The contents of this volume of the austrian history yearbook reflect well the thematic and temporal range of current writing on the history of the Habsburg monarchy, the Republic of Austria, and the other successor states to the monarchy. The volume includes fresh studies of politics, civic identity and loyalties, international relations, culture, the arts, scholarship, and historical memory.
The Robert A. Kann Memorial Lecture published in this volume marks the thirtieth such lecture presented at the University of Minnesota's Center for Austrian Studies since Carl E. Schorske began the series in 1984. The full version of the 2014 lecture by the distinguished early modern historian James D. Tracy begins the volume with a wide-ranging treatment of how the Habsburg-Ottoman warfare of the sixteenth century represented a conflict not just of competing states, but of differing civilizations. The international relations of the Habsburg monarchy also figure in the articles of Brian Vick and Václav Horčička. Vick offers new understandings of the broader social developments surrounding the Congress of Vienna, pointing to the vigor of Viennese and imperial civil society in shaping the meaning attached to the recently concluded wars and the social developments that followed. Horčička revisits the relations between Austria-Hungary and the United States in the latter part of World War I and the perceptions of the other state and its intentions by leading political figures on each side.
New research on the construction and representation of state loyalties and national identities in the monarchy and the various reactions to the growth of national loyalties figures in two of the articles. Bálint Varga adds new dimensions to the understanding of Bukovina's experience under Habsburg rule with his examination of the rise and fall of an Austrian identity in the provincial historiography of that land. Katherine Sorrels takes up the filiation of Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi's ideas for European integration and the influence on him of the Austrian pacifist Alfred Fried, who already before World War I opposed dividing the continent into ethnonational units.
Research on historical memory in the Habsburg monarchy and the successor states and the controversies that have arisen over the more contentious points have grown strongly in recent decades, particularly since the fall of Communism in East Central Europe and the end of the Cold War. Paul Miller traces the varying depictions of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in biographies, press treatments, monument plans, and films from the interwar period, Austria's Nazi era, and the Cold War. Rafael Milan Kropiunigg's article on the Borodajkewycz Affair, based on oral history interviews, offers new insights into the protests against Borodajkewycz's lectures in 1965, as well as the sharp contrast between the limited unrest in Austria in 1968 and the contemporary turmoil in Germany and France. Issues of historical memory also figure in Béla Bodó's article on the fate during the interwar period of members of Hungarian right-wing paramilitary units from 1919–1920. Bodó examines the divergent accounts by liberal, Marxist, and conservative Hungarian historians of the legacy of Hungary's White Terror and the subsequent role of the squad members in the Horthy regime, in the Nazi occupation in 1944 and in the Holocaust in Hungary, and then assesses what the available historical evidence shows about their actual activities.
This volume of the Yearbook offers a rich harvest of new scholarship on the cultural and intellectual history of Habsburg Central Europe. The forum on museums and material culture in Vienna, with articles by Diana Reynolds-Cordileone, Reinhard Johler, and Anita Aigner and comments by Julie Johnson and Heidemarie Uhl, analyzes exhibitions in Vienna since the late nineteenth century. The essays examine how such exhibitions have constructed and represented regional and national cultures in Austria, often using objects or settings of everyday life. Jan Surman analyzes the circulation of scholars and scholarship across the Austrian half of the monarchy during the late nineteenth century, using the examples of four professorial careers to examine what was shared and what was distinctive in the various academic communities. Ksenya Kiebuzinski assesses the circumstances that led French composer Léo Delibes to write the opera Kassya in the early 1890s, based on his personal travels in Galicia and his collection of diverse musical materials there. Between 1909 and 1926 the famous Czech artist Alfons Mucha produced a series of twenty large canvases on the topic of Slavic history and myth. Marta Filipová's article presents a fascinating analysis – the first extended treatment in English – of the long-running debates in Czech intellectual and political circles about the national significance and artistic value of the cycle.
Forty-one book reviews fill out this volume of the Yearbook. As always, the editors are profoundly grateful to the authors of those reviews and to the many scholars who gave generously of their time to read and evaluate article submissions to the Yearbook. The scholarly expertise and efforts of a great number of colleagues are essential in producing each volume of the Austrian History Yearbook, and this brief word of thanks is but a small token of the editors' immense gratitude. We also thank Daniel Pinkerton for his expert assistance in preparing the images presented in the articles and on the cover, Klaas van der Sanden of the University of Minnesota Institute for Global Studies for shepherding the Center for Austrian Studies as interim director from 2010 through summer 2014, and Christopher Flynn for assisting in formatting the accepted manuscripts. Mollie Madden completed four years of extraordinary service as assistant editor at the end of the summer of 2014 and has been succeeded in that role by Sharon Park. The other editors applaud and thank Mollie for her dedicated and tireless efforts.
