Schnittpunke Band I. Literarisches leben des Deutschsprachigen Ungarn um 1800

"Most Hungarians speak German [...] Their summer and winter theater, their reading, and even their bookstores are almost exclusively German" - so says E. M. Arndt's report on his trip to Hungary in August 1798. Little known as it may be today, the cities of the kingdom were indeed largely German-speaking at that time, with a lively and flourishing German-language cultural and literary life. German poems, stories, letters, journals and dramas were read far and wide. Reading them today, one is surprised to encounter in them the same attachment to the Hungarian fatherland as in the well-known Hungarian works of the time. Only the language separated them from each other. The German-speaking Hungarians commemorated in their works not differently than their Hungarian compatriots the glorious history of the Magyars with the country-building Árpád, but above all the Christian spirit of Stephen I and the world-open culture of King Matthias. Christian enlightened views shaped their Hungary-connected contemporary critique, and they represented these also in the respective constitution of reformist utopias as well as in all current economic and cultural expectations for the future. Thanks to their Hungarian identity and their German mother tongue, they always conveyed European values at the intersection of two national cultures.