The articles in this thirty-ninth volume of the Austrian History Yearbook demonstrate vividly the range of questions and approaches that historians are using today to develop new understandings of changing patterns of culture, artistic expression, and general intellectual life in Austria and Central Europe. Five of the articles, including this year's Robert A. Kann Memorial Lecture, examine developments in intellectual life and the arts as ideological, religious, social, and political crosscurrents have shaped them. With an analysis of both text and music, Mark Berry's article elucidates various influences from the Austrian Enlightenment on Haydn's famed oratorio, The Creation. Robert von Dassanowsky takes the reader into the ideological, political, and cultural maelstrom of Austria in the mid-1930s as he examines how some Austrian film makers under the Ständestaat tried to counter the pressures of German nationalist and Nazi interests with the assertion of a distinct Austrian Catholic identity, thereby providing alternatives to films produced in Germany.
The articles by Megan Brandow-Faller and Jonathan Koehler examine in varying ways how divisions in society, whether based on gender, class, or adherence to competing political movements, affected artistic life in Austria at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. Faller reminds us of the manifold ways in which gender can affect artistic production and artists' lives as she investigates the lives of three women who were muses for Gustav Klimt, Adolf Loos, and Gustav Mahler and demonstrates how they, in fact, used their roles as the inspiration of famous artists to pursue their own artistic careers. Jonathan Koehler discusses how and why high culture played such an important role for populist politicians in Vienna 1900. Looking to the integrative and educational functions of the arts, the working-class organizers of the Workers' Concert Association sought to link high culture, here concert programs, to the functions and needs of mass politics.
In Mary Gluck's Kann Memorial Lecture, we see how popular theaters, cabarets, and humor magazines in Budapest around 1900 provided a space for the airing of jokes and satire about Jews and the foibles of liberal notions of equality and assimilation that were otherwise taboo in polite liberal society. Liberal high culture in Hungary, as elsewhere in Central Europe, expected Jews to adopt mainstream social mores and modern education. This, along with upward economic mobility, would presumably enable Jews to meld into the ranks of the modern middle classes. Gluck reminds us that Budapest's popular theaters, musical halls, and satirical magazines, which counted many Jews among their producers, performers, and primary audiences, presented transgressive, often scandalous images and narratives that held up a critical lens to the realities of social experience. Gluck argues provocatively, though, that such popular entertainment presented satires of upwardly mobile Jews not simply to negate the liberal narrative of progress and assimilation but, rather, to provide a necessary counterpoint. In this reading, the outsized humor and often grotesque parody simultaneously served to affirm the liberal values of equal citizenship in Hungarian society and also to give voice to Jews' continued sense of belonging to a different Jewish world.
Andrea Orzoff and Patrice Dabrowski examine the dynamic and often highly contested cultural terrain where the concerns of politics and ideology meet popular culture. Orzoff examines the development in interwar Czechoslovakia of the cult of Tomáš Masaryk and its creation, propagation, and instrumentalization by “the Castle,” the inner circle of top officials and politicians clustered around the presidency. She traces the character, dimensions, and functions of the Masaryk myth, both domestic and international, and compares it to other cults of leadership. Patrice Dabrowski's article takes us to the Carpathian frontier of late nineteenth-century Galicia to examine Polish nationalists' efforts to transform a remote natural setting into a national landscape, a landscape that subsequently became renowned as an important Polish nationalist icon. Dabrowski demonstrates how the “discovery” by outsiders of this highland landscape created unexpected consequences both for Polish nationalists and the local inhabitants whose home environment was thus “discovered.”
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries all over Western societies, suicide as a possible symptom of larger social dysfunctions attracted the attention of social scientists and social philosophers as well as psychiatrists. Scholars and clinicians in the Habsburg monarchy and its successor states contributed prominently to those discussions. William Bowman analyzes suicide as a cultural and social phenomenon in Austria in the early 1930s, using case studies from Vienna's General Hospital and from the psychiatric hospital at Steinhof to establish a framework for determining how attempted suicides were understood and diagnosed at the time. Bowman shows that patients themselves often had a good understanding of the medical discourse and occasionally used it to their own advantage in encounters with physicians.
We are pleased to congratulate an author from volume thirty-eight of the Yearbook, David Gerlach. A jury composed of Paula Sutter Fichtner, Helmut Konrad, and Tara Zahra voted to award Professor Gerlach the 2007 R. John Rath Article Prize for his essay, “Working with the Enemy: Labor Politics in the Czech Borderlands, 1945–48.”
In the course of work on this volume of the Yearbook, Annett C. Richter completed her service as assistant editor, and Matthew J. Konieczny, a doctoral student in history at the University of Minnesota, succeeded her. Both have done splendid work, and Mr. Konieczny has proved to be an amazingly quick study in mastering the assistant editor's varied tasks and in dispatching them with great efficiency. During this last year, a new member of the executive committee of the Society for Austrian and Habsburg History, Maureen Healy of Oregon State University, joined the Editorial Board of the Yearbook. At the Center for Austrian Studies, Daniel Pinkerton helped prepare for publication the illustrations which appear here. This thirty-ninth volume of the Yearbook marks the beginning of a new relationship with Cambridge University Press as publisher and distributor. We are particularly grateful for the vision and care of Mark Zadrozny, the senior editor for journals for Cambridge in New York, and Jonathan Geffner, the production editor; and we look forward to a productive collaboration with them. We thank the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science and Research for its support for the positions of the associate editor and the assistant editor. To the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York, we express particular gratitude for generously subsidizing the publication of this volume through the purchase of copies.
