered from the Hungarian state archives and several denominational archives (Episcopal Archive, Archive of the Evangelical Church, Hungarian Jewish Archive, Hungarian Jewish Congregation of Belief). Other important sources were found at the Semmelweis Library and Museum, Ethnographic Museum, Kiscelli Museum, Hungarian Pedagogical Museum and Library, Hungarian National Museum, Metropolitan Ervin Szab Library, and National Sz ch nyi Library. To gain knowledge of Austro-Hungarian imperial child relief activities, I consulted the Austrian state archives in Vienna. To reconstruct the international humanitarian relief activities in Budapest, the book incorporates archival sources from Austria, the United States, Great Britain, and Switzerland. Contemporary British publications were gathered from the British National Archives in Kew and the British Library in London.
To demonstrate the involvement of the Save the Children Fund (London) and its International Union (Geneva), I conducted research at the Save the Children Fund Archive at the Cadbury Research Library in Birmingham. I also conducted research at the state archives in Geneva, which holds the collections of the Save the Children International Union. In Geneva, I also researched the archival collections of the League of Nations and the Archives du Comit International de la Croix-Rouge. To trace the involvement of the American National Red Cross, the US Food Administration, and the American Relief Administration, I conducted research at the National Archives and Records Administration at College Park, Washington, and the Hoover Institution Library Archives at Stanford University. For insight into the ethnic dimension of relief, I consulted records in the archive of the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in New York. The Library of Congress in Washington, DC, provided a useful body of US and international contemporary publications. Thank you to the archivists and librarians at each of these locations for their assistance. Finally, I have conducted life-story interviews with some individuals who participated in the children s trains to foreign countries. The accounts of the child evacuees, whom I would like to thank here, tell us what it meant to them to live a destitute life in postwar Budapest and to be sent away.
Most important, I would like to thank my husband, Gyula Kov cs, and our two daughters, Laura and Lotte, for their support, understanding, and patience over the past decade, when I traveled for various research trips and international conferences abroad. Without them I would have never finished writing this book. I also would like to thank my parents, Gisela and Christian Kind, and my sisters, Ulrike and Sophie, for their continuous support. As the travel that was necessary to research this book and the time to write it were substantial, I feel blessed that I could rely on their helping hands and support throughout the years. And last, I thank all the loving caretakers at the various nurseries, kindergartens, afternoon care facilities, and schools in Regensburg, Budapest, and Weimar-as well as our various au pairs, among them Magdolna Gy rgy, Csenge Moln r, Borb la M ry, and Sof a R os-for spending beautiful hours with our children while I was working on this book.
BUDAPEST S CHILDREN
INTRODUCTION
A Capital City in the Aftermath of War
They brought the children away from Budapest, because in the villages people could somehow still survive, but Budapest was a hell hole, it was terrible. The children were starving. This is how Piroska, a ninety-nine-year-old Hungarian woman, remembered her childhood. 1 In 1922, as an eight-year-old, malnourished and nearly starving, she was sent along with thousands of other children from Budapest to a foster family in Holland, where she stayed for several months. Her recollection of Hungary s capital is one of the few oral testimonies of a child s life in Budapest in the aftermath of the Great War. Most people of this generation are no longer alive. To flesh out Piroska s story, written sources and visuals of the period provide a vivid picture of children s experiences in Budapest in the early 1920s, unveiling the two intertwined historical topics that lie at the core of this book: children s destitution and relief.
To understand the particularly pressing condition of children in postwar Hungary, Budapest s Children elaborates on how the city and its children were affected by the social consequences of war and imperial dissolution, addressing the largely overlooked civilian dimension of postwar suffering. 2 War was never a unifying global experience, 3 as Mischa Honeck and James Marten put it; children s specific experiences in the aftermath of war were dependent on their place of upbringing and belonging, social and ethnic class, gender, and religion. Indeed, the history of chil