The tumultuous events that postponed—until 1921—the addition of Burgenland as the ninth Austrian federal state have given a belated boost to the centennial events marking the anniversary of the Republic of Austria’s founding in 1919. With the 2021 “100 Years Burgenland” anniversary extending well into 2023, and Eisenstadt celebrating a century as the province’s capital city in 2025, Burgenland has enjoyed a long party. Early tumult—and the fact that much of the region was situated in Hungary prior to 1919—also provides the backdrop to Ferenc Jankó’s excellent new study of Burgenland from a borderland to an Austrian federal state. Of course, as modern history teaches, yesterday’s center is the periphery of tomorrow, and physical borders saturate everyday life. Still, as R.J.W. Evans once observed, the 800-year-old frontier, “dividing imperial terrain—Austria, Styria, Carniola—from the lands of the Hungarian crown was perhaps the firmest in all Central Europe.” Seldom were borders more fixed than here.

For Ferenc Jankó, the transformation from borderland to Burgenland is anchored in geographical “discovery,” or more precisely, the production of geographical knowledge directed to the region that would come to be known as Burgenland. The premise of his book, in other words, is that for the emerging late-nineteenth-century academic discipline of geography, “Burgenland” did not exist. What existed was a largely indeterminate border region, bounded at certain frontiers, a region that offered an unlimited supply of natural, ethnographic, and cultural features to which an expanding cohort of professional geographers could apply their knowledge. Consistent with this point of departure, From Borderland to Burgenland proceeds through its seven chapters by introducing the names and writings of individual geographers, rather than focusing on notable lieux de mémoires or specific enduring controversies that mark the region.

Guided by the metaphor of “discovery” through geographical knowledge, the book is organized chronologically. Following a brief introduction, chapter 2 is devoted to top-down efforts, such as The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in Words and Pictures (or the Kronprinzwerk), to characterize the area within the framework of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, while a lengthy chapter 3 presents the influential Austrian post-1918 geographers of the region—among them, Richard Pfaundler, Robert Sieger, Eduard Stepan, Marian Sidartisch, as well as the American geographer Lawrence Martin. Here, in a turn that largely shapes From Borderland to Burgenland, the term “discoverer” functions both as a heuristic device and as a negative personal judgment upon those whose profession it is “to discover.” Thus, Eduard Stepan is described as engaging in “agitation work” and pursuing an “orientalist approach” toward Hungary, though neither what “agitation” and “Orientalism” might mean, nor how such concepts operated within the discipline of geography at the time, merit much concern for Jankó. Meanwhile, the work of Martin is trivialized by comparison to the short film, “Happy Birthday Burgenland, 1921–2021,” an Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (ORF) production shown during the intermission of the televised 2021 Vienna New Year’s Concert. Both Martin and the short film, Jankó writes, “indicate that there is a demand for discoverers” (51). Perhaps. But it was Martin, in the reports he wrote for the Coolidge Mission, who laid the groundwork for Allied leaders at the Paris Peace Conference to transfer to Austria much of the region that would become Burgenland.

Geographers of this Burgenland in the mid-1920s, as chapter 4 shows, brought with them a new agenda, discovering the region in fundamentally novel ways. Indeed, the territory that many of these German, Austrian, and Swiss geographers proposed to know was no longer postwar Burgenland but a pan-German Lebensraum. To be sure, the boundaries claimed for the area by the Latvian-born geographer Max Hildebert Boehm in 1925 borrowed from earlier attempts to classify the region in geographic terms. But more fundamentally, this new breed of land expert harnessed geographic knowledge to an ideologically transparent German geopolitical agenda. This was an “essentially … irredentist concept of a ‘Greater Burgenland’; in the north the Czechoslovaks and in the south the South Slavic State had taken a part of its territory in the south, and the eastern towns had remained in Hungary” (135). By now, “the national and cultural soil theory [had become] an emerging research paradigm” (129).

Chapter 5 turns to the discourses of tourism as a modern form of popular knowledge-making that emerged contemporaneously with the academic discourse of geography. In a context where First Republic Austria found itself lacking the full coordinates of a distinctly Austrian identity, Burgenland was Austria, en miniature, requiring everything from new symbols of provincial identity to cultural and political institutions to physical infrastructure. Marketing of Burgenland to tourists reached its zenith around 1930 with Forchtenstein Castle often pictured, and the Neusiedlersee inspiring flights of narrative fantasy, though somewhat prophetically, given the present-day landscape of Burgenland, the windmill was also a beloved object of painters and photographers. To this knowledge, the authors of guidebooks, who had often hiked the region, added a ground-level perspective, even if one such author, Max Hoffer, noted that there were “few possibilities for obtaining food and accommodation” (206). Chapter 6 crosses the recently created national border to explore how postwar Hungarian geographers saw the new Austrian province of Burgenland. Through periodicals, such as Turistaság és Alpinizmus (Hiking and Alpine Climbing), as well as in academic publications, these experts drew upon knowledge acquired through hiking to describe a “Hungarian landscape.” Thus, in Austria, Gusztáv Thirring found the Hungarian Alps, rather than the Austrian-Styrian border mountains. But these Hungarian discoverers expressed different perspectives. Some highlighted a sense of loss and yearning for the west, while others emphasized the peaceful cohabitation of ethnicities under historic Hungarian rule, and thus the pointlessness of “purposeless political intrigues of the past and the present” (220). Others, especially those with ethnographic ambitions, relitigated the past with more direct purpose, seeking for example, to clearly distinguish the Heinz and Heidebauer peoples of the region from contemporary Austrians.

With its primary emphasis on the disciplinary knowledge provided by geography, From Borderland to Burgenland does not follow the biographical road taken by Steven Seegel’s Map Men. Indeed, neither the stature nor the firmly national networks of the geographers discussed here would recommend such an approach. In fact, one virtue of this book resides in its elevation to discussion of marginal figures whose professional credentials might well have been challenged at the time. Aside from the accomplished Hungarian geographer and politician Pál Teleki, many of the “Burgenland” geographers were regional personalities, local secondary school teachers, hiking enthusiasts, or other intellectual hopefuls chasing the Zeitgeist and hoping for improved career opportunities. Seegel declared that he would call Map Men a “love story for dramatic effect.” To be sure, few readers would expect Jankó to proceed with his material with such grand gestures. But it must be said that a greater ironic skepticism towards the subject might be warranted. Post-Trianon Hungarian geographers, for example, rejected the term “Western Hungary,” the name used at the Paris Peace Conference to describe much of the region that would later become Burgenland. That term, they argued, deceptively delimited a region, which historically, had never been known by this name. To designate the area “Western Hungary” endowed the region with an identity that it did not possess (214). But seriously. If directional terms, such as east, west, north, and south, are inherently problematic, it is not only geographers who will search a long time for acceptable alternatives. Likewise, Jankó labels Austrian authors with an “Orientalist” perspective towards Hungary. But within Austria, Austrians have traditionally projected their own provincialism onto Burgenland, and today, the region is the reliable punchline of tired jokes, as public opinion remains resistant to acknowledging its remarkable economic success. Hungary? Burgenland is Austria’s Orient.

And yet, against the transnational “love stories” of celebrity geographers, From Borderland to Burgenland offers a powerful reminder of the local importance of geographical knowledge. In a time of austerity, Austrian president Karl Renner directed 50,000 crowns from the early postwar budget to Eduard Stepan’s 1920 Burgenland Festschrift. Contributors to that book included historians, an archives director, librarian, university professors, engineers, teachers, and artists—that is, a virtual cross section of the new Austrian intelligentsia. Burgenland would be for all Austrians. Meanwhile, the geographer Gusztáv Thirring, whom many believed helped turn the Sopron election, roused Hungarian spirits, declaring in 1920, “Today the fate of Hungary will be decided in Western Hungary. What takes place here will be the fate of the entire country.” That neither the Manifesto of the Hungarian Geographical Society to the Geographical Societies of the World, submitted to the Paris Peace Conference and probably written by Pál Teleki, nor the efforts of Robert Sieger, the single geographer among the Austrian delegation, played any documented role in the setting of boundaries by Allied leaders in Paris may be added to the ironies of history. To speak with From Borderland to Burgenland, all geography is both international and local.