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Karl-Peter Krauss.
Deutsche Auswanderer in Ungarn: Ansiedlung in
der Herrschaft Bóly im 18. Jahrhundert.
Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2003. 469 S. EUR
68.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-515-08221-1.
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=10175
Reviewed by
Samuel Goldberger (Department of Social Sciences
(emeritus), Capital Community College)
Published on H-German (January,
2005)
Repopulating
Hungary with Germans
Following the advice
of St. Stephen, first Christian king of Hungary, to
his son St. Imre to promote diversity to ensure the
well-being of the realm, various rulers of Hungary
over the following centuries invited non-Magyar
groups to settle. In times of perceived need,
various waves of German settlers were invited into
Hungary from the West, to develop agriculture and
crafts, to establish mining operations, and to
promote urbanization. First, not surprisingly, they
were settled in the agricultural areas along the
western border. Subsequently, in the High and Later
Middle Ages, they were settled in the mountainous
area of Szepes County (Zips) in northern Hungary and
in Transylvania (Siebenbürgen). Finally, during the
eighteenth century, settlers referred to generically
as Swabians or, since World War I in the successor
states of Old Hungary, as Danube Swabians (Donauschwaben)
came from western and southwestern regions of
Germany to repopulate agricultural areas of Hungary
devastated by the wars between the Habsburgs and the
Ottoman Turks.[1] The settlers who left Germany for
Hungary in the eighteenth century numbered
originally about 150,000 individuals. By the end of
World War II, when they were subjected to ethnic
cleansing by the governments of Hungary, Romania,
and Yugoslavia, the Donauschwaben numbered
about 1.5 million and constituted the largest German
cultural group in southeastern Europe. The migration
of the Swabians from Germany and the character of
their settlement in Hungary is the subject of the
present study by Karl-Peter Krauss, written
originally as a doctoral dissertation in the field
of historical demography.
Within the principal
areas of settlement of the Swabians, Krauss selected
the area known as the schwäbische Turkei,
the area bounded by Lake Balaton on the north, the
Danube River on the east, and the Drava River on the
south. The term was applied originally to a more
limited southern area within these bounds--the lower
part of Baranya County/Komitat Branau. Although
Krauss's study examines primarily the original schwäbische
Turkei, he generalizes always about the larger
area, which he refers to more frequently as
"southeast Transdanubia." More
specifically, he focuses on the manorial estate of Bóly
within the original schwäbische Turkei,
for a number of reasons. Unlike many of the other
Swabian settlements in this period, all the
settlements made in the twenty-seven villages of the
Bóly estate are still within the borders of the
Republic of Hungary. The records for Bóly are
relatively more complete than for many others, and
Krauss was conveniently able to confine his research
in Hungary to archives in two cities--Pécs and
Budapest--besides consulting various archives on his
home turf in southwest Germany and in Vienna. In his
introductory chapter on aims and methods, Krauss
states, furthermore, that he selected the manorial
estate of Bóly because, with its mix of ethnic
groups and confessions and the way it was set up and
managed, it reflected well the complexity of
southeast Transdanubia in the eighteenth century (p.
9).[2]
Karl-Peter Krauss
does an excellent job of outlining the economic and
social framework within which the manorial overlords
of the Batthyány family (typical of Hungarian
magnates of this period) carried out the settlement
of Bóly. History textbooks dealing with the Swabian
settlement in Hungary tend to focus on the areas of
the Banat and Bacska, where colonization was largely
state-directed, thus giving the false impression
that all the repopulating work of the eighteenth
century was a centralized activity of the Habsburgs.
A most valuable aspect of this study is the way in
which it highlights the entrepreneurial and
market-oriented strategy which led private
landowners, Hungarian aristocrats, to carry out
their own settlement activity in the schwäbische
Turkei. Although some other landlords initiated
sporadic resettlement in this area with German
colonists even earlier, Krauss confines his study to
the years 1720-67, when members of the Batthyány
family carried out the most intensive settlement of
Germans on the Bóly manorial estate.
Many Hungarian
aristocrats gained their wealth through loyalty to
the Habsburg dynasty during Hungary's civil wars and
wars of religion, and through military service in
the Habsburg wars against the Ottoman Turks. Thus,
Emperor Leopold I granted the Bóly estate to Count
Adam Batthyány II (1662-1703) in 1700 for
outstanding service in the recently concluded war
ending in the Treaty of Karlowitz.[3]
In the first of a
series of tables showing the number of tenants
subject to taxation at different times, Krauss makes
it clear that the communities of the Bóly manor
were not unpopulated prior to colonization with
German immigrants, another of the misconceptions
about the subject of German immigration which his
study corrects (p. 78). The communities of the
estate already had as tenants small numbers of both
Hungarian and Croatian peasants and Serbian
livestock herders. Following the early death of
Count Adam, the Bóly manor passed into the control
of his widow Countess Eleanora Batthyány-Strattmann
(1677-1741), who resided alternately in a city
palace in Vienna and at a seventeenth-century Batthyány
castle in Rechnitz/Rohonc (then in Hungary, now in
the Austrian province of Burgenland). Under Countess
Eleanora the first German colonists arrived, but
Serbs also continued to arrive at the manor as they
had earlier, and the different ethnic groups were
settled in the same communities.
In 1738, Countess
Eleanora Batthyány-Strattmann signed in Rechnitz a
"provisional" contract for the settlement
of German colonists in the town of Bóly. This
agreement is one of two for the German settlements
of the Bóly manorial estate that remain extant, and
it appears to have become a template for all the
others concluded subsequently, not only for the Bóly
manor but also for other manors of southeast
Transdanubia. Krauss refers to it often in his
study.[4] Countess Eleanora was ambitious to
increase the landholdings in her line of the family;
before her death she acquired through successive
royal grants or through purchase two other manorial
estates adjacent to the Bóly estate--Siklós and Üszög.
Until her death, whatever net income Bóly yielded
was remitted to her accounting office in Rechnitz.[5]
The lords and lady of the Bóly manor appointed a
series of managers (Hofrichter), and
regular visits by inspectors from the accounting
office were made to the estates acquired by this
line of the family.
Countess Eleanora's
younger son, Count (later Prince) Karl Joseph Batthyány
[Batthya'ny] (1698-1772), received the three
contiguous manors upon his mother's death in 1741,
and he moved the accounting office from Rechnitz to
the town of Siklós, where he carried out a thorough
reconstruction and renovation of the Renaissance
castle fortress there which had been badly damaged
in the wars with the Turks.
Krauss makes the
important point that the onset of a long period of
rising grain prices in Europe gave Hungarian
aristocrats an incentive to promote agriculture;
this had become clear by the final years of Countess
Eleanora, but her son Count Karl Joseph was the
first to act upon this in a systematic way, when in
the mid-1740s one set of tenants considered less
desirable--the Serbian pastoralists--began
systematically to be moved out and to be replaced
with Germans. With this new policy, the Bóly manor
became vastly more productive and a major
contributor to the income of its lord.[6]
This development
coincided with the willingness of many persons in
the southwestern and western regions of Germany to
emigrate. Because of population increase and
patterns of inheritance, it was becoming far more
difficult and expensive in these areas to acquire
farmland and to become successful peasant-farmers.
Southeast Transdanubia constituted a frontier area
where land was more available, and those who were
landless or had insufficient land could achieve a
social status and respectability becoming much more
difficult to attain in Germany.
Krauss's tables, pie
charts, and bar graphs reinforce his conclusions
about private enterprise, on the part of both
manorial lords and German immigrants, showing a
great increase, both in the number of tax-paying
tenants and in the number of tenants with German
names, in the period under study (pp. 78, 93, 96-97,
100-101, 104, 106). Whereas in 1720 the entire
manorial estate had only 263 tax-paying tenants, 67
percent of whom had Serbian or Croatian names and
the remainder Hungarian names, Bóly manor in 1767
had 1,412 tax-paying tenants, of whom 56 percent had
German names, 31 percent South Slavic names, and 13
percent Hungarian names. There was not only a
proportional but also an absolute decline in the
number of Serbian tenants. At the same time both the
total revenue of the manorial estate of Bóly and
the sources of that revenue changed greatly. A chart
shows that, while in 1734 total revenue amounted to
3,227 Hungarian gulden, gained mostly from ground
rent and the sale of wine to tenants, in 1758 total
revenue came to around 30,000 gulden (ten times as
much), most of which came from grain sales, with
wine and ground rent also continuing to be
significant (p. 122). Another chart illustrates that
the "bottom line," i.e., the amounts of
money remitted from the Boly manor to the Batthyány
accounting office, first in Rechnitz, later in Siklós,
increased more than six times, with the highest
remittance occurring during the War of the Austrian
Succession, when grain prices were especially high
(p. 124).
Chapter 6, about the
lifestyle of the Swabian settlers, is the most
poignant of Krauss's study. It is also highly
valuable for readers who have not read previously
about the Swabian settlement in Hungary from the
perspective of the immigrants' struggles and
experiences. In this chapter, as in others, Krauss
has shown how historical demography can enrich the
understanding of history.[7] Life was arduous, and
survival fraught with peril, for many German
settlers in the early decades. Undrained swamps were
breeding places for disease, nor had the settlers
anticipated the sometimes-violent conflicts with
other groups already settled on the Boly manorial
estate. Even in a century when life expectancy was
considerably lower than today in Germany (or Hungary
for that matter), it was lower in the frontier area
of southeast Transdanubia than in the immigrants'
homeland. The records show many settlers remarrying
very soon after the death of a spouse (how else to
continue a household or to raise children?) and
sometimes soon remarrying again. Very often, because
of multiple deaths and remarriages, children in
these blended families found themselves in the care
of parents, neither of whom was a biological parent.
Remarriages between spouses of highly disparate ages
were also quite common.
In chapters 5 and 6,
as well as others, Krauss shows how private
enterprise worked out for the immigrants. Unlike
other areas of Hungary where settlement was
state-directed, many of the German settlers of the
Boly estate actually surveyed and laid out their own
lots. Even though the latter, as opposed to those
who were taking over a lot previously occupied by
someone else, were usually granted the incentive of
three years' exemption from taxes, not all the
immigrants brought with them sufficient means to
become successful peasant-tenants. Social mobility
was much greater than in the land the settlers left,
but there was also the possibility of social
failure. A man who had been a tailor or herder of
sheep or pigs could rise to become a proud peasant
farmer, a Bauer, but when personal
disasters struck movement also occurred in the other
direction. Many of the settlers became cottagers,
building and occupying a house but working for wages
or exercising one of the many skilled trades in
demand on the estate.
Finally, in chapter
8, Krauss traces the buildup of tension between the
subjects of the Boly estate and their manorial lord,
Prince Karl Joseph Batthyány, in the years leading
up to 1767. As the estate prospered, the lord and
his agents erected numerous manorial buildings of
all sorts, both to better administer the estate and
to produce more income; the greatest concentration
of these buildings was in the Swabian town of Bóly
(table, p. 220). Every opportunity was employed to
compel the subjects of the estate to contribute
their unpaid labor to construction work and teamster
work. In general, also, as the population of the
manor grew denser, opportunities for interference of
the lord's agents in the lives of his subjects
multiplied. Tension grew even more as it became
known that Hungarian Queen Maria Theresa intended to
regulate land-registers to standardize the
obligations of subjects to lords. After a secret
meeting of the German subjects of the Bóly estate
in July 1766, peasants began to employ passive
resistance and delaying tactics when demands were
made by the lord's agents. By September 1, nine
thousand tenants of estates in Baranya County, armed
with sticks, were gathered in protest at the castle
fortress in Siklós. Soldiers, who had been brought
in, at first shot over their heads but ended up
shooting into the crowd and killing twelve
protesters before the rest dispersed. The
"uprising" dissipated.
In a final statement,
Karl-Peter Krauss points out that most of the
activists involved in the incidents of July-October
1766, at least on the manorial estate of Bóly, were
the better-off and more successful German settlers.
After the royal regulation of land registers, the Urbarium
of 1767, came to pass, neither lords nor peasants in
southeast Transdanubia gained everything they
wanted, but tensions eased considerably. With
limitless demands for compulsory labor restrained by
the new uniform standards, Prince Karl Joseph Batthyány
and his agents turned to increasing the sale of
alcoholic spirits on his estates as a way of keeping
profits at the same level. For this study in
historical demography, 1767 was a convenient
terminal date.
This historian
definitely recommends Krauss's study as valuable for
specialists in manorial life under the Old Regime,
the history of German migration, and the modern
history of Hungary. Appropriately for a volume
within the publications series of the Danube-Swabian
Institute for History and Culture in Tübingen, the
Institute's director, Dr. Horst Förster, stresses
in his forward the relevance of Krauss's study to
current debates in Germany over immigration. He
reminds German readers that "immigration"
is a new phenomenon for Germany, various regions of
which, prior to the twentieth century, had a
negative balance of migration, and he recommends the
conclusions revealed by the present study as germane
to this present-day debate. As an American whose
special field is modern history of Hungary, I could
not help reading Krauss's study from a somewhat
different perspective--not so much of Germany's loss
(both in terms of eighteenth-century emigrants and
the cultural destruction and suffering caused by
twentieth-century ethnic cleansing), but of the
losses in diversity to present-day Hungary and
Romania and the successor states or entities since
1993 of Yugoslavia.[8] It is interesting to reflect
that the current foreign minister of Germany,
christened Joseph Martin in 1948 by his parents
recently expelled from Hungary, proudly calls
himself Joschka Fischer.
Notes
[1].
Eighteenth-century emigrants from Germany to Hungary
originated in many different areas. Krauss points
out that in all the contemporary documents generated
by the colonists they invariably referred to
themselves as "Germans." The Hungarians
and South Slavs whose neighbors they became
pejoratively stereotyped them as "Swabians,"
and in the next century the descendants of the
colonists finally adopted the term themselves.
[2]. Although a list
of placenames in one of the appendices correctly
gives Deutschbohl or Deutschboja as the German name
of Bóly, Krauss never mentions that, in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries until after World
War II, Bóly was in fact called Németbóly, the
Hungarian equivalent of the German name. There still
exists a nearby town in the same county named
Magyarbóly, i.e., Ungarischbohl.
[3]. Unlike the
Esterházys, who kept all their entailed estates in
one line of the family, the Batthyánys divided
estates between different lines. Krauss concentrates
on those members of the family in a subsidiary line
who were the manorial lords (or lady) of the Bóly
estate. From 1524, when Franz Batthyány received
the manorial estate and fortified castle of Güssing/Németújvár
(now in the Austrian province of Burgenland) from
King Louis II of Hungary, until 1716 the
administrative center and accounting office of the
main line of the family was in Güssing. From 1716
until 1945 this administrative center was at a
family mansion in Körmend.
[4]. Throughout the
book Krauss is mindful of the ambitions, not only of
the Batthyánys who owned the Bóly manor but also
of the German colonists who immigrated there, and he
shows very well the interplay between them,
especially as reflected in this contract. Since the
German colonists, unlike Hungarian serfs, enjoyed
freedom of movement, they were anxious that the
contract they entered into would protect this in the
future, and the contract ultimately did so, even
though the manorial lord tried to hedge this about
with some restrictions. The immigrants wanted to owe
a minimum of obligations to the feudal lord of the
manor, and this appeared to be the case in a
provision that limited the days of
"ordinary" forced labor for the lord to
three per year. Here, however, the immigrants' lack
of ability to read "fine print" led to
their overlooking a clause that provided for
"extraordinary" forced labor without any
limit, an opening for future abuse. Later on, in any
case, manorial agents would point out that the
contract of 1738 was "provisional" and had
long since lapsed.
[5]. There is a
photograph of the seventeenth-century Rechnitz
castle in the book, but neither the text nor the
caption mentions that the castle no longer exists;
it was set on fire by retreating SS troops in 1945
and was subsequently demolished (p. 67).
[6]. Krauss shows
well the friction between the Serbian pastoralists
and the other groups owing to the fact that the
Serbs were accustomed to graze their animals
wherever they pleased, which tended to ruin land
used for growing crops. Entrepreneurial manorial
lords of southeast Transdanubia motivated to promote
agriculture rather than livestock raising were also
bound to lack patience with a Serbian population
that appealed continually to the privileges granted
them by the Habsburg rulers when they were refugees
from the Turks and to ignore the requests of
Hungarian manorial lords. As the influx of German
immigrants began, the Serbs behaved defiantly,
gaining for themselves accusations on the part of
estate agents of being "lawless" or
"thieving." Although the Habsburg rulers
continued for political reasons to renew the
privileges granted the Serbs by Emperor Leopold I in
1691, it became clear after a while that they were
reluctant to enforce these privileges against the
Hungarian aristocracy. When Empress Maria Theresa
renewed the privileges in 1743 the wording of the
document intimated that they had become
anachronistic and needed modification to keep up
with changing conditions. The Hungarian Chancellor
who signed this document was none other than Count
Ludwig Ernst Batthyány (1696-1765), the older
brother of the manorial lord of Bóly. In the
following years manorial lords of southeast
Transdanubia used various methods to drive out
no-longer-desirable Serbian tenants, and this
process was augmented by land-hungry German settlers
eager to buy out Serbian tenants. Most of the Serbs
driven out or bought out migrated beyond the Danube
into the Bacska or south of the Drava into Slavonia
(pp. 201-205).
[7]. Besides
correspondence found in various archives, Krauss
made use of the church registers recording
marriages, baptisms, and deaths of five all-German
communities of the Bóly manorial estate deposited
in the archives of the Arbeitskreis donauschwäbischer
Familienforscher e.V. in Sindelfingen, German
State of Baden-Württemberg. For purposes of
comparison Krauss also examined the
eighteenth-century church register of the town of
Stetten am kalten Markt in the same German state,
the town of origin of some of the Bóly settlers.
Although he makes reference to a published work
comparing the same sort of data in the same period
for the Upper Rhine and German communities in
Pennsylvania, Krauss did not look at primary sources
for the latter (p. 164).
[8]. Prince Karl
Joseph Batthyány's great-grandnephew Count Johann
Baptist Batthyány (1784-1865) in 1807-08 built the
neoclassical mansion that still stands in the town
of Bóly and became the first of his family to
reside there at least part of the year. After his
death without a male heir the Batthyány clan lost
the estate, which passed to a son-in-law of Count
Johann Baptist, Count Wilhelm Albert von Montenuovo
(1821-95), whose heirs maintained ownership until
1945.
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boly.hu
One of Krauss's tables, showing the Hungarian census
of 1920 for twenty-six of the twenty-seven
communities of the Bóly manorial estate (one
community being inadvertently omitted from the
table), indicates a total population of 18,276, of
whom 68.4 percent spoke German as their primary
language. The town of Bóly had a population of
3,022, of whom 83.3 percent were German (p. 11). I
could not find information as to how many of the two
hundred thousand Swabians of southeast Transdanubia
were forcibly expelled from Hungary in the years
1946-1948, but the tourist website for Baranya
County, (www.baranyanet.hu/baranyakapuja/),
indicates that at least 20 percent of the county is
still German-speaking. An act of 1994 entitles all
communities in Hungary with at least 20 percent of
the population speaking a minority language to
minority representation and to street signs in the
minority language. Another website (http://archiv.meh.hu/nekh/Magyar/nemethelyseg.htm)
lists the German communities so entitled. Among them
is Bóly, the website of which (www.boly.hu/)
indicates it was given municipal status in 1997
despite a population of only 3,800.
If
there is additional discussion of this review, you
may access it through the list discussion logs at: http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl.
Citation:
Samuel Goldberger. Review of Krauss,
Karl-Peter, Deutsche Auswanderer in Ungarn:
Ansiedlung in der Herrschaft Bóly im 18.
Jahrhundert. H-German, H-Net Reviews. January,
2005.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=10175
Copyright
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