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“Where our commonality is necessary…”: Rethinking the End of the Habsburg Monarchy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 April 2017

Pieter M. Judson
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Extract

As the hundredth anniversary of November 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 was defined at the time by the nationalist architects of the states that replaced the monarchy. Even accounting for a sensible revisionism of their versions of events over the past century, their general reasoning, their ideological claims, and their worldviews frame the predominant explanations for why the monarchy fell when it did. Concomitantly, they continue to influence our understanding of the character of the regimes that replaced the monarchy after its fall.

Type
Thirty-Second Annual Robert A. Kann Memorial Lecture
Information
Austrian History Yearbook , Volume 48 , April 2017 , pp. 1 - 21
Copyright
Copyright © Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota 2017 

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References

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10 I thank Rok Stergar, in particular, for this point.

11 That “democratic West” included Francisco Franco's Spain, António de Oliveira Salazar's Portugal, and Greece ruled by the authoritarian regime of the colonels from 1967 to 1974.

12 On the issue of national master narratives and the framing of Central and Eastern European historiographies, see Kolář, Pavel, “Die nationalgeschichtlichen ‘master narratives’ in der tschechischen Geschichtsschreibung der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts: Entstehungskontexte, Kontinuität und Wandel,” in Geschichtsschreibung zu den böhmischen Ländern im 20. Jahrhundert. Wissenschaftstraditionen, Institutionen, Diskurse, ed. Brenner, Christiane and Franzen, K. Erik (Munich, 2006), 209–41Google Scholar; Kolář, Pavel and Kopeček, Michal, “A Difficult Quest for New Paradigms: Czech Historiography after 1989,” in Narratives Unbound: Historical Studies in Post-Communist Eastern Europe, ed. Antohi, Sorin, Trencsényi, Balázs, and Apor, Péter (Budapest, 2007), 173–248 Google Scholar; Heiss, Gernot, von Klimó, Árpád, Kolař, Pavel, and Kováč, Dušan, “Habsburg's Difficult Legacy: Comparing and Relating Austrian, Czech, Magyar, and Slovak National Historical Master Narratives,” in The Contested Nation: Ethnicity, Class, Religion and Gender in National Histories, ed. Berger, Stefan and Lorenz, Chris (Basingstoke, 2008), 367–403 Google Scholar. An examination of the prestigious and in many ways impressive Habsburgermonarchie 1848–1918 series produced over the past decades by the Austrian Academy of Sciences also demonstrates the high degree to which the history of the region is—as is historical training—divided by nation.

13 A remarkably large and high-quality body of literature produced on a broad variety of subjects in the past thirty years has ably undermined the more traditional nationalist tropes by focusing either on the empire as a whole, or on local or regional developments apart from nation. A few of these many works include Boyer, John, Political Radicalism in Late Imperial Vienna: The Origins of the Christian Social Movement (Chicago, 1981)Google Scholar; Cohen, Gary B., The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague 1861–1914 (Princeton, 1981)Google Scholar; Cole, Laurence, Military Culture and Popular Patriotism in Late Imperial Austria (Oxford, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Deák, István, Beyond Nationalism: A Social and Political History of the Habsburg Officer Corps 1848–1918 (New York, 1990)Google Scholar; Deak, John, Forging a Multinational State: State Making in Imperial Austria from the Enlightenment to the First World War (Stanford, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gammerl, Benno, Untertanen, Staatsbürger und Andere. Der Umgang mit ethnichscher Heterogenität im britischen Weltreich und im Habsburgerreich 1867–1918 (Göttingen, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Haslinger, Peter, Nation und Territorium im tschechischen politischen Diskurs, 1880–1938 (Munich, 2010)Google Scholar; Heindl, Waltraud, Gehorsame Rebellen. Bürokratie und Beamte in Österreich, 1780–1848 (Vienna, 1991)Google Scholar; Hösler, Joachim, Von Krain zu Slowenien. Die Anfänge der nationalen Differenzierungsprozesse in Krain und der Untersteiermark von der Aufklärung bis zur Revolution 1768–1848 (Munich, 2006)Google Scholar; King, Jeremy, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics, 1848–1948 (Princeton, 2002)Google Scholar; Komlosy, Andrea, “Imperial Cohesion, Nation-Building, and Regional Integration in the Habsburg Monarchy,” in Nationalizing Empires, ed. Berger, Stefan and Miller, Alexei (Budapest and New York, 2015), 369–427 Google Scholar; Reill, Dominique K., Nationalists Who Feared the Nation: Adriatic Multi-Nationalism in Habsburg Dalmatia, Trieste, and Venice (Stanford, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Struve, Kai, Bauern und Nation in Galizien. Über Zugehörigkeit und soziale Emanzipation im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 2005)Google Scholar, Zahra, Tara, Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1948 (Ithaca, 2008)Google Scholar. Three critical works that demonstrate how common imperial institutions aided in forging the idea of national communities are: Stourzh, Gerald, Die Gleichberechtigung der Nationalitäten in der Verfassung und Verwaltung Österreichs, 1848–1918 (Vienna, 1985)Google Scholar; Brix, Emil, Die Umgangssprachen in Altösterreich zwischen Agitation und Assimilation: Die Sprachenstatistik in den zisleithanischen Volkszählungen, 1880 bis 1910 (Vienna, 1982)Google Scholar; Burger, Hannelore, Sprachenrecht und Sprachengerechtigkeit im österreichischen Unterrichtswesen 1867–1918 (Vienna, 1995)Google Scholar.

14 Claire Morelon, “Street Fronts: War, State Legitimacy and Urban Space, Prague 1914–1920” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Birmingham and Centre d'histoire de Sciences Po, 2015), 228. Discussing the alleged diametrical opposition between the old Habsburg Empire and the new Czechoslovakia, Morelon cites Ivan Šedivý’s critique of the popular use of the word “resistance” to describe Czech political activity during the First World War. Šedivý, Češi, české země a Velká válka, 1914–1918 (Prague, 2001).

15 Masaryk, Tomáš Garrigue, “The Problem of Small Nations and States, the Federation of Small Nations [1918],” in We Were and We Shall Be: The Czechoslovak Spirit through the Centuries, ed. Munzer, Zdenka and Munzer, Jan (New York, 1941), 152–58Google Scholar, here 153.

16 Zahra, Kidnapped Souls, chapters 4 and 5.

17 Gerwarth, Robert, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End (New York, 2016), 6Google Scholar.

18 See the superb reflections on official and local language use in several of the essays by Evans, R. J. W. in his Austria, Hungary, and the Habsburgs: Essays on Central Europe c. 1683–1867 (Oxford, 2006)Google Scholar.

19 František Palacký, “Letter to Frankfurt, 11 April 1848,” in Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe (1770–1945). Texts and Commentaries, vol. II: National Romanticism—The Formation of National Movements, ed. Balázs Trencsényi and Michal Kopeček (Budapest, 2007), 326.

20 von Hammer-Purgstall, Joseph Baron, “Vortrag über die Vielsprachigkeit” in Die feierliche Sitzung des kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften am 29. Mai 1852 (Vienna, 1852), 87–100 Google Scholar. See also the important article by Stachel, Peter, “Die Harmonisierung national-politischer Gegensätze und die Anfänge der Ethnographie in Österreich,” in Geschichte der österreichischen Humanwissenschaften, ed. Acham, Karl (Vienna, 2002), 323–67Google Scholar.

21 See the excellent analysis in Unowsky, Daniel L., The Pomp and Politics of Patriotism: Imperial Celebrations in Habsburg Austria 1848–1916 (West Lafayette, 2005)Google Scholar, especially 64–70.

22 Karl, Freiherr von Czoernig, Ethnographie der österreichischen Monarchie mit einer ethnographischen Karte in vier Blättern, 3 vols. (Vienna, 1857), 1:v.

23 On changing forms of ethnographic display in the monarchy, see Rampley, Matthew, “Peasants in Vienna: Ethnographic Display and the 1873 World's Fair,” Austrian History Yearbook 42 (2011): 110–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Johler, Reinhard, “The Invention of the Multicultural Museum in the Late Nineteenth Century: Ethnography and the Presentation of Cultural Diversity in Central Europe” in Austrian History Yearbook 46 (2015): 51–67 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Johler, “‘Ethnisierte Materialien’—‘materialisierte Ethnien,’” in Das entfernte Dorf. Moderne Kunst und ethnischer Artefakt, ed. Ákos Moravánszky (Vienna, 2002), 61–94. On the founding of Franz Josef University, see Judson, Habsburg Empire, 321–22.

24 On the Kronprinzenwerk, see Szász, Zoltán, “Das ‘Kronprinzenwerk’ und die hinter ihm stehende Konzeption,” in Nation und Nationalismus in wissenschaftlichen Standartwerken Österreich-Ungarns, 1867–1918, ed. Stagl, Justin (Vienna, 1997), 65–70 Google Scholar; Stagl, Justin, “Das ‘Kronprinzenwerk’—eine Darstellung des Vielvölkerreiches,” in Das entfernte Dorf. Moderner Kunst und ethnischer Artefakt, ed. Moravánsky, Ákos (Vienna, 2002), 169–82Google Scholar; Bendix, Regina, “Ethnology, Cultural Reification, and the Dynamics of Difference in the Kronprinzenwerk,” in Creating the Other: Ethnic Conflict and Nationalism in Habsburg Central Europe, ed. Wingfield, Nancy M. (New York, 2003), 149–66Google Scholar; Petschar, Hans, Altösterreich. Menschen, Länder und Völker in der Habsburgermonarchie (Vienna, 2011)Google Scholar; Petschar, Hans, “Über die Konstruktion von Identitäten. Vergangenheit und Zukunft im Kronprinzenwerk” in Migration und Innovation um 1900. Perspektiven auf das Wien der Jahrhundertwende (unter Mitarbeit von Agnes Meislinger), ed. Röhrlich, Elisabeth (Vienna, 2016), 315–56Google Scholar.

25 Okey, Robin, Taming Balkan Nationalism: The Habsburg ‘Civilizing Mission’ in Bosnia, 1878–1914 (Oxford, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hajdarpasic, Edin, Whose Bosnia? Nationalism and Political Imagination in the Balkans, 1840–1914 (Ithaca, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 The most persuasive and highly specific example of this political phenomenon for Czech nationalism may be found in the innovative work of historian Martin Klečacký, “Český ministr krajan v předlitavské vládě” (Ph.D. diss., Charles University, 2016). See also Klečacký, Martin, ed., Český „konzul” ve Vídni. Politická korespondence c.k. ministra krajana Antonína Rezka s mladočeským předákem Bedřichem Pacákem (Prague, 2015)Google Scholar.

27 Cohen, Gary B., “Nationalist Politics and the Dynamics of State and Civil Society in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1867–1914,” Central European History 40, no. 2 (2007): 278 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Judson, Pieter M., The Habsburg Empire: A New History (Cambridge, 2016), 433–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 King, Jeremy, “The Nationalization of East Central Europe: Ethnicism, Ethnicity, and Beyond,” in The Politics of Commemoration in Habsburg Central Europe, 1848 to the Present, ed. Wingfield, Nancy and Bucur, Maria (West Lafayette, 2001), 112–52Google Scholar.

30 The differences between how politicians or newspapers in Budapest understood or portrayed groups (as primarily ethnic in character) and how they were understood locally, is conveyed admirably in several of the chapters in Nemes, Robert, Another Hungary: The Nineteenth-Century Provinces in Eight Lives (Stanford, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 Claire Morelon, “Street Fronts,” especially 70–73, 89–90, 95–104; Lein, Richard, Pflichterfüllung oder Hochverrat? Die Tschechischen Soldaten Österreich-Ungarns im ersten Weltkrieg (Vienna, 2011)Google Scholar.

32 For the scope and practices of the military and its dictatorship, as well as useful background, see Scheer, Tamara, Die Ringstrassenfront. Österreich-Ungarn, das Kriegsüberwachungsamt und der Ausnahmezustand während des ersten Weltkrieges (Vienna, 2010)Google Scholar; Moll, Martin, Kein Burgfrieden. Der deutsch-slowenische Nationalitätenkonflikt in der Steiermark 1900–1918 (Innsbruck, 2007)Google Scholar; Iris [Alon] Rachamimov, “Arbiters of Allegiance: Austro-Hungarian Censors During World War I,” in Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe, ed. Pieter M. Judson and Marsha Rozenblit (New York, 2005), 157–77; Christoph Führ, Das k.u.k. Oberarmeekommando und die Innenpolitik in Österreich, 1914–1917, Studien zur Geschichte der Habsburgermonarchie 7 (Graz, 1968); Gumz, Jonathan, The Resurrection and Collapse of Empire in Habsburg Serbia, 1914–1918 (New York, 2009)Google Scholar; Kronenbitter, Günther, “Krieg im Frieden”: Die Führung der k. u. k. Armee und die Grossmachtpolitik Österreich-Ungarns 1906–1914 (Munich, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also John Deak's highly perceptive comments about the military and the administration during the war in Forging a Multinational State, 264–74. The classic work on the subject that has received attention recently thanks to renewed interest in the dictatorship, is Redlich, Josef, Österreichs Regierung und Verwaltung im Weltkriege. Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte des Weltkrieges (Vienna, 1925)Google Scholar, which was published in English as Austrian War Government (New Haven, 1929).

33 Hull, Isabel, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca, 2006)Google Scholar.

34 Scheer, Die Ringstrassenfront.

35 Not only the military high command, but also, not surprisingly, several elements of the aristocracy shared a pessimistic attitude about the future of the empire in a democratic age. See Wank, Solomon, “Pessimism in the Austrian Establishment at the Turn of the Century,” in The Mirror of History: Essays in Honor of Fritz Fellner, ed. Wank, Solomon, Maschl, Heidrun, Mazohl-Wallnig, Brigitte, and Wagenleitner, Reinhold (Santa Barbara, 1988), 295–314 Google Scholar.

36 Scheer, Die Ringstrassenfront, 145–67; József Galántai, Hungary in the First World War, trans. Éva Grusz and Judit Pokoly, rev. Mark Goodman (Budapest, 1989), 72–79.

37 Moll, Kein Burgfrieden. On the investigative commissions and reports (after the amnesty of 1917), see 472–99.

38 For a debunking of the myths of Czech nationalist defections, see Lein, Pflichterfüllung oder Hochverrat? On other myths of treason and Czech nationalist responses to them, see Morelon, “Street Fronts,” 58–63, 161–63.

39 Cole, Laurence, Military Culture and Popular Patriotism in Late Imperial Austria (Oxford, 2013), 322Google Scholar.

40 For the text of the manifesto, Neue Freie Presse, 18 October 1918, 1. For the Palacký text, František Palacký, “Letter to Frankfurt, 11 April 1848,” in Discourses of Collective Identity, 326–27.

41 Moll, Martin, Die Steiermark im ersten Weltkrieg. Der Kampf des Hinterlandes ums Überleben 1914–1918 (Graz, 2014), 159Google Scholar.

42 Moll, Die Steiermark, 160–62.

43 Robert Gerwarth also refers to these postwar states as resembling little empires. See The Vanquished, 14. See also Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1951), 260, 269–70Google Scholar; Smith, “Empires at the Paris Peace Conference.”

44 For these examples, see Morelon, “Street Fronts,” 214–17.

45 Haslinger, Peter and von Puttkamer, Joachim, eds., Staat, Loyalität und Minderheiten in Ostmittel- und Südosteuropa 1918–1914 (Munich, 2007)Google Scholar.

46 For examples of imperial and nationalist ambitions in the First Austrian Republic, see Judson, Pieter M., “Reisebeschreibungen in der ‘Südmark’ und die Idee der deutschen Diaspora nach 1918,” in Zwischen Exotik und Vertrauten. Zum Tourismus in der Habsburgermonarchie und ihren Nachfolgestaaten, ed. Stachel, Peter and Thomsen, Martina (Bielefeld, 2014), 59–76 Google Scholar; Judson, , “‘Das ist Zukunftssaat’: Political Travel and German Nationalism in Austria 1900–1933,” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften 22 (2011): 112–34Google Scholar.

47 On this dynamic in Italy, Pergher, Roberta, “Staging the Nation in Fascist Italy's ‘New Provinces’,” Austrian History Yearbook 43 (2012): 98–115, especially 104–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the Romanian treatment of Transylvanian Romanians, see Livezeanu, Irina, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania: Regionalism, Nation Building and Ethnic Struggle, 1918–1930 (Ithaca, 1995), 155–66Google Scholar.

48 Kučera, Rudolf, “Exploiting Victory, Sinking into Defeat: Uniformed Violence in the Creation of the New Order in Czechoslovakia and Austria, 1918–1922,” Journal of Modern History 88 (December 2016): 827–55, esp. 846–50, 854CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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