Following the final expulsion of the Ottomans from the Hungarian kingdom in the early 1700s, the Habsburgs initiated a substantial repopulation program in the war-torn region. This program also included settlers from the southwestern corner of the Holy Roman Empire. Its motives were economic rather than national and aimed at an increase in population as well as agricultural production. The largely Catholic German-speaking communities that arose primarily in the southern Hungarian lowlands along the Danube have later been designated as Danube Swabians, although their historical experiences were far from uniform and few of them originated in Swabia.
Throughout the eighteenth century, up to 400,000 Germans immigrated to Hungary, where lower land prices promised them superior economic opportunities. The Danube formed the central route of transportation to the new country. Despite early hardships, the German communities prospered and were able to expand their landholdings. They added a new element to the multicultural environment of historical southern Hungary, which by the twentieth century had grown to almost 1.5 million people.
After the Comprise of 1867, which in essence turned the Habsburg monarchy into a union of two distinct polities, the pressure to assimilate increased. This also resulted in a dramatic reduction of German primary schools in Hungary from 1,232 in 1869 to just 272 in 1905. Emigration to the United States further weakened the German element. On the other hand, there was geographic expansion based on the established Swabian practice of male primogeniture, which forced younger brothers to search for new farmsteads in other villages.
The governmental pressure triggered an initial political mobilization during the late Habsburg period, which did not truly succeed until the interwar era, however. By that time, the home regions of the Danube Swabians had been divided between Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Romania. Restrictive minority policies tipped the balance in favor of more nationalist minority organizations, particularly after the rise of National Socialism in Germany. During World War II, the Swabian territories were temporarily redistributed again, with substantial segments being returned to Hungary or included in the newly created Croatian state. The extensive collaboration with German authorities proved ominous for the postwar era. Most visible were the military enlistments, which often were less voluntary in practice than in theory.
After World War II, a massive wave of retribution hit the Danube Swabians. Many were expelled to Germany and Austria, from where a substantial number also moved on to the Americas. The removal was most comprehensive in Yugoslavia, where tens of thousands also perished in penal camps, whereas sizable populations initially remained in Hungary and especially Romania. Their postwar marginalization in their now communist home countries triggered a continual emigration movement, which turned into a torrent following the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. In the twenty-first century, the official number of Germans, not all of whom are Danube Swabians, had declined to 132,000 in Hungary, 36,000 in Romania, 4,000 in Serbia, and 3,000 in Croatia.
The historians Gerhard Seewann and Michael Portmann set out to present a readable overview of the Danube Swabian experience. The two Eastern Europeanists, of whom Seewann in particular has long specialized in Danube Swabian history, came well prepared for the challenging task of combining a diverse and transnational experience into a unified narrative. The presentation is chronological and revolves primarily around politics, economics, and identity. In accordance with the historical development, the individual chapters focus on a unified Danube Swabian experience up to World War I and shift to a separate treatment of individual successor states thereafter. The focus on a general readership is visible in the generous illustrations and in the didactic explanations of technical terms, but also in the absence of foot- or endnotes.
The work is a synthesis rather than a new interpretation. The authors explain that they wanted to create an illustrated handbook that describes and contextualizes the central threads of Danube Swabian history on a scholarly but accessible basis. They largely succeeded at this task, although it might not have been necessary to forgo an analytical structure that could lead to a substantive conclusion. Such a structure would have further underscored the scholarly credentials of this valuable and informative book.
