Peasant Society and Modernity: The Case of an Voralpen Region in the 20th century

This study is part of a project by a group of Austrian historians who are going to publish a handbook on the agricultural history of Austria in the 20th century. The first volume of this handbook overviews the topic from a national perspective. The second volume encompasses several case studies on agricultural regions. This case study focusses on the region Voralpen. Former studies on the agrarian history of Austria in the 20th century discussed general topics without enough historical `depth` on the one hand. On the other hand they focussed special aspects without enough historical `width`. The innovative character of this study is based on a specific micro historical view connecting both `width` and `depth`: The large-scale structures -market integration, nation building, secularization etc. - can be understood in small fields only. The micro historical view leads to three consequences: The social theory must overcome both subjectivistic and objectivistic positions and lead to a dialectic view of structures and practices. The methods must overcome the difference between the quantitative and the qualitative paradigm and connect these epistemological models. The contents must overcome the fragmentation of the social life and reconstruct the relations between economy, Politics and culture. The study puts its focus on the reconstruction of the economic, political and cultural transformation of peasant society, based on the interaction of internal and external forces such as supra-regional markets, bureaucratic state, expert knowledge etc. The Pielachtal in Lower Austria was chosen to be the field of research out of three reasons: The six rural communes include the Voralpen ecological structures in many variations. The institutional cooperation between the communes makes collecting historical sources easier. The project collaborator can build on previous studies he has done on the region. The historical sources for the case study Voralpen are public records, statistics, local and regional press, life narratives, private records, photos and agricultural objects which will be analysed with both quantitative and qualitative methods.

The project Peasant Society in the 20th Century aimed at reconstructing the wide and deep changes in the peasant life-worlds over the past hundred years. The agrarian structural change` appears as a - by no means inevitable - consequence of human thought and action. The indebtedness of farms seems to be a drive wheel of this structural change`. The project Peasant Society in the 20th Century aimed at reconstructing the wide and deep changes in the peasant life-worlds over the past hundred years. The investigation was centered on two regions with differently structured natural and cultural spaces: Kirchberg an der Pielach in the mountainous area and Gänserndorf in the low and hill area of Lower Austria. The project has chosen - as one of the first in agricultural history research in the 20th century - a micro-history approach. Along the names of persons, farms and plots of land a huge number of documents had been linked by a computer-aided database: property lists, statistical data, land registers and so on. Through this work many previously unknown documents of private and public collections - e. g. peasant diaries, familiy photo albums or the archives of the Bezirksbauernkammern - have been made accessible for historical studies. In combination with speaking` sources, the life records of rural women and men, these silent` sources gained precise insights into the structures and practices of farm people. The project results show that the regional conditions limited human thought and action; but within these limits farm women and men were provided with considerable rooms for thinking and acting. Shortly saying, the fundamental structural change` of the past hundred years did not befall the country like a natural disaster; rather, it was a consequence of human thought and action. The indebtedness of farms seems to be a drive wheel of the structural change`: those who invested must get into debt; those who had debts must invest. Within this helix of indebtedness the state played an important role as shown by the Entschuldung (freeing of debts) and Aufbau (development) program in 1938. The peasant private debts were nationalized` for the most part. Additionally, the participating farms were provided with new subsidies and credits causing different regional consequences: in the mountainous region the Aufbaumittel (development funds) were placed independently of the farm scales; however, in the low and hill region the larger farms got much more funds than the smaller. This was caused by different strategies of agrarian policy of the Nazi state: the mountain farmers in the disfavoured area which were thought as racial` most worthful should be preserved as a whole; however, the lowland farmers in the favoured area were supported depending mainly on their economic power. Also before and after the Nazi rule the strategies of peasant preservation` and rationalization` were tied together through state agrarian policies. Thus, the structural change` was both pushed ahead and slowed down in relation to temporal and spatial contexts. This Austrian way` of agrarian policy was expressed by the great portions of Nebenerwerbsbetrieben (part time familiy farms) that combined highly mechanized agricultural market production with non-agricultural wage labor. As a consequence the peasantry` had been more externally and internally differentiated. However, the manifold types of agricultural producers hardly constituted oppositional political projects; for the most part they were politically mobilized under the hegemony of the catholic-conservative Bauernbund (peasant union). Large issues like these can better be investigated in small places - an assumption that has been reinforced through the project results.