This is the sixth edition for which I have served as editor or coeditor. I was honored to succeed Pieter Judson, one of the most influential scholars of Habsburg history, one of my dissertation advisors, a fellow student of István Deák, and a friend. With this edition, the AHY welcomes a new coeditor, Maureen Healy. Dr. Healy, whom I have known since we both conducted research in Vienna in the 1990s, is currently Chair of the Department of History at Lewis and Clark College. Dr. Healy brings her international scholarly reputation and her wisdom to the yearbook. She and I along with executive editor Howard Louthan and book review editor Donald Wallace share a commitment to maintaining the AHY as the premier journal for Habsburg/post-Habsburg studies.
Despite the barriers to archival research posed by the pandemic, the current edition of the AHY demonstrates the continued energy and creativity shaping our field. Some of the contributions collected here offer new perspectives on seemingly familiar topics. Others delve into important subjects that had been largely overlooked or consider some of the legacies of the monarchy in the interwar period and beyond.
Two articles focus on Habsburg military and diplomatic history from 1750 to 1850, long topics treated in the pages of the yearbook, though here approached from new angles. Kurt Baird explores the centrality of honor during the wars of the Napoleonic era by analyzing one specific incident. Baird shows that even as the Habsburg state endeavored to reassert its preeminence in Central Europe, personal honor and demonstrated devotion to the emperor continued to play central roles in maintaining the loyalty of both soldiers and local communities. Barbora Pásztorová reevaluates the diplomacy of Klemens von Metternich. Her article centers neither on Metternich's efforts during the Napoleonic era nor on the revolutions of 1848, but instead on the Austrian chancellor's endeavors to preserve a European-wide peace in the face of multiple crises in the 1840s.
Two contributions focus on a similar chronological period (1750–1850) but turn to much less familiar topics. Veronika Čapská foregrounds a specific subculture of migrant workers: French women hired as governesses and tutors to the children of noble families in the Bohemian Lands. Čapská draws from literary sources, economic and legal documents, as well as material culture to flesh out the lives of these “servants of Francophilia,” who crossed cultural, social, and geographical borders. Čapská discerns significant shifts in popular views of French culture in Central Europe. In her piece, Daniela Haarmann considers the figure of Hermann, the ancient Germanic chieftain who fought against the Romans at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest and who became a popular symbol of German–French antagonism during the Thirty Years’ War. Haarmann analyzes paintings, literature, and newspapers to trace the representation and reception of the heroic myth of Hermann into the Napoleonic era and beyond. As she shows, Hermann came to symbolize claims of the Habsburgs to hegemony in German-speaking Central Europe.
There is much scholarship that examines legal trials as both reflective of and constitutive of social and political change. In his article, Philip Pajakowski considers the Merstallinger trial of 1883. The prosecution framed the accused as dangerous actors within an international conspiracy, raising the specter of social and political revolution; the defense focused on the legal guarantees of free speech and played down the seriousness of antigovernment movements. In her contribution, Ninja Bumann looks at Habsburg legal and administrative history from a very different angle. Bumann foregrounds cases of “runaway wives” and unlawful marriages to explore how the Habsburg monarchy incorporated elements of the Ottoman legal system into its administration of Bosnia after 1878. Sharia courts sought to defend and expand their purview even as the Habsburg administrators attempted to push back on that effort while avoiding interference in Muslim family law.
Two articles approach the topic of elections in the Austrian half of the monarchy in the decades around 1900 from complementary perspectives. Birgitta Bader-Zaar overviews the history of elections in the period, focusing on violence, the role of women, and the institution of polling booths. She questions common assumptions about the functioning of the Habsburg electoral system in the context of suffrage expansion and calls for more local studies to evaluate the dynamic between state, regional, and local actors that shaped the experience of voting. Bader-Zaar's contribution sets the stage for Joshua Shanes's close reading of violence during the 1911 parliamentary elections in the east Galician town of Drohobycz. The Drohobycz case study reveals much about democratization, local political bosses, Zionism, nationalism, and the politics of memory.
Nancy Wingfield is well known to the readership of the yearbook as a prize-winning author, distinguished historian, and generous mentor to so many scholars working on Habsburg/post-Habsburg Central Europe. In her Kann Lecture, Wingfield considers public conflicts between Czech Legionnaires and German-speaking citizens of interwar Czechoslovakia over the numerous statues of Habsburg Emperor Joseph II that dotted the landscape of the new state. As Wingfield notes, present-day statue wars over Civil War figures, Christopher Columbus, Andrew Jackson, and others do not represent a new or specifically American phenomenon. Laura Morowitz also considers some of the legacies of the Habsburg monarchy. Morowitz revisits the cosmopolitan culture of fin-de-siècle Vienna. From 1938 to 1945, Nazi cultural policy defined the Habsburgs as traitors to German purity and Vienna 1900 as “Jewified” while reinterpreting the art of Gustav Klimt as Germanic and embracing the politics of Karl Lueger. From the 1960s on, a renewed emphasis on Vienna 1900 as the cosmopolitan and Jewish birthplace of the modern world elided and repressed the shame of the Nazi period.
As always, the AHY includes reviews of major books on Habsburg/post-Habsburg history. This volume features forty-six book reviews of works spanning chronological periods from the medieval to the contemporary as well as review essays focused on new approaches to the person and reign of Emperor Charles V and to the life and work of Czech avant-garde artist Toyen. This edition also includes Franz Szabo's moving remembrance of the late Ernst Wangermann.
Our sincere thanks to the authors and reviewers for their excellent contributions to this fifty-third volume of the AHY. A special thanks to Timothy McDonald and James Gresock, our dedicated assistant editors, as well as to the editorial board, our correspondents, and our partners at Cambridge University Press.
