This book documents the physical aspects of the lives of Hungarian Jews in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: the way they looked, the kind of neighborhoods and apartments they lived in, and the places where they worked. The many historical photographs—there is at least one picture per page—and related text offers a virtual cross section of Hungarian society, a diverse group of the poor, the middle-class, and the wealthy. Regardless of whether they lived integrated within the majority society or in separate communities, whether they were assimilated Jews or Hasidim, they were an important and integral part of the nation. We have surprisingly few detailed accounts of their lifestyles—the world knows more about the circumstances of their deaths than about the way they lived. Much like piecing together an ancient sculpture from tiny shards found in an excavation, Koerner tries to reconstruct the many diverse lifestyles using fragmentary information and surviving photos.

Surveys Hungary's development from prehistory to the postcommunist era

This volume analyses the important structural changes and mobility that occurred in Hungary from the middle of the 19th to the end of the 20th centuries by using rich statistical and narrative sources, sometimes reaching to certain social stata. The period extending to WWI was the time of the establishment of the capital market economy, which went with the change of the occupational structure, the hierarchy of the status, and the culture. During the period between the two world wars, the territory and the population of the country greatly diminshed. This was also a reason of the slackening of the social mobility and the rigidity of the structure. After WWII, especially during the period of socialism, the political-led change of structure became determinant. All of these made possible the so-called "goulash communism," a change of life-style, from the sixties. From 1989 on, the return of the market capitalism has been forming the structure.

From the 1860s onward, Habsburg Hungary attempted a massive project of cultural assimilation to impose a unified national identity on its diverse populations. In one of the more quixotic episodes in this “Magyarization,” large monuments were erected near small towns commemorating the medieval conquest of the Carpathian Basin—supposedly, the moment when the Hungarian nation was born. This exactingly researched study recounts the troubled history of this plan, which—far from cultivating national pride—provoked resistance and even hostility among provincial Hungarians. Author Bálint Varga thus reframes the narrative of nineteenth-century nationalism, demonstrating the complex relationship between local and national memories.