^{The News}
Dedicated to Austrian-Hungarian Burgenland Family History

Our regular tidbits include the monthly BB Facebook report, book sales (with a little analysis) and a Cartoon of the Month.

Unlike most months, this month I provide an extended article, rather than just the bits and pieces of this article 1. Article 2 is about an emigrant processing facility that gets far less mention than Ellis Island: Castle Garden was New York's first facility dedicated entirely to immigrants coming to America, operating from 1855 to 1890. My Burgenland immigrants were part of the first wave of Burgenland emigrants, arriving in the US before Ellis Island opened. As you will see, I have only weak information that my people came through Castle Garden. Regardless, I wanted to know more about this facility... and you get to share in my research.

The remaining articles are our standard sections: A Historical BB Newsletter article, Ethnic Events and Emigrant Obituaries.

New FamilySearch Cemeteries Search Tool: FamilySearch recently announced a new search tool for cemeteries. It allows searches by location, cemetery name, or name of a person. It appears to be tied to the Family Tree tool within FamilySearch and, as such, is not yet as comprehensive as Find-A-Grave or similar tools. Nonetheless, it seems to be well-designed and accurate, and offers the opportunity to add a satellite-map link to family tree entries within FamilySearch. You can find it here: https://www.familysearch.org/en/cemeteries

Free At Last, Free At Last: In February, Merriam-Webster posted on Instagram that it’s okay to end a sentence with a preposition. Blasphemy, you say? If so, you are among the many who lambasted Merriam-Webster for their claim, saying things like "concluding with a preposition is lazy," or "just sounds weird," or "sounds like someone isn't intelligent enough to articulate themselves."

From my point of view, it is a problem I occasionally run into as I construct articles for each newsletter... is it better to write a "correct," though awkward, sentence or, instead, to write a sentence that feels natural but is one that I know someone will object to?

Now, if you didn't catch it, let me note that I ended my previous sentence with a dreaded preposition! Would you rather that I "correctly" wrote "...but is one to which someone will object?"

Sounds pretty pompous to me! And that is really the problem. Merriam-Webster is quick to note that they set no rules, rather they report how people use the language. So they argue that, unlike the claimed Winston Churchill quote (that he never said), "This is the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put," real people say, "This is the sort of nonsense I will not put up with."

Further, they note there are no linguistic or aesthetic reasons to prefer the first, and there certainly has never been a formal rule denying the second form.

The idea that ending with a preposition was wrong in English was first put forth by 17th century writers Joshua Poole and John Dryden, who were trying to align the language with Latin. Indeed, saying something like “Who are you speaking to?” would have sounded like Martian in Latin. One did not end sentences with a preposition in Latin so “To whom are you speaking?” would be the only syntactically correct phrasing. However, Latin is a Romance language; English is not!

English picked up the idea of preposition stranding, or sentence-terminal prepositions (as the practice is designated formally) from the Vikings after they invaded Britain in the eighth century and their people became part of the English stock. Their Old Norse language seeped into English over the succeeding generations. Old Norse “strands” prepositions, so English started to do the same. Old Norse has also evolved into languages like Swedish, a language in which a stranded preposition is considered totally proper.

Still, some felt opposition to ending sentences with a preposition was best, including Bishop Robert Lowth, who wrote his influential “A Short Introduction to English Grammar” in 1762. Nonetheless, the sheer awkwardness of his claim is captured in the words he wrote when arguing against it, “This is an idiom which our language is strongly inclined to,” apparently not catching the irony within his word choice.

This story is similar to other “rules” of English that get around. The idea that you shouldn’t split an infinitive is also based on Latin. But in Latin the infinitive is a single word; you literally can’t split it. Thus, you can't say things like "to quickly write a sentence" (here, "to write" is the infinitive and Latin and its "derived rule" says you should say, "to write a sentence quickly" or "to write quickly a sentence").

Enough! I'm going to end this with a homework assignment for you:

In Star Trek, the five-year mission of the USS Enterprise was: "To explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before."

This statement ends with a preposition; please provide a corrected version (and arguments as to why your correction is better!).



Eisenstadt Diocese Terminates Land Leases: If you have ever looked through the old land registers (Parzellen Protocollen) for Burgenland or even our BB House Lists (which are based on those registers), you may have noted land parcels that are assigned to the church. This includes parcels that are within the village for the church and/or church office themselves, but also parcels in the plow, forest and pasture lands.

These parcels outside the village proper are intended to be income-generating resources to support the long-term social security and current living expenses of the priests. As such, they go by a couple of names: benefices and sinecures. Within Burgenland, there are over 150 parish benefices totaling around 1,200 hectares (~3000 acres).

The benefice term is very direct: something that benefits the person to whom it is assigned. However, a sinecure is technically an office or position that carries a salary or otherwise generates income but requires or involves little or no direct responsibility, labor, or active service. Sinecures are given to an individual whose primary job is another office (such as a priest, whose real job is to care for the souls in the village).

Anyway, the Diocese of Eisenstadt announced in April that it is restructuring the administration of parish benefices and standardizing the leasing process. Thus, all contracts with existing tenants were terminated, affecting around 300 farmers. Annual terminability, for both the church and tenant, has always been a part of the contracts, as that offers flexibility to each, however it is rare that the church has done so.

The current action is driven by a long-ignored stipulation of the Second Vatican Council (held in the 1960s) that the administration of such leases should be centralized. Until now, the local parishes in Burgenland held responsibility for this, but going forward leases will be managed by the Diocese.

As for the lease holders, termination of their leases came as a surprise to the farmers, who said they would have liked to have been informed in advance. Many see their livelihoods threatened, suggesting there may be a price war and other tenants will come from other federal states "who are not so involved in the parish and do not participate in social life."

The previous lease holders also fear that there could be a problem with their government subsidies, as they are in the middle of a subsidy period that runs until 2027 that requires that they cultivate the land. "And if we lose the land now, there may be reclaims of the subsidy. In other words, there is not only economic damage from the fact that we lose these areas, but it could also be that we have to pay back the subsidy."

The Diocese says that the concerns of the farmers are understood, and with "equality of offers" the existing tenants would be preferred. But they say that lease awards are "also about the economic offer," implying the size of the bid is an important factor. Anyone in Austria can bid on the leases, so it remains unclear if the existing tenants will be able to continue to cultivate the land they have previously cultivated.

This past month, the deadline for lease offers under the new system expired and the ball is currently in the court of the pastors to decide which offers to accept. They say that the new allocation is "not only based on economic and ecological criteria, but also on pastoral criteria. Among other things, the commitment of the respective bidder to the parish is also decisive."

Final decisions on the new leases are expected in the first half of July, and according to the Diocese, there is no intention to terminate the contracts annually in the future... but we shall see.



Austrian State Treaty, 1955: As you likely know, Austria was the only nation annexed in its entirety by Germany. Its independence came to an end on March 13, 1938, when Nazi troops moved in and Hitler proclaimed its union with Germany in the so-called Anschluss. As a result, when WW-II took place, Austria did not declare war against any of the Allies nor did any of them declare war on Austria, as it was no longer an independent nation.

This placed Austria in a unique situation in postwar Europe, as the annexation raised questions about the extent to which the country was a victim of Nazi aggression or whether it had been a collaborator.

As early as 1943, the Moscow Declarations (by the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and the Republic of China) declared the annexation of Austria as null and void, called for the establishment of a free Austria after the victory over Nazi Germany, and considered themselves in no way bound by any changes effected in Austria since that annexation. However, the declaration also reminded Austria "that she has a responsibility, which she cannot evade, for participation in the war on the side of Hitlerite Germany, and that, in the final settlement account, will inevitably be taken of her own contribution to her liberation."

At the Potsdam Conference in 1945, the Allies agreed that they would jointly occupy Austria in the postwar period, dividing the country and its capital Vienna into four zones. The Soviets also demanded reparations from Austria, a request that was dropped due to the country's nonbelligerent status, but the United States did agree that the Soviet Union would be entitled to any German assets in the Soviet occupation zone.

The resulting Allied occupation started on 27 April 1945 when Austria, under Allied control, claimed independence from Germany. Karl Renner set up a provisional government, which was given a mandate in the elections of November 1945, and was recognized by the occupation powers on January 7, 1946, with Renner as President and Leopold Figl as Chancellor. However, the occupation powers retained veto power if all four agreed to a veto.

Burgenland, itself, was reestablished on October 1, 1945, and given to the Soviet forces in exchange for Styria.

Negotiations over the final status of Austria began in 1947, when half of fifty-nine proposed articles for a treaty were agreed upon. The foreign ministers chose to name the agreement the Austrian State Treaty, not the Austrian Peace Treaty, to acknowledge that Austria's involvement in the war had not been voluntary and that the treaty was therefore not to end a war, but to reestablish an independent state.

However, it would take until 1955 before a treaty was signed that granted Austria renewed independence and the withdrawal of occupation forces. The principle sticking point had been the issue of German assets: how they were defined and just how much compensation the Soviet Union was entitled to take. In reality, the Soviet occupation forces plundered factories, railroads, oil and shipping concerns in their zone, shipping removable assets back to Russia, regardless of whose assets they were. It was estimated that during the first year of peace, the Soviet seized some 63,778 pieces of equipment. Further, that during the occupation years, the Soviets extracted over $500 million worth of oil from Austrian fields and operated more than 300 Austrian enterprises for their own profit only. What could not be removed they offered to sell back to the provisional government at exorbitant prices.

Only after the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953 would Soviet policy toward Austria loosen, but by then they had largely crippled the Austrian economy in their zone. Still they demanded continuing payments in trade for not backing Yugoslavia's claims on Carinthia. Austria agreed to pay the Soviets $150 million in goods over a 6-year period, supply 1 million tons of oil per year for 10 years, and pay $2 million for the return of the Danube Shipping Company properties in Austria. Further, they agreed to remain neutral, staying out of NATO or other defensive arrangements (though they would do so only as an independent country rather than forced as a requirement of the treaty).

Finally, in April of 1955, representatives of the Austrian government traveled to Moscow and returned just four days later with a completed treaty. U.S. officials demanded two changes in the treaty regarding the Austrian armed forces and repatriation of displaced persons that the Soviets conceded to. On May 15, 1955, representatives from Britain, France, the United States, and the Soviet Union signed the Austrian State Treaty, ending seventeen years of occupation by foreign troops. It officially came into force on July 27, 1955 and the last occupation troops left on October 25 that year.

On October 26, 1955, the day after the last Allied troops left Austria, its parliament declared neutrality, as promised, and the date became a national holiday celebrating that declaration of neutrality.

This 5-month period in 1955, May through October, is a truly significant time in modern Austrian history, providing the basis for Burgenland's eventual recovery from the effects of World War II and its resulting Soviet occupation, and leading to its modern-day vitality. If you have elders who lived through it, ask them about it and please share their insights with all of us.



Burgenland-Area Commuter Traffic: Last month, I wrote again about the issues surrounding the Schattendorf/Ágfalva border crossing and the bollard system there. The bollards were installed to deter the excessive Hungarian commuter traffic, coming from Sopron, Hungary and beyond, on this (effectively) one-lane farm road and also through the neighborhood streets of Schattendorf.

Well, like most things, there are two sides to a story. In this case, Sopron, itself, has suffered from excessive commuter traffic through its streets, with some small part of that coming from Burgenländers who drive to, or via, Sopron every day. However, the bulk of the problem arises from the Hungarian M85 motorway and Hungarian Route 85, which largely parallel each other coming west from Györ and, for a long time, emptied onto the north-south Hungarian Route 84 and then onto other city streets on the south side of Sopron.

Route 84 is a wide two-lane road (two traffic lanes plus turn lanes) that circles through Sopron via its eastern and northeastern neighborhoods, becoming Austrian Route 16 past the border. As such, Route 84 is ill-suited to handle the combined M85, Route 85, and Route 84 traffic load, which forces drivers to find alternative routes through Sopron (some of whom were using the Schattendorf/Ágfalva farm road on the northwest side of Sopron).

Because of this, there has been a five-year effort to extend the four-lane M85 around the eastern side of Sopron and onward to the Austrian border (where its traffic will become Burgenland's problem but will relieve the inner road network of Sopron from heavy through-traffic and enable safer and faster travel). In addition, a smaller two-lane Northwest Bypass road has been under construction on the northwest side of Sopron, extending from Route 84 on the north side of Sopron to currently halfway down the western side of Sopron (from aerial maps, it appears it will be extended further south in the future).



You can see the Northwest Bypass road in the above map, as well as the route of the M85 and the Schattendorf/Ágfalva (Agendorf) farm road (being the white line extending north from Agendorf to the border crossing by Schattendorf).

As for the M85, it is expected to be finished by year end, only awaiting completion of road tunnels under Route 84 (the yellow-marked road) and a natural area that is pretty much where the M85 text appears on the above map. In fact, the western half of the final "construction" zone is already open for traffic, connecting via the southbound Route 84 on-ramp and rejoining the 84 just past the in-progress tunnel entrances under the 84. It is also an alternative route to the Northwest Bypass road, which opened in late May.

However, motorways in Hungary are toll roads, requiring purchase of what is known as a "vignette" to travel on them (whereas the bypass road is not a tollway). So, if you use the M85 to get to the bypass road, you must pay for the privilege. Vignettes can be purchased at gas stations in Hungary or electronically online, and there are annual, monthly, weekly and daily vignettes. It is also possible to purchase a single-county vignette, at about 18 euros a year, versus an annual vignette for all of Hungary at 150 euros.

While the construction work on the M85 will soon be complete, its extension around Sopron will end up costing some 140 million euros. Earlier in May, the section marked in solid red (in the above map) opened to traffic. When the final leg is completed, the volume of traffic on the Burgenland side is expected to increase significantly, so precautions have already been taken to limit freight traffic.

As for the two-lane northwest bypass, it currently connects Route 84 with Ágfalvi Street, so that people coming from Austria or Győr no longer have to drive through the city centre to reach the industrial facilities in the western part of the city or the towns on the western side of Sopron. The bypass includes roundabouts at several roads and cost 26.5 million euros.

The completion, five years ago, of the M85 to the southern edge of Sopron has resulted in what the mayor says is "the greatest infrastructural development of the last hundred years."  But he goes on to say that the extension to the border will relieve the city centre of traffic and significantly improve the quality of life in Sopron, where there was "an urgent need to redirect the large freight traffic that currently flows through the city."



The Facebook Bunch (from Vanessa Sandhu):

Greetings, Burgenland Bunch!

Here is a quick update from our Facebook group. This month we added 7 new members, bringing our membership count to 2,201! Please join us if you haven’t done so—you have over 2,200 new Burgenland-loving friends waiting to meet you! facebook.com/share

Member Herbert Pensenhofer shared some great photos and videos of the raising of the Maibaum in Sankt Martin in der Wart. Member Janet Kroboth-Weber shared photos of the Maibaum at the open-air museum in Gerersdorf. Member Fred Knarr shared photos of the Maibaum in Neuhaus in der Wart, and Member Hermann Schabhüttl shared photos of Rudersdorf’s Maibaum, too!

Member Fred Knarr shared a great post about Burgenland’s Iron Curtain Trail. The trail covers 180 miles and features many beautiful and historical sites. The trail begins in Kittsee and travels through Nickelsdorf, Halbturn, Andau, Fertőd (home of the Esterházy Palace), and Hegykő (home of the Sara thermal baths). As the trail continues on, nature lovers can see 2 lovely National Parks (Neusiedlersee-Seewinkel and Fertő-Hanság). Traveling west, the trail arrives in Sopron, where the Iron Curtain was parted on June 27, 1989. Kőszeg is nearby, boasting a beautiful nature preserve. The trail continues on, passing through Bozsok, where a castle and ruins can be seen. The path winds through Felsöcsatar and Bildein, then moves on to the wine cellars of Heiligenbrunn. The trail ends near St. Emmerich’s Church in Inzenhof. Fred shared a nice link, with lots of great photos and information. You can see it here: burgenland.info/radrouten/iron-curtain-trail

Member Janet Kroboth-Weber shared an interesting link commemorating the 500th Anniversary of Güssing Castle’s possession by the Batthyány family. The castle’s existence reaches all the way back to 1157, but it became a possession of the Batthyány family on June 30, 1524. You can read more about it here: batthyany.at/burg-gussing

Member Catherine Polenz Stallone found a neat resource for those looking for Hungarian death notices. She writes “Purely by accident (and a bit of desperation), I came across this website that had death notices for Hungary. I didn't need to sign in to use the site. While it isn't the answer to all your brick walls, it did help me to confirm a few things, find a couple spouses, children and grandchildren. Obviously, the notices are in Hungarian and you will have to translate them—time consuming but not impossible. I only used Google to translate.” You can find it here: dspace.oszk.hu/discover

We’ll end with a song this month. Please enjoy this tune, called “Kennst du das Burgenland”, performed by musicians from Weiden am See, located at the Neusiedlersee. youtu.be/VDGHAX

Until next month, stay safe and healthy!

Vanessa



Update for book "The Burgenländer Emigration to America": Here is this month's update on purchases of the English issue of the 3rd edition of Dr. Walter Dujmovits' book "Die Amerika-Wanderung Der Burgenländer."

Current total sales are 1773 copies, as an interested person purchased 1 book during this past month.

As always, the book is available for online purchase at a list price of $8.89 (which is the current production charge for the book, as we purposely choose not to make any profit so you can obtain the book at as low a cost as possible!), plus tax & shipping. See the BB homepage for a link to the information / ordering page.

Given the book has now been available for over 10 years, I thought I would show you the pattern of cumulative sales and dollars expended to purchase the book (as of May 23, when I gathered this data).



The number of "units" is straightforward: I just provide a running total across time, leading to the near 1,800 units sold, as mentioned above. As you can see from the graph, the number of books purchased has decreased year-by-year, which is no surprise. Likewise, "dollars" has a similar plot, though lower starting in 2015, when our vendor substantially reduced their production charge (which is what you pay).

"Dollars" expended is more complicated, though, as books sold in five different currencies. The great bulk (1,599 units) were sold in US dollars. In addition to those, 130 books were paid for in Euros, 37 in Canadian dollars, four in British pounds, and 3 in Australian dollars. The report I can see shows the charges in those currencies, not their values converted to US dollars. Still, one would think that this amounted to a simple currency conversion and that the underlying "true" cost to each purchaser remained the same. However, the production charge changed, at least in US dollars, three times over the years... but it did not change in other currencies at the same time or as often as the US charge changed, so the true "cost" evidently differed between currencies at times! Rather than hunt down currency conversions at each sales date for these currencies, I chose to use the current conversions and apply those to all such entries. This will, of course, lead to inaccurate true "dollars" expended but, given the comparatively few such entries and the up and down of currency values over time, I'm going to say this is "close enough" for my purposes. Having done so, the average "charge" per book has been $8.49 US (still a bargain), and the resulting chart is what you see above.

The book is an excellent read for the Burgenländers in your family... so get theirs now!



Burgenland Recipes: (none this month... can you share one?)



Note: Our recipes sortable list has links directly to the recipes or food-related articles published in our past newsletters. You can access the list by clicking our recipe box (to the right). Thanks to the contributions of our members over the years, we have quite a collection of Burgenland recipes, some with several variations.

However, whenever we use up our unpublished recipes, this recipe section will become dormant. So, if you have a favorite family recipe, please consider sharing it with us. We will be happy to publish it. Our older relatives, sadly, aren't with us forever, so don't allow your favorite ethnic dish to be lost to future generations.

You can send your recipe to BB Recipes Editor, Alan Varga. Thanks!



Cartoon of the Month:

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