After touring Transylvania in 1773, Joseph II, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and co-regent of the Habsburg monarchy, wrote to Empress Maria Theresa complaining about the state of the province's economy and its administrative corruption. Such problems required urgent reform of the sort that could be carried out only by a strong, centralized government acting in the spirit of Enlightened Absolutism. However, success in these endeavors required something more. In Joseph II's words: “We have to remember that the best intentions fail often and the lack of knowledge of local realities makes such a real difference in governance, that what is often considered the best and wisest decisions, cannot be applied locally efficiently; the total ignorance of Your Majesty's advisers at the court and the Transylvanian Chancellery is a real hindrance and harm for the administration.”

On the eve of World War I the Ukrainian inhabitants of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy numbered some four million. They were divided among the Austrian provinces of Galicia (3,380,000) and Bukovina (300,000) and the Kingdom of Hungary (470,000).2 In each of these three territories the Ukrainians lived under quite different conditions; hence, a historian should treat each of the three groups as a separate entity. Since the Galician Ukrainians were not only the most numerous but also historically by far the most important, this paper will deal only with them.

Five years ago, an odd discussion was underway on the HABSBURG listserv, triggered by the following question: “Was Habsburg bureaucracy sloppy?” The debate that followed was characterized by a remarkable intensity and an equally notable superficiality, leading to the conclusion that too little research on this topic has been done so far. For this reason, I am very obliged to the Austrian History Yearbook for this opportunity to clarify several important duties and functions of bureaucracy in general and the unique attributes of Habsburg bureaucracy in particular.

Between the Revolution of 1848 and the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, imperial Austria experienced an extraordinary expansion of nationalism and of national conflict. German, Czech, Polish, Ukrainian, Italian, Slovene, and other national movements became major players and rivals, transforming public life in the process. This essay examines that process through a municipal lens. What was particular about the intersection of the national in imperial Austria with the municipal? How did municipal and national politics affect one another, and what can we understand, through their dynamics, about Austrian politics more generally?

The Croatian break with the Yugoslav narrative was—besides parting from the official slogan “brotherhood and unity”—first of all a break with its anti-Fascist legacy and narrative about World War II. This article asserts that while the contents of the “politics of the past” changed completely after Croatia's independence in 1990, the manner in which a dominant historical narrative was asserted during the era of President Franjo Tuđman remained the same, thanks to the Manichean worldview on which it rested, a deficient democracy, and government oppression of the free media.

Many years ago, Arthur J. May wrote, “Only the Bucovina provided a patch of blue in the beclouded nationality sky of Austria.” Without going into the comparative aspect of this assertion, the object of this study is to ascertain to what extent May's statement correctly reflects the complex relationships of the ethnoculrural or national groups in Bukovina. How blue was the sky really?

Acquired by Austria in 1774–75, Bukovina prior to 1918 was a small Crownland in the northeastern corner of the Austrian Empire. It bordered on Hungary, Romania, the Russian Empire, and the Austrian province of Galicia. Its area was about 410,000 square kilometers, and its population in 1910 was just over 800,000. Some of the land was rolling and fairly fertile countryside, especially in the north and east, merging into the foothills that in turn gave way to the Carpathian Mountains in the south and west. Much of Bukovina was forested. The estates of the large landowners, sometimes with a palace or large manor house, stood in glaring contrast to the small landholdings of the peasantry and their cramped housing. The capital, Czernowitz (Chernivtsi), with a population in 1910 of around 87,000, was the only sizable city.

In the aftermath of World War II, Austria once again achieved notoriety as a “prison of peoples.” In 1951, the Ost-West Kurier, a newspaper in Essen, decried the degrading mistreatment of Austria's so-called “prisoners of the postwar.” Men, women, and children were wasting away in former concentration camps and were denied citizenship rights, the right to work or to travel freely, and basic social protections, the newspaper reported. These “prisoners” were not, however, former Jewish concentration camp inmates, prisoners of war (POWs), or displaced persons (DPs). They were German expellees from Eastern Europe—the very Germans on whose behalf the Nazi war for Lebensraum had allegedly been fought. “In the entire Western world, there is today no group of human beings who has been sentenced to live with so few rights as the so-called Volksdeutsche in Austria,” the newspaper's editors proclaimed:

Each version of the European welfare state developed out of particular historical contexts. The modern Austrian welfare state was developed in “Red Vienna” as a response to the perceived dysgenic emergency of World War I and strong doubts about the Lebensfähigkeit (viability, “ability for life”) of the young nation itself. Eugenic thought was central to the Vienna Welfare Ministry's mission, activity, and appeal to both a local and international audience. The welfare system implemented in Vienna in the interwar years worked to sustain and amplify the city's viability by creating hygienic conditions that Dr. Julius Tandler, its founder, believed would positively alter the very constitutions of its citizens and make possible a “coming generation” of healthy children.

In hisStudy inAustrianIntellectualHistory, Robert Kann unobtrusively posed a pivotal question that continues to engage practitioners of intellectual history. Whose culture, he asked, are we talking about when we generalize about the literary, artistic, and musical products of an age? His unhesitating answer, “the culture of the select few,” reflected the dominant view of intellectual historians in 1960, the year when the book was first published. Since then, our sense of what constitutes historical relevance has expanded, and the automatic equation of culture with social and intellectual elites has eroded but has by no means disappeared.

In the wake of independence in October 1918, the leaders of Czechoslovakia designated a multitude of national symbols for the nascent state, among them a flag, an anthem, an emblem, coinage, holidays, and stamps. Czech (and Slovak) art, drama, literature, and music commemorated new heroes and resurrected national historic figures ignored under Austria-Hungary. In this break with the past, national memory helped legitimate the new Czechoslovakia through celebration of the anti-Habsburg leaders in the struggle for independence and through denigration of former Habsburg rulers. Some nationalist Czechs, particularly the Czech legionnaires who had served in the Czechoslovak Army Abroad during World War I, were not content with the simple construction or reconstitution of Czech national symbols, but demanded in addition the destruction of numerous symbols of Habsburg rule. Thus, physical representations of the Habsburg past, many of which were to be found in the German-populated border regions of the Bohemian lands, became targets of their opprobrium.

This essay deals with a relatively little studied event in modern Austrian history but one that had powerful ramifications over the course of the next fifty years of Austrian history in the twentieth century.

The scholarship on twentieth-century refugee movement highlights the persecution of national, ethnic, and religious minorities arising from state and nation-building. The very structure and function of modern nation-states made specific populations within them vulnerable outsiders. The nation-state limited and defined in new ways those groups for whom the state would take responsibility. “In practically every way we can imagine,” writes Michael Marrus, “the First World War imposed on contemporaries the awesome power of the nation-state.” Refugee movement has also been tied to policies of wartime persecution and the chaos of imperial collapse. Populations in flux mark a regime no longer in control, a state in dissolution and decay.

Over 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 contribution to Oxford University Press's Very Short Introduction series, that take a “from-the-beginning-to-the-end” approach in chronological terms. French historian Jean Bérenger's classical overview of the history of the Habsburg lands since 1273, first published in 1990 and subsequently translated into German and English, probably constitutes the most substantial contribution in this vein (that is to say, for the period after 1989 that is under discussion here).

The arrival in Vienna of over one hundred thousand Jewish refugees fleeing the Russian army's advance into Galicia and Bukovina in the first months of World War I had a profound impact on Viennese Jewry. The refugees became a constant and pervasive theme of wartime Jewish debate in Vienna, and their influence was felt in many areas of communal life—political, cultural, economic, and religious. Moreover, their very visible presence in the city served to highlight the always prominent “Jewish Question” in Vienna for Jews and non-Jews alike, precipitating an eruption of virulent anti-Semitism that initially targeted the refugees but was later directed at Viennese Jews in general. (Indeed, one Jewish newspaper commented in September 1917 that anti-Semitism had become a “national sport.”) As the welfare problem posed by the refugees developed into a highly charged issue in Viennese politics, welfare work also became an important arena of Jewish politics.

For almost three weeks the scenes repeated themselves: cannon fire, chiming church bells, massive crowds, peasant bands on horseback, school girls in white dresses laying flowers along the emperor's path, torchlight parades, mountaintop bonfires, city illuminations, serenades, court dinners, aristocratic balls, early morning prayers at cathedrals and synagogues. During Francis Joseph's 1880 inspection tour of Galicia,2 today divided between Poland and Ukraine, millions of Galicians either saw the emperor, talked with someone who did, read about his visit in the paper, or heard abąout it at a village reading hall or gathering, or from the local priest

In the first issue of Settlement (Osidlování), the weekly paper of the Czechoslovak Settlement Office, an article entitled, “So That It Is Not Forgotten,” explained the reasons for the Czech hatred of Germans: “[I]t is hatred as the reaction for the most ruthless attack which was undertaken by Germans against humanity and not least against us.” After invoking the authority of Jan Hus, the fifteenth-century religious reformer and longtime Czech national icon, the author concluded: “It is the spontaneous wish of the entire nation that we completely get rid of the Germans with final certainty, even at the price of clear material loss. It is up to us to prove that all Germans are replaceable, and that we not only have the ability, but especially enough good will and self-sacrifice to prove this in deed.” This column became a regular series that provided different examples of Germans betraying the Czech nation and thereby helped to justify the need to expel them from the country. Coming as it did in the spring of 1946, when the pace of the Allied-sponsored “population transfer” began to accelerate, the column seems somewhat out of place. Hundreds of thousands of Sudeten Germans had previously been expelled in 1945; with current Allied support there was no apparent need to justify the policy further. Yet the attempts to rekindle the atmosphere of hatred spawned by the war came at a time when some Czechs sought to retain Sudeten Germans for labor needs, especially in the borderland regions where the vast majority of these German speakers lived and worked. The “spontaneous wish of the nation” to expel every last German needed some prodding.

An important fact to keep in mind in studying the Slovenian nationality problem in the nineteenth-century Habsburg monarchy is the lack of coincidence between ethnic and administrative boundaries. Instead of living together in a single province, the Slovenes formed a significant percentage of the population of each of more than a half dozen different administrative subdivisions of the Austrian empire. Approximately half of them lived in provinces with a non-Slovenian majority. According to the official survey made by Carl Joseph von Czoernig, which was based on the 1846 census for the Austrian lands and that of 1850 for the kingdom of Hungary, there were 428,000 Slovenes and Serbo-Croatians (92 percent of the total population) in Carniola. There were 363,000 Slovenes (36 percent of all the inhabitants) in Styria; 96,000 (30 percent), in Carinthia;1 128,000 (67 percent), in Gorica (Görz); 25,000 (31.5 percent), in Trieste; and 32,000 (14 percent), in Istria. In addition, 45,000 Slovenes lived in the border areas that were added to the Transleithanian half of the dual monarchy after 1867 and 27,000 in the province of Venetia, which belonged to the Habsburg empire until 1866.

Linguists have long been aware that the ubiquitous distinction between “languages” and “dialects” has more to do with political and social forces, typically nationalism, than with objective linguistic distance.1 This article, an exercise in the history of (linguistic) science, examines political and social factors operating on other levels of linguistic classification than the “language-dialect” dichotomy. Nationalism and linguistic thought are mutually interactive throughout a linguistic classification system: political and social history not only affects a list of “languages,” but also a list of “dialects.”

Sixty years after its conclusion, World War II still fills the world's memory. Massive demonstrations in China last winter recalled Japanese atrocities during the war, while just over a month ago the world marked the sixtieth anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Monuments and museums continue to be erected to commemorate the Holocaust. And films on the war, as the recent success of Downfall demonstrates, continue to attract viewers. Some of the things that happened during World War II seem to us to be unforgettable.