Long description:

The area that constitutes the Austrian federal province of Burgenland belonged to the Hungarian part of the Habsburg empire until the end of World War I. This book helps us realize that geographical knowledge does not come ready-made. Instead, it is created by knowledge makers: geographers, historians, statisticians etc. This knowledge-making helped to legitimatize the area transferred between Austria and Hungary, shape the Burgenland identity, and depict its geopolitical role in the rise of national socialism. This book is about how those studying Burgenland, the creators of its geographical knowledge, saw and represented the province. It explores how they grasped the geographical characteristics of the region through their own perspective, influenced by their own professional positions, individual careers, motivations, and by the broader historical and social medium.

The way the area between the provinces of Lower Austria and Styria came about as Burgenland is enthralling, as is how the people there experienced this change of sovereignty and how everyday social and economic relationships were transformed. Tracing the geographical discourses in the interwar period and beyond, the book argues that Burgenland became a successful geographical project, and departs from thoughts of subdivision, unviability, and backwardness, concentrating instead on fertility, unity, and modernization.

Table of Contents:

List of Figures
Acknowledgements

Chapter 1. Introduction
Approaches of the book
Pictures of Burgenland

Chapter 2. The Romance of the Monarchy
Seen from Cisleithania
Seen from Transleithania

Chapter 3. Discoverers
From language territory to territorial claim
A tentative boundary recommendation
The most Austrian geographer
Burgenlandarbeit
Pionierarbeit
Explorers of north and south

Chapter 4. Discoverers of Burgenland and German Geopolitics
The Empire comes back
Hands up, yogi!
A German borderland in the southeast

Chapter 5. Identity and Tourism
Burgenland idyll
Landeskunde, Heimatkunde

Chapter 6. The discovery of Burgenland in the Spatial and Temporal Perspective
We came to bid our farewells
Grenzland reloaded

Chapter 7. Private Discovery
Between towns
The Hun, the Heinz, and the Croat
Centers, hinterlands and transport
From emigration to expulsion
From peasant houses to the alpine-type houses
Between two borders

Chapter 8. Summary

References
List of figures
Index