This year Howard Louthan assumed the Directorship of the Center for Austrian Studies, becoming Executive Editor of the Austrian History Yearbook as well. Howard has graciously allowed me to write the editors' notes this year, giving me the opportunity to express my personal gratitude to all who have taken part in producing the Yearbook during the past decade that I have served as editor. It has been a privilege to serve as article editor, and especially to experience firsthand the original work of such a broad array of creative scholars. The community of those who engage with the Yearbook has grown, while becoming increasingly international in the past decade. I consider myself particularly fortunate, because as editor I consistently got to read exciting and often cutting-edge work contributed by many younger authors on both sides of the Atlantic.
I was also extraordinarily fortunate to have the generous assistance of so many colleagues, both new and established scholars, who nurtured the Yearbook by evaluating manuscripts and bringing dynamic new work to our attention. Some of you did much more than you needed to do in this regard. I also had the support of the Executive Committee of the Society of Austrian and Habsburg Historians, which frequently brought articles, forums, and unknown authors to my attention. I had the assistance of a highly professional and indeed meticulous staff at the Center for Austrian Studies, who annually worked very hard (especially in December!) to produce a journal of the highest caliber. Finally, I was lucky to assume the editorship at a moment when the Yearbook was thriving under Charles Ingrao's stewardship. I hope that Daniel Unowsky, the talented new editor, will find that I have passed on a journal to him that is in equally strong shape.
Volume 47 of the Yearbook includes thoughtful, creative, and highly original articles by a higher than usual number of authors based in Europe. It also, appropriately to my own interests, includes a large number of articles on nineteenth-century topics, a century that has seen something of a decline in the profession over the past decade. Distinguished medievalist Patrick J. Geary of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton delivered the 2015 Robert A. Kann memorial lecture, a tradition begun with a lecture by Carl E. Schorske in 1984. Geary's lecture, entitled “Austria, the Writing of History, and the Search for European Identity” opens this volume of the AHY. In his lecture, Professor Geary analyzed four medievalists of the Institut für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung who developed highly distinctive and open-ended strategies for writing cultural histories of Austria, and by extension of Europe itself. Arguing that they subtly resisted nationalist tropes by developing contingent, discontinuous, and complex understandings of the constructed nature of Austrian history, Geary demonstrates the importance of their approaches to understanding the broader history of Europe itself.
Czech scholar Miroslav Šedivý, who has in the past written on the Near Eastern policies of the Austrian Empire during the Vormärz, turns his attention in this volume to the fallout from European conflicts over Middle East policy that became the Rhine Crisis of 1840. Šedivý investigates the degree to which this crisis—which famously saw outpourings of what looks like German nationalist (anti-French) popular sentiment—had an impact on popular opinion in the Habsburg monarchy. Interrogating how the crisis was understood in Austria, Šedivý considers what kind of understandings—indeed what kind of patriotism—a German-speaking Austrian public may have experienced during the tense months surrounding the Rhine Crisis. William Godsey, an American scholar based in Vienna, explores in his article the complex ways that a nineteenth century aristocratic woman whose family was deeply involved in imperial and Bohemian politics, experienced both Czech nationalist loyalties and Habsburg patriotism. In the process he demonstrates how deeply her intertwined feelings of both imperial patriotism and a kind of aristocratic Czech Bohemian nationalism depended on each other for coherence.
In his article on naming Ágoston Berecz examines the Hungarian state's attempt to regulate—but also to codify—Hungarian-language first names among Romanian and Saxon populations of Transylvania and eastern Hungary in the period around the turn of the nineteenth century. In part an example of a kind of Magyarization, the legislation that attempted to codify legitimate Hungarian names could also be seen as part of the nineteenth century state's takeover of registration functions from the churches in an effort to manage populations more effectively. Wolfgang Göderle takes up the same theme of population management in his article but from a very different theoretical angle. Göderle scrutinizes both the design of and the specific practices developed for the very first census taken by the Cisleithanian government in 1869. Most of the literature on the imperial Austrian censuses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has focused overwhelmingly on questions about language use and nationhood, starting with the census of 1880. Explicitly avoiding this aspect of later censuses, Göderle focuses instead on the foundational practices created for the 1869 census that categorized the empire's population in highly particular terms, while making it legible for the first time to statistical forms of analysis.
Stephen Walsh analyzes the polar expedition that returned to Austria in 1874, having, among other accomplishments, stumbled upon a hitherto undiscovered northern territory that its leaders named Franz-Josef Land for the Habsburg emperor. Walsh argues that in the decade following the military defeats of the 1860s, the unification of Germany without Austria, and at the height of what could be called Austria's “liberal era,” polar exploration symbolized Austria's considerable cultural power and scientific influence in the world. The enormously popular polar expedition demonstrated the power of liberal values of rationality and progress as well as Austria's scientific achievement. Moreover, it demonstrated Austria's ability to compete among its peers for the laurels of colonization. The polar regions may not have constituted a colony in the traditional sense, but according to Walsh, Austria's ability to explore, document, and to retrieve specimens from these regions demonstrated the empire's ability to compete successfully against rival empires on a global stage.
The question of empire and its character dominates Jana Osterkamp's article on the “cooperative empire.” Osterkamp's essay questions the standard theoretical understanding of empire that insists on a stark separation among imperial regions and provinces as part of a center–periphery structure that defines imperial rule. In her analysis of Habsburg Austria in the late nineteenth century Osterkamp has uncovered growing forms of practical cooperation among several Crownlands of the empire that give the lie to the alleged structural prohibitions on communication and cooperation on which much current literature about empires insists. The financial crises that plagued the Crownlands around 1900—prevented as they were from implementing their own systems of taxation—forced them to seek solutions in cooperation with each other, and not simply to rely on the imperial metropole. Moreover, her study also effectively undermines the imagined dichotomy between empire and nation-state that Osterkamp believes still shapes too many research questions and methodological approaches to the history of empire.
Michael Burri and Matthew Rampley close out the volume with reexaminations of cultural practices and policies in the interwar period of the First Austrian Republic. Burri takes a new look at the symbolic meaning and politics of music festivals organized in the Austrian Republic in the immediate postwar period. Designed to address the terrible challenges facing an unfamiliar postwar world, in part by defining a particularly Austrian identity for this new world, these festivals also reflecting and magnified specific political impulses of that time. The Meisteraufführungen Wiener Musik (Virtuoso Performances of Viennese Music) of 1920 was the first ambitious cultural initiative taken by Vienna's new socialist government. Burri effectively contrasts its intentions and fundamental character to those articulated by the early organizers of the first Salzburg Festivals. What should the relationship of the new Austrian national state be to Austria's cultural heritage? Indeed, how specifically should that heritage be understood and promoted? Burri interrogates the individual festival programs as alternative theories of Austrian history put forward by organizers with very different political imaginations of what the new Austria should be. Matthew Rampley also explores the complex relationship of the post- and prewar artistic worlds in his essay on the largely unacknowledged links between the prewar traditions of the Austrian baroque and the Austrian modernity articulated by architects and artists of the First Republic. Arguing that artistic and stylistic continuities between the pre- and postwar years were far stronger than most cultural historians acknowledge, Rampley offers a different account of the ways in which Austrian baroque styles nevertheless continued to permeate the world of the 1920s and 1930s.
Along with these articles and a full set of thirty-six book reviews, volume 47 includes an obituary by Antonie Doležalová of one of several notable historians of Austria who died in the past year, the late economic historian Alice Teichová. I and the other editors—Associate Editor Margarete Grandner, Book Review Editor Maureen Healy, and Assistant Editors Sharon J. Park and Christopher Flynn—want to thank a great number of colleagues, particularly those who generously served as anonymous readers of article manuscripts and whose expertise proved essential to producing this volume of the Austrian History Yearbook. Our brief thanks here are but a small token of our gratitude. We also thank Daniel Pinkerton for his expert assistance in preparing the images presented in the articles and on the cover.
In closing I want to take a moment to thank everyone who worked with the me on the Yearbook over the past ten years, everyone who offered suggestions, created forums, wrote commentary, and all who through their participation contributed to transforming our field into a an exemplary one for the historical profession. I'm excited to see where Daniel Unowsky leads us in the coming years.
