Batschka, The fruitful land between the Danube & the Theiß

By Josef Schramm
Translated by Brad Schwebler

The region in the middle of the Danube came under Hapsburg ownership at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries.  At the time wide stretches of the land were swampy and almost devoid of people.  The emperor in Vienna wanted to see this stretch of land in the neighborhood of the Turkish border settled and called on people of different nations under the dominion of the crown.  Families and clans came from the present day lands of France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and besides that accepted refugees from Turkey: Croatia and Serbia.  The people must first create their new homeland through hard work.  The consciousness of these achievements connected the south Pannonian people, completely the same as the language or religion they belonged to.  The Hungarian speaking people called their new homeland “Délvidék” and considered themselves as a new branch of Hungarians.  The Slovakian speaking people called the land “Vojvodina” and themselves “Vojvodjani”.  The German speaking people formed the new branch of Germans called the Donauschwaben.  These three groups determined the economical, cultural, and political life of the south Pannonians.  The political leadership lay at times with one, at times with the others.  Like in the other Donauschwaben settlement regions, people also lived in the Batschka until World War II peacefully next to each other.  Then began the days in which all people between the Danube and the Theiß have suffered and the Donauschwaben were the actual victims of the national hate. Read More . . .