They arrived by cart and on rafts floating down the Danube. Thousands of new settlers, including women and children. Miners, metallurgists, merchants and lumberjacks. All of them spoke a foreign language.
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Driven by the timeless human desire for a better life, they headed for a country on Europe’s eastern cultural frontier, devastated by the Mongol invasion and sparsely populated by local Slovaks.
To this day, we admire the miners’ skill, the Gothic centres of central Slovak towns, Spiš’s monuments of European importance and the extraordinary works of Master Paul of Levoča.
It is all part of the legacy of the Carpathian Germans, whose distinctive culture helped shape multi-ethnic Central Europe.
They lived alongside Slovaks for more than 800 years. In the Middle Ages, every fifth inhabitant of what is now Slovakia was German. Today, only around 5,000 remain. What did Slovakia inherit from its Germans, and where did they go?
Death, hardship, bread
“Erste Generation der Siedler erntete Tod, zweite die Not, nur die dritte hat das Brot.”
The saying, passed down among Carpathian Germans about their distant beginnings, means that the first generation of settlers reaped death, the second hardship, and only the third had bread.
In their new homeland, they settled uninhabited valleys as well as existing Slovak villages. There were relatively few ethnic Slovaks, and the country was economically far behind the rest of Europe. Much of life still operated according to practices inherited from a much earlier age.
The German settlers did not arrive only with their carts, children and livestock. They also brought new technologies, skills and a willingness to work hard as they cleared forests, founded towns and ventured deep underground.
“German colonisation has been both exaggerated and played down in the past,” Ondrej Pöss, a prominent member of Slovakia’s German minority and director of the Museum of Carpathian German Culture until 2021, said in 2020. Pöss died in April this year.
“On one side, there was the nationalistic grandiosity of German researchers. On the other, there was the systematic belittling of the importance of German immigration and its contribution,” he said.
“Today, there is a consensus that German eastward settlement between the 11th and 14th centuries formed part of a broad European movement in the mediaeval development of countries.”
Historian Michal Schvarc and Ondrej Pöss, the then director of the Museum of Carpathian German Culture. (source: SME/Marko Erd)
Invited by kings
“Much benefit comes from guests and newcomers. Guests arrive from various countries and regions, bringing with them different languages and customs, different forms of knowledge and weapons. All this adorns and elevates the royal throne while intimidating the arrogance of foreigners.