Austrian immigrants
Austrian immigrants have played a significant role in shaping various aspects of American culture, despite representing a small percentage of the US population. Their migration to the United States occurred in four notable waves, starting with the arrival of Salzburg Protestants in 1734 seeking religious freedom. The second wave, known as the "Forty-eighters," occurred in 1848 and involved politically motivated intellectuals fleeing repression. The largest wave came in the early 1900s due to political and ethnic conflicts leading up to World War I, while the fourth wave was driven by the Holocaust and post-World War II displacement.
Throughout history, Austrian Americans have made impactful contributions across multiple fields, including cinema, where figures like Fred Astaire and Hedy Lamarr emerged, as well as in sciences with notable individuals like physicist Wolfgang Pauli. The influence of Austrian culture is also evident in American skiing traditions, introduced by immigrants like Hannes Schneider. By the early twenty-first century, an estimated 735,128 Americans identified as having Austrian ancestry, highlighting their enduring legacy in the fabric of American society.
Subject Terms
Austrian immigrants
SIGNIFICANCE: Although some estimates suggest that the numbers of Austrians in the United States (US) have represented less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the entire US population, Austrian immigrants and Austrian Americans have had a profound impact on the arts, sciences, and popular culture of the US.
Austrian immigration provides an example of the difficulty of defining certain American immigrant populations because of changing borders and ethnic identifications. An analog of modern Austria existed in ancient times as a province of the ancient Roman Empire. In later centuries, the region persisted, at various times and in various forms and sizes, as a duchy, as a powerful empire in its own right, and as a partner with Hungary in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
The modern state of Austria was not established until 1918. Therefore, pre-1918 statistics on Austrian immigration cannot be authoritative for several reasons. For example, under the Austrian and Austro-Hungarian empires, members of many ethnic groups were technically Austrian citizens. These included Serbs, Czechs, and Slovenians. However, when these people, who were technically Austrian nationals, immigrated to the US, American immigration officials did not always distinguish between ethnicity and national citizenship. For this reason, Austrian immigrants of Serbian descent might have been recorded as "Serbians," not as "Austrians." Conversely, immigration officials were also not always clear about distinctions between Austria and its fellow German-speaking neighbor, Germany. It is likely that more than a few immigrants who should have been recorded as Austrians were listed as Germans.
Four Waves of Immigration
Four distinct periods in US and European history have seen the most significant numbers of immigrants from Austria. The first occurred before the American Revolution and was prompted by quests for religious freedom. From the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, much of German-speaking Europe consisted of dozens of small duchies, principalities, and kingdoms. Their rulers' religious preferences— either Roman Catholics or Protestants—were usually identified as the state religions. Citizens of other religious persuasions were often discriminated against, if not persecuted outright. This religious intolerance frequently led to emigration.
The first Austrian immigrants arrived in 1734 on American shores in what is now the state of Georgia. They came from the Salzburg area, where Roman Catholicism was dominant. Several hundred in number, they established a community called Ebenezer not far from Savannah. After the American Revolution (1775–83), one of their number, Johann Adam Treutlen, became the first governor of the new state of Georgia. When US President Bill Clinton later proclaimed September 26, 1997, to be Austrian American Day, he recalled the contributions of Georgia's early Salzburger pioneers.
The second significant wave of immigrants began in 1848 when a series of small pro-democracy rebellions broke out in what would become modern Austria. The suppression of these small revolutions led to the immigration to the US of many of the intellectuals who had waged them. Called the "Forty-eighters," these Austrians tended to settle in large American cities in the North and Midwest, where a number of them became active in the abolitionist movement.
The third immigration wave was the largest and took place during the first decade of the twentieth century, during which more than two million Austrians arrived on American shores, largely because of the political and ethnic conflicts that eventually led to the outbreak of World War I. The fourth and final wave was motivated by World War II. During the years leading up to that conflict, many Austrian Jews fled their homeland to escape the Holocaust. After the war ended in 1945, more Austrians—this time from many backgrounds—immigrated to escape the desolation and disorganization left in its wake. From the mid-1930s through the mid-1950s, approximately 70,000 Austrians arrived in the US. After Austria regained independence in 1955 and emerged as a prosperous, democratic country during the 1960s, Austrian immigration to the US became negligible.
Austrian Americans
Austrian immigrants have proven that even a small immigrant population can strongly affect America's cultural and intellectual life, as Austrian immigrants and Austrian Americans have been prominent in a wide array of fields. Austrian immigrants and their offspring have been prominent in cinema since the earliest days of motion pictures. Examples include silent-screen star Ricardo Cortez, the celebrated dancer Fred Astaire, actor Peter Lorre, and legendary screen star Hedy Lamarr. Three of Hollywood's most respected directors of the early and mid-twentieth century were of Austrian descent— Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger, and Billy Wilder—as was noted actor and director Erich von Stroheim. One of the most popular musicals in Broadway and Hollywood film history, The Sound of Music, is based on the true story of an Austrian family that eventually immigrated to America. During the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, three of the best-known actors in America were of Austrian descent: Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was a superstar during the 1980s and 1990s and became governor of California in 2003; soap opera icon Erika Slezak, of One Life to Live; and Natalie Portman, who played Padm Amidala in the enormously popular Star Wars films and won a 2011 Academy Award for her performance in Black Swan.
Other areas of endeavor in which Austrians in America have triumphed have included law (Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter), musical composing (Arnold Schoenberg and Erich Korngold), physics (Wolfgang Pauli), literature (Franz Werfel), and food preparation (Wolfgang Puck). A little-known area in which Austrian immigrants have greatly influenced America is skiing, as much of the art and practice of alpine skiing in the US follows Austrian traditions first taught in American ski resorts by such immigrants as Hannes Schneider and Stefan Kruckenhauser. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, there were approximately 735,128 Americans who claimed full or partial Austrian descent.
Bibliography
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