The Spatial Control of Central European Concierges
Research Area 3: Objects, Traces, Mapping: Everyday Experience of Spaces.
Contact: istvan.adam@cefres.cz
István has been awarded the degree of PhD at the University of Bristol. His doctoral project examines the role of an understudied group of everyday Hungarians during and before the Holocaust: the Budapest building managers, concierges, or in Hungarian: the házmester. He analysed the building managers’ wartime acts in the light of their decades-long struggle for a higher salary, social appreciation and their aspiration to authority.
As he was working on his doctoral dissertation, gradually István has started to realize that it was not only the Hungarian context where building managers could play a critical role in the Jewish citizens’ survival. This is why his postdoctoral project investigates the similarities and differences among ordinary professionals working as concierges in different Central European territories in the 20th century: in Hungary, in the Czech Lands, in Slovakia and in Poland, and finally in a Western European country: France.
The comparative nature of Istvan’s postdoctoral project is useful in drawing up a European pattern of behaviour of those who belonged to the concierge profession. This could help to better understand the motivation of the general population, who witnessed the persecution of the European Jewry and who welcomed back the survivors in a transitional period. Instead of focusing on the wartime actions (or inactions) of the entire population of a specific country, or instead of drawing up righteous and less righteous realms, Istvan’s research shows that is makes more sense to choose certain groups with similar social and professional problems from various countries, and compare their long time acts and agencies.
CV
Education
2010-2015: PhD in Historical Studies, University of Bristol. Dissertation Title: “Bystanders” to Genocide?: The Role of Building Managers in the Hungarian Holocaust, written under the supervision of Tim Cole and Josie McLellan.
2008-2009: MA in History, Central European University, Budapest. Thesis Title: Post-Holocaust Pogroms in Poland and Hungary.
1998-2003: BA in Law, University of Szeged. Thesis Title: The History of Refugee Legislation.
1994-1998: BA in History, József Attila University, Szeged. Thesis Title: Polish Refugees in Hungary during World War II.
Grants and Fellowships
- Claims Conference Saul Kagan Fellow in Advanced Shoah Studies, 2013–2015.
- EHRI/European Holocaust Research Infrastructure Fellow at the Prague Jewish Museum, November 2014.
- Junior Fellow at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, March 2014 – August 2014.
- Tziporah Wiesel Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, December 2012 – May 2013.
- EHRI/European Holocaust Research Infrastructure Fellowship at Yad Vashem, October-November, 2012
- J. & O. Winter Fund Grant, 2011.
- University of Bristol, Faculty of Arts Scholarship For Postgraduates, 2010.
Selected Publications
Monography
- Budapest Building Managers and the Holocaust in Hungary. London, Palgrave, 2017.
Articles
- Review on Barna-Pető, Political Justice in Budapest after WWII, Hungarian Historical Review 3 (2015), p. 790-795.
- “Tipping the Rescuer? The Financial Aspects of the Budapest Building Managers’ Helping Activity during the Last Phase of the Second World War”, in: S:I.M.O.N. – Shoah: Intervention. Methods, Documentation 2 (2015) 1, p. 4-14.
- “Das verletzte Selbstwertgefühl des Herrn Professor” in S.I.M.O.N. – Shoah: Intervention. Methods, Documentation 1 (2014), p. 22-27.
- “A házmesterek szerepe a magyar holokausztban” [The Role of Building Managers in the Hungarian Holocaust], in Randolph L. Braham (ed.), Tanulmányok a holokausztról VI [Studies on the Holocaust, vol. VI], Budapest, Múlt és jövő, 2014, p. 103-137.
My research explores the making of a ‘productivist’ middle-class and their battle for social legitimation, intellectual authority, and middle-class identity in the Habsburg Monarchy between the 1867 Ausgleich and the aftermath of the Great War. In this study I analyze who became engaged in the battle for social recognition, what their motivations (scientific, social, economic) were, and what themes and social issues they considered important in their professional and private endeavors. A special emphasis is put on the relation between the educational system, with its inherent role in the knowledge production of specialized disciplines, and the economic and social modernization of the Dualist Monarchy. Here, my approach focuses on how educational change (e.g. the rise of professional education) could be interpreted from the perspective of its social effects or even in terms of economic causes. My research also includes the analysis of various types of white-collar work in early urban capitalism, especially from the perspective of how the struggles around class, status, and power were represented and negotiated in the public sphere and in related scientific endeavors by our protagonists. In this vein, selected case studies deal with the practices of accounting, banking, insurance business, engineering, and transportation.
The research project seeks to analyse the stakes behind the concept of judgement in the light of Seneca’s tragedies. In such works, judgement stands as a decision-making process within the frame of Stoicism, as a decision of the judicial authority under the Roman Empire and last, as a part of tragedy as genre. Legal procedure formalising the decision making, the new constellation of the judicial field in the imperial era raised new questions about the nature of judgement in general, including that of moral and aesthetical judgement. The aim of this research is to explore how the formalising of assessing and decision making processes, especially in legal procedure, are being questioned–since they are at the origin of European law. This will lead to reflecting upon judicial authority and judgement. Grounded in the study of classics, this survey of the judgement in the works of Seneca should enable to look into the precondition of social sciences topics and the study of law, without being embedded in their methodology.