Mirna Zeman's book, resulting from a PhD dissertation (Paderborn, 2009), deals with representations and images applied to Croatia. She draws upon existing research on the discovery of Eastern Europe (Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment, Stanford, 1996), as well as Balkanism (Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, New York, 1997), while keeping a sound distance from them. She acknowledges that there was a preexisting discourse on Croatia before the eighteenth century and that it was also elaborated by some Slavs themselves. No prevailing unity is assumed in those discourses, which mainly pertain to a Western perspective, so that a complex ambivalence surfaces from the analysis.
The period covered stretches from the government of Maria Theresa (1740) to the foundation of the Illyrian Provinces (1809). During that prenational time, German-speaking authors dealt with the presence of others in Croatia, Slavonia, and Dalmatia. Those regions were certainly not among the most visited in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, remaining on the margin of travelers' interest as “internal peripheries” (13), even if the variegated texts exhumed testify to the manifold links that existed between Croatia and other Habsburg lands. Those texts are admittedly heterogeneous, stemming from actual and armchair travelers, from the Emperor Joseph II himself to some of his subjects, including a defender of the Serbian Orthodox Church. How, why, and where the images of the Croats came from are the main questions raised in the book.
The author does not pretend to have collected all the available sources on the subject, but she instead delivers an in-depth analysis of a substantial corpus deliberately limited to a dozen texts, carefully chosen in order to explain their diverging characteristics. The microanalysis of the texts, as well as the insightful reconstruction of the contexts that gave the decisive impetus for the travelers to undertake their written descriptions of Croatia, efficiently prove that the conjunction of knowledge and power is never quite the same. In a time of scarce firsthand knowledge available on that peripheral but strategically situated region, gathering information during a journey and giving it a written form cannot occur in the case of Austrian travelers without at the least an implicit support of the authorities. The commercial, political, military, or cultural elements described have a pragmatic, as well as changing, weight in the context of evolving imperial schemes of government. But travelers with no allegiance to the Habsburgs move freely out of that submission.
Zeman delineates with accuracy her research agenda, defining the terms used (such as “Imagothemen” and “Illyrians”) and clearly revealing her theoretical background. She gives due attention to each author under consideration, noting his own identification with a community and the presumed audience he had in mind when compiling and structuring information on Croatian lands.
Using Michel Foucault's concept of governmentality, Zeman sees description of state interests as the guiding forces behind the traveler's journey and the publication of his account. The imperial context makes Peter Simon Pallas's expedition to Catherine II's Siberia appear as a model for Balthasar Hacquet, whose profile seems to be the Habsburg counterpart of Alberto Fortis's travels in Dalmatia for the imperial interests of Venice.
The Hungarian travelers identify the local population either clearly as Croats and thus pertaining to the Kingdom of Hungary (Stephan von Köröskény), or as inhabitants of Hungary speaking a Slavic language (Vincenz Batthyány). The context of both Hungarian case studies presented, where there is no use of the Slavic integrative term “Illyria” but a clear Hungarian collocation, eloquently contrasts with the absence of any stereotypes and national assignation in the diary Emperor Joseph II kept during his Croatian journey in 1775. This diary was primarily intended for his mother Maria Theresa and did not need to be as explicit as texts published for a broader audience. Zeman's decision to include the study of only that (recently published) manuscript and of Hungarian perspectives reinforces the uniqueness and illuminating potential of the other studied material.
The book ends with texts that reflect a shift in the perceptions of otherness: while previous texts described it in the benevolent vein of the Aufklärung, these texts introduced a decidedly negative perception of otherness in racial and radical terms. Armchair travelers exemplify the latent legitimizing of the cultural and civilizational difference between German-speaking countries and Slavic periphery that would become pervasive in the subsequent period. All that heterogeneous material is summarized in the last chapter. Images of military ability, as well as of noble savages (which were not only the product of Austrian statisticians, but also of local Slavonic writers) practicing oral poetry and displaying physical strength, but definitely perceived as subordinates in the economic system, form the core of the stereotypes assigned to different groups of people elaborated and transmitted in the analyzed writings.
The Republic of Ragusa (Dubrovnik) has not been included, without any further explanation (35), though it certainly would have provided other perspectives, such as confirming or undermining the assumption that German Balkanism was linked with the Croatian lands. A further analysis of the difference between published material and manuscripts would also have shed more light on the circulation of stereotypes. Nevertheless, the study provides some largely unknown texts carefully placed in the very specific context of their production and publication. As a convincing way of reading these texts, Zeman's analysis contributes to a better understanding of Austrian imperial agenda and the production of scholarship it enhanced.
