Vol. XXXVI · 2005

John C. Swanson

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There are numerous ethnic minorities in Central and Eastern Europe. Exact numbers are often difficult to determine, since some people view membership as a subjective feeling.4 For those who consider it subjective, as well as for those who believe that membership is decided by objective criteria, there remain other issues that make counting members difficult, including questions of assimilation, political climate, and memories of persecution.5 Yet there are ethnic minorities throughout Central and Eastern Europe; the most obvious examples include the ethnic Russians scattered throughout the states of the former Soviet Union; Magyars in Romania, Slovakia, Serbia, and Ukraine; the Albanians in Macedonia and Serbia-Montenegro; and the Serbs in Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo. One of the largest ethnic minorities before 1945 was the Germans, numbering slightly more than ten million in 1933.6 Many of these Germans were relocated toward the end of World War II and after, leaving a much smaller number of Germans in states other than Germany and Austria today.7 It is one such German ethnic minority -the Hungarian-Germans - that is the subject of this study.8