My mum’s family is Hungarian, and a few years back while I was finishing my minor in German, my grandpa was showing me some letters his grandpa wrote back home during the first world war. They were dated from 1917, and were all written in German. Being the only one in the family who could speak German, I was tasked with translating them. They were only interesting for the sheer age of the letters - it was just a simple, “I’m ok, say a prayer for me, I’ll see you soon” type single paragraph letter.
Here’s what’s curious: his family was Hungarian. He was Hungarian. The grammar in the letter certainly suggests he was not especially comfortable with German (verbs all over the place and the like, among other gaffes). And there was a Austrian “Zenzur-Abteilung” stamp of approval on the other sides of the letters. So, can I then infer from all of this that soldiers in the great war, fighting for Austria-Hungary, had to write in German in order to get their letters sent home? I’m interested if anyone knows the Straight Dope behind this, since it seems like there would be an interesting story behind it!
I doubt it was mandatory to write in German; the Austro-Hungarian empire was a multiethnic state, and it was well aware of this. Even though German was clearly the dominant language because the ruling class were German, other languages were not systematically repressed, and after the formal restoration of the Hungarian monarchy in 1866, Hungary and Austria were formally equal crowns with a common ruler (the Austrian Emperor was simultaneously King of Hungary), but separate governments and administrative bureaucracies. In the imperial administration, it was expected of high-ranking officials to have at least some knowledge of both languages.
My guess to explain the use of German, rather than Hungarian, in your letter would be that your great-great-grandfather was aware that the letter would be censored; and while the use of Hungarian in the letter was not prohibited, the censor reading it would be more likely to be a native speaker of German than of Hungarian, so writing in German would simply speed up the clearance process.
Your great-great-grandfather may have been ethnically Magyar, but he might have been educated in an Austrian (i.e., German) school. There were a lot of Germans living in Hungary at the time (see map), and, especially if the family were Catholic, a German school might be the only one available. If the family spoke Magyar at home, but he learned to read and write in German, it would explain his discomfort with the language.
You g-g-grandfather may have been illiterate and someone else (who wasn’t much better, obviously) could have written the letters.
Well, he signed the letter at the bottom in Hungarian, so it stands to reason that it was his writing. From the stories my grandpa told me of him, I’ve inferred that he was quite literate, and well read at that! #1 is a possibility though, since I can’t imagine he’d have done much Hungarian schooling pre-1919.
I’m no expert, but isn’t censoring done at the unit level (it is in Catch-22 at least:) ). Could it be that the person/people in his unit who did the censoring did not speak Hungarian, so he had to write in German?
Long story short, schools were generally run by churches, not the state, and the schools taught whatever language was popular in the congregration, although the state guaranteed minorities could be taught in their own language. This included not just German and Magyar, but Slavic, Italian and other languages that were spoken in the empire.
It’s also possible that g-g-grandfather was writing to people who would’ve been more comfortable reading German than Magyar.
I gather that even a Hungarian with only a basic education was likely to know more than one language.
As best I can tell from the context I was presented by grandpa, these are letters that he wrote while in a Russian klink. So…in theory there ought have been censors at two levels, but I have a feeling something was lost in oral history…
