“The French Revolution is over” asserted François Furet in 1978.Footnote ¹ This sentence is surely an unusual way to speak of an event that was separated from the time of the book's publication by five French republics and two French empires. Yet with this seemingly banal claim, Furet aimed to show how writing the history of the Revolution was not merely about the past. The story of Revolution was a “story of beginnings” and “a discourse about identity,” with a foothold in what was to come. Conservatives, liberals, and socialists all had their own distinctive “Revolutions.” For others, like Jules Michelet, history was a way to heal the national wounds of his time: “One people! One country! Once France! Never, I pray you, let us become two nations,” he cried in response to the mutually antagonistic views of the recent French past.Footnote ²

A century after the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, the time has come for us to say: Austria-Hungary is no more. The small cities of Donaueschingen and Furtwangen, as Claudio Magris reminds us in his novel Danube, laid claims against each other that the location of Danube's true source is inside their municipal borders.Footnote ³ Like the river Danube, the Donaumonarchie has acquired a timeless aspect, the essence of which has been contested as much if not more since its fall as it was during its existence. One hundred years ago, the Donaumonarchie came to its historical estuary, which fed into the nation-states of the “New Europe.” The centenary of the demise of the Habsburg Empire is thus also the centenary of the birth of Yugoslavia, another multi-national entity that provokes conflicting conclusions regarding its essence. The anniversary of the Monarchy's demise and Yugoslavia's birth therefore offer a good opportunity to reflect on the historiographies around the two states. Consistently but not always consciously, Habsburg and Yugoslav historians were trying to make sense of the loss, and of the creation. The time has come for us to contemplate how our interpretation of Habsburg history in its final decades and our reading of Yugoslav naissance are influenced by the fact that, just as with the histories of the French Revolution, these stories of beginnings and ends were also discourses about identity. As these discourses underpinned the turbulent history of the twentieth century, I believe that the most important question is: What are the loudest silences of the two historiographies?

Perhaps even before 1914, there was some uniqueness in the relationship between the Habsburg Empire and the South Slavs. Certainly, the Sarajevo assassination tied the end of Habsburg and beginning of Yugoslav history intrinsically together, becoming the nodal point of the two histories. The three main conspirators that stood behind the Sarajevo assassination served their sentences in the Theresienstadt prison. Harsh treatment, in the form of occasional beatings, scarce meals, and solitary confinement in cold cells, meant that none of the conspirators managed to survive the war. Gavrilo Princip survived the longest; he died in April of 1918. Immediately afterwards, a group of Austro-Hungarian soldiers received an order to bury his remains in an unmarked grave. Corporal František Lébl—a solider who was sympathetic to Princip, his co-conspirators, and the Slav cause—secretly sketched the location of the grave. After the war, the grave was excavated and a skeleton without an arm was found. There was no doubt it was Princip. Prior to his death, his arm had been amputated due to improperly healed broken bones.

An implicit quarrel over the destiny of Princip's remains symbolically marked the origin of a dilemma; what were Princip's principles? Was he, in the words of Safet Isović’s 1976 folk song, “a young hero of Bosnia,” or a man whose soul was “corrupted with bad literature,” as claimed by the Habsburg state prosecutor in September of 1914?Footnote ⁴ Because the Great War started after the Sarajevo assassination, the answer to the question what were Princip's principles was intrinsically bound with the questions of war guilt and whether the change of 1918 was primarily one of creation or of destruction. Stefan Collini noticed that just as there is no such thing as “theory-free history,” there is also no such thing as “history-free theory.”Footnote ⁵ It seems, however, that the weight of history here was often above the limit of what historiographical scale could endure, and its product was often either a victimization narrative or a story of glorification.

Of all the successor states, Yugoslavia took the greatest part of Austria-Hungary with it: its share of the former Habsburg lands was slightly larger than the whole of Czechoslovakia. However, we can say that the newly formed state of the South Slavs did more than inherit its territory. It also took over Habsburg problems as well. The political issues faced by both Yugoslavias, the interwar Kingdom and the Socialist Federation, were similar to the burdens that were faced by the Monarchy: national conflicts and center/periphery strains that never went away. One can even say that Yugoslav history was duplicating the dynamics of the history of the Habsburg Empire during its last decades insofar as both Yugoslavias struggled to find their own Ausgleich.

Just as the story of Gavrilo Princip stands as a Weberian “ideal type” of the “terrorist or freedom fighter” dilemma, depictions of the Habsburg Empire have ranged from lost multicultural paradise to “prison of nations.” The historiography of Yugoslavia is not less equivocal, with assessments of particularly socialist Yugoslavia ranging from expressions of nostalgia for its “brotherhood and unity” project to blaming its nationality policies for the war that followed its collapse. Furthermore, not only Austria-Hungary, but also Yugoslavia was deemed by many as a country that was doomed to fail.Footnote ⁶

Yugoslavia and Austria-Hungary are not the only historical formations that provoke conflicting conclusions. However, at the intersection of Yugoslav and Habsburg history there seems to be a division of unique depth, one that in itself forced certain questions upon historians, and hid others. In this essay, I aim to analyze how the turbulent history of the last hundred years push historians towards different “truths.” Can we simply claim that there were always many vantage points, and that from every single one of them Austria-Hungary and Yugoslavia appear different? I would say no. Even though a mountain looks different from various positions, and changing weather conditions can influence its visibility, every mountain has only one shape.

I will use the metaphor of the “mountain” to approximate certain essential characteristics of both late Habsburg and Yugoslav history. These two mountains, these histories, lean on each other through 1918. Complete understanding of the intersection of Yugoslav and Habsburg history is not possible without at the very least pondering whether we have access to what lies behind the curtain, whether we can access the past without inadvertently engaging primarily with narratives that originated on the desks of historians. The questions that emerge is whether the historiographies merely unearthed the uncharted part of the map of the past, or became the map itself? Did historiographies bare the mountains’ contours or became the contours? The historiography of the Habsburg Empire, in its main lines and with its volatile character, looks surprisingly like the historiography of Yugoslavia. The two historiographies correspond and relate to each other, although they also talk past one another. I will argue that historiography is an important part of these mountains. In other words, the loudest silence of both historiographies is the fact that historiography itself constitutes at least in part the “mountain” of both Yugoslav and Habsburg history.

Historiographies seized this function in two different ways. On the one hand, they were inherently presentist in nature, and on the other, both are characterized by a defensive tone in their narratives, and are often engaged in an implicit debate with alternative models while propagating assumptions about what makes for viable state formation. Storytelling was tacitly the linchpin between the “necessity” of the Habsburg Empire and the “inevitability” of nation-states. The underlying character of the narrative was presentist, understood as “the sense that only the present exists, a present characterized at once by the tyranny of an instant and by the treadmill of an unending now.”Footnote ⁷ I will begin my argumentation about the importance of the present moment to the essence of history with two types of examples: first, with an analysis of how historians either used falsified documents or have falsified the documents themselves, and second, by an exploration of two cases when historical research was not published. In the last part of the essay, I will demonstrate that both historiographies—or rather the self-conscious falsifications or holes within them—buttressed these mountains because they anchored themselves to the same dilemma, namely the question of what was created or what was lost.

John Deak recently pointed to the historiographic durability of the anti-Habsburg propaganda created during the First World War.Footnote ⁸ There should be no doubt that historians of the Entente played their part in the war effort. At the same time, throughout its existence, the Monarchy used all of its capacities to promote suitable interpretations of contemporary politics, which later overflowed into post-1918 historiography, such that the intimate connection between politics and historiography was not the sole purview of the Entente. In 1908, Austro-Hungarian foreign minister Aehrenthal asked historian Heinrich Friedjung to examine certain documents and to write about Serb-Habsburg relations. In his text, Friedjung claimed that the enmity of Serbia towards Austria-Hungary was “without comparison in modern European history.”Footnote ⁹ The concept of Großserbien, which was not a new coinage, was used to denounce dissatisfaction with the Monarchy. The explanation went that the Slavs were spellbound by the propaganda coming out of the independent Kingdom of Serbia and were therefore seduced by the desire for an enlarged Serbian national state. Oscar Tartaglia, a Yugoslav nationalist, explained the politics in The Flag, his biweekly political magazine founded in early 1914, as follows: “The Flag was openly revolutionary and nationalist, and publicly propagated and spread the idea of political unity of all Yugoslavs, which at the time amounted to ‘Greater Serbian’ propaganda.”Footnote ¹⁰ Shortly after Friedjung's text was published, it was discovered that he had been given documents forged by the Austro-Hungarian foreign ministry. The forgery severely damaged the reputations of both the Monarchy and Friedjung as a historian.Footnote ¹¹

The “truth” about the dissatisfaction within the Empire and the assassination of Franz Ferdinand did not lose its contemporary relevance with the passage of time. When Nazi Germany invaded and occupied Yugoslavia in 1941, its troops were interested not only in Yugoslav resources, but also in the contents of the Belgrade archives. Historian Hans Übersberger was approached by Joachim von Ribbentrop to write an analysis.Footnote ¹² In 1943, Übersberger published a text pointing to the “guilt” of Russia and Serbia for the outbreak of the First World War.Footnote ¹³ He based his argumentation on some sentences from the documents captured by the German Army in Yugoslavia. In his translations into German, however, Übersberger falsified the original documents, adding words and commas.Footnote ¹⁴ It was not the first time that someone had meddled in this or a similar manner. Out of all Sarajevo conspirators, only one managed to escape the Habsburg authorities in Bosnia. His name was Muhamed Mehmedbašić. The Habsburg state prosecutor Leo Pfeffer, who was in charge of the official investigation, suspected that police had deliberately let Mehmedbašić go so that he would not face trial. The authorities wanted a list of arrestees comprised purely of Serbian names.Footnote ¹⁵

As we have seen, Friedjung and Übersberger wrote in answer to certain contemporary political “needs.” Other expedients sometimes entailed not publishing already finished manuscripts. Arguably, the most detailed account of relations between Serbia and Austria-Hungary is Relations between Serbia and Austria-Hungary in the XX Century, by Vladimir Ćorović. The book was commissioned by the Yugoslav government in 1930 as a way of countering the claims of German and Austrian historians regarding the origins of the Great War. Ćorović, a historian trained in Vienna and Munich and, prior to 1914, the head of the library of the Landesmuseum für Bosnien und die Herzegovina in Sarajevo, was an obvious choice for the task. In 1935, the book was printed and was ready for distribution, but it never reached libraries. The Yugoslav Prime Minister, Milan Stojadinović, stopped its publication because he thought it would provoke Germany at a time when Stojadinović was attempting to steer Yugoslav foreign policy towards better relations with Berlin. As a consequence, almost all of the volumes were destroyed.Footnote ¹⁶

In the 1960s, the Croatian historian Josip Horvat wrote Youth Rebellion 1911–1914. The book dealt with the Yugoslav-oriented Croatian nationalist youth, with a special focus on three assassination attempts on Habsburg officials in Croatia. Horvat died soon after finishing the manuscript. The book itself was only published forty years later. If Ćorović’s book was pulped for the benefit of Yugoslavia's foreign affairs, Horvat's manuscript was a victim of Yugoslavia's inner problems. The late 1960s and afterwards was a time of political turmoil in Yugoslavia, when the Croatian Spring embodied the rise of Croatian nationalism. Croatian literary critic and writer, Branko Matan, argues that in that kind of atmosphere there simply “could not be any special interest” for Horvat and his book about “naive and romantic Yugoslavism.”Footnote ¹⁷ The more positive stance towards the Habsburgs was a way of distancing from the common Yugoslav past. As the crisis in Yugoslavia, and in the entire eastern bloc, was deepening, the Habsburg legacy was also a way to get closer to “Europe.” When, at the invitation of Franjo Tudjman, Otto von Habsburg visited Zagreb on the eve of the first elections in Yugoslavia in 1990, von Habsburg said that the Habsburg family was not the way they were represented in Yugoslav textbooks and that it was his moral duty to help Croatia gain independence and regain European identity. By implication, having a European identity needed to be achieved by getting away from Yugoslavia. Horvat's book did not fit well into this narrative. Its protagonists had a different vision of how one should get to “Europe.” When the members of the Croatian pro-Yugoslav youth organized the attempted assassination of a Habsburg commissioner for Croatia in Zagreb in 1912, one of them noted that with this assassination “Croatia had entered Europe.”Footnote ¹⁸

It seems that there is one general principle to which both historiographies are subordinated: focusing solely on what was created, in the case of Yugoslavia, or on what was lost, in the case of the Habsburg Empire. This seems to be the principle that can accommodate these multiple descriptions of the same reality. In the Yugoslav case I will try to demonstrate this by analyzing how the passage of time and the changing answer to the question “what was created” changed perspectives, while in the Habsburg case I will elucidate how the two different groups of Habsburg historians were equally tied to the question “what was lost” with the disappearance of the Empire.

Two prominent communist intellectuals published books about Mlada Bosna (Young Bosnia) and the Sarajevo Assassination.Footnote ¹⁹ Veselin Masleša wrote his Young Bosnia in 1940, and Vladimir Dedijer published his Road to Sarajevo in 1966. Both Masleša and Dedijer represented the official party line, and yet they produced completely different books. Masleša argued that Mlada Bosna did not have “enough knowledge,” and claimed that the politics of Mlada Bosna represented nothing more than the most ordinary aggregate of various ideas. Masleša used his book to postulate contemporary Communist dogmas about the nature of Yugoslavia and attacked the post-1918 settlement. Not surprisingly, he saw Mlada Bosna as an “inappropriate expression” of the people who lived in Bosnia and Herzegovina.Footnote ²⁰

Masleša was killed during the Second World War and he did not live to witness the creation and trajectory of Communist Yugoslavia, an experience that fundamentally shaped Dedijer's view. Dedijer published his The Road to Sarajevo in 1966. His key interpretations of the Sarajevo Assassination are located in two chapters, titled Primordial Rebels and Kosovo Tyrannicide. He saw the key for understanding the Sarajevo Assassination in a spontaneous revolutionary spirit, and he insisted on a connection between the Sarajevo assassination and the place of tyrannicide in the national folk epic. Additionally, Dedijer argued that it is difficult to connect Mlada Bosna with any other ideology of their era.Footnote ²¹ This is quite a bewildering claim, given that precisely Dedijer's own book is the best source for refuting such a statement.

Dedijer tried to point out that the folk epic, understood as a fervent force of national pride and an instigator of the fight for national independence, was the impetus behind Mlada Bosna and its members’ wish to free themselves from Austria. He implied that the idea of sacrifice is the essence of South Slav pride and identity. Nonetheless, apart from phrases like “revolutionary Yugoslavism” that were supposed to be an explanation per se, he did not show a reliable link between “South Slav primordial pride” and the ideas of the Mlada Bosna. Princip and his conspirator friends were translators of Friedrich Nietzsche, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Stefan Zweig. Thanks to them, the Futurist Manifesto and German expressionist poetry potently transgressed the borders of the South Slav world. Their vision of the future was shaped by Petr Kropotkin and Mikhail Bakunin, and their role model was Rakhmetov, protagonist of Nikolai Chernyshevskii's novel What Is To Be Done? Parts of their manifestoes were sometimes simply copied from Johann Gottlieb Fichte's and Giuseppe Mazzini's writings. They compared Habsburg rule in their homeland, Bosnia and Herzegovina, with Russian rule in Finland, British rule in India, and French and Italian endeavors in Africa.Footnote ²² Yet for Dedijer, it was all about the South Slavs and their character.

Official Yugoslav patriotism after the Second World War was marked by enormous revolutionary enthusiasm, self-confidence, and national pride, but also with a belief that, because of the willingness to fight shown during the Second World War, Yugoslavs were exceptional in their love of freedom.Footnote ²³ The great schism between Josip Broz Tito and Joseph Stalin in 1948 served to intensify that feeling. The pressure placed by the USSR on Tito solidified Yugoslav unity, and the answer of one group of intellectuals was to advocate romantic revolutionary Yugoslavism as an ideology whose key feature was the spirit of independence and rebellion. Among their favorite historical examples were the episodes of South Slav rebellions against great empires, Ottoman and Habsburg.Footnote ²⁴ After The Road to Sarajevo, Dedijer wrote The Lost Battle of Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, a book about the 1948 Tito-Stalin split. It was dedicated to another hero of national independence and pride, Jan Palach, the young Czechoslovak patriot who decided to resist Soviet invasion in 1968 by self-immolation. During the last years of his life, Dedijer was planning, together with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, to write a book about South Slav and South American heroes.Footnote ²⁵ Quite telling is the fact that one of the Sarajevo assassins, Cvetko Popović, decided to write his own version of the events only after he concluded that Dedijer, Masleša, and others wrongly depicted the ideological underpinnings of Mlada Bosna.Footnote ²⁶

Unlike Yugoslav historiography, which was related to the question of what was created, the post-1918 Habsburg historiography was anchored to the question of what was lost. Alan Sked noted the difference between two different schools of Habsburg history.Footnote ²⁷ The first mainly focused on the great power status and the foreign policy of the monarchy. Austro-Hungarian history was evaluated in relation to international stability, the understanding of which was shaped by the political views of the observer.Footnote ²⁸ In certain moments of the twentieth century, the Habsburg Empire, at least in its final decades, was seen as a mere appendage to Germany. This seems to be the proper context for reading Alan Taylor's The Habsburg Monarchy 1809–1918 and the last chapters of his The Course of German History, which he published in 1941 and 1945.

Periodically, it seems, the greatest danger to the Empire's image, and often to its very existence, was a dominant and powerful Germany. Especially after 1945, however, it seemed that the disappearance of the Habsburgs created a power vacuum waiting to be filled.Footnote ²⁹ The first such attempt was made by Nazi Germany, and afterwards by the USSR. Post-Habsburg space was seen as a region pinched between two totalitarianisms. No one put it more bluntly than George Kennan in 1979: “The Austro-Hungarian Empire still looks better, as a solution to the tangled problems of that part of the world, than anything that has succeeded it.”Footnote ³⁰

The other school, Sked argues, was shaped by the writing of exiles. Elsewhere, Sked added: “it is certainly no coincidence that much of the writing on the Monarchy has come from those who suffered, or from the sons of those who suffered, at the hands of these [successor] regimes.”Footnote ³¹ The Second World War represented the time when Habsburg studies began to flourish.Footnote ³² Robert Kann's The Multinational Empire, published in 1950, written with the experience of 1940s behind him, claimed that “Austria withstood the national onslaught for over two generations.”Footnote ³³ The present became the only viewpoint for evaluating the past. Because of what happened during the Second World War—and we should keep in mind that all the locations in the film Schindler's List used to be part of the Monarchy—the interwar writings about the monarchy were devalued after 1945.Footnote ³⁴

As the crisis in Yugoslavia was deepening, central Europe also gained its own “other” in the Balkans. In early 1990s, Tony Judt was the minority when he argued that “there is a Central European fantasy of a never-never Europe of tolerance, freedom and cultural pluralism [ . . . ] [T]o suppose that this part of the Continent was once a near-paradise of cultural, ethnic, and linguistic multiplicity and compatibility, producing untold cultural and intellectual riches, has been part of the Western image in recent years.”Footnote ³⁵ Yugoslavia failed, it was argued, because it did not have the “cosmopolitan tolerance” of the Habsburg Empire.Footnote ³⁶

A century ago Yugoslavia inherited large parts of Habsburg territory. Their histories became entangled—the one's end was another's beginning. In this essay my goal was not to use a slice of historiography and narrate from it, but instead to take 1918 as a center point for looking backwards and forwards. The cyclical spiral of change created by 1918 made the year loom over the historiography, and that has tied the historical perspectives with the moment when one world was replaced by another. Consequently, this year, annus horribilis or annus mirabilis, binds historians intrinsically with the question of what was lost and what was created. In a way, 1918 is often both a starting and an end point for thinking about the Monarchy and the successor states. Furthermore, the power of that question is here to stay and it experiences new permutations. In 2018, Habsburg history is not only about what was lost, but also about what could be lost: “just as the absence of the Monarchy proved its absolute necessity, however, so we should be more aware than we are of how poorly off contemporary Europe would be without the European Union, for all its flaws.”Footnote ³⁷ At the same time, since a quarter of a century has passed since the breakup of Yugoslavia, Yugoslav historiography has become detached from “what was created” and has been increasingly concerned with “what was lost.” Sympathy and nostalgia for Communist Yugoslavia has provoked a lot of wishful thinking among historians, both before and especially after its collapse. The country's achievements have often been overemphasized.Footnote ³⁸

During the one hundred years that separates us from 1918, two historiographies developed almost duplicating dynamics. For both Yugoslav and Habsburg historiography, the change of 1918 was never simply the past. The historiography was presentist for one crucial reason—simply too much history happened in the meantime. One can even say that the only continuity in the last hundred years was discontinuity. Both Yugoslavias disappeared in wars, and the history of post-Habsburg space in general was anything but tranquil. In his text, Ondřej Slačálek has shown how contemporary politics shaped the memory of the Habsburg Empire. My focus has been on historiography. Fritz Stern noted: “The past did not know what we now know. It is our [historians’] task to try to re-create likely hopes and apprehensions of the people at the time.”Footnote ³⁹ Within the spatial bounds of a single essay, I have attempted to point to what I believe is the greatest silence of both Yugoslav and Habsburg historiographies: that the nature of our knowledge, the shape of the mountain that we see, was framed by the turbulent course of the twentieth century, which pushed onlookers towards different watchtowers. These onlooker-historians not only wavered between the position of observer and participant, the answers they sought in the past were often pre-formed by the nature of their questions. In contrast to Stern, their past already included what we now know.