Introduction Excerpt for The Banat of Temesvar

Introduction

THE BANAT OF TEMESVAR was a Habsburg creation. Known to the Ottomans as the Eyalet of Temesvar, the region was bounded to the north by the Mureș (Maros, Marosch) River, to the west by the Tisza (Tisa, Theiss) River, to the south by the Danube River, and to the east by the Carpathian Mountains. It was only when the region was under Viennese control from 1718 until 1778 that it officially had the name of “Banat.”¹ During this time, the Banat’s plains and mountains became a sandbox in which imperial administrators could play. Grand projects to improve production and to reshape the swampy landscape changed the region economically and physically. Alongside these material changes, and oftentimes in support of them, the Habsburgs sponsored the infusion of a colonial element in the Banat as tens of thousands of Western and Central Europeans descended on the region, adding dynamic ethnic, linguistic, and religious elements.

When the court in Vienna ceded control to the Hungarians in 1778, the “Banat” ceased to exist, officially, if not colloquially. The handover was the first of three major dissolutions of the short-lived region: territorial, political, and demographic. The territorial dissolution occurred when the Hungarians dismembered the Banat and incorporated it into their county system creating Torontál, Temes, and Krassó-Szörény counties. The political dissolution came in 1920 when the Treaty of Trianon ended Habsburg control and divided the historical Banat between three states: Romania; the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes; and a small portion to Hungary. The demographic dissolution of the region’s long-standing multiethnicity began in 1918 and was mostly complete following World War II. A region that had once boasted a German-speaking minority approaching one-quarter of the population both suddenly (in Yugoslavia) and more slowly (in Romania) lost this population to flight, expulsion, and emigration in the aftermath of the Nazi defeat. Currently, the vast majority of inhabitants of the historical Banat belong to the dominant ethnic group of their state, be that Romanian, Serbian, or Hungarian. In this way, it resembles other “backward” multiethnic borderlands that no longer exist. As Kate Brown put it when discussing the history of the Kresy in today’s Ukraine, this work is “a biography of no place and the people who no longer live there.”²

Despite this upheaval, the history of the Banat is neither solely a rousing history of increasing national self-determination nor a lamentable history of the loss of a multicultural society. The story is, in fact, much more intriguing, and complicated, than either teleological perspective implies. The Banat in the eighteenth century was a space where different peoples and cultures met and interacted. It was a frontier, a borderland, a latter-day march of European culture. Postcolonial historians have extensively studied such areas. Mary Louise Pratt called them “contact zones.”³ Richard White referred to them as “the middle ground.”⁴ The Banat was a “transborder” region that linked populations in the Habsburg, Holy Roman, and Ottoman Empires who shared “a common history, common economic integration and common cultural features.”⁵ Rather than simply creation or loss, movement and interaction are the keys to understanding the region and its broader significance.

These interactions were not always peaceful. There was violence and dispossession as the Habsburgs and their proxies sought to secure their claims to the borderland and pull it politically and economically into Europe. A complicated ethnoreligious situation threatened the actualization of these goals. War and confrontation with the Ottomans, colonization by hitherto largely alien elements, and local resistance to Habsburg rule were consistent problems throughout the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century. Habsburg policies, at least until Joseph II, privileged Western and Central European colonists to the detriment of local people. The Habsburgs, much like later nationalists, sought to compartmentalize and physically separate different ethnoreligious groups even as their policies added to the diversity of the region. Using a variety of methods, the authorities sought to create monoreligious, and to a certain extent monoethnic, islands of settlement throughout the Banat from the early eighteenth through the first quarter of the nineteenth century. They wanted to implant a population that they could trust to help secure the region against anticipated Ottoman aggression and internal threats to their rule. They further believed that different groups were incapable of living near each other without strife. They sought to protect the more privileged groups, like the colonists, from the local inhabitants, like the Romani and Wallachs. While the violence was not on the scale that became common in the twentieth century, the Habsburg administration did use force to achieve their ends. They expelled all Muslims from the Banat following conquest. They attempted to convert local people to Roman or Greek Catholicism (the “Uniate” Church). They dispossessed and relocated groups to make way for colonists.

These policies, and their consequences, led to periods of ethnic tension and violence as local people reacted to the imposition of a foreign, colonial culture. This tension had long-term effects. Almost any time there was war in the region (1737–1739, 1788–1790, 1848–1849, 1939–1945, though notably not 1914–1918) local people targeted colonists and their descendants for violence and disappropriation. While the expulsion and often outright destruction of German communities following the Second World War was certainly sparked by Nazi policies and aggression, the roots of this ethnoreligious conflict go back to the eighteenth century and the initial settlement.

This work explores the creation of a settler society and culture as well as the impact it had on the surrounding standing population. It charts the development of a Central European settler culture in the region, exploring its ecology, architecture, material culture, written records, and interactions with local people in a unique map of settlement. It argues that the colonists faced a variety of challenges in their new homes and used both practical and spiritual means to deal with them. Furthermore, it demonstrates that colonists, in particular German speakers who had and continue to have a reputation as a “cultured” influence in Eastern Europe, were not the modernizing force desired by the Habsburg authorities, especially in the early years of the colonial movement. Comparing the colonial experiment in the Banat with contemporary experiences of German-speaking colonists elsewhere (Russia, Spain, and North America) will further highlight his fact. We will then shift perspective and explore what the standing population thought of the change and how they engaged both official policy and the settlers themselves. The conclusion illustrates that the memory of this colonial history has affected, and continues to affect, interethnic relations in the region.

Investigating popular culture, especially that of rural people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is fraught with difficulties.⁶ In the settler case, I try to understand the “everyday life” of a settler. Who were they? What did they do? Where did they live? What were their fears? What did they believe? It is important to remember that there was not a uniform settler culture, no more than there was a uniform Wallach or Rascian culture. Instead, culture varied, especially between rural and urban, flatland and mountain. While there were differences in the “popular cultures,” some aspects were shared among most colonists. Investigating this world is not an easy task. It can be hard for people in industrial and postindustrial societies to access the mental and physical world inhabited by early modern people.

Additionally, sources on popular culture and daily life are rare. Peasants and artisans in the early modern period rarely left written evidence behind. What one commonly does see are official petitions, pleas, and stylized court and judicial proceedings that were often focused more on form than substance. Those commoners who did produce unique written materials were exceptional and unlikely to be “normal” individuals with representative experiences. Thus, the “authentic” voice of common people is extremely difficult to find in the eighteenth and even in the early nineteenth centuries. Similarly, investigating cultural borders and colonial encounters is a difficult endeavor. When the authentic voice fades, I use official documents created by the elite (travelers, scientists, government administrators, etc.) to help reconstruct how peasants and commoners lived in the Banat throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Sources describing popular culture or colonial people created by the elite need to be approached with caution. Government sources are not inherently neutral and often betray official or personal biases.⁷ Likewise, travelers and their descriptions, which were crucial to contemporary and current notions of the frontier, are filled with suspect interpretations. According to Pratt, travel writers were “advanced scouts for capitalist ‘improvement.’”⁸ As such, they often portrayed the lands they visited as empty or misused. Such tropes were extremely common in elite descriptions of the Banat. The perceived emptiness or misuse of land justified European conquest and the reordering of society in both the Banat and in the wider colonial world. Travelogues also “gave European reading publics a sense of ownership, entitlement, and familiarity” with faraway lands.⁹ In the Banat, travel writers and other scholars assisted and justified Habsburg control and their developmental policies initiated shortly after conquest.

This is not to say that all of their observations are worthless. As Maria Todorova points out, speaking specifically of the French and German literature on the Balkans:

Despite professed and internalized reservations about objectivity, reading some of the nineteenth-century products of the great descriptive effort aimed at the collection and accumulation of positive knowledge cannot fail to fill one with enormous respect for the broad endeavor, immense erudition, and tireless labor that went into these works. This is not to say that there are not occasional flashes of preconceived ideas or outright prejudice but the amount of disciplined and critical observation vastly superseded the minor faults one is bound to discover.¹⁰

Thus, while this literature can be biased and reproduce prejudices, it can also be effectively used as a historical source.¹¹ The key is to read travelogues and official documents looking for information that the author may not have intended to include, or may not have found very important, but that nevertheless can provide important insights into the often-hidden world of peasant life. Critically, historians need to verify and corroborate information, as much as is possible for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, across multiple source bases.

Following the rise of nationalism in the nineteenth century, travelers and observers changed the object of the praise. Rather than solely the intelligence of the Habsburg regime, it was the industriousness of the colonists (now described as “Germans”) that made the Banat great.¹⁵ This line of argumentation, that is, the Germans as “cultural beacons” (Kulturträger) in the East, has continued up to today, even in otherwise excellent histories.¹⁶ In an echo of this tendency, modern Romanian tourist literature and some scholarship tout the German contribution to Timișoara to the local culture while downplaying or outright ignoring other ethnic groups.¹⁷ Banat Germans themselves, and their supporters in the wider German-speaking world, used this laudatory, often imagined history as a national rallying point, first against Magyarization and later as a means to preserve their heritage in the newly created states of Romania and the Kingdom of the Yugoslavs.¹⁸ Adherents of Nazism and its accompanying German ultranationalist world view took the praise for the German element in the region to a horrifying end.¹⁹ To be clear, Germans were not the only group to use the Banat to showcase a nationalist viewpoint, especially in the interwar period. Hungarians, Romanians, and Serbs also co-opted the Banat’s history to bolster their own national myths and make explicit claims to territory. Though occurring largely after World War I, such pieces appeared as late as the turn of the twenty-first century.²⁰ After the expulsion and flight of many of the Germans of the Banat following the end of World War II, a number of books looked back on their tenure in the region with longing.²¹ Others were more explicitly apologetic texts that sought to minimize the Banat German role in the atrocities of the war or focus solely on the crimes committed against them in the aftermath, especially in Yugoslavia, giving very little context with which to judge the chaos and violence that followed the war.²²

There are, of course, numerous monographs and articles on the region written by professional historians, generally in German, with longer works appearing especially in the interwar period or shortly after World War II.²³ One potential problem with many of these scholarly treatises is that their authors were Banat Germans or their progeny. Many of the publishers of these works were and are likewise groups closely tied to the Banat German community in Austria and Germany. Neither factor is in and of itself a problem, but it does give these authors an “insider” perspective which can be both a blessing and a curse. Also potentially problematic is the fact that many of the seminal works on the subject were written in the 1930s. While the authors themselves may not have been associated with the Nazis (and some of the scholars of the Germans of the East were unabashed Nazis), the climate in which they wrote was especially toxic.²⁴

More recently, scholars and politicians have used the Banat as a showpiece for multiculturalism.²⁵ According to this vision, the region is a template for greater Europe, a region where different ethnic constituencies live, and have lived, in relative harmony. Such contentions ignore the earlier history of the Banat and especially the migration and ethnic cleansing (the Holocaust, anti-Roma violence, German expulsion, Yugoslav Wars) that since the end of World War I has rendered the wider region ever more homogenous and thus less likely to exhibit interethnic conflict. While there were certainly extensive periods in which Wallachs, Rascians, and colonists were not engaged in violent confrontation, the consistency with which problems did arise is indicative of underlying tension, a tension that only increased as national movements gained prominence in the nineteenth century. While cooperation among individuals assuredly did occur, in a broad sense, competition was the norm.²⁶

The treatment of the Banat in the English literature on the Habsburg monarchy is limited. Aside from one general monograph, most articles have used the Banat as a vehicle to comment on broader imperial policy.²⁷ As Judy Batt noted, there was no “systematic history of Banat in English to which to refer the reader.”²⁸ In recent treatments of the history of the Habsburg monarchy, the Banat is, perhaps naturally, relegated to the periphery. Oftentimes, these works misrepresent small, but potentially vital aspects of the region, such as who was allowed to colonize or who had sovereignty over the region. These mistakes generally make the Habsburgs (Maria Theresia in particular) look more tolerant than they were.²⁹ Quite often, the Banat seems to be shorthand for “somewhere far away on the frontier,” set up in comparison with more “central,” generally urban areas. This book fills this lacuna and provides an in-depth history of the region and its peoples, using the colonial endeavor there as a framework for understanding the broader history. This will put the Banat more firmly on the mental map of Habsburgists and provide a basis for comparison to other colonial ventures around the world, an effort I begin in this work as well.

Notes

1. Like Galicia, the Habsburg Banat “belongs to the category of extinct geopolitical entities.” Larry Wolff, The Idea of Galicia, 1.

2. Brown, A Biography of No Place, 1.

3. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 8.

4. White, The Middle Ground, x.

5. Komlosy, “Habsburg Borderlands,” 51.

6. Burke, Popular Culture.

7. As Brown stated, “Written evidence is evidence for the arguments of those who wrote the documents.” While I find this contention a bit too cynical, there is truth in it that should cause us to be critical of our sources. Brown, A Biography, 13.

8. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 60

9. Ibid., 12, 3.

10. Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, 80. In the nineteenth century, even British travel writing “became informative and knowledgeable, rising high on the comparative scale of European travelogues.” Ibid., 89.

11. Todorova agrees. Ibid., 63–64.

12. Larry Wolff, The Idea, 4.

13. Burke, What Is Cultural History? Burke argued that while there have been studies on “memory,” the literature on “social or cultural amnesia” is lacking. I hope that much of this work is read as a response to the historical amnesia regarding the region.

14. Born, Raspe, and Ferber, Travels through the Bannat of Temeswar; Griselini, Aus dem Versuch.

15. Kohl, Austria; Paton, The Bulgarian, the Turk, and the German; Paton, Researches on the Danube. Apparently, even some Hungarian officials in the mid-nineteenth century agreed with this position. Deák described a Hungarian official who, when arguing against Serb demands for more autonomy, questioned what would happen to the “German colonists who turned southern Hungary into an agricultural paradise” (Deák’s words) if they came to power. Deák, The Lawful Revolution, 243.

16. Jordan, Die kaiserliche Wirtschaftspolitik. This amazing work is an in-depth exploration of the development of the Banat’s economy, though even Jordan occasionally lauds the German colonists’ contributions without much solid historical evidence.

17. Koranyi, “Reinventing the Banat,” 101, 105–6.

18. Möller, Wie die schwäbischen Gemeinden. In his introductory words to Leo Hoffmann’s work, Dr. Kaspar Muth summed up the feeling as follows: “A people, that does not have a history, is no people.” Leo Hoffmann, Kurze Geschichte. Milleker, Die erste organisierte deutsche Kolonisation des Banats.

19. For example: Herrschaft, Das Banat; Zakić, “‘My Life for Prince Eugene,’” 79–94.

20. Jivi-Banatanu, The Banat Problem; Horváth, The Banat; Pejin, “The Privileged District of Velika Kikinda.”

21. István and Lang, Gedenkstätten; Baumann, Geschichte der Banater Berglanddeutschen Volksgruppe. Baumann’s work was typical. He was born and worked in the region he wrote about before leaving for Austria following World War II. He was especially tough on the Wallachs/Romanians in his work, portraying them, not altogether wrongly, as inimical to German settlement. His book, like many in this genre, was published by a group of Germans who fled the region following the Second World War. It is highly elegiacal and triumphal regarding the German presence in the mountains of the Banat.

22. For a defense of the Banat Germans during this period by a leading SS commander, see Kumm, Vorwärts, Prinz Eugen!. Springenschmid, Our Lost Children; Wildmann, Sonnleitner, and Weber, Genocide of the Ethnic Germans in Yugoslavia.

23. For instance, Schünemann, Österreichs Bevölkerungspolitik; Kallbrunner, Das kaiserliche Banat; Lotz and Senz, Festschrift für Friedrich Lotz. Today, the Institut für donauschwäbische Geschichte und Landeskunde is an excellent source for the most up-to-date information regarding not only the Germans in the Banat but also all along the Danube. In particular, Josef Wolf has published numerous articles and source collections on the region. He, too, has familial and cultural connections to the region. For a dated, though still useful, summary of the dissertations written on the Banat in the first two thirds of the twentieth century, see: Krischan, “Dissertationen über das Banat (1897–1967),” 203–21.

24. For a book on the complicity of German scholars in the Nazi regime throughout the East, see Haar and Fahlbusch, German Scholars.

25. Batt talked about this “paradoxical myth” in Batt, “Reinventing Banat.” See also: Engel, foreword to Kulturraum Banat, 7. Neumann, Multicultural Identities.

26. James Koranyi also problematizes the idea of a “cosmopolitan Banat,” though he largely focuses on modern events in Romania and Serbia. Koranyi, “Reinventing,” 97–113.

27. Marin, A Frontier Region. There are a few article-length treatments that address the history of colonization in the region by Karl Roider (one with Robert Forest) alongside more focused articles by authors such as William O’Reilly, Sabine Jesner, and Benjamin Landais.

28. Batt, “Reinventing Banat,” 180.

29. Only Catholics (and Orthodox, largely from the Ottoman Empire) were allowed to settle in the Banat until the 1780s. Even luminaries in the field are susceptible to such minor mistakes. Pieter Judson, for instance, says Jews were part of the colonizing program in the 1760s. Judson also refers to the Banat as part of Hungary, which likewise did not happen until the 1770s. Judson, The Habsburg Empire, 67. Likewise, Paula Sutter Fichtner writes that under Charles VI, “Temesvár Country” was part of Hungary. Fichtner, The Habsburgs, 119. Martyn Rady describes the Banat as “the reconquered part of Hungary.” While true, this description hides the fact that the region was not officially united with Hungary until the 1770s and is thus misleading. Rady, The Habsburgs, 176. Beales, Joseph II, 2:173, 176, 198, also made similar claims for increased tolerance in the settlement of the Banat with Protestants in the later Theresian era. In The Routledge History of East Central Europe since 1700, the Banat receives only cursory attention and again the ability of Protestants to settle there is misstated. Brandy and Hajdarpasic, “Religion and Ethnicity,” 186. Mistakes then creep into more synthetic works on migration. Hoerder, for instance, presents Habsburg policies as much more tolerant than they were, at least until Joseph II. Hoerder, Cultures in Contact, 285. Ingrao correctly notes the lack of religious toleration and provides the most in-depth and accurate discussion of the Banat, though still limited and scattered. Ingrao, The Habsburg Monarchy, 159.