Danube Swabians Erotic

The Danube Swabians were assembled by policy rather than by descent. After the Habsburgs pushed the Ottomans out of the middle Danube at the end of the seventeenth century, they held a depopulated plain and nobody to work it, so they went recruiting. Three organized waves of settlers came downriver between the 1720s and the 1780s, packed onto the flat-bottomed barges out of Ulm that the passengers called Ulmer Schachteln, Ulm boxes, bound for the Banat, the Batschka, Baranya and Slavonia. Most were not Swabian at all. They came from the Palatinate, Hesse, Lorraine, Alsace, Bavaria and Austria, and ended up named for the port they left from. The label itself is a twentieth-century coinage, fixed onto people who for two hundred years had simply called themselves the Germans of a particular village. Their speech carried that scatter: Rhine Franconian and Palatine dialects mostly, leveled village by village into local mixtures, with standard German kept for church and school and Hungarian, Serbian or Romanian picked up at the market. The first colonists had to be Catholic by imperial rule, and Catholic most of them stayed, though Joseph II's Patent of Toleration in 1781 opened the plain to Lutherans, who settled heavily in parts of the Batschka.

You could identify a Swabian village from the road. Habsburg engineers laid them out on a grid with wide straight streets, and the houses stood gable-end to the road, whitewashed, long and narrow, a covered side corridor running the length of the yard. The year turned on the parish calendar and peaked at Kerweih, the church consecration feast, where young men and women danced for a decorated rosemary bouquet and a hat that were auctioned off at the end. There is an old settler saying about what the land cost: the first generation gets death, the second hardship, the third bread. The bread did not last. Trianon split the settlement zone among Hungary, Yugoslavia and Romania in 1920 and turned one population into three minorities. What followed the Second World War ended the community in its homeland: expropriation and internment camps in Yugoslavia, where tens of thousands died at Rudolfsgnad, Gakovo and Jarek between 1945 and 1948; expulsion from Hungary; deportation from Romania to Soviet labor camps and later to the Baragan steppe. The survivors and their children are now in Germany and Austria, in Cleveland, Chicago and Kitchener, and in Entre Rios in southern Brazil, where a colony founded by refugees in 1951 still keeps the language.