This article deals with an early modern court historian's judgments concerning the political competence and incompetence of his contemporaries. Although the phrase “political competence” may seem anachronistic when referring to the second half of the seventeenth century, hardly any historian today would deny that, at least since the late medieval period, European intellectuals belonging to political elites had developed their own understanding of what constitutes effective statesmanship. That understanding was not always normative, or based on exempla of the classical past—it could be practical and expressed through evaluations of current events. In the middle of the seventeenth century, the future Habsburg court historian Galeazzo Gualdo Priorato wrote about Oliver Cromwell: “And let it be noted from his extraordinary example, that not the nobility of birth, nor riches . . . qualify one for high office, as it usually solely happens, but that it is the opportunity that . . . wakes up the spirits, and sharpens the minds.” This article will deal with Priorato's judgments of political competence (and incompetence) in the works that he wrote while in the service of the Austrian Habsburgs.

Film was a relatively new commercial-entertainment medium in the summer of 1930, and newerstill were the “talkies.” Unforeseen cultural difficulties accompanied the advent of sound films, to which spoken language gave an intrinsic national character. Language accentuated national differences in feeling and thought, and since audiences could no longer “naturalize” films, they could not adopt the imaginative content of sound films as their own “cultural territory.” American audiences mocked the nasal English accents in British films, while the British hissed American accents and Parisians greeted the first American ”talkie” with cries of “Speak French!” In Czechoslovakia, historical circumstances complicated popular reaction to sound films. With the founding of the state in 1918, Czechs had rejected their Austrian legacy and attempted to enforce a Czech character in all aspects of public life.

Recent surveys on post-soviet Eastern Europe reveal that ethnicity and ethnic differentiation are gradually losing their salience among local citizens, while social identification (for example, identities of workers or businesspeople) has become increasingly important as a way for people to perceive both themselves and ongoing political and economic changes. This tendency purports to herald the emergence of a society in which citizens compete for rewards and opportunities on the basis of merit rather than ethnic heritage. In Lithuania and Western Ukraine, however, this is not the case. National identification axes are the most important, and a strong national identity promotes democracy and opposition to communism.

The Habsburg monarchy seems doubly confounding. Its historians call it an empire, but it actually never called itself that. For a fraction of its existence (1804–67), the monarchy counted as a Kaisertum, a word meant to burnish the fading glory of a lost imperial title (of the Holy Roman Empire). But its rulers never evinced the self-confident imperial aggressiveness or the desire to exploit distant territories that characterized British or Russian counterparts, and students of global empires often do not think the Habsburgs fit the category. But after calling the double monarchy an empire, Central European specialists lose the critical edge historians apply to other empires, and celebrate the Habsburgs for holding back nationalism, the force that made the twentieth century so deadly. The monarchy was not only an empire but a virtuous empire. This Kann Memorial Lecture examines a range of theoretical and practical reasons for calling the Habsburg state an empire—as its subjects often did. But if we do, we should recognize that like other empires it abhorred democracy. Perhaps more than a dam holding back the twentieth century and all its evils, the Habsburg Empire was more a conduit.

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 movement, Walde paved the way for a clearly identifiable image of rural Austria without foregoing the modernization process that took place in the Alps at the time. Filtering essential elements of local culture and synthesizing them with both a modern formal language and “modern” topics, most significantly ski tourism, he created a regionalism that reverberated beyond the narrow confines of his home province and caught particular momentum during the rise of the Austrian Ständestaat in the 1930s. Moving in between regional and national significance, Walde's work underlines the essential position of the region in Austria after 1918 and conveys that an engaged regionalism that responded to the rapid cultural and political changes taking place became a significant aspect of interwar Austrian painting.

This article explores the consequences of the Austro-Hungarian Empire's end through the tumultuous biography of a philanthropic entrepreneur and quasi-consul community leader known today for assisting thousands of Jewish refugees during World War II. Focusing on Paul Komor (1886–1973) and the migrant community of Shanghai Hungarians, the article contends that postimperial diasporas preserved a piece of empire in their commitment to Jewish emancipation, imperialist nationalism, multiple loyalties, and political nostalgia. It also argues that diasporic networks and charitable actions communicated political and national loyalties while creating and defining the boundaries of the community. Presenting original research involving sources in multiple languages from China, Hungary, the U.S., the U.K., and the Netherlands, the article traces the fortunes of a Jewish Hungarian family in colonial Shanghai, shows the limits of its son's charity-rooted advancement in community leadership, sheds light on the seemingly contradictory political ideas of a postimperial expatriate to explain his complicated relationship with his kinstate, and analyzes the institutionalization of communal charity and the competing prerequisite definitions of postimperial national belonging.

Not very often does a work of art, which provoked very mixed reactions at the time of its completion, continue to stir the political and cultural waters nearly one hundred years later. The Slav Epic, a series of twenty large canvases created by Alfons Mucha (1860–1939) between 1909 and 1926 on the topic of Slavic history and myth, is such a work, and it has provoked critical comments from Czech art historians, politicians, and journalists. The most recent disputes, which have arisen in the last couple of years, concern the city council of Prague, which has expressed a wish to house the work somewhere in Prague in fulfillment of the artist's wishes, and the town of Moravský Krumlov in Mucha's home region, where the Epic was exhibited for forty years and lays claims to it as well. The debate about its physical location has also been joined by a number of public figures, including Mucha's grandson and the secretary to the then Czech president Václav Klaus, who called the Epic “the kitsch of the millennium” and “sheer Pan-Slavic propaganda.” Such negative comments only highlight the fact that the Slav Epic continues to generate controversy and has not yet found its place in the Czech, let alone European, context.

An Enthusiastic Group of Romanians gathered in Sibiu at the 1905 annualassembly of Astra, the largest Romanian cultural association in Transylvania, to celebrate their nation and their future. Moved by the gathering and the festivities, the editor of the association's paper, Transilvania, expressed a hope he and thousands of his compatriots shared: “Never before has this people been in a more favorable position as a superiorethnic element, as an important factor of civilization, and as a gifted nation with vitality, character, and great talents that guarantee it a bright future and a distinguished place among the peoples of eastern Europe.”1 Like many prominent Romanians of his time, the editor firmlybelieved that his nation would enjoy equal status with other European national groups in the near future. Equal standing had been a central goal of theRomanian intellectuals and clergy who founded the Transylvanian Associationfor Romanian Literature and the Culture of the Romanian People, or Astra, in 1861. Since the eighteenth century, Romanian elites in Transylvania had worked to obtain recognition for their national community so that they couldparticipate fully in the political life of the region. Two centuries later Astra members still hoped they were on the verge of forming a Romanian nation that could achieve the right to control its own destiny.

Viewed from the perspective of thousands of years, political history reveals a pattern of continuous alternation between decay and re-formation. Thus, after the fall of the Roman empire, the first political entity that emerged in the West was the Carolingian empire, which, through the coronation of the emperor in 800, assumed the form of a revived western Roman empire. Although it soon became limited to the part of the old empire inhabited by the “German nation,” it continued to exist, at least in outward form, under the name of the Holy Roman Empire until 1806. As early as 1804, though, Francis II had adopted the title of emperor of Austria for his position as ruler of the “hereditary Austrian lands.”

For hungarian society, as for most of East-Central Europe, the socalled Jewish question has been, and continues to be, an obsessive, seemingly insoluble dilemma that cries out for definition, discussion, commentary, and analysis. The notion persists, in both professional and general opinion, that if only a true historical understanding of the question were possible, a solution would also be within reach. The assumption is almost axiomatic that the Jewish question, with its attendant passions, prejudices, and contradictions, must be the expression of some prior set of causes that holds the key to its deciphering.

IN DECEMBER 1883, Habsburg political and military leaders met in crisis session to discuss the situation in Serbia. Serious rioting threatened to. topple the friendly government of Prince Milan Obrenović, which two and a half years earlier had concluded a secret agreement in Vienna that made the country a dependency of the Habsburg Monarchy. The Serbian war ministry had rushed troops from the large Belgrade garrison to the troubled areas and had placed the two battalions that remained in the capital on a war footing in an attempt to ensure continued calm. Alarmed by these drastic measures, an Austro-Hungarian crown council, although not obligated to do so under existing treaties with Belgrade, authorized the commitment of Habsburg military forces should unrest escalate to revolution in Serbia.

Rabinbach has made a valuable contribution to the study of the Jewish migration within the Habsburg monarchy, the most noteworthy phenomenon of which was the wholesale mass movement of Galician Jews to Vienna during the second half of the nineteenth century. The author, relying mainly on contemporary statistical records for source material, ably documents the increase in Jewish inhabitants in Vienna from one to ten percent of the total population during this period.