The
Burgenländer
After
the fall of the Austrian Hungarian Empire and the end of the First World War
in 1918, Austria lost a portion of its alpine land in the South to Italy and
gained a small strip of land from Hungary to the east in 1921. This area came
to be known as the Burgenland. The ethnical diversity of the Burgenland also
includes different languages like German, Croatian and Hungarian. The culture
is however more Eastern European or Hungarian than that of the alpine Austria
to the West, which is evident in traditions, clothing and food. Due to overpopulation,
a high rate of unemployment, and the lack of industries of any sort, the predominantly
farming population of the Burgenland was driven to commute into other areas
of Austria or neighboring countries without much success. This is why the
“Burgenland immigration” to the US that started in the 1880's
to the farming communities of South Dakota, Iowa, and Minnesota and reached
its peak in the early 1920´s.
The founder
of the Burgenländer in Chicago was John Wenzel, who was the first to
a party of 45 young men on the ship “Kaiser Wilhelm” in 1900.
These men later founded the Burgenland Community in Chicago that grew to approximately
30,000 people in the years to come. In the late 1920's John Wenzel, Jr. and
his wife Ida settled in Fuller Park, where most of the Burgenländer lived
at that time. Another immigrant is John Glatz, who arrived in America in 1910.
He learned his trade as a blacksmith in his native Loipersdorf. After working
as a coal miner in the St. Louis area he became a railroad laborer in Chicago.
His grandson, Tom Glatz, is still living in Chicago and is organizing the
“Chicago Enclave” of the “Burgenland Bunch” which
is an informal volunteer organization run over the internet.
The Burgenland homepage
provides links to other useful websites including the World- GenWeb (www.worldgenweb.org)
for queries, and to Roots-L (www.rootsweb.
com) for newsletter distribution and archives. The lives of the early
Burgenland immigrants were hard. For most of them the US and the Chicago
area in particular became their new home for the rest of their lives, although
the intention had been to stay only a few years in order to save enough
money to make a living and provide financial support to the relatives back
home in Austria.
Website: www.burgenlaender.com
