Talk:Germans of Hungary

[Untitled]

Shouldn't this be at Hungarian Germans or Germans in Hungary? As it stands now, it sounds like it's an article about Germans who can't wait for dinner. Liamdaly620 03:02, 7 October 2006 (UTC)

I suggest that the title should be German Hungarians. This is the way they are referred to in most documents. Gravy t 22:54, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

Many of these Germanic groups settled in Hungary long before there was a Germany. IN fact Hungary and Austria were in a political union until 1918. So, they were not German. Many, especially in the southern areas near Serbia, called themselves Shwoveh (Schwowe). So, at best they were ethnic GErmans, speaking a Germanic language when they were not assimilated into Hungarian. Many in fact were Hungarian at an identity, language and cultural level. So, at best they were all Germanic Hungarians. This should be the name of this Page.Imersion (talk) 14:35, 31 July 2015 (UTC)

Until the end of WWII, the Donauschwaben (Danube Swabians) retained their German identity, way of life and culture, as well as several German dialects and costumes. The Danube Swabians did not describe themselves as Hungarians, and also not as Germanic Hungarians as you claimed, because they allways said mir san Deitsche, or mir rede noch die Deitsch Mottersproch. Also DNA Studies shows that the Donschwaben are of majority German Ancestry https://assets.researchsquare.com/files/rs-1407483/v2/0286f9e1-7ea3-428c-b9c2-68d939b1c342.pdf?c=1648499273wa.

In Hungary, once were entire villages in which only Danube Swabians lived. As example, In the Lower Baranya, some have called themselves Stiffolder until today, because their Ancestors once came from the Hochstift Fulda in Hesse around 1720. Nalanidil (talk) 18:11, 1 June 2022 (UTC)

Treatment in Post-War Hungary

"Speaking German in public was widely disdained, and often verbally reproached, even into the 1970s". I doubt that this is true. I studied German in Hungary in primary school from about 1957, and in high school in 1960-62. While Russian was a mandatory second language from fifth grade on, the most common modern (i.e., other than Latin) foreign language taught in schools after Russian was German; there were very few English teachers. There were lots of German tourists in Hungary even in the 1960s. Waiters in classier restaurants often spoke German to foreign tourists (most of the waiters did not speak English), and menus were often bilingual Hungarian-German. I had East German friends visiting me in Hungary around 1962-63, and I did not feel inhibited talking to them in German in public. What happened in the early 1950s may be a different matter, I don't know. Mateat (talk) 03:18, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

The info was tagged for long, so I removed it. (I'm Hungarian, to me too it rings blatantly false. German was OK even with the Communists because of East Germany.) Squash Racket (talk) 12:59, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

I think the wording of the sentence in question was wrong. Learning of second languages outside Russian differed from institution to institution. In our elementary, there weren't any besides Russian. Having said that, the point was the acceptance of using minority languages. It's very different talking about the use of a foreign language by non-natives, and the use of a minority one, which really did not improve until the 1980's. I'm an ethnic German myself, my paternal grandfather being the first non-Swabian in the family (my mother's side is Hungarian). Still, I had to learn German, just like anybody else, and because neither my given nor family name is German, I can't use German in official communication. Shinichi1977 (talk) 17:55, 9 May 2015 (UTC)

I find these comments narrowly insular. Clearly after Potsdam, for many years German was a subversive and disdained language. Imersion (talk) 14:38, 31 July 2015 (UTC)

EXPULSION

There are many errors in the Expulsion section of the Wikipedia Germans of Hungary web-site. For example, the expulsion of the Hungarian Germans was not caused by Benes' wish to expel the Hungarians from Slovakia and Germans from the Sudetenland, but by the Hungarian Communist Party, strongly supported by the Soviet Union, which was the occupying power in Hungary at that time. The objective was to gain power in Hungary,just as in the other Eastern European countries, and to promote a radical land reform. To achieve this end, the Soviet Union proposed the expulsion of the German Hungarians at the Potsdam conference in August 1945 which was then approved by the Allies. Another serious error is the statement that in 1950 the Hungarian government gave the opportunity to those German Hungarians who were deported to East Germany to return to Hungary and most did. Granted there was a general amnesty in October 1949 for those Germans remaining in Hungary and in May 1950 the expulsions were officially stopped and the German Hungarians received Hungarian citizenship but if any German Hungarians left East Germany in 1950 they went to West Germany rather to another communist country. Nevertheless,about 8,000 Germans were reported to have illegally returned to Hungary prior to 1950,(about 4% of those expelled)for a number of reasons. I shall edit this Expulsion section shortly Zweisimmen (talk) 17:46, 6 October 2015 (UTC)

The table in Treatment in Post-War Hungary indicates the data are from the 2011 census in Hungary, but the citations bring up tables from the 2001 census in Hungary. Perhaps that could be rectified. And the sources for the infobox populations are bare urls, which now lead to a long table of contents in Hungarian, rather than specific tables containing those numbers. It is better to use full citations for the Census data, at least including the table title and the year of the census which is the source. There is one report from the 2011 census by Hungary, but I am not sure it has the data matching what I see in this article today.

I did not find a table for people still speaking German, for example, only providing ethnic identity as German in Hungary. Maybe that is found in a different report. --Prairieplant (talk) 19:47, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

References

Merge tag without discussion?

There is a merge tag at the beginning of the article, but there is no relevant section about it on this Talk page. In my opinion, the topic of the Danube Swabians article is neither a subset nor a superset of the topic of this article: (1) the Danube Swabians article does not only talk about Swabians who lives/lived in Hungary (or the Kingdom of Hungary), but also about Swabians of other countries; moreover, (2) not all Germans who lives/lived in Hungary are/were Swabians. For example, the Zipsers are Germans, but they are not Swabians. So, I do not think that a merge is appropriate. KœrteFa {ταλκ} 14:15, 13 October 2013 (UTC)

Census numbers, 2001–present

It appears there are multiple different questions on the Hungarian census to solicit ethnicity, including more straightforward ones about language ("mother tongue" and language spoken with family/friends), as well as others that are a bit ambiguous (ethnicity/nationality vs. "belonging to" or "affiliation with" ethnicity/nationality). The nationwide and county-wise numbers for these various questions regarding German identity/language are available on the 2022 census website here.

The "main population characteristics" summary provided on the census website here (click through to the slide titled "Ethnic affiliation") gives the 142,551 number for "German ethnic affiliation", which matches the 2022 number for the "Ethnic attribute" labeled "Belong to German ethnic group" in the database linked above. It is the numbers for "Belong ...", broken down by county, that I updated the table in the article to reflect. It appears the prior numbers for 2001 and 2011, where they were offered, accorded with the numbers for the "Ethnic attribute" simply labeled "German".

In case the more useful/accurate/etc. numbers are not the ones I elected to use, I wanted to start a discussion here so editors know what the obvious alternatives might be. Also, I did not update the county-wise numbers in the infobox for now. Peloneous(t)[c] 01:06, 2 November 2024 (UTC)