2.1. The first period: the war and the subsequent decade: from 1943 to 1955

By the German mind and thinking someone's national identity depends on three factors: 1./ origin, 2./ language and 3./ his conscious engagement in the nation's fate. According to these three factors, the German East-research institutes studied settlements, dialects, folklore and ethnography so that they could raise the national awareness of the Germans living outside the borders of the German state and formulate the aggressive and conquering concept of the German "cultural land" (Kulturboden). As the Transdanubian Research Institute was created from the idea of fighting against this ideology naturally its researches concentrated on this topic. However, after the fall of fascism the real problems of Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, came up to the surface again. In particular, the lack of capital, industrial backwardness, the underdevelopment and relative overpopulation of agriculture, so all those real problems that needed help. Thus, Southeast Europe's social structure had to turn from rural society into an industrial society to a certain extent. Fascism did not recognize these facts, so it set up its objective to develop an agricultural society in which the "superior" Germans were served by the "inferior" enslaved peoples of Eastern Europe.

Even in this period some works were written by Zoltán Szabó Pál which were dealing with the city of Pécs and its historical questions. As ZOLTÁN SZABÓ PÁL was primarily a geographer, so Pécs most of his writings were dealing with Pécs from physical geographical aspects. However, some of them from cultural historical aspects may be important which in addition to settlement geographical themes were dealing with historical and cultural geographical issues. The topics of these papers were as follows:

• The soil and culture of Pécs
• The people of South Transdanubia
• The five citizenship of Pannonia
• The emergence of the city
• Pécs and the Mecsek mountains
• The two-thousand year old Pécs

In these pamphlets the author explains that Pécs was continuously a city for two thousand years, the development and prosperity of which was made possible by the local people beginning from the Roman times through King Stephen through the collaboration of the local citizens with Hungarian rulers. He came to the same conclusion in case of other cities of Transdanubia, which was against the Germanic, Frankish urban development theories. He held lectures of such content in several cities of Transdanubia which were needed very badly, because the Germans' propaganda machinery proclaimed the foundation of Hungarian cities by the Germans.

Concerning the other two researchers of the Institute, LAJOS HEGEDŰS was working as a linguist in the field of Hungarian language, ANDRÁS BABICS was involved in historical seminars.

LAJOS HEGEDŰS was working in the Institute until 1947. He studied mainly vernacular pronunciation.

LAJOS HEGEDŰS assumed that folk pronunciation cannot be perfectly marked by phonetic symbols. Therefore, on studying vernacular material he followed the procedure that he recorded conversations on plastic records and published them through the recordings. Applying this method in the early 1940s was a pioneer's work. He collected material to his work dealing with the language of the Moldavian csángos settled down in Tolna County still as the Institute's employee.

With his leaving the Institute's linguistic researches ceased.