Regierungswechsel in Ungarn 1994: Konkursverwaltung nach dem Realsozialismus und Wahlsieg der Sozialisten

'In der westlichen Osteuropaforschung wurde Ungarn häufig als das kommunistische Reformland par exellence hingestellt, auf das noch Ende der 80er Jahre als Beweis des Reform- und Wandlungspotentials des Realsozialismus hingewiesen wurde. Nach der Implosion der realsozialistischen Ordnung nahm man an, daß Ungarn zu denjenigen Ländern gehören würde, die die Transformation am schnellsten vollziehen und die 'Transformationskrise' am schnellsten bewältigen würden. Es kam anders als erwartet. Die Konkursmasse des Realsozialismus erwies sich auch in Ungarn als schwerwiegender als vermutet. Der Linkstrend in den postsozialistischen Ländern erfaßte auch Ungarn. Im Mai 1994 errangen die Sozialisten (USP) einen unerwartet hohen Wahlsieg (33%), der ihnen infolge des Wahlrechts, das die stärkste Partei begünstigt, 54% der Parlamentssitze bescherte. Im vorliegenden Bericht wird der Versuch unternommen, die Fehleinschätzungen der Hinterlassenschaft des Realsozialismus kritisch zu beleuchten und die Probleme der Transformation in Ungarn zu skizzieren. Hinweise auf das gesellschaftliche und intellektuelle Milieu während der ersten demokratischen Legislaturperiode sollen den Wahlausgang 1994 verdeutlichen.' (Autorenreferat)'East European studies in the west frequently portrayed Hungary as the reforming communist country par excellece, singled out until the end of the eighties as proof of 'real socialism's' potential for reform and change. After the implosion of the 'real socialist' order, it was assumed that Hungary would be one of the first countries to undergo transformation and one of the fastest to pull out of the 'transformation crisis'. The actual course of development disproved these expectations. The legacy in bankruptcy of the 'real socialist' system turned out in Hungary, too, to be a greater burden than had been supposed. Hungary, too, became caught up in the leftist trend that swept the post-socialist countries. In May 1994 the socialists (HSP) achieved an unexpectedly high result (33%) in the election, winning, thanks to an electoral law which favours the strongest party, 54% of the seats in parliament. The present report endeavours to critically examine how and why the legacy of 'real socialism' was misjudged and to outline the problems of transformation in Hungary. References to the social and intellectual milieu during the first democratic parliamentary term attempt to explain the results of the 1994 election.' (author's abstract

Aufarbeitung der kommunistischen Vergangenheit in Ungarn

'Im vorliegenden Bericht geht es um einen Überblick, um eine Bestandsaufnahme der Bemühungen um die juristische, personalpolitische und gesellschaftliche Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit seit dem politischen Systemwechsel in 199O. Es sollen insbesondere die Motive und politisch-sozialen Hintergründe hervorgehoben werden, die die seit 1994 regierenden sozialistisch-freidemokratischen Koalitionsparteien und ihre intellektuelle Basis dazu veranlaßt haben, bzw. ihnen dazu verholfen haben, gegen die Aufarbeitung der kommunistischen Vergangenheit einen erfolgreicheren Widerstand zu leisten, als es etwa in Deutschland der Fall war und ist.' (Autorenreferat)'The present report is intended as a review, a stock-take of the juridical, personnel-policy and societal efforts made since the change of political system in 199O to grasp the nettle of Hungary's communist past. In particular, the report attempts to highlight the motives and politicosocial backgrounds that have instigated and/ or helped the socialist/ free-democratic coalition partners who have been in power since 1994, and their intellectual substructure, to resist more successfully than has been and still is the case elsewhere, for instance in Germany, pressure to delve into the communist past in Hungary.' (author's abstract

HI scaling relations of galaxies in the environment of HI-rich and control galaxies observed by the Bluedisk project

Our work is based on the "Bluedisk" project, a program to map the neutral gas in a sample of 25 HI-rich spirals and a similar number of control galaxies with the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope (WSRT). In this paper we focus on the HI properties of the galaxies in the environment of our targeted galaxies. In total, we extract 65 galaxies from the WSRT cubes with stellar masses between $10^8M_{\odot}$ and $10^{11}M_{\odot}$. Most of these galaxies are located on the same HI mass-size relation and "HI-plane" as normal spiral galaxies. We find that companions around HI-rich galaxies tend to be HI-rich as well and to have larger R90,HI/R50,HI. This suggests a scenario of "HI conformity", similar to the colour conformity found by Weinmann et al. (2006): galaxies tend to adopt the HI properties of their neighbours. We visually inspect the outliers from the HI mass-size relation and galaxies which are offset from the HI plane and find that they show morphological and kinematical signatures of recent interactions with their environment. We speculate that these outliers have been disturbed by tidal or ram-pressure stripping processes, or in a few cases, by accretion events.Comment: 16 pages, 12 figures; accepted for publication in MNRA

Structure and Kinematics of the Nearby Dwarf Galaxy UGCA 105

Owing to their shallow stellar potential, dwarf galaxies possess thick gas disks, which makes them good candidates for studies of the galactic vertical kinematical structure. We present 21 cm line observations of the isolated nearby dwarf irregular galaxy UGCA 105, taken with the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope (WSRT), and analyse the geometry of its neutral hydrogen (HI) disk and its kinematics. The galaxy shows a fragmented HI distribution. It is more extended than the optical disk, and hence allows one to determine its kinematics out to very large galacto-centric distances. The HI kinematics and morphology are well-ordered and symmetric for an irregular galaxy. The HI is sufficiently extended to observe a substantial amount of differential rotation. Moreover, UGCA 105 shows strong signatures for the presence of a kinematically anomalous gas component. Performing tilted-ring modelling by use of the least-squares fitting routine TiRiFiC, we found that the HI disk of UGCA 105 has a moderately warped and diffuse outermost part. Probing a wide range of parameter combinations, we succeeded in modelling the data cube as a disk with a strong vertical gradient in rotation velocity ($\approx -60\,\rm km\,s^{-1}\,kpc^{-1}$), as well as vertically increasing inwards motion ($\approx -70\,\rm km\,s^{-1}\,kpc^{-1}$) within the radius of the stellar disk. The inferred radial gas inflow amounts to $0.06\,\rm M_\odot \rm yr^{-1}$, which is similar to the star formation rate of the galaxy. The observed kinematics are hence compatible with direct or indirect accretion from the intergalactic medium, an extreme backflow of material that has formerly been expelled from the disk, or a combination of both.Comment: 15 pages, 12 figures, accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysic

An HI View of Galaxy Conformity: HI-rich Environment around HI-excess Galaxies

Using data taken as part of the Bluedisk project we study the connection between neutral hydrogen (HI) in the environment of spiral galaxies and that in the galaxies themselves. We measure the total HI mass present in the environment in a statistical way by studying the distribution of noise peaks in the HI data cubes obtained for 40 galaxies observed with WSRT. We find that galaxies whose HI mass fraction is high relative to standard scaling relations have an excess HI mass in the surrounding environment as well. Gas in the environment consists of gas clumps which are individually below the detection limit of our HI data. These clumps may be hosted by small satellite galaxies and\or be the high-density peaks of a more diffuse gas distribution in the inter-galactic medium. We interpret this result as an indication for a picture in which the HI-rich central galaxies accrete gas from an extended gas reservoir present in their environment.Comment: 15 pages, 13 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRA

The Sudden Death of the Nearest Quasar

Galaxy formation is significantly modulated by energy output from supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies which grow in highly efficient luminous quasar phases. The timescale on which black holes transition into and out of such phases is, however, unknown. We present the first measurement of the shutdown timescale for an individual quasar using X-ray observations of the nearby galaxy IC 2497, which hosted a luminous quasar no more than 70,000 years ago that is still seen as a light echo in `Hanny's Voorwerp', but whose present-day radiative output is lower by at least 2 and more likely by over 4 orders of magnitude. This extremely rapid shutdown provides new insights into the physics of accretion in supermassive black holes, and may signal a transition of the accretion disk to a radiatively inefficient state.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures. Astrophysical Journal Letters, in pres

The HI Tully-Fisher Relation of Early-Type Galaxies

We study the HI K-band Tully-Fisher relation and the baryonic Tully-Fisher relation for a sample of 16 early-type galaxies, taken from the ATLAS3D sample, which all have very regular HI disks extending well beyond the optical body (> 5 R_eff). We use the kinematics of these disks to estimate the circular velocity at large radii for these galaxies. We find that the Tully-Fisher relation for our early-type galaxies is offset by about 0.5-0.7 magnitudes from the relation for spiral galaxies. The residuals with respect to the spiral Tully-Fisher relation correlate with estimates of the stellar mass-to-light ratio, suggesting that the offset between the relations is mainly driven by differences in stellar populations. We also observe a small offset between our Tully-Fisher relation with the relation derived for the ATLAS3D sample based on CO data representing the galaxies' inner regions (< 1 R_eff). This indicates that the circular velocities at large radii are systematically 10% lower than those near 0.5-1 R_eff, in line with recent determinations of the shape of the mass profile of early-type galaxies. The baryonic Tully-Fisher relation of our sample is distinctly tighter than the standard one, in particular when using mass-to-light ratios based on dynamical models of the stellar kinematics. We find that the early-type galaxies fall on the spiral baryonic Tully-Fisher relation if one assumes M/L_K = 0.54 M_sun/L_sun for the stellar populations of the spirals, a value similar to that found by recent studies of the dynamics of spiral galaxies. Such a mass-to-light ratio for spiral galaxies would imply that their disks are 60-70% of maximal. Our analysis increases the range of galaxy morphologies for which the baryonic Tully-Fisher relations holds, strengthening previous claims that it is a more fundamental scaling relation than the classical Tully-Fisher relation.Comment: Accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysic