Wrote Miklós Zrínyi (Nikola Zrinski) in the mid seventeenth century about those who died fighting against the Ottomans. The poet, who himself was engaged in both politics and war, defined Hungarian identity as Christian and premised on warfare unto death against Muslims.

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.

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.

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.

On 2 January 2012, a mass demonstration took place in Budapest in front of the Opera House. The rally was the culminating event in a series of street protests that had shaken Hungary during the previous months when many inhabitants of the Hungarian capital, along with their co-nationals elsewhere, felt increasingly uneasy with the symbolic politics initiated by the government of Viktor Orbán and his center-right FIDESZ Party. In particular, the crowd that collected in front of what is still Hungary's most representative institution of culture, on the main boulevard Andrássy út, protested against the inauguration of the new constitution that had come into force the previous day. Despite opposition inside and outside of Hungary, the ruling political elite comprising the prime minister and his political entourage celebrated the new constitution—and themselves—at a gala event in the opera house. A number of other celebratory events in connection with Hungary's new constitution were also staged, among them a controversial exhibition of paintings in the National Gallery, located to date in the Buda Palace, meant to highlight the most important events in recent Hungarian history. Inside the opera house, Orbán and his political supporters listened to a collection of works by, among others, Franz Liszt, Ferenc Erkel, and Béla Bartók, but the composition of the program was a matter of minor importance on that day. Instead, as he and his government representatives congratulated each other that night on their party's achievements in power, the crowd outside the opera house jeered in reference to Hungary's fall in international economic rankings and the methods of rule that they saw as authoritarian, if not dictatorial, and appealed to a wider international community, for example, with slogans such as, “Hey Europe, sorry about my Prime Minister.”

In 1911 malt factory owner Ignatz Briess of Olmütz/Olomouc wrote a memoir to explain the nature of Jewish life in small town Moravia before the Revolution of 1848 to his children and grandchildren. He related that he had attended a German-Jewish Trivialschule, a German-language elementary school run by the Jewish community for Jewish children, in his home town of Prerau/Přerov in the late 1830s and early 1840s. At the school, the children had two to three hours of German subjects every morning; and at the end of every year, the state school inspector, a local priest, examined them on their studies. At the same time, Briess learned Hebrew, Bible, and Talmud in the cheder, the traditional Jewish school, for seven more hours every day. The cheder, he remarked, was just like those in Halbasien, that is, Galicia, or Eastern Europe. Despite his reference to Karl Emil Franzos's negative evaluation of Galician Jewish life, Briess described the chaotic conditions in the cheder positively and with considerable warmth. His father, a grain dealer and manager of a noble estate who had studied at the famous Pressburg yeshiva in Hungary and who read Goethe, Schiller, Shakespeare, Spinoza, Mendelssohn, and Kant in his spare time, made sure that his son received a thorough Jewish education. The memoir, a nostalgic evocation of a vanished world, describes a Jewish community that was deeply pious, enmeshed in the world of Jewish religious tradition yet also influenced by secular, German-language culture, much of it expressed in Jewish terms. At his bar mitzvah in 1846, Briess gave a droschoh (a traditional learned discourse) for which the traditional rabbi helped him prepare, and a “German sermon,” on which he worked with his Trivialschule teacher.

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.

Among those who interest themselves in modernism in the context of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Prague is sometimes referred to as the “second city of cubism.” In 1911, at a time when the style was still largely unknown in Europe, an artists’ group devoted to the defense and promotion of the new art was founded in Prague. The members of the Skupina výtvarných umělců, or Visual Artists Group, wrote extensively about cubism in their journal Umělecký mesičník [Art Monthly] as well as in other publications. They sponsored numerous exhibits of the art at home and participated in shows of Czech cubist art abroad. In February 1914, Prague was the site of the largest show of cubist art anywhere in the world up to that time.

On 24 August 1914, Lieutenant General Artur von Bolfras warned his peer Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf that the draconian measures directed against domestic suspects were causing a lot of trouble and amounted to throwing the baby out with the bath water by fostering internal animosity. “We should not,” Bolfras insisted, “unnecessarily antagonize the population who have so far shown themselves to be loyal and ready for sacrifice beyond all expectations.” He urged in particular that Conrad should use his influence to put a stop to the excesses of the military command in Temesvár in southern Hungary, where, starting in late July 1914, hundreds of arrests were made following the partial mobilization against Serbia, thus putting into practice Conrad's professed military rationale: “better lock up one hundred people than one too few.” The initial spate of arrests and internments that accompanied the mobilization for war continued well into the autumn of 1914, snowballing into virulent state-driven repression, targeting mostly, but not only, Serbs, a situation which Josef Redlich referred to in his journal as a “race war” and a “systematic policy of extermination.” To Bolfras's letter of notification, Conrad replied that orders had been wired to Temesvár to the effect that abuses should be avoided and the military should work harmoniously with the civilian authorities, but he also signified that “we here can't do anything about individual abuses.”

Almost every national historiography has at one time or another emphasized a certain era dominated by the alleged extraordinary feats of particular individuals. Modern nationalists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries often sought support for their founding myths in their histories, exploiting imagery of heroic eras and their heroes for the needs of the present. The work of historians played an integral part of this mythmaking process. The German word Heldenzeitalter [Age of Heroes] is a concept with exactly such strong historiographical dimension. The term is not precise. It has variously been used to denote the mythic era of German sagas, the time of the Völkerwanderungen [migrations of peoples], and the Ostrogoth king Theodoric (sixth century). The same concept of an “age of heroes” is also fundamental to understanding Austrian historiography. This age constitutes a basic element of the Austrian national idea, and as with the other applications of the term “Age of Heroes,” the Austrian version, which was largely a nineteenth-century historiographical construct, was also fed by epics and poetry and myth making. The ruling Habsburg dynasty also actively supported the design of an Austrian Age of Heroes, at whose center could be found the figure of Prince Eugene of Savoy (1663–1736).

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.

It is difficult to imagine how collective memory might function without the watershed dates that structure our stories about the past. Almost by definition, however, such familiar milestones fail to capture the complex dynamics of the transition from one era to the next. A case in point is the dismantling of the Iron Curtain. As the anniversary commemorations of 2009 showed, this development came to be epitomized by the tearing down of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989. One does not need to doubt the importance of this event to see that its sheer symbolic weight tends to obscure the intricacies of the Eastern European transition process. More often than not, accounts that foreground this turning point marginalize some sixty million Hungarians, Poles, Czechs, and Slovaks who embarked on the transition process well ahead of the citizens of East Germany.