In my lecture I will attempt to outline what elements of national characterology concerning Hungarianness and Germanness appear in the early modern German poet Jacob Vogel’s epic Ungrische Schlacht… (Jehna [Jena]: bey Johann Weidners Witben, 1626) and in its two medieval sources, Liudprand’s Antapodosis and Widukind’s Res gestae Saxonicae libri tres. The analysis is based on Reinhart Koselleck’s theory of asymmetrical counter-concepts (Zur historisch-politischen Semantik asymmetrischer Gegenbegriffe. In: Koselleck, Reinhart: Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1979, p. 211-259.). I will examine how the appearance and use of imagological elements in source works and epic have changed along the lines of Tünde Radek’s conceptual pairs (Western-Eastern, Christian-Pagan, moral-amoral), which she has successfully adapted for the analysis of historiographical and literary works. These conceptual pairs are the subject of Tünde Radek’s doctoral dissertation written in German Das Ungarnbild in der deutschsprachigen Historiographie des Mittelalters (Frankfurt a. M.: Lang, 2008, 289 p.), and of her studies in Hungarian.
I graduated from the University of Szeged with a degree in German and Italian Language and Literature, Humanities and Teacher Education. I did my doctoral studies at the Doctoral School of Literature at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of Pázmány Péter Catholic University. My field is the history of early modern German literature. I work at the Library of the Hungarian Parliament. My responsibilities include the supervision of the Library’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Collection. I am currently working on my doctoral dissertation on the sources of Jacob Vogel’s epic Ungrische Schlacht.