Writing against Suffocation: Migrant Letters as Documents and Strategies of Survival in the Hereditary Lands of the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

Between 1734 and 1774, Protestants from the hereditary lands of the Habsburg Empire were sent to Transylvania as a punishment for their "heretic" beliefs. Families were torn apart, husbands separated from their wives, children withheld from their parents. As a lot of the 3,500 deportees were literate, some of them wrote letters to those they had left behind or to Protestant representatives in Regensburg. Close to two hundred letters from this context have survived—many of the letters perished due to harsh censorship—and they constitute a unique and impressive source. Elaborate writing of peasants and craft smen from the early modern period is rare in general, and in this case it moreover provides astonishing insights not only into deviant devotional practices but, first and foremost, into mentalities (as conceptualized by the Annales School). The collection includes rare first-hand reports on emotions between spouses, on expressions of tenderness toward children, and on strategies in coping with state-induced violence. The implications of the analysis of these letters often run contrary to mainstream historical beliefs