Due to my heavy workload and a stint abroad, I have not been able to post as much here as I would have liked to. The work and research on the Ungers is still ongoing though, at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich and elsewhere. I shall soon post something on the etymology of Unger as promised, but I need to consult a few books at the Bavarian State Library. Maybe it is because I am an academic, but I would rather properly quote the sources my explanations are based on.
I am also looking into cutting tools to prepare and finally make available some footage on the playing-card making process. I do not know yet how long this will take, I am a novice to video production. There is so much more to report on and material to present, but I will need to take it one step at a time.
The interesting news though is that there now are people who claim to be my relatives. For once, I received an email message from the museum that three families would like to get in touch with me because they are my relatives. I do have various relatives in Hungary and elsewhere I know of and unfortunately we lost touch with the Hungarian and some Austrian ones entirely when the older generation died in the 1990s. However, I stumbled across a German newspaper article from Neue Zeitung in Budapest, which discusses the recent museum exhibition and then portrays two Unger women from Sopron who claim to be relatives. From what they write I do not think so, but I would love to find out. I wrote to the paper to enquire…
And I saw that someone else too of the name Unger, who definitely is not a direct relative, also tries to create the impression that there is a direct link between him and my family. It must be so cool to be a descendent of a card-making and artist family… I am now beginning to fully grasp the former relevance of the Gotha!
But of course it is easy to fall for a red herring or get sidetracked, it happened to my family too. At the beginning we were still clueless about the original whereabouts of the Ungers since Mátyás Unger senior had not been born in Győr, nor had he been married there. Someone had provided my father with a copious pedigree from Ungers inhabiting a nearby village called Jánossomorja. I shall never in my life forget the incredulous look on the supposed relatives faces when we – my parents, a cousin and her father then in his 80s and I – showed up there one afternoon in the Easter holidays of 1988 to enquire about a possible connection… It is impossible to describe their puzzled reaction (as if it mattered!), but just thinking about it now for the first time in years I am almost rolling on the floor laughing, literally.
