From Minority to Übermensch: The Social Roots of Ethnic Conflict in the German Diaspora of Hungary, Romania and Slovakia

I Introduction

When the numerous peace treaties ending the First World War were signed, six major ethnic minorities (German, Jew, Macedonian, Magyar, Roma and Ukrainian) with contested positions remained.¹ For these minorities 1918-19 was filled with contradictions. At one level, the end of trench warfare, the sweeping away of autarchic monarchies, and the establishment of new popular governments based on modern constitutions, represented progress. A new age of democracy and prosperity seemed close at hand. Instead of liberty, however, the peace treaties ushered in decades of contested sovereignty between dissimilating minorities, and assimilating and insecure new nation states. The end of the war was followed by the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy with the goal of reducing further ethnic-national conflict; but peace and the creation of new nation states brought a Pandora's box of problems, leading to a crisis of identity, instability, contesting ideologies, irredentism, migrating states, fluid borders and, eventually, the most violent years of genocide (1938-45) in European history.

This article focuses on the Germans, the largest and most infamous minority of East Central Europe—the ethnic nationality often understood as supporting Germany's imperial ambitions in Eastern Europe during the Second World War. The creation of the German minority is considered the classic example of the flaws inherent in the Peace of 1918-19. Approximately ten million Germans became national minorities living in East Central Europe after the war's conclusion, with an estimated three million in Czechoslovakia, one million in Poland, 750,000 in Romania, 700,000 in the Kingdom of Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia, and 500,000 in Hungary.² While prior to the First World War this ethnicity was one of the privileged groups within the multinational states of East Central Europe, in a matter of months it lost its elite position. Following 1918-19, the successor states of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy introduced new languages, and new administrators filled the void previously held by Austro-Hungarian bureaucrats. Many schools were built, textbooks written, new histories taught, stamps issued and currencies minted, but they were all in the spirit and language of the new nation states. Equally significant, the new political elite who rose to power often built their careers on defending the interests of their respective national groups, and the oppressive Germans became the antagonists in their nationalist rhetoric.

It was difficult to be a German in the East Central Europe of 1918-19. But who were these Germans? What were their idiosyncrasies? Can they be realistically lumped into one group? I argue that they cannot. The German ethnic groups living in East Central Europe show evidence of remarkably distinct types of evolution. To illustrate that great diversity, this article discusses the development — leading up to the Second World War — of three German diasporas: the Zipsers in Czechoslovakia, the Saxons in Romania, and the Swabians in Hungary. Out of these three German sub-groups in 1910, the Swabians were the largest with an estimated size of 1.4 million, followed by the Saxons with 300,000 and the Zipsers with 50,000.³

The argument proposed is that ethnic conflict among the German minorities of East Central Europe must be understood in relation to the strategic position that each ethnicity held within the broader social structure. Succinctly put, the three German diasporas found themselves under new states, with new majorities, and growing ethnic conflict within each group followed three different paths. After the First World War, a new militant pan Germanism emerged in Europe, leading in the late 1930s to the Nazification of the three German communities. But the message of National Socialism was conveyed in a different manner in each case, orchestrating its appeal around the social-structural position of the three German minorities. An important element of National Socialism was anti-Semitism, yet even on this point, the growing anti-Jewish attitude of the German minorities was not uniform. The study of the Zipsers, Swabians and Saxons, three ideal types — in the Weberian sense — will...