This year, distinguished historian of the Habsburg Monarchy and former Director of the Center for Austrian Studies Gary B. Cohen delivered the Center's annual Robert Kann Memorial Lecture. Cohen's lecture examined cultural life in fin-de-siècle Prague. The lecture investigated the sometimes surprising ways in which different urban sites of cultural production, from the opera to theater to concerts to art exhibitions, poetry readings, and literary journals, frequently functioned to bring together Praguers whose different linguistic practices or political loyalties might otherwise have kept them in opposing political and social camps. Although Prague public life was often divided by national loyalty, Cohen's examples reveal a host of situations in which nationhood was simply inadequate—or irrelevant—to organizing cultural life. Cohen's analysis is particularly impressive in its nuanced examination of individual experience and memory to chart the places where social life did not divide according to the expected nationalist or linguistic differences.
Two articles in this volume commemorate important historic anniversaries in 2014: Alan Sked's reappraisal of Austria's role in the Napoleonic Coalition's so-called Wars of Liberation of 1813–1814, and Maureen Healy's compelling portrait of quotidian concerns in Vienna on 28 May 1914, a month before the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand. Sked argues that even today many historians take their cue from Heinrich von Treitschke's kleindeutsch oriented account of the wars of liberation, and he offers a strongly opposing view of Austria's centrality to both the coalition and its eventual military success. Healy uses close readings of what we might call “small” stories reported by Vienna's newspapers on 28 May 1914 as a way to interrogate historians' retrospective anticipations of the coming of World War I. By focusing on these stories, Healy not only complicates our sense of what exactly constituted “the ordinary” in prewar Vienna but, by extension, makes clear how this “messy ordinariness” remained a part of the extraordinary events that earned the name World War I.
One terrifying product of the experience of World War I in Habsburg Central Europe was the mass movement of refugees, especially from the eastern Crownlands of Galicia and Bukovina. Rebekah Klein-Pejšová's article examines Jewish refugee policy—especially refugee camps—both in Austria-Hungary and in the early years of the first Czechoslovak Republic. Klein-Pejšová focuses in particular on examples from what is present-day Slovakia (formerly Hungary) both as the point of entry for refugees from the east, and as the site where a change in their treatment between regimes was most evident. Linking treatment of refugees to the question of state legitimacy, she demonstrates how the new postwar regime distanced itself from its imperial predecessor quite conscientiously through its refugee policies.
In her article on early-modern convent entry sermons in Habsburg Central Europe, Veronika Čapská demonstrates how the intrepid historian might effectively use literary texts and objects of material culture to gain a broader understanding of convent life and oral cultural traditions in the early modern period. Little is known—and even less is written—about the daily life practices or the life cycles of communities of nuns in East Central Europe. Čapská's article offers textual readings of convent entry sermons in order to gain both a sense of a critical moment in a nun's life and to capture the remaining vestiges of an otherwise lost oral culture.
Two authors in the 2014 volume offer carefully contextualized sketches of Imperial thinkers whose careers spanned the mid to the end of the Enlightenment in Austria. Michael O'Sullivan offers a complex portrait of Hungarian Count Karl Reviczky (1737–1793), a diplomat and bureaucrat under Joseph II, who was also an accomplished orientalist and translator of Ottoman documents and Persian lyric ghazals. O'Sullivan's analyses of Reviczky, and specifically of his intellectual pursuits, reveal an Enlightenment cosmopolitan, Hungarian patriot, and Imperial loyalist for whom language and translation became symbolic means to include more people in the nation, and for whom the rise of a Magyar vernacular toward the end of his life constituted a danger to his Enlightenment vision of society. Christine Ottner examines the work of archivist and historian Joseph Chmel (1798–1858), a founding member of the Austrian Academy of the Sciences and a key figure within the newly developing historical profession in Vormärz Austria. Ottner interprets Chmels' professional contributions both to historical practice in Austria and to historiography, by relating his specific methodology to his historical-political understanding of the character of the Habsburg monarchy.
Two articles seek to revise our thinking about the character of interwar Austria. Johannes Thaler analyzes the fascinating and complex relationship between the Dolfuss-Schuschnigg dictatorship, on the one hand, and pro-Habsburg legitimists in Austria, on the other hand. According to Thaler, Legitimism played a far more important—but also ambiguous—role in Austrian politics in the 1930s than has been previously admitted. For one, since the Dolfuss-Schuschnigg regime tolerated Legitimism, it often could become a forum for making veiled critiques of the government at public meetings or rallies, even by former Socialists. Using the long lost (until the 1990s) archive of the Fatherland Front, Thaler shows how the regime used toleration or even sponsorship of the Legitimist movement to build popular support for an independent Austria in the face of Nazi threats, while Austrians themselves often used the Legitimist movement as a front for articulating criticism of the regime. Mark Lewis's article examines largely failed efforts by the Austrian and Yugoslav police to cooperate in repressing Croatian emigré Ustaša terrorists in Austria. The article offers a fascinating analysis of early transnational efforts to police an avowedly terrorist movement, while at the same time demonstrating how particular political agendas that dominated both the Austrian and Yugoslav police forces limited the potential extent and effectiveness of any cooperation. In Lewis's opinion, both political concerns and the limits of specific police practices outweighed any movement toward police bureaucratization and professionalization some historians date to this period.
Finally, Bernhard Weidinger offers a persuasive account of the influential role played by Austro-German nationalist university fraternities or Burschenschaften in the sometimes violent conflict over the status of South Tirol/Alto Adige in the 1950s and 1960s. Weidinger demonstrates, among other points, that these German nationalist associations publicly claimed to stand for national self-determination in contexts such as the South Tirol/Alto Adige, where German speakers constituted a visible minority. At the same time, however, within Austria itself they violently opposed the granting of comparable rights to the Slovene-speaking minority in Carinthia.
The 2014 Yearbook also takes note of the death of a distinguished former Austrian and historian of Austria and Germany, Klemens von Klemperer (1916–2012), who died in December of 2012.
Once again the editors would like especially to thank the many outstanding scholars who contributed book reviews to this volume, as well as to those who generously, willingly, and anonymously agreed to evaluate article manuscript contributions to the journal. Each of you constitutes a critical part of our larger scholarly community, and without your tireless efforts, we would not be able to produce the Austrian History Yearbook. We thank each of you.
