Skip to content

Heavy Fabric. Women – Traditional Costume – Life Stories

Start Date
06 June 2025
End Date
25 January 2026
Venue
Museum of Ethnography
Location
Budapest, Hungary
Curator
Henrike Hampe
Hosting curators of the Museum of Ethnography:
Mónika Lackner, Erika Vass

Swabian destinies represented through clothing at the Museum of Ethnography

What stories do our clothes tell? Are they capable of revealing the secrets of the past, of representing the fate of individuals, families, and ethnic groups? The Museum of Ethnography’s guest exhibition comes from the Danube-Swabian Central Museum in Ulm to reveal through beautiful costumes the joyful and traumatic events in the lives of German girls and women living along the Danube. The temporary exhibition will be open from 6 June 2025 to 25 January 2026.

„It is spring and 13-year-old Elisabeth is filled with anticipation – she is going to her first ball! Her mother has taken great care to make her the perfect outfit. The white shirt is adorned with embroidered flowers and Elisabeth’s monogram. The pleated skirt, which unfurls at every turn, gleams from afar. The fact that girls wear such colourful attire is due to the influence of Hungarian culture and has only been common in the village for some ten years. 

The Kremers go to the neighbouring village of Gyönk to buy the pink fabric. Here are two Jewish merchants who sell particularly high-quality and fashionable fabrics – just the thing for a girl’s first ball. But for Elisabeth it is also the last one. In August 1947 her family is expelled from Hungary.” This is just one of the many stories featured in the exhibition Heavy Fabric—told through a ball gown from Szakadát.

Clothing is one of the visible parts of our identity – it shows who we are, who we want to be or who we are expected to be. Before clothing was mass-produced and marketed globally, each item was unique, created for a specific person. They not only revealed the shape, age, social and economic status, religious and ethnic background of the owner, but also the celebration or event for which they were made. Over time, thousands of memories were woven into these costumes: promises of happiness, experiences of loss, and the hope of new beginnings.

A guest exhibition by the Danube-Swabian Central Museum in Ulm (Donauschwäbisches Zentralmuseum, DZM) tells the story of German girls and women from the Danube region through 20 costumes from the period 1880–1980. The exhibition will include unique works such as watercolours of costumes from German villages in Hungary by the Vienna-born painter Erna Piffl (1904–1987).

The exhibition seeks to answer two questions: how did women shape their clothes and how did the clothes shape them? Through the personal stories of festive garments and their former owners, the exhibition traces the important stages of women’s lives from childhood through marriage to old age, and the history of 20th-century Germany, including the tragic events of forced labour and deportation following the Second World War.

The costumes of brides, celebrating families, girls going to church, Swabians deprived of their lives speak of the relationship between thrift and representation, tradition and religiosity, remembering and forgetting, the tasks of sewing, knitting, crocheting, embroidery, the maintenance of clean clothes, their changes, the impact of great historical events on everyday life.

DZM collects and researches the history and culture of the German minority in South-Eastern Europe. The term Danube Swabians (Donauschwaben), used since the 1920s, refers to the descendants of the 500,000 Germans who emigrated and settled in the 18th and 19th centuries along the Danube in various regions of historical Hungary: in Tolna, Baranya and Somogy (“Swabian Turkey”), in the Transdanubian Mountains, in Békés, Bačka, Banat, Syrmia, Slavonia and Szatmár. After the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, they became citizens of Hungary, Yugoslavia and Romania. The end of the Second World War brought an even greater caesura in their history: the entire German ethnic group was accused of collaborating with the National Socialists. Most of the Danube Swabians fled or were forcibly expelled from their homes, many died in Yugoslav internment camps or forced labour in the Soviet Union. Their descendants now live in different parts of the world, and in Hungary today almost 143,000 people claim to be Hungarian Germans. This time, their history is conveyed by the clothes they wear and the people who wear them.

The DZM textile collection holds nearly 12,000 garments. Most of them are women’s clothes from the 1940s, which families took with them when they fled or were expelled, and later preserved as keepsakes. A large proportion are festive and Sunday dresses, as women tended to save their most valuable items. The owners mainly wore these clothes at gatherings with fellow expellees in Germany—while in everyday life, they had to adapt their appearance to the new environment for the sake of their future.

In their new environment, however, they were confronted with the fact that these clothes reinforced their estrangement and alienation. The best pieces were thus relegated to the bottom of the wardrobe, often kept for decades as souvenirs of their former homeland before being sent to museums.

Curator: Henrike Hampe – Danube-Swabian Central Museum in Ulm

Hosting curators of the Museum of Ethnography: Mónika Lackner, Erika Vass