So I’ve been reading about the Transylvania saxons. They migrated to Transylvania Kingdom of Hungary in 1100’s and stayed untill ww2 when a ton were expelled by the Soviet’s and some are around in the modern day.
So my question is how the heck did they manage to stay German over 800 years in foreign lands surrounded by Hungarians and Romanians? They still are German culturally, language wise, and by DNA, but how? How did they not intermix with the Romanian and Hungarians after 800 years? How did they keep their language and traditions and not assimilate. Did they literally only marry other Transylvanian saxons?
Question 2: did other Germans from Germany and Austria consider the Transylvania saxons German even in the 1800-1909’s? Like did the Nazi’s consider the Transylvania saxons to be true pure Germans or did they see them as “mud blood” intermixed peoples of German and Eastern European descent? And did the Austrian empire classify them as ethnic Germans or as Eastern Europeans in say the 1900’s late 1800’s?
Hi! Late answer but hope you'll read it still!
As you might know these Germans arrived when the Hungarian king Andrew II invited the Teutonic order to Transylvania for both military (border guarding) and economic gain (to utilise the regions vast resources). Though the order got later kicked out the people stayed, as they were protected by the Andreanum, a charter that gave them special privileges: They got excemption from various legal and financial obligations to the king and Hungarian nobles; they were treated as one legal unit, their land could not be returned to the king; they could trade and hold markets freely, and in general outsiders couldn't nose into their own business (in exchange fror military duties). As you can guess this gave a huge jump to their separate-ness and common identity, and generally speaking enjoyed greater economic prosperity than most of Transylvania or Hungary. The region also got quite urbanized especially compared to rest of Hungary.
I think if you consider these points its easy to see how they stayed German: They lived among themselves and ruled themselves. While I'm not 100% sure about this region specifically, but in other parts of medieval Hungary you couldn't so easily move around. Social and spatial mobility was low, most peasents in the Kingdom were tied to their noble, in early times there wasn't even any legal mechanism to leave it. Nobles had no reasons to move around too as they lived where their land was. While there were the Romanians being largely shepherds or landless peasents, its not like they could just move into a rich Saxon town. They would have obviously no means to buy a house but at best settle down outside town, stay distrusted and never really accepted into their communities due to religious, linguistic and legal difference (Saxons, along with Székelys and Hungarian nobles were allied in the Unio Trium Nationum, directed against peasents). There would have been no incentive for a Saxon to marry anyone but another Saxon and maybe very rarely a Hungarian.
As for 2, I don't know about Nazis but Austrians certainly considered them Germans, in fact Transylvanian Saxons were supporters of the Habsburg Empire - although in 1785 their privileged were voided, but for example they were against Hungarians in the 1848-49 revolution.