Between Lower Austria and Moravia: displaced local elites and the Feldsberg/Valtice agricultural school

Abstract

ABSTRACT Since its founding in 1873, the Lower Austrian Regional Agricultural, Pomiculture and Viniculture School in Feldsberg, Lower Austria – today Valtice, Czech Republic – has played an important role in the local community. This secondary school has educated agricultural workers as well as provided continuing education for people in the region and beyond. Picture postcards from the turn of the twentieth century show the school with other notable town landmarks, reflecting its importance in the small, predominantly German-speaking border community. The Paris Peace Conference awarded Feldsberg/Valtice, a historically Lower Austrian town, to Czechoslovakia after the First World War. Analysis of this agricultural school provides a way to examine post-war borderlands from a regional perspective. The secondary educational institution became a point of conflict as the new Czechoslovak state transformed it from a German-speaking Lower Austrian school to a Czech-speaking one in Moravia. The Czechification of the agricultural institution in Feldsberg/Valtice was part of a larger effort to build a Czechoslovak national state. The author examines the life of the Lower Austrian school’s last German director, Matthias Arthold, who first studied at the school and then worked at other institutions across Lower Austria and Moravia, before becoming the Feldsberg/Valtice school’s director in 1908. Analysis of the alumni associations, one German, founded in 1913, and the other Czech, founded in 1924, illuminates the legacy of local elites and institutions that the provincial-turned-international border transformed.