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372 Matthew Rampley and Košice  – commonly referred to as Zips (in Hungarian : Szepes, in Slovak : Spiš)  – was a German speech island, amidst a broader population of Slovaks and Hungarians. Like Böhm, Henszlmann was also of German-speaking origin. Pulszky was from a family of Polish aristocrats, but his father’s first language was German, and German was the language spoken at home, even though his mother was Hungarian.24 Indeed, when 15 he had to be sent to study at the provincial town of Miskolc in order to improve his Hungarian language skills.25 Eitelberger can be mentioned in this context, too, for having grown up and studied in Olmütz (now : Olomouc) in Moravia, he was also the product of a German speech island, although in this case it was in a mixed German- and Czech-speaking environment. The changing demography of late nineteenth-century Austria-Hungary has, for un- derstandable reasons, attracted considerable commentary, since it has most often been identified as the principal cause of the instability and eventual collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy. Yet even in the first half of the 1800s there were discernible shifts ; in par- ticular, the German-speaking population in Hungary began to lose its distinct identity and adopt Hungarian as their primary language. During the War of Independence Buda was still a predominantly German-speaking town, but on the other side of the Danube, Pest, which owed much of its development to traders and artisans from Germany, had become a Hungarian town, and had come to overshadow in size and significance its counterpart across the river.26 This fluid cultural landscape arguably had a formative influence on all those members of the Böhm circle who came from beyond Vienna, in contrast to others such as Edu- ard von Sacken, Albert von Camesina and Gustav Heider, who were based in Vienna or its vicinity. Indeed, one might go further, and argue that their similar backgrounds were linked to, even responsible for, common attitudes towards the question of national identity. In the later nineteenth century, as Habsburg political and social life became in- creasingly fractured, the experience of linguistic and cultural difference became increas- ingly associated with various nationalist political movements. Yet in the 1840s, it could 24 “Im väterlichen Hause war die deutsche Sprache die Umgangssprache, in der Schule wurde latein- isch und deutsch unterrichtet […] deutsch waren die Bücher und Zeitungen, die ich las, ungarisch sprach ich nur bei meiner Grossmutter in Keresztes” [German was the everyday language of my pa- ternal home, in school Latin and German were taught […] German, too, were the books and newspapers I read ; I only spoke Hungarian with my grandmother in Keresztes]. Pulszky, Meine Zeit, mein Leben  I (cit. n.  22), p.  33. 25 On Pulszky’s biography see, too, L. Csorba, Ferenc Pulszky, in : Marosi/Laczkó/Szábo/Tohtné Mészáros (eds.), Ferenc Pulszky (cit. n.  21), pp.  121–128. 26 This issue is addressed in C. Horel, Histoire de Budapest, Paris 1999. See especially chapter  5 : Une ville que s’élève (1800–1849), pp.  85–124. Open Access © 2019 by BÖHLAU VERLAG GMBH & CO.KG, WIEN