The Fate of Western Hungary 1918-1921 - Corvinus Library ...

In the Fall of 1918, there was still not a word of Burgenland as that, as
Austria’s ninth federated province, only came into being later, on January 1,
1922. Its boundaries were finalized in the same year by the Council of the
League of Nations. Hence, Burgenland did not exist before 1922 in a historical,
geographic, political or legal sense. This author does not refer to this political
aggregation called today as Burgenland when looking back to the Trianon
Treaty, the Sopron plebiscite and the border drawn after boundary adjustments,
or previous centuries. The decades and centuries before 1922, Austrian politics
(and ideology), historiography, ethnography and other sciences consistently
refer to the former western Hungarian territory sharing the Austrian-Hungarian
border as Burgenland. This is historically inaccurate, a twisting of the facts and
a crude falsification. 31 It s important to note that, in recent decades, – and some
even today – numerous Hungarian historians, ethnographers and other scientists
slavishly use the term ‘Burgenland’ when talking about the pre-1922 events of
Moson, Sopron and Vas counties, even going back to centuries ago.
To return to the events of the day: on December 2, 1918, Austrian army
officers drove to Szentmargitbánya, a small community on the shore of Lake
Fertő. There, they “hastily assembled the miners from the quarry, made all
manner of rosy promises to them, and got them to exclaim their desire to
separate from Hungary. Next, they fired up the mob to go to the next town of
Ruszt, chase away the (Hungarian) authorities and declare there too their wish
of joining with Austria. Some part of the mob started out but broke up at the
edge of the village and turned back.” 32
Delighted by its seeming success, the Westungarische Kanzlei decided to
distribute weapons among the German-speaking population of western Hungary
for the purpose of an insurrection, to enable it to wrest, by force of arms, the
marked-for-appropriation Hungarian territories. Each shipment of arms,
31 According to the leading figure of post-WWII Austrian ethnography, Leopold
Schmidt (1912–1981), ‘Burgenland’ has been much more a part of Lower Austria’s
culture since the end of the Turkish period than of Hungary’s. [Hungary was
reconquered from Turkish occupation in 1686-ed.] A three-volume book published
between the wars (fourth published in 1959), purporting to be the definitive
bibliography of ‘Burgenland,’ traced the borders created in 1922 back to 1800. See,
Litschauer, G. Franz: Bibliographie zur Geschichte, Landes- und Volkskunde des
Burgenlandes 1800–1929. Vols. 1–3, Linz–Wels, 1933–1938. Vol. 4, Eisenstadt, 1959.
It was in regard to the three-volume Litschauer bibliography that Károly Mollay (1913-
1997), linguist, Germanophile wrote in 1939 that: “…I pointed out that purposeful work
of the Germans, through which they wish to intellectually appropriate the history of not
only ‘Burgenland’ but all of western Hungary. Since then, the expropriation of
Hungarian intellectual achievements was begun with seemingly amazing planning. It is
this direction that Litschauer’s book serves. His title promises a book on Burgenland
but his Burgenland includes Körmend, Vasvár, Szombathely, Sopron and Pozsony, too,
with every Magyar element of our culture. In any case, it is strange to find such thesis
shift in a scientific work but, beyond the political objective, we must also admit to
Litschauer’s great scientific achievement.” In: Soproni Szemle, 1939, issues 1–2, p 91.
32 Gagyi, op. cit., p. 6.
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