Story of the Donauschwaben
The story of our family starts in Schowe, a village in southern Europe, now in Serbia, that was part of the story of the Donauschwaben. More can be learned on the DVHH Schowe page and the many other pages of the Donauschwaben Villages Helping Hands sites.
Here is the story as told by cousin Fritz Seil.
THE DANUBE SWABIANS
Emergence of a Subculture
Fredrick J. Seil, MD
Berkeley, CA 94708
Ravno Selo, the village in which I was born, is about 18 miles north-northwest of the Danube (Donau) city of Novi Sad in the Backa (Batschka) region of the Vojvodina province of Serbia. It was not always called Ravno Selo. The original Hungarian name may have been Sove, or O-Sove or Uj-Sove. German settlers who arrived in 1786 called it Schowe, and divided it into Alt (old) Schowe, the existing village, and Neu (new) Schowe, where their new homes were constructed. The settlers originated from various parts of southwest Germany, including Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg, Hessen, Saarland, Lorraine, Alsace and, as was the case with my forbears, the Rhineland Palatinate (Rheinpfalz). They came at the invitation of the Habsburg emperor Joseph II (1780-1790) of Austro-Hungary, as part of the resettlement of areas of southern Hungary begun by his grandfather, Karl VI (1711-1740) and continued by his mother, Maria Theresia (1740-1780). These lands had been occupied for more than 150 years by Turks of the Ottoman empire until their withdrawal after a series of military defeats near the end of the seventeenth century.
The founding of Neu Schowe occurred during the last of three periods from 1718-1737, 1744-1772 and 1782-1787 of organized large-scale migrations of Germans to areas of Austro-Hungary along the course of the Danube river and its tributaries. The general plan was for the settlers to make their way by ground transport, primarily horse-drawn wagons or on foot, to the Swabian city of Ulm and there board barges for the downstream trip on the Danube. The Danube flows through Vienna, Budapest and Belgrade on its way to the Black Sea. The migrants initially had to disembark in Vienna where they were registered, given a small stipend, food supplies and provisions for the rest of the journey, and assigned their destinations. After processing, they were reloaded onto barges for the completion of the trip.
The scheme of the Habsburg rulers of the Austro-Hungarian empire was to repopulate and restore the lands devastated by the Turks during their lengthy occupation and to extend Catholicism.in eastern Europe. A population growing food would also be a source of support for the military guarding the borders of the empire. Only Catholics were invited during the first two periods of colonization, as this was the faith of the Habsburgs, and it was not until the third migration, during the reign of Joseph II, one of whose missions was religious freedom, that Protestants were also included. Emissaries were sent to southwest German regions to induce farmers to leave their homes with promises of free land for crops and pastures, housing, building materials, livestock, financial assistance, freedom from taxation for a decade, deferment from military service for the firstborn sons, and the right to retain their language and culture. Such inducements were effective in overpopulated areas or areas impoverished by wars and crop failures, and among those burdened with excessive taxes and servitude to landowners.
The settlers endured many hardships, especially during the first period of migration. Not all of the promised lands were arable, and some were swamps that required drainage before any crops could be planted. Families were decimated by disease, including malaria, typhus, cholera and bubonic plague. Borders were not yet secure and many of the newly established villages were raided by Turks and the colonists killed. The losses sustained by the approximately 15,000 German settlers during the first period were such that many of the settlements had to be rebuilt during the second migration of about 75,000 new recruits. Political instability and wars continued on the continent during this period, including the Seven Years War (1756-1763) between Prussia under Fredrick II (Fredrick the Great) and a coalition of Austria, France and Russia. Not only did the settlers have to deal with reclaiming a barren land, but troop movements required for the conduct of the war left them with intervals during which they were relatively unprotected and subject to further raids. An additional 60,000 settlers arrived during the third period of migration, at the end of which over 1,000 new towns and villages had been established in the Danube basin. Government sponsorship of organized colonization was discontinued after 1789, but settlers continued to flow into the region well into the next century.
Germans were not the only ethnic group of settlers in the lands occupied by the Turks. Others included Hungarians, Croatians, Serbians, Romanians and Bulgarians, and to a lesser extent Czechs, French, Italians and Spaniards. Ethnic and religious groups were generally segregated into separate villages, although there were exceptions, one of which was Schowe. Schowe was cohabited by Serbians and Protestant Germans, the former in the original village (Alt Schowe) and the latter in the extended village (Neu Schowe). While proximate to other ethnic groups and engaging in business with them, German settlers interacted primarily with each other socially, and intermarriage between Germans and other ethnic groups was infrequent. Nevertheless, some degree of integration of customs and clothing occurred, and culinary traits of their neighbors were incorporated by Germans. Although less than 10% of the total population of settlers from all three migrations originated in Schwaben, the German settlers were referred to as “Swabians” by non-Germans, as many of the original migrants of the first period came from Schwaben. At that time Schwaben was a large territory that included the German departure point city of Ulm (Schwaben is now an administrative region in the southwest corner of Bavaria).
In spite of continuing hardships and political unrest and discrimination, the German settlers persevered and over the next century transformed an unproductive wasteland into one of the most successful agrarian economies of Europe. Wheat and hemp were prominent crops, both for home use and export, in the southern regions of Batschka and Banat, but other crops such as corn, sugar beets, hay, sunflowers and hops were also grown in fields surrounding the grid-patterned villages. Vegetables and fruits, primarily for the settlers’ own use, were generally grown in courtyard gardens within the villages, where livestock and poultry were housed. The relatively isolated villagers prospered and developed a fairly stable life pattern, less affected by changes in government and less subject to assimilation into Hungarian culture than ethnic Germans living in cities.
The stability of the pattern was altered by the advent of World War I. Schowe was involved early, as my grandfather was one of the first soldiers killed in the war, felled by a sniper’s bullet from the opposite bank of a river that he was patrolling. It was left to my grandmother, who never remarried, to raise my father and his younger sister. The war brought profound changes affecting many of the Germans in Austro-Hungary, not only by direct losses, but by the redistribution of national boundries that followed. The Habsburg rule came to an end along with the dismantling of the Austro-Hungarian empire. In the Treaty of Trianon signed in 1920, Hungary was reduced to almost a quarter of its size, and the remaining territories of the former empire were incorporated into Austria, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and what was soon to become Yugoslavia. The descendents of the German settlers of the Danube basin were now divided among three countries, Hungary, Yugoslavia and Romania, and had to deal, as minorities, with new administrations. It was at this time that reference to this group of Germans as “Danube Swabians” (Donauschwaben) became entrenched, acknowledging their German origin and identifying them as an ethnic group.
The Danube Swabians encountered increasing difficulties with maintaining their culture and language under the new regimes. In Yugoslavia, for example, restrictions were in effect in some locales on teaching in the German language in schools, higher education opportunities were sparse for ethnic Germans, and political opportunities in the Yugoslav government were limited and ineffective. Justice was not meted evenly by Serbian judges and office holders. German responses to these conditions varied from formation of a Swabian German Cultural Union, whose motto was “true to country and true to heritage” (Staatstreu und Volkstreu), to adaptation and endurance of unfavorable conditions as much as possible, to leaving for other lands. Many Danube Swabians chose to leave during this period and emigrated to Germany, Austria and the United States of America. My father was among those who decided to leave and move his family to the USA.