Interwar Republic & Borderland Integration

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.

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.

1699 - 1867

After the Ottoman retreat, the Habsburg Counter-Reformation and magnate estate economy reshaped the landscape in stone. The Esterházy family (palace owners since 1622) rebuilt Eisenstadt in Baroque splendour; the Haydnsaal and palace chapel embody a cultural world where aristocratic patronage, liturgical observance and musical production converged under feudal hierarchy. But this was not simply 'patronage': the Esterházy protection of Jewish communities after 1670 was a feudal arrangement with obligations, not philanthropy. Samson Wertheimer's private synagogue (c. 1700) in the Wertheimer House survived because the Court Jew served the magnate's financial apparatus. Schloss Halbturn (built 1711 by Lucas von Hildebrandt under Charles VI) imposed imperial Habsburg architecture on the eastern borderland. Burg Forchtenstein's Wunderkammer, never opened to public alteration, preserves the Esterházy material worldview unchanged. The Eisenstadt Jewish Cemetery, with the grave of Rabbi Meir Eisenstadt (MaHaRaM Esh, d. 1744), remains an active Orthodox pilgrimage site — a living ritual anchor that survived the magnate era's end. Do not let the Baroque façade obscure the feudal power dynamics it was built to display.

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.