Abstract
Ever since the 1920 Trianon Treaty that dismantled the former Hungarian empire, Komárno’s significance in Slovak and Hungarian symbolic politics has exceeded that of a town merely at the border with the former ruler-nation. Instead, it has represented the entire Hungarian community in Slovakia.
On the basis of oral history interviews analyzed against the background of local and state-level politics in Slovakia and in Hungary, this article considers the way Komárno Hungarians and Slovaks perceive themselves in their bi-ethnic environment. It contrasts the local, everyday cohabitation with the instrumentalization of the national question in Budapest and Bratislava.
It shows how the continued dynamic development of the bi-ethnic community is undermined by the politicization of the national question, which in itself is seen as a part of the post-communist legacy: as if the fading contours of the physical border after the fall of the Iron Curtain had to be replaced by a symbolic border of language and nationality.