Borders are rarely born in conference halls. As the newly edited book The Disputed Austro-Hungarian Border: Agendas, Actors, and Practices in Western Hungary/Burgenland after World War I, published this year by Bergahn Books shows that the borders are created by wars and conflicts and then changed by clerks, soldiers, smugglers and villagers trying to make sense of a new world order. By focusing on one of the seemingly post-1918 quieter frontiers, the line separating Austria from Hungary, the book challenges the narrative that the Treaty of Trianon neatly decided everything with a stroke of the pen.
As two of the editors, Hannes Grandits and Katharina Tyran underline throughout our podcast, the creation of Burgenland was a complicated process stretching over several years, entangling ideology, class and everyday survival. The volume’s nine chapters, written by Ibolya Murber, Michael Burri, Ferenc Jankó, Sabine Schmitner-Laszakovits, Gábor Egry, Melinda Harlov-Csortán, Katharina Tyran, Hannes Grandits and Ursula K. Mindler-Steiner, explore this border-making through a tangle of sources from international commission reports, local testimonies to administrative records. Hannes Grandits notes that although the decision to transfer parts of western Hungary to Austria was made in 1919, it remained unimplemented for nearly two years. In the meantime, loyalties shifted, black markets thrived, and even a brief Bolshevik experiment in Hungary complicated the decision-making process.
Throughout this period, identities shifted. Katharina Tyran provides the example of Ivan Dobrović, a Croatian cultural activist who changed the spelling of his name depending on context. As she emphasizes, this small act captures the fluid identities the new nation-states tried to erase. Other contributors trace the social consequences. The Esterházy family saw their estates shrink; local bureaucrats slipped down the social ladder; peasants and artisans, newly politicised, wavered between social democracy and nationalism. Minority communities, Croats, Jews, Roma, found themselves suddenly reclassified by powers that barely understood them.
This book reads the border negotiation as an anatomy of transition. The conclusion of our conversation is that borders are not only documents, but lived experiences, shaped by people who rarely appear in diplomatic archives. The lesson of Burgenland is that borders are performed, contested and reimagined every day.
Katharina Tyran is an Associate Professor of Slavic Philology at the University of Helsinki. Her research considers sociolinguistic topics with a focus on minoritized languages, linguistic landscape research, grapholinguistics and script. She published a monograph on language codification processes and identification attitudes among the Burgenland Croatian community with a cross-border perspective.
Hannes Grandits is a Chair of Southeast European History at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He was also senior associate at the History Institute of Karl-Franzens-University Graz. He teaches the history of Southeast and Central Europe, with a special interest also in European comparative and global perspectives. His latest publication is The End of Ottoman Rule in Bosnia.
The interview was conducted by Adrian Matus. Lilit Hakobyan edited the audio file.
