Summary:

During the 1848 uprising in the Banat region, Serbian rebels attacked Hungarian civilians. The author, a Hungarian soldier, explains how Serbian rebels had been incited through propaganda claiming that Hungarians sought to impose their Reformed religion and language on the Serbs. This manipulation fueled intense religious and national fanaticism.

In the story, the narrator tries to convince a young Serbian woman that the Hungarians did not come to harm her people, but only to punish the bandits who had attacked Hungarian families. She refuses to believe him, seeing him as the enemy since her own relatives are among the rebels.

The text then portrays the brutal reality of the civil conflict — guerrilla warfare, massacres, arson, looting, and the suffering of innocent civilians.”

In the book “Deutsche Monatsschrift für Politik, Wissenshaft kunst and leben, Volumes 1–2” from 1851 we find a passage about the Serbian-Hungarian conflict of 1848-49. The author mentions that Serbian religious fanaticism was directed towards the Hungarians after Serbian leaders claimed that the Hungarians wanted to impose a new religion on the Serbian population. On page 310 we can read:

“As is well known, attempts were made to convince the Serbian people that the Hungarians wanted to impose the Reformed faith and their language on the Serbs. With a people as superstitious as the Serbians, religious fanaticism is much easier to stir up than nationalistic fanaticism.

I told her that we share the same God as them and that we would neither impose our language nor our religion on them, much less mistreat or kill them or their fathers. We had only come to fire upon the persecuted Hungarian families against their robbers and murderers, and only to punish Lestere, but certainly not the entire Serbian people, for the atrocities they had committed.

My words, however, had little effect; the twofold fanaticism had already taken too deep root in her youthful heart for Lestere to be receptive to the words of her enemy, for whom she saw me. After all, the robbers and murderers we had come to punish were her brothers and relatives; therefore, she prayed for them and wedded.

At times, she fixed her dark eyes thoughtfully on me, then she smiled with a wonderful mixture of the wild and the gentle, and she said she pityed me for being Hungarian. I only briefly participated in the Nacenkampf in the Banat. Continuous guerrilla fighting, night raids, murder, robbery, arson, and devastation of all kinds.

Homeless families wandering the fields, violated virgins, despair, misery, and nameless wretchedness—these are the elements that provide me with the richest material for hair-raising tales from that time, which I, however, spare the reader and instead ask him to accompany me to another scene of no less interesting events.”

Reference

Deutsche Monatsschrift für Politik, Wissenshaft kunst and leben Volumes 1–2. 1851