Emigration in the 19th Century

We don't know the exact beginning of the emigration from Liechtenstein to America. The earliest emigrant we are aware of is Joseph Batliner from Schellenberg. There are, however, no documents in Liechtenstein regarding his leaving. In America, by contrast, we see him marrying in 1835 and two years later purchasing a 70-acre parcel of land near Floyds Knobs, Indiana. This property became the cornerstone of the Batliner farm, and today his descendants are still farming the land.

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Volume II

presents a collection of 15 biographical essays of individual emigrants and families in the New World as well as 17 emigrants' personal accounts of their experiences in the place they chose to make their new home. Most emigrants from the Principality of Liechtenstein favored the U.S., substantially fewer settled in Canada and a small number of Liechtensteiners migrated to South American countries.
Migration is a multi-faceted phenomenon. Many publications have dealt with economic or political causes for migration. Historians commonly shy away from migrants' personal motivations because they are difficult to grasp in strictly scholarly terms. Yet particularly readers back in the Old Country want to know more about motivations beyond, say, economic statistics. For people who "stayed home" it is often difficult to comprehend how others could pack up their belongings and leave their native country for good. After all, the fact that relatives or neighbors choose to turn their backs on their home country can be and often is understood as a negative comment about home. Migration can be offensive to those who stay behind.
People need to make sense of the migration experience. It's part of national as well as personal histories. However, in the Old Country as well as in the New World, people tend to resort to mythmaking about migration. While migrants and their descendants often prefer exaggerated rags-to-riches stories about immigrants, folklore in German-speaking countries has coined quite different words with which to describe the desire to pull up one's stakes: Terms such as "Wanderlust" (literally the "desire to roam") and "Amerika-Fieber" (America-Fever) try to express the migrants' inner motivation as some sort of affliction or unsteadiness. Be it a story of success or an invocation of "Wanderlust", both explanations serve to make acceptable the choice to leave home.
The essays in this book concentrate on migration as a personal, inner experience. The migrants' stories can hardly explain migration as a historical phenomenon. Likewise the historical account of migration from Liechtenstein to the Americas cannot bring readers close to the migrants' experience. Thus the two volumes complement each other, one providing verifiable historical data and documents, the other supplementing the facts with the incalculable feelings migration evokes in both migrants and those who stayed behind.

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