Reading these articles in our AHY Forum brought back a flood of memories to my last days as a university undergraduate at Emory University when I first encountered Emperor Rudolf II and Renaissance Prague in a course taught by the late James Allen Vann. What captivates us about the past? What prompts naive undergraduates to take that fateful step and pursue a PhD in history? For me, it was simply Rudolf

This article analyzes a collection of narratives concerning the Russian occupation of Lviv (Lwów, Lemberg), the capital of the Austrian Crownland Galicia, between September 1914 and June 1915 in the initial phase of World War I. These narratives were produced and published in Polish and German between 1915, when Lviv was still occupied, and 1935, sixteen years after it had been included in a reborn

In 1577, a petty pawnbroker named Ester lost a clasp belonging to a Prague noblewoman, Lady Juliana the Fifth. Having been traded repeatedly between anonymous pawnbrokers, the clasp was eventually tracked down in the Polish city of Poznań, by which time Ester had already fled Prague and taken refuge in Cracow. In this essay, I use the subsequent criminal court case to explore this illuminating episode

The histories of early modern religion and trade have both benefited from the global turn in recent years. This article brings the two fields together through the study of religious objects in Prague in the seventeenth century and shows ways in which religion and religious practice were entangled with new commercial and artistic ventures that crossed regional and international borders. Among the possessions

This article investigates the uses of the term “Hungarian Empire” during the long nineteenth century. It argues that the term “empire” emerged in the Hungarian political discourse in the Vormärz era and it was used to denote the imagined integrity of Hungary proper, Transylvania, Croatia, Slavonia, and eventually Dalmatia on the grounds of the historic rights of the Holy Crown of Hungary in the form

After the collapse of the Habsburg Empire and the sanctioning of new national borders in 1920, the successor states faced the controversial task of reconceptualizing the idea of national territory. Images of historically significant landscapes played a crucial role in this process. Employing the concept of mental maps, this article explores how such images shaped the connections between place, memory

John Connelly, a member of the history faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, for the last quarter century, has produced what will surely stand as a landmark among grand syntheses on the modern history of Eastern Europe. The book title uses the geographical designation favored during the Cold War, but the subject is more precisely East Central Europe, a term that Connelly uses interchangeably

In spite of the recent transnational turn, there continues to be a considerable gap between Fascist studies and the new approaches to the transitions, imperial collapses, and legacies of post–World War I Europe. This article posits itself at the crossroads between fascist studies, Habsburg studies, and scholarship on post-1918 violence. In this regard, the difficulties of the state transition, the

The question that sparked this forum was to what extent we can see Prague as an important stage for Renaissance and Reformation exchange and as an internationally connected city. It is striking, though not unexpected, that all the authors have been drawn to some extent to sources and subjects in Rudolfine Prague. It must be stressed, however, that the emphasis of each of these studies is somewhat different

This article uses three well-known members of Rudolf II's imperial court—the astronomer Johannes Kepler, the composer Philippe de Monte, and the adventurer Kryštof Harant—to delineate some ways music helped Europeans understand identity and difference in the early modern period. For Kepler, the unfamiliar intervals of a Muslim prayer he heard during the visit of an Ottoman delegation offered empirical

The “Ibiza affair,” a succession of scandals triggered by undercover recordings of the FPÖ's former head, Heinz-Christian Strache, in compromising discussions with a purported Russian oligarch's niece has profoundly altered Austria's political landscape and public debates. This article offers a historically contextualized analysis of the multiple voices and competing truth claims articulated by diverse

The Ottoman conquest of Szigetvar and Gyula (1566) exposed the weakness of the Habsburg monarchy. Unable to mount a military response, Maximilian II depended on his diplomats to ward off the imposition of a conqueror's peace along the Hungarian border. But an official register, the Book of Halil Beg, put forward the sultan's claims to a wide swath of towns and villages, including many still held by

This essay assesses the role of regionalism in interwar Austrian painting with a focus on the Tyrolean painter and architect Alfons Walde (1891–1958). At a time when painting was seen to be in crisis, eclipsed by the deaths of prominent Viennese artists such as Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, regionalism offered an alternative engagement with modern art. As the representative of a wider regionalist

This article investigates the coinciding of the mass migration from Europe to the Americas and the emergence of mass culture, two developments that shaped everyday life, popular entertainment, and Jewish and non-Jewish relations at the turn of the twentieth century. Jewish actors and actresses were among the most prominent performers who staged in Orpheums, Varietés, and vaudevilles on both sides of

This article was first conceived as a commemorative address for the centenary of the extinction of the Habsburg monarchy, which occurred in November 1918. It seeks to take a correspondingly broad view, geographically and chronologically, of the factors that occasioned that collapse. It addresses three main themes, structured loosely around three classic historiographical analyses of the monarchy as

This article reframes the formation of the Ottoman-Habsburg frontier after 1699 in social historical terms. By going beyond diplomatic and military factors, it identifies how the contraction of Ottoman borders affected taxation, landholding, and Muslim-Christian relations in Bosnia. The article argues that peasants in Ottoman Bosnia experienced the mounting pressures of increasing taxation, manipulation

This article positions multidisciplinary artist Friedl Dicker-Brandeis at the center of a web that spans Vienna 1900, the Weimar Bauhaus, and interwar Vienna. Using a network metaphor to read her work, she is understood here as specialist of the ars combinatoria, in which she recombines genre and media in unexpected ways. She translates the language of photograms into painting, ecclesiastical subject

There is a renewed interest in writing about the First Republic among Austrian historians. As always, it is political: how to frame the collapse of the empire, how to address the political divides of the era, whether to attribute “fascism” to the Ständestaat, what constitutes history, and what is mere description. The following essay takes into account five new and large additions to the canon.

I have been asked to speak about the life of the Empress-Queen Maria Theresa. I would like to start by directing your attention to the cover pictures of three recent biographies (Figures 1‒3). If you look at these pictures you will find one astonishing commonality. I am sure that this is neither a coincidence, nor just a fad: on each of the three covers, you only see a part of the portrait. For me

This article analyzes the role of urban civic militias (burgher corps) in Habsburg Austria from the end of the nineteenth century to the aftermath of World War I. Far from a remnant of the early modern past, by the turn of the twentieth century these militias were thriving local institutions. They fostered dynastic patriotism and participated in the growing promotion of shooting among the population

Spanish bullfights have been organized twice in Hungary: in 1904 and 1924. Unlike in 1904, when the bullfights arrived in Budapest from Paris and were held with the city's urban tourism promotion interests in mind, the 1924 corrida was connected to the internationalization of Spanish bullfights through their support by fascist Italy, causing a domestic political imbroglio in Hungary due to competing

Rudolf von Habsburg was a recurring motif in Austrian literature after the assumption of an Austrian imperial title by Emperor Francis II/I in 1804. These depictions were nourished by an enthusiasm for the Middle Ages circulating at the beginning of the nineteenth century and focused on the House of Habsburg and the establishment of Habsburg rule in Central Europe in the thirteenth century. As the

This article examines the case of a Bosnian brother and sister at the center of a diplomatic dispute between Austria and the Ottoman Empire in 1852. Mara Illić had to cross the border into Austria in order to board a ship that would take her to Anatolia with the household of a paşa who had been banished. Milan called upon Austrian authorities to “liberate” Mara, whom he claimed had been enslaved when

This article addresses the onset of a decades-long conflict between the ruler of the Holy Roman Empire King Ludwig IV of Bavaria and the papacy. When Ludwig intervened on behalf of antipapal factions in northern Italy in 1323, Pope John XXII issued an ultimatum demanding that Ludwig immediately cease to exercise the royal power and title on the pretext that he had never received papal approval of his

Liberal political changes in the Habsburg monarchy during the 1860s and 1870s, especially those caused by the December Constitution of 1867 and the ensuing schooling laws, created the necessary legal framework for German and Czech school associations to establish national monolingual schools in Bohemia—the so-called minority schools. These local organizations, however, were soon superseded by central

This article examines Austrian perceptions of the people and landscape of Bosnia-Herzegovina from 1878 to 1908. It traces Austrians’ fantasies about and encounters with Bosnian Muslims, whom they often categorized as “Turks.” Following the Congress of Berlin, Austrians claimed to be doing the civilizing work of “Europe” in Bosnia. The article investigates the meanings of border and borderlands between

This article examines the causes and repercussions of the flight of two-dozen Orthodox Christian merchants from Ottoman Bosnia to Habsburg Croatia in 1873. The seemingly minor event quickly escalated from an isolated border incident to a full-blown diplomatic crisis-defused only with the merchants' repatriation, the recall of a Habsburg consul, and the removal of the Ottoman provincial governor and

Prince Charles Antoine de Ligne, son of Prince Charles Joseph de Ligne, died fighting French revolutionary forces at Croix-au-Bois in the Argonne region on 14 September 1792. He left behind a last will and testament (a copy is held in the Kriegsarchiv in Vienna) that evoked the memory of his small circle of aristocratic Viennese friends called “les Indissolubles.” Each member received a personal legacy

This article centers on the persistent notion that female domestics are vulnerable to prostitution. Focusing on Vienna in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the article highlights the underlying fallacies of this notion. The 1810 Vienna Servant Code created a system of policing that made it easier for officials to collect data on maidservants. Compounded by problems in classification, maidservants

W hatever we call “treason” — Hochverrat, trahison, velezrada, veleizdaja, felsegsertes —it has been a constant phenomenon in human history. The “traitor,” the individual who breaks a major bond of trust, has emerged in every era and is usually treated as a pariah in society. At the most significant treason trial of the late Habsburg monarchy, that of fifty-three Serbs in Zagreb in 1909, the main defense

F orty years ago R. J. W. Evans, in his now classic study of The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy , observed that, in the absence of a coherent early modern central government, the Habsburg enterprise rested crucially upon the baroque court and Habsburg patronage of the arts. Evans especially noted that “two great synthetic achievements, alike commissioned by court, magnates, and Church, alike immortally

B aron Franz von der Trenck might not now be a household name, but in the eighteenth century, he was notorious for the blood-curdling excesses of the soldiers under his command and an approach to war on behalf of Queen Empress Maria Theresa that appeared to defy the tenets of the age. As one biography described, “The thirty-eight year lifespan of the pandur general Franz Baron von der Trenck was a

I n the small, idyllic German Evangelical Cemetery in Prague-Strasnice, a simple tombstone stands in the back row of graves, dedicated to the memory of “Dr. Heinrich Rauchberg, Professor at the German University in Prague, 1860–1938” and his wife Freia (1874–1939) (see Figures 1 and 2). When the Viennese-born demographer passed away, he left behind him an impressive professional career in the Habsburg

S o read some of the subheadings in a 14 June 1920 article in the Wiener Montags-Presse , analyzing prostitution in post-imperial Vienna. Many journalists—sometimes, even the same journalists—continued to employ the very vocabulary, “contagion,” “contamination,” and “filth,” in their postwar exposes that they had used in their prewar and wartime reports on prostitution in the Habsburg monarchy. Viennese

T hese excerpts from critical reviews covering French dance tours in Vienna, Salzburg, and Innsbruck reflect the scale and variety of French cultural engagement and its growing public visibility in Austria. Out of the four Allied powers, it was France, and not the Soviet Union with its “ballet capital,” that made most use of dance and ballet for nation-branding purposes, both in sabots and on pointe

I n his office on 1 Union Square West in New York City, Samuel Buchler, president of the Federation of Hungarian Jews in America, sat at his desk and looked at the trees turning red, yellow, and brown in the park below the window. It was September 1924, and Buchler had just read the news from Hungary. After years of anti-Jewish violence—the white terror, passively condoned by the postwar regime—the

It is generally acknowledged that museums were an essential part of the national project in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe—and some retain this function even today. Classic works in nationalism studies, such as Eric Hobsbawm's, have highlighted the role they played in the birth of modern nations. Subsequent studies that focused on specific national contexts help us better understand

I n his great 1848 historical drama , Ein Bruderzwist im Hause Habsburg , the Austrian playwright Franz Grillparzer has Emperor Matthias utter the words that have often been applied to understanding the whole history of the Habsburg monarchy: Das ist der Fluch von unserm edeln Haus: Auf halben Wegen und zu halber Tat Mit halben Mitteln zauderhaft zu streben. [That is the curse of our noble house: Striving

I n a memorandum presented to the Hungarian-Czechoslovak Boundary Commission on 23 February 1922 by the inhabitants of the southern Slovak town of Viskovce (Hungarian: Ipolyvisk), the twenty-five signatories requested “humbly for consideration and well-meaning settlement of the following concern.” The municipality was bordered on three sides by the Ipeľ (Hungarian: Ipoly) River, but had been cut off

T his study analyzes the phenomenon of church paintings as subversive visual representations of Fascism and as an act of systematic rebellion against Fascist “ideological marking of space.” Slovene Expressionist painter and sculptor Tone Kralj's (1900−75) paintings functioned as ideological markers of national territory. He painted churches along the ethnic border as it was imagined by the Slovene

A t the turn of August and September of 1914 , Galician Ukrainian volunteers formed the Legion of Ukrainian Sich Riflemen ( Ukrains′ki Sichovi Stril′tsi or Ukrainische Sitschower Schutzen ) as a unit separate from the simultaneously created Polish Legions. Sich referred to the historical headquarters of the Zaporozhian Cossacks located on the Dnieper River. In photographs, however, the Sich Riflemen

O ver the last three decades , a steady stream of histories of the Habsburg monarchy and/or its ruling dynasty has appeared, reflecting the renewed interest in the region after the collapse of the Soviet bloc in central and east-central Europe. These histories—among which English-language publications predominate—fall into three broad categories. Firstly, there are those, such as Martyn Rady's recent

The Enlightenment seems out of kilter. Until fairly recently, its trajectories were beguilingly simple and straightforward. Devised by Western metropolitan masterminds, the Enlightenment was piously appropriated by their latter-day apprentices in Central and Eastern Europe. This process of benign percolation made modern science, political liberty, and religious toleration trickle down to East-Central

F ew institutions have possessed as enduring importance in Europe's history as the Holy Roman Empire. Dating its foundation to Charlemagne's coronation in 800, it survived for a millennium, being dissolved only in 1806 in the face of the overwhelming threat from Napoleonic imperialism. Its geographical extent was equally remarkable: at its peak, imperial territory stretched eastward from the North

A s the hundredth anniversary of N ovember 1918 approaches, this article suggests some ways in which historians might rethink dominant narratives about the character of the Habsburg monarchy in its final years, the reasons for its collapse, and its complex legacies to the postwar world. Currently, most accounts that narrate the fall of the empire are still shaped to some extent by outcomes whose character

F rom A pril 1919 to A pril 1920, twenty-four-year-old Joseph Roth worked full time as a reporter on the newly founded Viennese daily Der Neue Tag [The new day]. It was his first regular job and, although he was later to become one of the best-paid journalists of the Weimar Republic, it was also the only one he would ever hold on a fixed contract. In spring 1919, Roth had recently returned from eastern

THIS YEAR HOWARD LOUTHAN ASSUMED THE DIRECTORSHIP of the Center for Austrian Studies, becoming Executive Editor of the Austrian History Yearbook as well. Howard has graciously allowed me to write the editors’ notes this year, giving me the opportunity to express my personal gratitude to all who have taken part in producing the Yearbook during the past decade that I have served as editor. It has been

T he K ingdom of H ungary instituted the civil registry of births , marriages, and deaths in 1894. While the new institution was both eulogized and criticized as a major step in the separation of church and state and toward the creation of a modern, secular Hungary, it also opened up a new path for nation building. In this exceedingly multilingual and multinational country, churches often acted as

Recension av Robert Kriechbaumer, Zwischen Osterreich und Grossdeutschland: Eine politische Geschichte der Salzburger Festspiele 1933-1944. Vienna: Bohlau, 2013.

R ising from the ruins of a post-1918 Austria shed of its monarchical leadership and much of its former territory, the Salzburg Festival acquired a symbolic authority during the First Austrian Republic that continues to ensure its privileged place in Austrian politics and culture to this day. At the core of this privileged place are two signature legacies that, while grounded in the festival's prewar

T he artistic and cultural life of A ustria after World War I has often been presented in a gloomy light. As one contributor to a recent multivolume history of Austrian art commented, “the era between the two world wars is for long periods a time of indecision and fragmentation, of stagnation and loss of orientation … the 20 years of the First Republic of 1918–1938 did not provide a unified or convincing

T he population of A ustria -H ungary was counted five times between 1869 and 1910. This process of counting established a new relationship between the state and its citizens. The state procured vast knowledge about its citizens, and the latter became accustomed to contact on a regular basis with state authorities and administrative practices. By the end of the nineteenth century, both the state and

U ntil not so very long ago , the national conflicts in the last decades of the Habsburg monarchy prompted historians to focus on nationality as the crucial marker of self-understanding among its populations. The high tide of modern nation-states after 1918 made national borders, national mindsets, and national power structures the framework for ever-greater historical interest in the lineages of national