Burgenland is Austria’s youngest and least populous province. It only joined the newly created Alpine republic in 1921, after parts of the German-speaking western rim of the former Hungarian kingdom had been assigned to Austria in the Treaty of Trianon. These origins explain the unusual shape of the new entity as a narrow strip along Austria’s eastern border, which was exacerbated by the detachment of its designated capital of Sopron/Ödenburg following a much-debated plebiscite.

Ferenc Jankó investigates the creation of Burgenland in primarily geographical literature, with a special focus on the interwar era. Jankó is Associate Professor at the Department of Social and Economic Geography at Budapest’s Eötvös Loránd University but grew up in Sopron right on the border to Austria. He defines the new book, which is a revised translation of his 2021 study Burgenland földrajzi felfedezése, as an exploration of the geographical discovery of Burgenland and thus the geographical equivalent of a regional historiography. The authors he considers hail from more than one discipline, however. Ultimately, the study is even more multifaceted, as the author complements his meta-analysis of primarily Austrian/German and Hungarian literature with his own original research.

Jankó’s focus is on geographical knowledge-making. He describes the initial delineation of a distinct region termed German West Hungary by researchers and activists in the late Habsburg period. As Hungarian critics were quick to point out, this region was not genuinely based on historical or geographical foundations but merely on linguistic conditions. In the beginning, its proponents did not promote a separation from Hungary. Faced with the collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy and subsequent designs to turn the area into a corridor connecting Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, however, Vienna claimed and received parts of the region at the Paris peace conference.

The new province required a suitable identity, and geographers contributed eagerly to its creation. This identity could be purely regional, but it could also be integrated into a larger Austrian mission in the East or German geopolitics. Regional identity creation was hampered by the province’s internal fault lines between a northern sector facing Vienna and a southern one looking toward Graz. As a consequence, Burgenland was divided between Lower Austria and Styria during the Anschluss period, only to be recreated in 1945.

After World War II, the static geopolitical situation of the Cold War and the preceding expulsion of most Germans on the Hungarian side settled the border question for good. Thus, most Austrian scholars depoliticized their research, as it was no longer needed to alter or justify existing conditions. The topic also lost interest among Hungarian researchers, who had previously tried to distinguish the German-speakers of western Hungary from Austrians and to underscore their established ties to Hungary.

In an extensive chapter preceding the brief conclusion, the author subsequently presents his own geographical interpretation of Burgenland, which focuses on economic development, ethnic conditions, geographical foundations and rural settlement patterns. In his most innovative contribution, he analyzes the pace of regional modernization and compares it to adjacent areas in the (Hungarian) east and the (Austrian) west. For a long time, the Hungarian border districts could not keep up economically with Burgenland, which in turn lagged behind the Austrian core. While Burgenland turned toward Vienna, western Hungary had no choice but to turn east. The author concludes that the border created after World War I evolved first into an ethnolinguistic, thereafter also a political-ideological and finally even a socioeconomic divide. It took the joint EU membership of Austria and Hungary to reestablish closer ties.

Inspired by the postwar American geographer Andrew Frank Burghardt, Ferenc Jankó presents a multifaceted analysis of the intellectual creation of Austria’s easternmost province. The author discusses a wide selection of geographers, historians and activists and soberly describes the often conflicting assessments of Austrian and Hungarian researchers. In the process, he also highlights the political function of scholarship, showing, inter alia, how language maps turned into political claims and how academics informed the American peace delegation in the aftermath of World War I.

The study’s laudable breadth also poses some challenges. The author moves between scholarly and propagandist sources without much differentiation, and his own interpretation of the regional development remains somewhat isolated from the preceding metastudy. Overall, however, From Borderland to Burgenland casts valuable interdisciplinary light upon a border region that is often neglected in international scholarship.