When looking at a map of Austria, from a distance, it looks as though its borders are simple – Germany and Czechia to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the west. However, if you zoom in, you will soon find a tiny addition to the northern boundary – an exclave almost entirely surrounded by Germany.
In this small part of Austria lies the pretty little village of Jungholz, in the state of Tyrol. It forms what is known as a pene-exclave – connected to the rest of the country by a single point, which is the summit of the mountain, Sorgschrofen. In fact, the mountain is so difficult to traverse that the village is only accessible via Germany.
Sorgschrofen mountain is marked by a Gipfelkreuz, or summit cross, which stands above a sheer-sided cliff face. This marks the only geographical point where the Tirolean village and the rest of Austria meet—a strip of connecting land that is less than three feet wide.
But how did this tiny village come to be part of Austria and not part of Germany? In June 1342, a farmer from Wertach in Germany, Hermann Häselin, chose to sell the area to Heinz Lochpyler, an Austrian taxman from nearby Tannheim.
The buyer had the area incorporated with his other possession of Tyrol. Then, in the Bavarian–Austrian border treaty of 1844, Jungholz went to Austria. It stayed this way until 1938, when Germany took over Austria, and Jungholz and the similarly isolated Kleinwalsertal were annexed to Gau Swabia in Bavaria. With the end of World War Two, it was returned to Austria.
The lack of a road connection to anywhere else in Austria led to Jungholz being included in the German customs area before Austria joined the EU in 1995. It also used the Deutsche Mark instead of the Austrian schilling as currency until 2002, when the Euro was introduced.
If, for example, one of the 300 residents of Jungholz wished to visit the Austrian city of Innsbruck, they would need to pass into Bavaria, Germany and head eastwards before re-entering Austria near the town of Vils.
“So many oddities exist here,” Arnold Holl, managing director of a ski lift company, told BBC Travel in 2022. “Locals speak with a German dialect and have a German way of thinking. The staff are mostly from Germany.
“And I drive 20km from Austria, up and over the Oberjoch Pass and through Germany, then back into Austria to work every day. I’m a Tiroler, and for me this is not the Tirol.”
Life for residents is a bizarre mix of Austrian and German policies. Most people are born in Germany – since the nearest Austrian hospital is too far away – but everyone is issued an Austrian passport. While food and drink come from Germany, telephone and internet comes from Austria. Letters to Jungholz can be addressed with either a German or an Austrian postal code. There is no secondary school, but an agreement exists that allows children to attend a German school, 40 minutes away in Bavaria.
When the borders were closed during the COVID-19 pandemic, the exclave became even further isolated from the rest of Austria. Bavarian State Police introduced border control at the end of the village, effectively cutting off residents from the outside world. When the second of four national lockdowns in Austria was announced in November 2020, Mayor Karina Konrad negotiated an exemption that allowed residents to be treated almost completely as German citizens.
“I grew up in Jungholz and it was normal for us that we weren’t normal,” Mayor Konrad explained to the BBC. “In Germany, they said we weren’t German and in Austria they said we weren’t Austrian. In daily life we are neither Austrian, nor Tirolean, but Jungholzer.”