By Anita McChesney

Introduction: Highlighting Austria’s Migration History

2015 marked the culmination of the so-called “European immigration crisis,” which was, at that time, the largest increase of displaced persons seeking asylum in Europe since the end of World War II. (1) Located between two major refugee routes, Austria received around 90,000 asylum requests that year which was the third highest number of applications per capita. The continuing impact of these events have brought renewed focus on migration and with it an opportunity not only to highlight displaced people but also to engage with Austria’s longer and often untold history of migration. Historian Dirk Rupnow has spoken of “historical amnesia” and noted that although Austria has long been a country of immigration, the history of migration and the experiences of migrants have not been integrated into the hegemonic version of Austrian history. (2) Austrian writers have sought to position themselves against this narrative with literary accounts that tell some of these missing stories and offer new perspectives on Austria’s migration history. (3)

Theodora Bauer contributes to these literary initiatives with her 2017 novel Chikago. (4) Motivated by the increase in migrants in 2015 and the ensuing political and social backlash, Bauer challenges hegemonic narratives by uncovering Austria’s longer migration history. (5) This novel by the Burgenland native focuses specifically on emigration from her home state to the United States in the 1920s-1930s, for which she draws on archival research in Austria and the US and interviews with some of those emigrants and their families in Chicago. In Chikago, Bauer transforms this historical information into personalized accounts of immigrants’ dreams, struggles and defeat amidst economic disruption, social and political unrest, and xenophobia. With implicit, yet obvious parallels to the present, Bauer foregrounds such experiences as integral to the fabric of contemporary Austria. These personal perspectives offer a more complete view of Austrian history and promote greater empathy with the migrant experience. In the following article I describe Bauer’s attempts to reframe perceptions of migration history in Chikago. Beginning with a brief history of Austrian emigration to the USA with an emphasis on interwar emigration from Burgenland, I then explore how Bauer vivid, personalized narrative portrays these experiences as a repeating cycle of hope and despair rather than a linear progression. Bauer’s reframing emphasizes migration as an integral part of Austrian history and seeks to warn against practices of marginalization and xenophobia that result from historical amnesia and a hegemonic view of history and society.

A Brief History of Emigration from Austria to the USA: 1734-1918

The first documented mention of emigrants from the Austrian territories were the “Salzburgers” who founded the community of Ebenezer in Savannah, Georgia in 1734. Part of a larger group of 16,000 protestants expelled by the Archbishop of Salzburg in 1732, the first group of 25 miners and peasants was followed by additional families in the winter of 1735/36, for a total of around 150. While a trickle of immigrants to the United States continued until the mid-nineteen century, the largest boom came between 1876, and the granting of the legal right to emigrate, and 1910, a downturn in the US economy and restrictions on immigration. During this period approximately 3.5 million people made their way from the Habsburg Monarchy to the United States. Roughly 11.8% were from German-speaking areas while the majority were from Galicia and Bukovina, Slovak-speaking parts of Hungary, Central and Eastern Hungary and Croatia, Slovenia, and Bosnia. The biggest push factor was economic hardship in the Habsburg lands especially in rural areas where the migrants may also have suffered discrimination based on their nationality. Despite the hardships and exorbitant costs of the long journey across the ocean, the USA was particularly attractive due to its prevailing labor shortage and higher wages. Following a stagnation of the US economy between 1908 and 1911, and the ensuing collapse in the job market for unskilled workers, migration declined and then came to a halt with the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Emigration from Austria remained low after the war when the United States introduced a quota system that capped immigration at 3% of its total population (from an 1890 census). This had the effect that between 1921 and 1924, only 7,342 immigrants were admitted from Austria, between 1924 and 1929, only 785 immigrants per year received an immigrant visa, while from 1929 to 1939, the annual quota from Austria was limited to 1,413 immigrants. (6)

Immigration from Burgenland to the USA: 1921-1935

The inter-war period is particularly significant to the history of Burgenland, the area of western Hungary that officially became an Austrian state in 1921. (7) Between 1921-1935 around 22,000 people emigrated from Burgenland to the United State. This was a remarkable figure that equals roughly 32% of the total number of migrants from Austria during that period. By comparison, Vienna, the state with the largest overall population, recorded 19,089 emigrants, followed by Styria with 9,711 and Lower Austria with 8,923. (8) The primary reason for this large number of migrants was economic hardship. During the interwar period, Central Europe experienced extreme poverty and deprivation. The difficult economic situation was magnified in the newly founded state which experienced few of the changes that might have improved the inhabitants’ difficult daily lives, and many sought better conditions in the US. Unlike previous immigrant groups from the Habsburg lands who scattered across the Midwest and in big cities, the Burgenland immigrants remained largely together. The new arrivals settled in the industrial centers of the Midwest, especially in Chicago where nearly 40,000 of these settlers and their descendants live today. Their lasting influence can be seen in an area of northwest Chicago called “Little Burgenland,” and in the cultural organizations that maintain connections with Austria and other Central and East Central European ethnic communities and promote Austrian culture. (9)

Of course, not everyone found success and approximately 14,4% returned to Burgenland. This is hardly surprising given the many obstacles coming to the US. After surviving a long, arduous journey on overcrowded, poorly ventilated third-class decks with inadequate hygiene, the migrants arrived to an often less than warm reception. Locals often felt culturally superior to the immigrants, seeing them as a swarm of poor, have-nots who posed a threat to their jobs. (10) The new arrivals s for reducing the overall wages and for exploding rent costs. They also often encountered religious and racist hostility from the US establishment, which consisted of WASPs, White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, while the European immigrants came from predominantly Catholic regions, were of Jewish faith, or were avowed atheists. Despite the many real challenges, the prevailing narratives that made their way back to the homeland were those of the “rich uncle from America” and the myths of “rags to riches” and “dishwasher to millionaire” that obscured the lived experiences and continue to shape popular nostalgic images of this period in the United States and Europe even today. (11)

The impact left by the Burgenland returnees can still be seen in the Northern Burgenland community of Kittsee, where a district comprising seven streets is named “Chikago.” The American returnees allegedly compared the newly created district to the rapid growth of the American metropolis of Chicago where they had been.

Figure 1: Street Signs in the district “Chikago” in Kittsee in Northern Burgenland. (Photos by Michael Burri. Used with permission.

Figure 2: A house built by returnees in the district of Kittsee “Chikago.” (Photo: Philipp Strobl. Used with permission.)

(Re)-presenting Burgenland-US Emigration in Chikago

Theodora Bauer takes the title of her novel Chikago (2017) from this chapter of Austria’s migration history. The novel follows the fate of a small family of migrants from an impoverished region in Burgenland to the United States and back and highlights the recurring cycle of hope and disillusionment that shapes their search for a better life. The novel’s organization emphasizes this cyclical pattern. Divided chronologically into four sections titled 1921, 1922, 1937, and 1937, the middle two sections of Chikago capture the migrant experience abroad, which are bookended by the conditions in Austria that drove them there and the conditions to which they return. Within each section, short chapters offer alternating accounts from the third-person limited perspective of the protagonists, the half-sisters Anica (Ana) and Katica, Katica’s boyfriend/husband Ferenc (Feri), and their son Josip (Joe/Josef) who is born in America. The sentences themselves are short, and the characters and narrator speak contemporary conversational Austrian. With this choice of perspective and language, Bauer challenges migration histories that are relayed as one overarching, cohesive narrative from above. Instead, her novel offers personalized, often fractured, accounts that capture the everyday reality of life for the migrants at the margins of society before and during their quest for a better life, and then after their return. In this sense Bauer engages in a history from below, a familiar approach in historiography since 1980s that “takes as its subjects ordinary people, and concentrates on their experiences and perspectives, contrasting itself with the stereotype of traditional political history and its focus on the actions of ‘great men.’” (12)

This “history from below” begins with a description of life in Burgenland in 1921 and the decision to leave for America. While all three share the hopes for a better life, Feri most clearly articulates this dream of many labor migrants. Discontented with the poor economic conditions in Burgenland after the war (“it was better everywhere than here” he continually bemoans), (13) Feri dreams of joining scores of Austrians traveling to the paradise on the other side of the Atlantic, including his parents and older brother. Following what he calls his “American feeling,”(14) Feri’s conviction grows to the point that he feels he deserves this new, better life:

So he had no choice but to go over there himself and take what was rightfully his. A new world that belonged to him, a life in which the endless waiting would finally be over, in which thoughts of his own future would no longer be painful. A life in which he could finally do something, have something, be something. It seemed perfectly natural to Feri that he would get it. America, quite simply, owed him such a life. (15)

Feri’s dream of a better life noticeably disregards contradictory evidence, such as his parents’ return to Burgenland materially and psychologically bankrupt.

In the second section, set in 1922 and relayed in alternating accounts from Ana’s and Feri’s perspectives, Chikago describes the rise and fall of these dreams. Ana’s first glimpse of the Statue of Liberty foreshadows the bleak future awaiting them:

With a stoic gaze, the statue raised its torch to the sky. It looked as if it wanted to set the clouds on fire with it. […] The statue didn’t look at her; its staring eyes were expressionless. Ana saw nothing inviting in its face, only this suppressed anger, the steely flame in its metallic hand. (16)

This description radically inverts the words of Emma Lazarus’s poem “The New Colossus” inscribed at the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty:

[…]

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” (17)

In contrast to these words that helped promote the mythical view of the United States as a land that “glows world-wide welcome” and boasts a “golden door,” Ana describes the statue’s steely flame, its stern look, “stoic gaze,” expressionless staring eyes,” and its “suppressed anger” that offers “nothing inviting.”

Notwithstanding her foreboding feeling upon seeing the Statue of Liberty, Ana describes the arrival hall on Ellis Island in the next scene with a sense of awe and with it the sustained hope of a bright future:

Ana had never seen such a large space before. A single room as large as this one – it was loud and stuffy, the people crashing against the sisters like a sluggish wave that never stopped pushing forward. Nevertheless, Ana had the feeling she was standing in a church. It was a large, American church, she suddenly understood that. Important and sacred things had happened here, a strange transformation; they had been immersed in a great soup full of important documents and figures, so that they could finally become Americans, or at least those present, immigrants (Eingewanderte) from migrants (Einwanderer), wine from water. Where the crucified Christ had hung in their village, a huge flag stretched out, taking up almost the entire space at the head of the church. […] That was when Ana saw America for the first time. This America hung above everything she experienced here, above the good and the bad. It shone out at her for the first time from this superhuman banner, from this orderly, taut banner that screamed its strength to everyone, so large and irrefutable that for a silent, solitary moment in this large crowd of people, it left her speechless. (18)

The overt religious analogies in this passage elevate the mythical America to a new level. In this American church, as Ana describes it, a miraculous transformation is consummated much as the water to wine in a Catholic mass or as with a baptism. This description transforms the reality of the arrival hall, (“the sluggish wave of people”) into a mystical baptism by which migrants (Einwanderer) become Americans, or at least immigrants (Eingewanderte).

The cover of Chikago visually reinforces the ambivalent feeling of migrants upon arrival. In the image, a small group faces forward with their backs to the viewer and peers into the fog. The man pointing into the fog and the man crouched with a hand over his eyes straining to see more clearly suggest their hope of a bright future that lies beyond the cloud bank. While the future is as unclear as the mist covering everything before them, they have left the past behind, illustrated by their backs to the viewer and the few possessions on the pier behind them bound up in simple fabric sacks.

The ambivalence expressed in the cover image and in Ana’s alternating trepidation and awe on arrival at Ellis Island turns into disappointment in Chicago. The remainder of section two relays the reality of living in crowded shanties, working impossibly long hours in poor conditions in factories or on the railroad, and the isolation that stems from an inability to communicate in a foreign language. (19) Both Katica and Feri succumb to these conditions. Katica dies in childbirth and Feri, who is discouraged by the backbreaking work for little to no pay and his wife’s death, resorts to drinking away his guilt and disappointment in illegal basement Speakeasies before he is shot dead in a police raid. “He wanted to drink in the good memories, not the bad ones,” Anica reflects on her brother-in-law. (20)

The third section shows this continuing cycle of disappointment subsequent generations of migrants in the so-called promised land. Jumping forward to the year 1937, the narrative shows the hopelessness of everyday life for Katica and Feri’s son Joe (or Josip as his aunt calls him) and Ana, who now works as a nanny for a rich German-speaking family. Joe’s life is no different than that of his father, and even 15 years later they are no closer to attaining the American dream. (21) Facing a shortage of jobs and poor economic prospects, Joe feels excluded and full of despair and, much like his father before him, longs to leave and go “anywhere” else.

Every day in front of the factory, the smell of meat, run-down guys, nothing but contempt in their eyes. At the railways, nothing. On the building site, nothing. Up in the city, are you kidding me? Nothing. […] What was the point of this shitty life here, this shitty city, his real parents should have stayed over there, whoever they were, wherever that was. […] Anywhere, anywhere would be damned better than here. (22)

In addition to marginalization and economic hardship, Bauer also describes the social and economic unrest that mark the everyday reality in this storied land, most notably the oppression of workers. Drawing loosely on the events of the Memorial Day Massacre of May 30, 1937, one scene in the novel describes how Joe takes Ana’s charge, the frail young woman Lily White who has illusions of helping the poor in Chicago like the women of the Hull House, to witness a factory strike. What starts as a peaceful demonstration for workers’ rights turns violent when the police shoot ten unarmed demonstrators. Overwhelmed by what she has witnessed, the fragile Lily collapses. She never fully recovers and is eventually admitted to a mental hospital. Their tenuous subsistence in Chicago worsens when, during an altercation between Joe and his cousin Cathy, she falls to her death in the Chicago River. Ana then packs their few belongings and returns with Joe to their village in Burgenland.

The final section, also set in 1937, chronicles Ana and Josip’s failed attempt to find a better life in Burgenland. Back in their village conditions have not improved but rather gotten worse with the rise of Austro-fascism. Joe, whom the Nazi youth insist on renaming the German Josef, (23) searches for acceptance in that group who carry out increasingly brazen attacks against their political opponents. These range from distributing pamphlets and swastikas to burning down a woman’s house who dares to publicly speak against “Der Führer.” They also focus their rage on Ana and eventually even Josef turns against his aunt, first throwing a stone through her window with the branding “gypsy,” and then in the final scene, standing by as the Nazi youth attack her with a knife and presumably kill her.

Reframing Migrant Narratives

In this history from below, Theodora Bauer depicts a vividly personal and ambivalent reality of migration often absent in official factual accounts. This perspective subverts the view from above that relays facts and numbers and that champions success stories to instead promote empathy with the recurring rise and fall in hopes. Bauer’s novel thereby attempts to correct the misperception of migration as a unidimensional, linear movement from East to West, and as an advancement from the bottom to the top, from “dishwasher to millionaire,” as myths presents it. This family’s move from Burgenland to Chicago and back attests instead to a circular dynamic marked by breaks and repetition. (24) A poignant section at the end of the novel reflects on this pattern:

Just outside the village, behind the cemetery, there was a settlement called Chikago. They lined up Burgenland farmhouses in seven alleyways, close together, with holes in the jagged house fronts where there were still empty plots of land. Behind them, the wide expanse up to the town with its castle, meadows and forests, which the country border cut in the middle. It is said that the settlement was named after an emigrant who returned before the war. He reportedly said, “You’re building like in Chicago,” and that’s how the rows of houses got their name. Ana thought to herself how strange it was that her path had taken her full circle. She moved from one Chicago to another, and yet the big, wide world with its promises was always somewhere else. Now she was back where she started, and taken literally, she hadn’t really moved a single step in the meantime. (25)

What began as a journey full of hope and dreams in 1921 is revealed over the ensuing 16 years and across different locations to be more of the same. Both in Chikago and Chicago they experience poverty, marginalization, and political and social unrest.

In addition to reframing the migrant narrative as a repeating cycle, Bauer also aims to deconstruct a narrative of Austrian cultural hegemony. In an interview on the novel, Theodora Bauer describes her sense that the current resurgent nationalism in Europe speaks to “the wish to showcase the glamorous past […] that seems as if history were being reinterpreted for the purposes of the new hegemony, as if a ‘usable past’ were being sought.” (26) Chikago pushes back against such disingenuous reinterpretations by highlighting the reality of Austria’s long, continuous history as an emigrant, immigrant and multiethnic nation. The setting in Burgenland is significant as a border zone that was contested and redefined after the First World War. One of the few lands Austria gained, this was the site of Hungarian protests until 1921 when the borders were conclusively redrawn. Despite political attempts to separate and define distinct identities, Burgenland is a point of convergence for multiple identities. Early in the novel Ana puzzles about the arbitrary attempts to redraw identities with the geographical borders:

Now the war was over and they had created new countries, they had drawn borders back and forth, sometimes right through the middle of landscapes. They said that up ahead, there, near Pressburg [Bratislava], that’s where the country ends. Ana didn’t understand. What did that mean, “end”? The hill was still there, and so was the city, even though Pressburg [Bratislava] was now in Czechoslovakia. … Ana wondered if it was permissible to create a new country so simply, with a handshake perhaps, an oath, a signature? (27)

The political decisions that separate people into categories make no sense to Ana. The names of the characters in Chikago underscore the fluidity of borders and the area’s diversity rather than homogeneity. Anica/Ana/Anne’s multiple names reflect her Croatian-German heritage and her life in Chicago; at the same time her identity remains in flux since her mother is unknown. Her half-sister Katica also has the German name Katharina, reflecting her Croatian-Austrian identity. Feri is called Franjo, Ferenc, Feri or Franz, depending on whether he is with Croatian, Hungarian, English or German speaking individuals, while his son is called Joe in America, Josip to his aunt, but Josef back in Burgenland. The multiple, changing names underscore the fluid nature of identity that, like the shifting borders of the territory, retains its dynamic essence even while external labels change.

In addition to underscoring Austria’s continuous migrant and multiethnic history, Bauer’s also highlights a long history of marginalization and exclusion. From the beginning, the impoverished family is marginalized in the small community. The father, a blacksmith, is ostracized by the local community presumably because he befriended a gypsy settlement. (28) Anica is likewise marginalized, in large part due to her purported gypsy mother, (29) and derisively referred to as “this abandoned gypsy girl.” (30) These xenophobic sentiments crystalize in a plot by the young village men to burn down the gypsy encampment in 1921. Ana’s father thwarts these plans by evacuating the inhabitants before the men can arrive while she knocks the torch out of the mob’s hands and drives them back with a pitchfork. (31)

Ana and Joe’s return in 1937 shows an intensification in the community’s racial exclusion politics. As they are first entering the village after their 16-year absence, Ana describes a void: “Where the gypsies once camped, there is now nothing left, only dry, knee-high grass.” (32) This image of the dried up, unkempt grass is a harbinger of the policy of social elimination, and cultural impoverishment under Austro-fascism that Joe/Josef becomes a part of. Upon their return, Ana is again dismissed as a gypsy, and the head city official warns Joe/Josef “it was rumored that she was a gypsy. […] you can’t trust gypsies.” (33) Joe then uses this label against her: ”They call you gypsy’ he said, quietly, over his shoulder, like a wry explanation for everything he had done.” (34) These aggressions culminate with the, presumably deadly, attack on Ana in the final scene. Joe/Josef’s radicalization serves as a warning about the consequences of recurring marginalization and exclusion and as an implicit commentary on the effects of the lack of empathy for others as well as a misconception, or even deliberate rewriting, of one’s history.

Conclusion

In 1905 George Santayana famously claimed that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” (35) Theodora Bauer underscores this message in Chikago. The personalized accounts of the cycle of migration between Chikago-Chicago-Chikago and the futile search for a better life amidst economic disruption, social and political unrest, and xenophobia, draw parallels between the past and present. Through the personal narratives Bauer aims to break the historical amnesia and a hegemonic view of Austrian history and society for a more empathetic response. To close with the author’s words: “What happens to my characters could now affect Afghans maybe, or people from the Balkans. But Ana and Joe are not Muslims. They are ‘our own’ people. The parallels could give some food for thought for readers of my novel.” (36)

Author Biography

Anita McChesney (Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University) is Associate Professor of German at Texas Tech University. Her research focuses on German and Austrian crime fiction and on the intersection of media, myth and history in contemporary Austrian literature. Recent articles include “The European Union and Other Crazy Utopias: Robert Menasse’s Postnationalist Vision in Die Hauptstadt.” and “Detective Fiction in a Post-Truth World: Eva Rossmann’s Patrioten.” She is the recipient of the Fulbright-Botstiber Visiting Professor of Austrian-American Studies in Austria for Spring 2025 and is currently at the University of Salzburg teaching and researching literary images of Austria through the historical lens of Austrian-American points of contact.