According to Siegfried Kapper’s 1851 publication “Sudslavische Wanderungen im Sommer 1850”, we can read of a the 1848-49 conflict between Germans and Hungarians resisting the Serbian troops. During the fighting, the Hungarian village of Temerin was burned down, and the Germans fought the Serbs in the town of Weißkirchen (Bela Crkva).
Cited:
“From the very beginning, differences in faith hindered any closer bond with their Serbian neighbors; upon the outbreak of the Serbian uprising, this long-standing aloofness intensified into more or less open hostility. The Serb—resolute in his enmity—can never forgive the calculating Slovak for the fact that, despite their shared Slavic kinship and mutual hatred of the Magyars, the Slovak always deferred to whoever held power at the moment.”
“The German settler never truly befriended his non-German neighbors. Beyond the differences in language, faith, and custom, there was the preferential treatment by the authorities, which encouraged the German to look down upon everyone else—especially the Serbs and Slovaks. Apart from business dealings, there was no real social contact; it was rare for a German to marry a Serb woman, or a Serb man a German woman.
The era of language conflicts turned what had once been mere antipathy into a wide chasm. Grateful and loyal to the authorities, the Germans largely embraced the principles the state championed and became open enemies of the Serbs and Slovaks when the latter rose in open revolution against attempts to assimilate them into Magyar culture—an enmity whose manifestations remain too vivid in living memory and perception to simply fade away… “
“Because the Hungarians refused to surrender Temerin—fearing encirclement—the Serbs burned that village down as well.
Fortunately, the road to Sakalowac—a very well-laid-out frontier village—is not as long as the road to a government office when one lacks connections; and as recompense for the hardships endured thus far, one now travels along reasonably well-maintained frontier roads which, thanks to the superior frontier administration, are lined with shady avenues of trees.
Soon one reaches Vračevgaj, the very spot from which the Serbs gave the brave inhabitants of Weißkirchen so much trouble in the years 1848 and 1849—so much so that I would not be surprised if the name (which likely signifies “Devil’s Forest”—vrag meaning devil and gaj forest) had only recently been bestowed upon the place by the good town of Weißkirchen.
Then, after a short drive across the plain—where so many thousands of shots had been exchanged between the Serbs and the people of Weißkirchen that newspapers claimed the poor town had completely vanished from the face of the earth—we now find ourselves before Weißkirchen.
The location of this garrison town—inhabited partly by Serbs and partly by Germans, and belonging to the regiment formerly known as the Illyrian and now as the Serbian-Banat Border Regiment (or Bela Crkva in Serbian)—is as pleasant geographically as it was politically unpleasant.
Approaching from the south across a magnificent, lush green plain, the town nestles against a splendid, rolling chain of vine-clad hills to the north, while to the east, the blue mountain ranges of Neumoldawa and Saßka bound the horizon—over which the high peaks of the Wallachian mountains loom faintly into the clear sky.
Weißkirchen—inhabited largely by Germans according to the Germans, and largely by Serbs according to the Serbs—suffered the unhappy fate of having to play out the conflict between nations in its own streets; a conflict that, however small in scale, was waged with the utmost bitterness.
The Germans, devoted to the Hungarian cause, recognized no duty more sacred than preserving their city for that cause. The Serbs—in revolt against Hungary and its government—considered nothing more important than seizing control of Weißkirchen, as they wished to spread their uprising rapidly and successfully across the Banat from that base.”
Source
Sudslavische Wanderungen im Sommer 1850. Volume 2. Siegfried Kapper. 1851.
