Throughout the city\u00b4s history, the population of Bratislava had fundamentally restructured three times. Until the second half of the 19th century, for the geographical proximity of Vienna, the German element was determinant in the life of the city. Then, in the period from the 1860s up to 1918 it was the Hungarian language and culture that was forging ahead. After the change of state power in the years 1918\u20131919, the Slovak character of the city gradually strengthened. This process intensified again in the period of 1945\u20131948 by forced Slovakisation, rights deprivation, deportation and forced relocation of the non-Slovak (Hungarian and German) population, which was followed in the 1950s and 1960s by intentional mass settling of Slovaks in Bratislava. This obviously led to a restructuring of the city\u00b4s ethnic character. By now, Bratislava as the capital of Slovakia and later of the independent Slovak Republic, has become an almost entirely Slovak city.
\nConsequently, even the first hundred years of the professional Hungarian-language theatre between 1820 and 1920 had also been a now and again interrupted period of struggle for existence, for gaining ground, for finding its place, for winning its civil rights. And if we take the period of the fifty years between 1880 and 1930, when the Hungarian-language theatre of Bratislava actually began to advance, we can see that within the first four decades it suddenly\u2014from one day to another\u2014lost ground, its raison d\u00b4\u00eatre, then, by the end of the 1930s it completely ceased to exist. That is, in Bratislava two major switches of languages and cultures took place within fifty years\u2014which is rare, even in a wider context. First it was the Hungarian language that gradually gained more and more of a hold from the absolute majority of the German language and culture, then, by suppression of Hungarian, the Slovak\u2014and in some extent the Czech\u2014character of the city had strengthened, thus providing a successful example of \u201cnationalization of the place and the past\u201d. This study observes the initial stages of the second change of Bratislava\u00b4s language and culture, respectively, the processes preceding the change. Taking divergent approaches, it examines the many aspects of the changes affecting the city\u00b4s Hungarian-language theatre in the light of the contemporary press, and it also pays special attention to Hungarian and Slovak theatre historiography.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Throughout the city\u00b4s history, the population of Bratislava had fundamentally restructured three times. Until the second half of the 19th century, for the geographical proximity of Vienna, the German element was determinant in the life of the city. Then, in the period from the 1860s up to 1918 it was the Hungarian language and culture […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":878,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[555,568,540],"tags":[],"post_year":[],"coauthors":[295],"class_list":["post-2595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-forum-social-science-review","category-studies","category-szemle"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n