As Richard L. Rudolph correctly observes at the beginning of his article, Austrian economic history has not been adequately examined in international, comparative studies of the problems of economic growth. Undoubtedly this is attributable both to the traditional orientation of Austrian historians toward national and regional studies and to the interest of so many historians in various aspects of the preindustrial age. Macroeconomic approaches have, therefore, been deemphasized, even though they have led to significant new conclusions in regard to the nature of preindustrial economy and society, partly because of the difficulty in applying this methodology to an analysis of the increasingly complex affairs of a modern industrial society.

In this concluding lecture I wish to express my thanks for the excellent papers presented at this carefully prepared and in many ways unique conference. In one who grew up, now more than half a century ago, under the reign of Francis Joseph and who has always retained some emotional loyalty to those years of his own youth and his own student days, who went to war in 1914 under the black and yellow flag of the Austrian monarchy—in such a person the fact that here in faraway Midwestern America the problems of the long defunct monarchy are being discussed with a sense of actuality in an international scholarly gathering by men of diverse ideologies and nationalities arouses a feeling of satisfaction and some melancholy.

The end of World War I marked a turning point in European history: Europe was dismembered into nation-states from the former territories of the German Reich and the Danubian monarchy, creating a belt of borders stretching approximately twenty thousand kilometers. The dissolution of the Habsburg monarchy alone brought about destabilization not only to the region but to Europe as a whole.

On the morning of July 1, 1916, prominent members of Viennese high society gathered in a large imperial park not far from the center of Vienna. This park, the Prater, had been the site of many fairs, exhibits, and festivals in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It accommodated the World's Fair in 1873 and since then had housed circuses, variety shows, children's exhibits, and the Luna Park amusement complex. The Prater was a favorite destination of Viennese of all classes in search of recreation and entertainment. On this particular morning, those in attendance were more notable than usual; they included Archduke Franz Salvator, War Minister Alexander Krobatin, Education Minister Max von Hussarek, the Austrian defense minister, ambassadors of several allied countries, and local and regional government officials. They were on hand to celebrate the grand opening of what sponsors promised would be an exhibition unlike any Vienna had ever seen. At eleven o'clock, the prestigious entourage entered the first hall of the grandest entertainment spectacle of the wartime home front: the Vienna War Exhibition.

Throughout the world, historians expand the history of their nations and states into periods when these polities did not yet exist. The French speak of their first dynasty and mean the Frankish Merovingians. Until recently French history textbooks even for students in the French overseas territories started with “Nos ancêtres, les Gaulois.” In the German Kaiserreich between 1871 and 1918, let us say, little Jan Kowalski in Poznan had to accept the Germanic peoples as his forefathers, as every textbook on German history dealt with them at length. Needless to say, not only German medievalists speak of Germans long before theodiscus or teutonicus came to mean deutsch. All over the world people search for the roots of their identity. Take, for instance, the present preoccupation with Celtic ancestors. Not only the Irish, Welsh, Scots, and Bretons, but a great many other Europeans also want to be Celts by origin. “Their successors in Brittany, Wales, or Ireland do not threaten anybody with Anschluss or war. The Celtic origins, therefore, fit the Austrian neutrality perfectly well,” as Erich Zöllner ironically put it in 1976 after Chancellor Bruno Kreisky had openly declared that the Celts and not the Germans were our forefathers.

In the nineteenth century, the imperial palace in Vienna had become the epicenter of political decision making in the Danube monarchy. The fact that the Hofburg served as the emperor's family home and at the same time as the unchallenged centerpiece of politics and administration lent its function a duality that was mirrored in the title of the town where the palace was located. Officially, Vienna was the Haupt- und Residenzstadt, that is, the empire's capital and the monarch's official residence. In this former role, Vienna was second to none. Vienna was the seat of offices and ministries, the meeting place of parliamentary deputies in the Reichsrat, and the place where the governors who represented the sovereign in the respective Crownlands had their headquarters in the Statthalterei. It was not until Budapest became the capital of the Kingdom of Hungary in the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 that Vienna had to share its rank with another city. In their role as the monarch's official residence, both Vienna's and the Hofburg's traditions went back to the Middle Ages. There had been no interruptions even when in the Baroque period the monarchs had built other residences elsewhere in what today is Vienna, among them the Favorita palace on the Wieden (today's Theresianum), the Favorita palace in the Augarten park, and Schönbrunn palace. At all times the Hofburg had been the place where the Habsburg family and the sovereign lived during the winter half-year, and furthermore, it remained the setting of the most eminent ceremonies that formed the rituals of the Habsburg sovereign (Corpus Christi procession, Anniversarium militare ceremonies in commemoration of the dead, and others). No other Habsburg palace would ever challenge the Hofburg's priority in terms of rank.

Baron 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 symphony of violence and death.” On the other side of the Prussian-Austrian conflict, Friedrich von der Trenck was iconic in different ways, with a career that careened from the military under Frederick II, to prison, and lastly to the guillotine in Paris. In service to their monarchs and in pursuit of personal advancement, security, and adventure, the Trenck cousins collided with each other at various points, demonstrating what it meant for nobles to be both architects and victims of fame, reputation, and slander. After Franz's death in prison, Friedrich, for his own reasons, had a hand in shaping the reputation of his cousin as a larger-than-life military man with an affinity for particular types of violence. However, Friedrich was not the only curator of Franz's legacy and others took part during and after Franz's life in the adulteration and appropriation of his life narrative. As a military man, Franz von der Trenck weaponized his own reputation, but its plasticity continued far after his death because he served as a stand-in for a variety of cultural inquiries, anxieties, and hopes beyond military practices and the laws of war. The subtexts of those narratives reveal particular cultural fault lines salient not just in the eighteenth century but also long after, including the constructed, imaginary boundary between the civilized and uncivilized in time and geography. Legends about Trenck drew on tropes about an uncivilized past through the ostensible space between a cultured European center and a wild Slavic or Turkic periphery. The boundary of civilization was not the only theme threaded through stories about Trenck. The nature of his violence was condemned by many and featured in his downfall, but there was also a subterranean admiration for a man who appeared to glorify war as an essential, formative masculine adventure and who romanticized the transgression of rape in war. Beginning with Friedrich and resonating still in twentieth-century nationalist iterations of Trenck is the idolization of a figure who seemed to transcend the petty morality or narrow-mindedness of those who judged him.

Of the various causes of the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy, nationalism was certainly one of the most important. In an age of integral nationalism like the latter part of the nineteenth and the early part of the twentieth century it proved extremely difficult for a multinational empire like the Austro-Hungarian monarchy to survive. Not only did the Habsburgs face the question of how to retain the loyalty of a dozen different nationalities within the framework of a single empire, but they also had to reconcile ever increasing differences between the Slavs and the Germans and Magyars and between the Germans and the Magyars themselves. In the end, the Habsburg government failed to meet the challenge.

The complex of events linked to the second Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683 often has been characterized as a turning point in East Central, indeed even European history, an argument which probably can be disputed only on semantic or philosophical grounds. For example, the late Hugo Hantsch once stated in private conversation that he firmly believed that the abortive Ottoman assault upon Austria's capital fundamentally determined the future of the Habsburg empire. Assuming that this judgment is valid, the purpose here is to refine, extend—and correct a bit—certain conclusions drawn in two earlier books, one in English and the other in German, concerning the subject in question. These observations are occasioned by the avalanche of writings evoked by the tercentennial celebration of the sieges in Vienna and elsewhere and by personal discussions of the author with the Hungarian historians, László Benczédi and Géza Perjes. It is convenient to treat the topic under three headings: the antecedents of the Ottoman offensive, the significance of the events per se, including the delicate question of Polish participation, and the consequences of the allied victory and the subsequent campaigns in Hungary.