Austrian Immigration to Canada: Selected Essays PDF
Preview Austrian Immigration to Canada: Selected Essays
AUSTRIAN IMMIGRATION TO CANADA This page intentionally left blank AUSTRIAN IMMIGRATION TO CANADA SELECTED ESSAYS Edited by Franz A.J. Szabo Carleton University Press Copyright © Carleton University Press, 1996 Printed and bound in Canada Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Main entry under title: Austrian immigration to Canada : selected essays Essays originally presented at a symposium on Austrian immigration in Canada held at Carleton University, Ottawa, in May 1995. Companion vol. to a History of Austrian migration to Canada. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-88629-281-6 1. Austrian Canadians—History. I. Szabo, Franz A. J. FC106.A9A98 1996 971'.00436 C96-900280-7 F1035.A9A98 1996 Cover Design: Your Aunt Nellie Typeset: Mayhew & Associates/Chisholm Communications, Ottawa, Ontario Carleton University Press gratefully acknowledges the support extended to its publishing program by the Canada Council and the financial assistance of the Ontario Arts Council. The Press would also like to thank the Department of Canadian Heritage, Government of Canada, and the Government of Ontario through the Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Recreation, for their assistance. CONTENTS Acknowledgements vii Introduction The Austrian Immigrant and the Canadian Multicultural Spectrum Franz AJ. Szabo 1 I German-Speaking Immigrants of Many Backgrounds and the 1990s Canadian Identity Dirk Hoerder 11 II Demographic Patterns of Austrian Canadians, 1900-1991 Gertrud Neuwirth and John de Vries 33 III Push and Pull Factors for Overseas Migrants from Austria- Hungary in the 19th and 20th Centuries Michael John 55 IV Austrians Abroad: Austrian Emigration after 1945 Traude Horvath and Gerda Neyer 83 V The Largest Austrian Dialect Speech-Island in North America Herfried Scheer 93 VI The Trudeau-Kreisky Connection: Austria and Canada on the Road to Canciin Oliver Rathkolb 103 VII The Empire Replanted: The Enrichment of Canada's Musical Life by Austrian Immigrants in the 20th Century PaulMdntyre 113 VIII The History of the Egger Family of Immigrants to Canada Thomas Samhaber 127 IX Immigration: A Personal Retrospective of an Austrian in Canada Helmut Walter Ott 135 This page intentionally left blank ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Production of this volume would not have been possible without the gen- erous financial support of government agencies both in Canada and in Austria. In the first instance we owe our special gratitude to the Govern- ment of Canada's Secretary of State for Multiculturalism and the Status of Women, Department of Canadian Heritage, for helping to subsidize our symposium on Austrian immigration to Canada, and making it pos- sible to invite scholars and members of the community from across Cana- da and from Europe. Particular thanks are due to the officials in the Her- itage department who expedited our conference grant request, Mark Cur- foot-Mollington and Susanne Samson. Secondly, we owe an incalculable debt of gratitude to the Austrian ambassador to Canada, His Excellency, Dr. Walther G. Lichem, who not only took time to attend our confer- ence, but at whose personal initiative a publication subsidy for this vol- ume was secured from the Austrian Federal Ministry for External Affairs (Bundesministerium fur auswartige Angelegenheiten). We thank the Ministry for its generous support. We are also grateful to G. Struart Adam, Dean of the Faculty of Arts of Carleton University, for the addi- tional support he gave the conference, to John Flood, general editor of Carleton University Press, for taking on this publication project at short notice, and to Jennie Strickland, our copy editor, for saving us from a multitude of technical errors. This page intentionally left blank INTRODUCTION THE AUSTRIAN IMMIGRANT AND THE CANADIAN MULTICULTURAL SPECTRUM Franz AJ. Szabo Carleton University THE IMMIGRANT IS FATED to be a Janus-faced creature. The condition is a familiar one to many generations of newcomers to Canada—never com- pletely at home in the adopted country, nonetheless increasingly out of touch with the realities of the country of origin. Many of them report the sense of alienation that comes from being "at home nowhere," except per- haps on board the aircraft which transports them between the two lands. It is because of such duality that it will perhaps come as no surprise that the impetus for a systematic study of the Austrian immigration to Cana- da should have come from an anniversary in Austrian history. On 1 November 1996 a famous central European medieval document will be a thousand years old. That document marks the first recorded use of the word Ostarrichiy medieval forerunner of the modern German, Osterreich —that is, Austria.1 The approach of that date and the ensuing "millenni- um" celebrations in Austria, and among Austrians throughout the world, inspired a group of Canadian and Austrian scholars to take up the little studied subject of the Austrian migration to Canada. The results of this collaborative research effort have been published under the title A History of the Austrian Migration to Canada.2 The gene- sis, objectives and development of the project that resulted in this book are described in detail in the preface to that volume, but a central part of the research project was the convening of an international symposium, both to act as a traditional academic forum to vet research findings, but also to give Austrian immigrants from all over Canada an opportunity to react to and comment on research of which they themselves had been the
The list of books you might like
