It means *mastering the past" from the German *Verganenheit" +
*Bewaeltigung" mastering.  The Germans, owing to the horror of the Nazi
times, had a psychological problem in facing up to their past and in order
to overcome it they first had to face it.  It is a little like our American
problem in facing up to Mai Lai in Vietnam where U.S. troops killed small
children and defenseless women except that the German problem is infinitely
greater since whole populations were massacred (as in Lidice in CR, villages
in Greek Macedonia, the Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw, Babi Yar in Ukraine, etc.

--
Glen D. Camp
Professor of Political Science
Bryant College
401-232-6246
>

On Fri, 7 Oct 1994, H. MARC wrote:

> What does Vergangenheitsbewaeltigungmean?  BTW, Thanx for the Respekt article
> translation.  Very interesting...marc
>

Just a useless (?) footnote on the history of the Roma language:

maybe it was a shared fellow-feeling with a people whose language was
being pressurized into extinction by a centralizing, "Enlightened"
absolutist state, but one of the Czech patriotic intellectuals who
figured in the early Czech national revival, among his other works, which
were mostly concerning preserving and creating modern literature in Czech,
wrote and published (about 1815 or so, if memory serves) a grammar of the
Roma language.  Almost certainly the first published grammar in Czech of the
language:  I don't know if Czech Roma now have anything similar.


Sincerely,

Hugh Agnew

I read an article in March in Hungary about the current citizenship laws and
here is what they said:
Everybody who has any Hungarian ancestry is a Hungarian citizen by default.
This law is fairly similar to the corresponding law in Germany.

Istvan Siposs

Marc,

Now I really don't get it. You said you are partly Hungarian and partly French,
the worst possible genetic combination. What do you mean? Are you ashamed of
being Hungarian or being French (or both)?
By the way, to my best knowledge, there is such a phrase as 'mental ability'.

Istvan Siposs

Jennifer,

I don't know about rent in rural areas (as a matter of fact, I haven't even
heard of anyone trying to rent in a village.) I was referring to rents in
cities including Budapest, although prices are much higher there than
anywhere else, so it's not rare to find a small apartment for $120-$150 in BP.
The cheapest rents are somewhere around $70 as far as I know but many times
those are illegal units which makes things pretty inconvenient sometimes.

Istvan