European Integration & Cross-Border Cultural Revival

The post-war European integration project binding contemporary member regions across borders.

1 chapter

1945 - 1989

The Iron Curtain turned Burgenland into a militarised dead zone on the western edge of the Soviet bloc. The Andau bridge carried approximately 200,000 Hungarian refugees after the 1956 uprising — James Michener's 'The Bridge at Andau' made it an international symbol, but the deeper story is the 45 years of border-zone confinement experienced by Burgenlanders themselves, not just the refugees who passed through. The Seefestspiele Mörbisch, founded in 1957 on a lakeside stage metres from the Iron Curtain, was a deliberate tourism-policy intervention to rebrand a militarised border zone as a cultural destination. Its founding premiere, 'Der Zigeunerbaron,' deployed exoticised Roma imagery while actual Burgenland Roma were still recovering from Nazi genocide. Do not treat the operetta programme as organic local heritage; it was a Cold War construct designed to overwrite the border reality with imperial nostalgia. The wire-cutting by Foreign Ministers Mock and Horn at Klingenbach on 27 June 1989, and the Pan-European Picnic on 19 August 1989 (when approximately 700 East Germans crossed the border), marked the Curtain's end — but these events primarily concerned East Germans, making local Burgenlanders supporting characters in a German reunification story.

1938 - 1945

The Anschluss of 1938 destroyed the Sheva Kehillot within months. Jewish communities that had survived Magyarization and the border shift — Eisenstadt, Mattersburg, Kobersdorf, Lackenbach, Frauenkirchen, Kittsee, Deutschkreuz — were deported, their synagogues desecrated, their communal records scattered. No living Jewish community remains in any of the Seven Communities; what survives is fragmentary — cemetery inscriptions, the Austrian Jewish Museum (founded 1972), memorial plaques, and the Rabbi Meir Eisenstadt grave that still draws Orthodox pilgrims. At Rechnitz, approximately 180 Hungarian-Jewish forced labourers were murdered at the Kreuzstadl on 24-25 March 1945 by local Nazi officials and guests at a castle party. The mass graves have never been found despite repeated searches. The 'wall of silence' documented in the 1994 film Totschweigen, and the Refugius association founded in 1993 by Pastor Wolfgang Schlaffer, embody Austria's difficulty in confronting its Nazi past. Do not resolve the question of local complicity; it remains unresolved. The Rechnitz case has become a national metaphor — not a closed chapter but an open wound.

1921 - 1938

The 1921 transfer of Deutsch-Westungarn to Austria — officially incorporated on 5 December — was the outcome of international treaties (Saint-Germain, Trianon) contested by both sides, not a 'natural return' of German-speaking territory. The Sopron plebiscite (14-16 December 1921) further complicated the story: Sopron voted to remain Hungarian, earning the title 'Civitas Fidelissima,' while five of eight surrounding villages voted for Austria. The Lajtabánság episode — a short-lived unrecognized state patrolled by Rongyos Gárda paramilitaries — remains politically charged; both 'freedom fighter' and 'paramilitary' framings exist. Jobbik held a commemorative ceremony in Oberwart as recently as 2010, sparking an Austrian parliamentary inquiry. The Landhaus Eisenstadt (built 1926-1929) became the seat of the new Burgenland Landtag, an architectural embodiment of the region's transformation from Hungarian county to Austrian federal state. Jewish communities in the Sheva Kehillot — Kobersdorf, Mattersburg, Deutschkreuz — navigated the transition from Hungarian to Austrian rule, their communal structures now answerable to a new state. The Stadtschlaining Old Synagogue survives as a material trace of this precarious interwar existence.

1867 - 1920

The Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 brought Magyarization as state policy to the region's non-Hungarian populations. Croat-language schools were closed, Croatian was banned from church use, and Hungarian became mandatory in administration. This documented policy was not uniquely Hungarian — similar nation-building assimilation occurred across Europe — but its specific effects on Burgenland's minorities were severe: Croat oral tradition survived Magyarization (written traditions were suppressed), but the ban on Croat-language church services disrupted liturgical calendar traditions that were only restored after 1955. The wine economy continued to structure rural life. Rust's 1524 export privilege from Queen Maria still governed the Ruster Ausbruch trade, and the Buschenschank season (Martiniloben, St. Martin's Day, November 11) carried the Pannonian wine harvest calendar through political upheaval. Mattersburg (Nagymarton) and Deutschkreuz (Sopronkeresztúr), both members of the Sheva Kehillot with Jewish populations reaching 40-50%, saw their German-Jewish communal institutions pressured by Hungarian-language mandates. The Hungarian population of the region numbered 26,600 in the 1910 census; post-1921 emigration of Hungarian civil servants would dramatically reduce this.