Imagined countrymen : German migrants between nationalist claims and daily life experiences in Austria, 1900-1960

Abstract

Throughout the 20th century, German nationalists romanticised the national dedication of Germans coming from multilingual regions of Europe. Imagined as living colonial bulwarks against other nations, these Germans were supposed to be particularly loyal both to the territory they claimed as the Heimat and to its people. This loyalty should not be lost through the act of migration or of the territorial changes that took placer after the fall of the empire in 1918. German Nationalists assumed, for example, that self-professed German migrants from the former Habsburg crownlands living in the territory of the Republic of Austria after 1918, were particularly prone to be “most active in völkisch matters”. Both their selfproclaimed national representatives as well as local nationalist activists in Austria expected these migrants to act as a united community – a union that was often assumed to have been reinforced through the act of migration itself. At the same time though, both the representatives of these migrants as well as their local Austrian political counterparts dedicated considerable energies to creating those very expected communities in the first place. Through a series of case studies, this dissertation explores the history of this type of German migrant activism in Austria from the early 1900s and until the end of the 1960s. Focussing on ideological continuities that are particularly evident in the Austrian case, the dissertation seeks to show that German migrant activism was a specific political tradition in Central Europe with a longer history. In so doing, it connects the nationalist mobilisation of German Inner-Imperial migrants in the Habsburg Monarchy with the efforts of the post-1945 ethnic German expellee activists and their claims for national recognition.