Two of the most iconic photos of the 1956 Hungarian revolution involve a colossal statue of Stalin, erected in 1951 and toppled on the first day of the anti-Soviet uprising. One of these pictures shows Stalin's decapitated head, abandoned in the street as curious pedestrians amble by. The other shows a tall stone pedestal with nothing on it but a lonely pair of bronze boots. Situated near Heroes' Square, Hungary's national pantheon, the Stalin statue had served as a symbol of Hungary's subjugation to the Soviet Union; and its ceremonious and deliberate destruction provided a poignant symbol for the fall of Stalinism.

This Essay Attempts to contribute to our understanding of the intellectual and cultural history of Central Europe by making explicit a variety of themes that haunt discourse about Austrian culture and by making some suggestions about periodizing the relationship between Austria and German culture. I originally developed these thoughts on Austria as a region of German culture for a conference in 1983 at the Center for Austrian Studies on regions and regionalism in Austria. Although the political institutions of Central Europe have undergone a revolution since then, the question of Austria's relationship to German culture still holds its importance for the historian-and for contemporary Austrians as well. The German culture I have in mind here is not the kleindeutsch national culture of Bismarck's Reich, but rather the realm that was once constituted by the German-speaking lands of the Holy Roman Empire. This geographical space in Central Europe suggests a more ideal realm of the spirit, for which language is our best point of reference and which corresponds to no merely temporal state.

A little more than one thousand and ten years ago, the annus mirabilis of Otto I taught the unruly Magyars that “nomadism in one country” was not a workable proposition2 and that they had to make adjustments if they wished to belong to the nascent European community. A little less than ten years ago, the Hungarians received another object lesson suggesting that too much emphasis on western civilization might become another source of danger. Since they were separated by a whole millennium, the meaning of the two events is certainly very different. But both were results of a mis judgment of domestic forces and international relations—a phenomenon which was far from uncommon in the history of Hungary.

In the years 1945 to 1953, Karl Gruber exerted an influence over Austrian foreign policy at times resembling the dominant influence of a Kaunitz or a Metternich. But as a diplomatist Gruber did not come close to the finesse and shrewd sense of power that his two great predecessors possessed. Moreover, Gruber had to maneuver in less predictable domestic and international terrain. During his tenure in the Ballhausplatz, foreign policy wassubject to domestic partisan struggle as well as parliamentary control and public opinion. Furthermore, Austria no longer figured as a great power and was locked into the monumental Cold War struggle between East and West on the frontline of the superpower tensions. Gruber operated in an extremely hostile international environment. Instead of the traditional well-balanced nineteenth-century “concert of powers,” which had profited so much from Austrian professional statesmanship, the inexperienced Gruber faced the United States and the Soviet Union, which were in almost total control of international politics. The two superpowers were engaged in a gigantic ideological struggle, each striving for a preponderance of power. A small nation such as Austria was buffeted to and fro between the conflicts in Central Europe and could hardly escape the pull of the global “empires” fashioned at the time. The United States and the Soviet Union confronted each other in spiraling arms races (nuclear and conventional) and rigid alliance systems in an uneasy truce called the Cold War. In this context of a tight bilateral international system, even England and France—the former great powers reduced to the status of middling powers after the ignominious loss of their great colonial empires—had a difficult time holding on to their traditional influence in the international arena. Small powers like Austria were largely impotent, unless they fashioned for themselves some room to maneuver between the superpower blocs.

The nature and scope of Reform Catholicism has been debated intermittently since the movement's emergence in the eighteenth century. The debate has peaked at those moments in which the movement's legacy became most relevant to the contemporary religious and political scene, and the period of the past few decades has been one of those moments.2 Reform Catholicism in the Holy Roman Empire has long been misunderstood because the politicization of the 1760s and 1770s and the radicalization of the 1780s and 1790s have cast the earlier stages into obscurity or disrepute.

This Essay Provides a critical assessment of the system of military justice established in Austria by the American occupation authorities. It places military justice and its function in the wider context of U.S. occupation policy as it developed from total control to increasingly milder forms of tutelage under the impact of the Cold War and increasing Austrian self-assertion. The essay is based on the hitherto largely untapped files contained in seventy-five boxes of the Legal Division of the U.S. Military Government in Austria, collected in two visits in 1990 and 1991 to the National Archives in Suitland, Maryland.

Sultan Suleyman the Lawgiver (r. 1520–1566) led six invasions of Hungary during his reign. Although he failed to take Vienna (1529, 1532), by the conclusion of his last campaign in 1566, he had extended Ottoman rule up the Danube as far as Esztergom and beyond. For his part, Ferdinand I sought to consolidate his claim to Hungary by sending armies against cities recently taken by the Ottomans on three occasions; none of these campaigns achieved its objective. In the years between invasions from one side or the other, there were frequent truces and from 1547 a series of peace treaties. Nonetheless, Kleinkrieg remained the order of the day along the border. Convention dictated that a certain amount of raiding was tolerable, even in the relatively peaceful seventeenth century, but sixteenth-century “raiding parties” (especially from the Ottoman side) were sometimes large enough to storm and capture important fortresses. In the sixteenth century, castles on either side sent out bands of soldiers to force all peasants within reach to pay taxes to the “rightful” ruler. In the seventeenth century, the Ottoman paşa of Buda would sometimes request the help of his Habsburg counterpart in collecting the sultan's taxes from border villages.

On March 22 and 25,1854, on the eve of the outbreak of the Crimean War, a select group of Austrian ministers of state presided over by Emperor Francis Joseph met to reach some basic decisions on Austrian policy. Students of Crimean War diplomacy have paid considerable attention to these ministerial conferences, using the protocols and other documents bearing on them. The most thorough analysis, and for later historiography the most influential, is that of Franz Eckhart. This essay proposes another look at these conferences in the belief that an interpretation different from the traditional one sheds more light on the nature of the debate, the decisions made and postponed, and the fundamental nature of Austria's dilemma. It also suggests in some ways a more favorable view of the policy of Austrian Foreign Minister Karl Ferdinand von Buol-Schauenstein than the usual condemnation of it as a rash and aggressive policy of va banque, or a constant vacillation between East and West without program or goal, or both.

Recalling the medieval pageantry of the coronation of the future emperor Joseph II as King of the Romans in Frankfurt in 1764, the sexagenarian Johann Wolfgang von Goethe mentions among the names of the special ambassadors attending the solemn occasion Prince Esterházy, the Bohemian envoy, [who] was not tall, though well built, vivacious, and at the same time of noble respectability, yet neither proud nor cold. I had a special liking for him, because he reminded me of the Marshall de Broglio.

On April 11, 1848, František Palacký—the “Bohemian of Slavic stock,” as he described himself—wrote his famous reply to the Committee of Fifty at the Frankfurt National Assembly. In explaining why an Austrian Slav could not participate in a German parliament, he stressed the need for Austria's separate existence and also warned that the splitting up of the Austrian empire into a group of small republics would result in the establishment of a universal Russian monarchy. “Truly,” he exclaimed, “if the Austrian empire had not already been long in existence, we would have to hurry and create it in the interest of Europe and in the interest of humanity itself.” Yet, he went on to ask, why did this state, which nature and history had given the task of shielding Europe, appear so helpless in the face of storm and crisis? Why? Because for all too long Austria, in her disastrous blindness, had failed to admit the very legal and moral grounds for its existence: the fundamental principle of complete equality of rights and consideration for its nationalities. Palacky singled out the person he held responsible for this failure: Metternich! “Metternich,” he wrote, “did not fall just because he was the worst foe of freedom but also because he was the most irreconcilable enemy of all Slavic nationalities in Austria.”2

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 with Eastern Europe to designate the lands lying between Germany and Austria in the west and the former components of the Soviet Union to the east.

The trial of forty-six-year-old Regine Riehl, who was charged with embezzlement, fraud, pandering, and other crimes associated with the operation of her tolerated bordello, opened in Vienna on 2 November 1906. Residents of the imperial capital and in the wider Habsburg monarchy and beyond avidly followed the five-day trial, which incited public debate on the subject of prostitution throughout the monarchy. Indeed, prostitution became a “topic of the day,” a theme that became “salonfähig” (acceptable for good society), due to the extensive newspaper coverage of the trial.

At first glance, the three essays that make up this forum dedicated to the Adriatic appear to chart a fairly standard course for scholarship on the region, depicting the area as one transected by conflict and contest or, alternatively, as a site of cultural mixing and coexistence. The reader quickly realizes, however, that all three authors offer innovative analyses that challenge, even as they build on, the body of work exploring the political and cultural contours of the Adriatic in the modern era. Much of this scholarship reiterates a reductive view of the Adriatic that sees it principally through the narrow prism of competing Italian and Slavic nationalist claims. Although Dominique Reill, Igor Tchoukarine, and Borut Klabjan address Italo-(South)Slav tensions and dialogues, they locate them in much broader frameworks that oblige the reader to rethink understandings of both the contents of these nationalisms and the contexts within which they developed. In different ways, for example, these papers highlight a seemingly obvious but little explored fact: The object of so much contestation and desire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was not just land, but also the sea that lapped the shores of the Adriatic territories.

East and east central European cities are a neglected field of research in urban history. While a certain number of publications exist on select urban phenomena such as urban Jewry, only recently have attempts been made to focus research on entire cities. Studies published in the last decade have tried to discover the unknown urban world of multiethnic societies in countries such as Russia, Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltic states. Researchers must cope with specific problems. General city histories are very rare, with the exception of several “city biographies” dating from the 1920s and 1930s. Archival sources are rather poorly documented in inventories, and holdings (especially on the territory of the former Soviet Union) suffered wartime losses and are often scattered. Multilingual skills and knowledge of “exotic” languages such as Ukrainian, Lithuanian, or Yiddish are mandatory. And finally, the usual approaches do not lead to satisfactory results. “Traditional” urban history deals with Western European and North American urban societies that were shaped by a special set of social, economic, and juridical circumstances, in which longstanding city autonomy, rapid modernization since the eighteenth century, a powerful city bourgeoisie, and highly developed and differentiated public spheres played important roles. When one applies the standards of Western city development to the multinational Central and Eastern European cities during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the latter appear to be underdeveloped and lacking in many of the institutional preconditions that make a mere urban agglomeration a city. Such considerations may even be applied to a city such as Lemberg (L'viv in Ukrainian, Lwow in Polish), which belonged to Austria-Hungary until 1918, and was always regarded as a stronghold of “Vienneseness” and “Europeaness” in the “East.”

The supposedly authoritativeÖsterreichisches Staatswörterbuch (1905 edition) states unequivocally that the only joint-stock bank that existed before 1850 was a land bank founded in 1841 by the Galician estates. März, who has written the definitive work on the Credit-Anstalt, also found no place in his otherwise excellent study for the Schwarzenberg Bank, asserting that the Credit-Anstalt was founded simply on the model of the Crédit Mobilier of contemporary France. The only publication that concerned itself with the Schwarzenberg Bank, formally known as the Wiener oktroyirte Commerzial-, Leih- und Wechselbank (Chartered Commercial, Loan, and Exchange Bank of Vienna) in some detail was written in 1918, with the observation that it strongly resembled the Crédit Mobilier type of bank. This work was obviously ignored both in Austria and elsewhere where the history of banking and banks has been discussed.

On 7 October 1866, Adolf Pratobevera—a prominent liberal politician and former Justice Minister—wrote in his diary that “politics [is] again in flux, whether this is a blessing? God knows.” Pratobevera was writing just three months after the battle of Königgrätz/Hradec Králové in a period of immense instability and uncertainty for the Habsburg monarchy. Following Austria's military defeat at Königgrätz, the traditional supports of the system—the emperor, the army, and the bureaucracy—were in a weakened state and this dramatically opened the range of possibilities in politics. Indeed, the defeat threw the whole political system into question, a situation that sharply exposed the fault lines and internal political workings of the monarchy. In the period from Königgrätz on 3 July 1866 to the ministerial meeting on 1 February 1867 (when the emperor definitively decided on the dualist structure), all political parties and movements had the opportunity to define their program, to seek possible allies, and to argue their particular vision of the monarchy's political structure.

When Engelbert Dollfuss became chancellor of Austria in May 1932, no one dreamed that he would become a fascist dicator.1 Even his bitter opponents in 1933 and 1934 admitted that he was genuine democrat when he became chancellor. He had friendly relations with the leaders of the Social Democratic Party. In May 1932, the Social Democratic Party leader Otto Bauer felt that when the time was ripe Dollfuß intended to form a coalition with his party.

Two Decades Ago, Holger Herwig's The German Naval Officer Corps: A Social and Political History, 1890–1918 (1973) chronicled the story of the new military elite that rose to prominence when imperial Germany went to sea: a corps that sought to emulate the traditions of the Prussian army, its middle-class officers eager to embrace the values and attitudes of the more aristocratic army officer corps.1 Recently Istvan Deak's excellent work Beyond Nationalism: A Social and Political History of the Habsburg Officer Corps, 1848–1918 (1990) has provided a comprehensive picture of the officer corps of the Habsburg army.2 Like imperial Germany, Austria-Hungary was a central European land power with few long-standing traditions at sea, but differences in social composition, training, and outlook distinguished the Austro-Hungarian naval officer corps from its German counterpart. Within the Dual Monarchy the navy had to deal with the nationality question and other challenges that also faced the army, but in many respects its officer corps reflected the diversity of the empire more than the Habsburg army officer corps did, contributing to the navy's relatively more successful record as a multinational institution.

Of all the great questions of Habsburg history, perhaps the greatest is this: What would have been the consequence if Charles V had decided to prioritize differently his dealings with France, the Ottoman Empire, and Christian reformers? It is certain that the House of Habsburg would have proceeded along a different path, but such a truism hardly advances a better understanding of events in the empire, or in Europe more widely, in the sixteenth century. Charles V, as pater ecclesiae and as head of a monarchia universalis, stands astride the traditional and the modern. To him is attributed the last opportunity for Habsburg universal empire, with the long hand of the casa de Austria imprinting Habsburg ambitions on the world.