LIFE AT THE IRON CURTAIN: ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL CONDITIONS OF THE RURAL POPULATION IN THE “MILL QUARTER” AFTER 1945

LIVING CONDITIONS OF THE PEASANT POPULATION AND RURAL ARTISANS IN THE REMOTE AUSTRIAN "MILL QUARTER" IN THE 19th & 20th CENTURY, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Left: My husband Karl Wurm at the current Austrian-Czech border, where the Iron Curtain ran until 1989 at the border stream Lainsitz / Luznice. Right: The “Schwarzenberg Canal”, a sluiceway for logs built at the time of the Habsburg Monarchy, where the Iron Curtain separated the two regions, the “Mill Quarter” (Mühlviertel) and Southern Bohemia, from 1948 until 1989

Border stones between Austria (Ö) and Czechoslovakia (C) in the “Mill Quarter” today

Left: Part of the Iron Curtain at the borders of Austria, Czechoslovakia, East and West Germany; right: Current map of the Bohemian Forest region: Southern Bohemia and the “Mill Quarter”

Left: Anti-tank barriers at the Iron Curtain in Southern Bohemia; right “Death Strip”, preventing people from leaving Czechoslovakia and entering the country from Austria

Iron Curtain memorial in the “Mill Quarter”

Iron Curtain memorial trail

My husband Karl’s mother Rosa Wurm, née Traxler, was born on 11 July 1927 (second on the left, sitting). Her family had moved from Kaplitz / Kaplice in Southern Bohemia a few kilometres south to Passberg in Austria.  After World War II she trained as a cook.

Left: the family’s farm house in Passberg, “Mill Quarter”; right: Rosa as a young woman

The British Prime Minister described the situation of the Cold War in Europe in 1946 with the words “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an IRON CURTAIN has descended across the continent.”

The border across the “Bohemian Forest”

For the regions of the “Mill Quarter” and Southern Bohemia this meant that the landscape around the Bohemian Forest, which had been united and disputed along a thousand-year-old border, was since 1948 divided with nearly no communication possible between the two parts. In the area between the Danube and the Moldau many different peoples had found their home over centuries. The Celtic “Bojer” lent their name to “Bohemia” and “Bavaria” and later many different Germanic and Slavic tribes settled in the wooded landscape of the dense Bohemian Forest. The borders which were gradually formed and marginally moved during these centuries were not determined by natural barriers, but by territorial claims to power of various rulers, who traversed the Bohemian Forest north and south.

In the Middle Ages the Bohemian Kings and the Bavarian Dukes were the highest-ranking authorities in the region. Yet the expansive efforts of the local rulers, the “Witigonen” family, in clearing and cultivating the densely-wooded area offered them some independence from the powerful players in the medieval “Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation”. Their territorial claims incorporated possessions which were in the sphere of influence of the Bohemian kings, the Bavarian Dukes, the Austrian Dukes and the mighty diocese of Passau. The”Witigonen’s” chance of uniting the region from southern Bohemia to the Danube was thwarted in the 13th century and since the 14th century today’s border between Bohemia and Austria was consolidated step by step.

When the Kingdom of Bohemia and the Dukedom of Austria were united in 1526 under the Habsburgs and continued to exist as an imperial unity until 1918, in some way the border always remained. Tolls were levied between the provinces of Upper Austria and Bohemia and trade between these parts of the Habsburg Empire was controlled at checkpoints. In 1775 all tariff barriers inside the Habsburg Empire were removed and a common economic zone was established. Just a year earlier, in 1774, the market reeve of Oberplan (now Horni Plan in Czechia) had to settle a dispute over a cow, which was “smuggled” from Ratschin near Oberplan south to Schindlau near Ulrichsberg (now in Austria).

Nevertheless, in 1788 a precise measuring of the border between Bohemia and Austria was initiated, although it was no longer a customs boundary. Yet it was still an administrative boundary, which was relevant with respect to civil and social legal decisions. Who wanted to travel from Bohemia to Austria or vice versa had to have a special pass until 1857, be it for tradesmen or apprentices on the “Walz”, perfecting their skills and completing their apprenticeships, or just for visits of relatives and friends. Only nobility, members of the clergy and civil servants could move freely in the Habsburg Empire.

Left: Customs house between Austria and Bohemia in the Habsburg Monarchy. Right: Former Customs House in St. Oswald, “Mill Quarter”, which was erected in 1920 after the end of the Habsburg Empire and the setting up of the state of Czechoslovakia.

What is important to note is that this border was never a language barrier. As long as the administrative state did not interfere and create multiple political and national dependences, different languages did not cause problems. It is known that many members of the local nobility and citizenry were bilingual, German and Czech. Not only did most people in the Czech area speak German as well, also in towns of the “Mill Quarter”, such as Haslach and Freistadt, not just noblemen, but also citizens spoke Czech and not just German. Christoph von Zelking, who donated the famous gothic altar in the church of Kefermarkt, wrote in his last will that his sons had to know Latin, Italian and Czech apart from German, if they wanted to inherit his property.

In 1855 the first map of the Habsburg Empire was drawn up which showed the different linguistic areas and mixed language zones. Since 1869 the Habsburg census incorporated the language spoken, but it was disputed whether the mother tongue or the language spoken in daily life was to be the basis of these language statistics. At this time of rising nationalism, the political border was competing with the linguistic border. The expansion of the administrative state in the fields of education, law enforcement, the military and public security had drastically changed the importance of language. Nationalist ideology poisoned the atmosphere and when the state demanded that in mixed language areas, civil servants had to speak both languages, for example German and Czech, this caused many animosities, because more Czech speakers spoke German, too, than German-speakers Czech. This consequently led to a preference of Czech civil servants employed in the Habsburg administration of the region of Southern Bohemia.

From an economic point of view, the “Mill Quarter” and Southern Bohemia had always been closely interlinked. The “Schwarzenberg Canal”, a sluiceway, shipped logs from the Moldau region to the Danube and down to Vienna. The fast-expanding capital city of the Habsburg Empire was in urgent need of lumber that could no longer be provided from the Viennese Forest or the forests in the vicinity. So, building a sluiceway for floating logs from the Bohemian Forest to the Danube was a convenient solution. The first plans for this most ambitious and technically complicated project were made in 1775. The challenge for the engineers was how to overcome the European main watershed near Rosenhügel. The canal, when it was completed brought great wealth to the noble Schwarzenberg family, as they owned large stretches of woodland in the Bohemian Forest. The engineering project was praised as the “Eighth World Wonder”.

Left: Spot of the European main water shed between Danube – Black Sea and Elbe – North Sea. Right and below: The restored “Schwarzenberg Canal” sluice way.

The horse-drawn railway between Linz and Budweis / Ceske Budejovice, which transported salt from the salt mines of the “Salzkammergut” to Bohemia, was another innovative technical project crossing the Bohemian Forest, but much less successful economically. The 197 kilometre-track connected Gmunden in the “Salzkammergut”, Linz and Budweis. The first part was opened in 1832 and the line was completed in 1836. The transport of passengers and goods was much more profitable from Southern Bohemia to the south than vice versa. Due to technical problems on the narrow and hilly tracks the change from horse-drawn to steam-driven engines came much too late in 1855/56 and only from Gmunden to Linz, which track was flatter and wider. In the meantime, they had even experimented with oxen-drawn engines, because oxen were cheaper than horses. The railway entrepreneur Franz Anton Gestner, who had initiated the horse-drawn railway, was not innovative and forward-looking enough. From Linz to Budweis the passenger trains took 14 hours, two hours more than the stagecoach and from Linz to Gmunden another six and a half hours and freight transport was just as bad. As the railway line was not profitable, the horse-drawn line Linz – Budweis had to be abandoned in 1872, because it was already outdated when it was opened. In comparison, in England the first steam-driven railway opened in 1825 between Stockton and Darlington. On the contrary, the existence of a horse-drawn railway even hindered a modern infrastructure development of the Bohemian Forest.

Left: Salt transport on the horse-drawn railway to Southern Bohemia; right: Museum horse-drawn railway in Kerschbaum at the border to Bohemia

Left: Tracks of the former horse-drawn railway in the “Mill Quarter”; right: Former railway station in Kerschbaum

The majority German-speaking Bohemian districts Krumau / Cesky Krumlov and Kaplitz / Kaplice, where Karl’s mother’s family came from, were economically oriented to the south towards the Danube region in the 18th and 19th century. In the 19th century an extensive migration from Bohemia to Upper Austria took place. Czech workers were involved in building the horse-drawn railway and in Linz the tobacco factory and other large constructions. They worked in coalmining in the “Hausruckviertel” and in the weapons factory in Steyr. For many Czechs Upper Austria was the first stop on their move to Vienna. They were mostly employed in Linz and Steyr as industrial workers, craftsmen, and in domestic service jobs. While in 1858 2,000 Czechs were registered in Upper Austria, in the second half of the 19th century Czechs from Bohemia made up 10 per cent of the population of Linz and 15 per cent in Steyr.

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VIENNA 1945: THE END OF WORLD WAR II: LIFE IN THE LIBERATED AND OCCUPIED CITY & HOW DID RESTITUTION WORK FOR THE NON-ELITE

LIVES OF THE NON-ÉLITE IN VIENNA FROM THE AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN EMPIRE TO THE NAZI REGIME AND POST-WAR AUSTRIA, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Between 1942 and 1944 the Nazis constructed three pairs of “Flak Towers” in the 2nd, 3rd and in the area of the 6th/7th district in Vienna, which are still present in the city scape today as an ugly warning against war. They were erected to attack Allied bombers, but were rather inefficient. Only two of them have found a new purpose nowadays, one as a depot for art and the one below as a climbing wall and aquarium (“Haus des Meeres”).

These “Flak Towers” were also used as bomb shelters in 1944/45 and my grandmother Lola and my mother Herta only once sought refuge in this tower in Esterházypark near their flat in Mariahilferstrasse 41, but the crowded atmosphere there so much frightened Herta, who was 11 years old then, that they never returned and hid in the cellar of their house instead.

The “Viennese Diary of 1944/1945” by Josef Schöner (1904-1978) offers a personal impression of the life in the city of Vienna during the last days of the war and the months after the liberation of the city by the Soviet Red Army. Schöner was an Austrian diplomat who had been dispatched to the United States and was forcibly retired by the Nazis in 1939 after the “Anschluss” (the Nazi takeover of Austria). During the war he worked in the restaurant business of his parents and was called back to diplomatic service after the end of the war. The experiences of my grandparents, Lola and Toni Kainz, and their daughter, Herta, my mother, are an important source of information about life in Vienna during the last months of the 2nd World War and the time after liberation. My great-grandparents, Ignaz and Rudolfine Sobotka, in the photo below with Lola, their daughter and Herta, their granddaughter, returned from the Nazi concentration camp Theresienstadt to Vienna in the summer of 1945, but they never talked about their experiences during their imprisonment.


Ignaz and Rudolfine Sobotka with their daughter Lola (left) and their granddaughter Herta (right) after their return from the KZ Theresienstadt in the small flat of Lola and Toni in Mariahilferstrasse 41

Ignaz and Rudolfine Sobotka with their granddaughter Herta (and with Lola and Toni) on the balcony of the bigger rented flat in Lerchenfeldergürtel 45, which was allocated to Ignaz and his family after their liberation from the KZ Theresienstadt

This article furthermore deals with the way restitution worked for the victims of Nazi persecution after the war, focussing on the non-elite who had survived Nazi concentration camps and the ordinary Viennese citizens of Jewish descent who returned from exile. The overall number of those who came back to settle in Austria again was embarrassingly small: only 6 per cent. This can be explained by the fact that they were not at all welcome in post-war Austria.

The decision of the Allied Forces in 1943 to insist on “unconditional surrender” of Germany implied that Germany would have no say at all in the new world order after the end of the 2nd World War. The Allies then started to discuss the destiny of the many small states which had been incorporated into the Nazi “Third Reich”. Austria was just one of them and certainly not the most important one. A new order in Central Europe was considered important because it had become apparent that the Western inter-war policy of the 1920s and 1930s had failed in the region. The British were the first to weigh the pros and cons of four different options for Austria after the end of the war.  First, Austria could become an independent state as between 1918 and 1938; second, it could remain in a union with Germany; third, Austria could be part of a new, not yet clearly defined “Danube Confederation” or fourth, Austria could be split up and the western part would join Germany or Switzerland and the eastern part the “Danube Confederation”. But the Soviet Union had its own interests in the Central European region and Stalin insisted on the restoration of an independent Austrian Republic. The British wanted to boost the resistance among the Austrians against the Nazis and made that a condition for a preferential treatment of Austria after the victory over Nazi Germany. They were certain that Austria had to rely on massive foreign aid to survive as an independent state and that’s why they preferred a “Danube Confederation”. But the Soviets were strictly against any form of a Central European confederation of states. At the same time there was no clear strategy visible in the USA and the British did not want to alienate either the Americans or the Soviets. In a draft of July 1943 Austria was declared the first free country which had been a victim of Nazi aggression and the decision how Austria would be treated in future would depend on the behaviour of the Austrian people, who were responsible for the war, too. The “Anschluss” was imposed on Austria and was therefore null and void. In order not to become a basis for German aggression again in future Austria was to be restored as an independent state. Already in this draft the responsibility of the Austrians for the war was deliberately expressed in an ambiguous way. At that point in time also the governments of the Commonwealth countries discussed the destiny of small European states like Austria and the South-African Prime Minister Jan Smuts vehemently opposed a promise to Austria that it could expect preferential treatment to Germany and he further rejected the idea of promising independence to small states which were economically too weak to survive. He pleaded for a South German state, which would achieve two goals, namely a breaking up of Germany and the integration of Austria in a state with Bavaria. This was a solution which did not please the British Foreign Office under Anthony Eden who preferred a Central European Confederation and refused to offer preferential treatment to Bavaria, the region of origin of National Socialism. The Soviet Union pleaded for the Austrian independence and stated that they would not expect Austria to come under the Soviet sphere of influence.  Interestingly, the Soviets did not want to stress Austria’s responsibility for the war.

Finally on 1 November 1943 the “Moscow Declaration” confirmed that Austria was the first victim of Nazi Germany and would be restored as an independent republic once Hitler was defeated. At that point in time it was not to be predicted of how great the importance of this document would be for the future of Austria in 1945. Despite its ambiguity this declaration is the most important document for Austria before the State Treaty of 1955. The “Moscow Declaration” must have been known in Austria in November 1943 because the Nazi newspaper, the “Völkischer Beobachter”, reported about it. In conclusion it can be said that the British had invested much more thought in the future of Austria than any other of the Allied partners. They now started to plan the zones of occupation after the war and were prepared to offer the whole of Austria to the United States because their projected zone of occupation in southern Germany was rather small. But the Soviets insisted on a joint occupation of Austria by the Soviets, the Americans and the British. During this time of strategic planning, the war continued and the destruction of the German and Austrian cities and infrastructure was stepped up by Allied bombardments. In the spring of 1944 the south of Austria had come under attack of Tito’s Communist Partisans from the south. In September 1944 Churchill and Roosevelt agreed on the zones of occupation for Germany and the Soviet, British and American diplomats came to an understanding that the one who reached Vienna first, would invite the other two Allies to join in. On 31 October 1944 the British stipulated what should happen in case Austria was reached by the Allied troops before the unconditional surrender of Germany. Most importantly these directives included a warning that Austria could not escape its responsibility for the participation in the war and that it would be held accountable. Yet the degree to which Austrians contributed to the liberation of their own country would be taken into account. This proclamation stated that the British considered Austria an enemy state because Austria was waging a war against the Allies and that’s why the British considered themselves as victors and not liberators. The Soviets wanted to occupy the Burgenland and the eastern parts of Lower Austria and Styria and a third of the city of Vienna. The Americans expected that their zone of occupation in Vienna included an airfield. Basically, the Americans and the French had no special interest in occupying parts of Austria. Their focus was on Germany, but they accepted the British invitation to participate in the occupation of Austria.

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