In 1911 Bavarian composer Richard Strauss and Austrian poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal began to contemplate a new opera (following the success of Der Rosenkavalier), and the poet proposed a fairy-tale subject that would eventually become Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman without a Shadow). The leading characters included a fairy-tale emperor and empress (tenor and soprano) who reigned over “The Empire of the Southeastern Islands.” As composer and librettist began their work in 1911, in a Europe largely dominated by emperors and empresses, Hofmannsthal’s idea for a fairy-tale empire could be viewed as a symbolic reflection of the real Habsburg empire in which the poet actually lived.Footnote ¹ By the time the opera came to the stage in 1919, however, after World War I, the Habsburg, Hohenzollern, and Romanov empires had all been defeated, overthrown, and abolished, so that the “Empire of the Southeastern Islands” could appear simply as a fantasy domain in the new Wilsonian world where emperors and empresses were well on their way to becoming altogether fairy-tale figures.

A new book on eastern Europe and Southeast Asia explores some of the experiences and impressions of Habsburg travelers visiting the British and Dutch East Indies; they reported back on the islands and peninsulas that would eventually constitute Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia, but might have been imagined and mentally mapped as “The Empire of the Southeastern Islands.” Edited by Jan Mrázek, a Czech-born, American-educated professor of Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore, the book is a collection of contributions from a scholarly symposium, entitled Escaping Kakania: Eastern European Travels in Colonial Southeast Asia. It is not a straightforward matter to define this subject: an unsystematic sampling of travelers coming from somewhere between Germany and Russia who voyaged to somewhere between China and Australia. In fact, “inbetweenness” becomes a part of the definition of the subject, playing upon the uncertain identities of the travelers and the archipelagic extension of the destinations, peripheral Europeans discovering peripheral Asia (4). The travelers, as this volume suggests, were of intermediary European status: Habsburg subjects who sometimes considered themselves semi-colonial peoples encountering on their travels the fully colonial subjects of European empire in Asia. Mrázek himself, as a Czech scholar in Singapore, with wide-ranging interests in Indonesian gamelan music and wayang kulit puppet theater would be a perfect subject for a contribution to this volume were he not himself the editor. In the introduction, trying to construct a little bit of theoretical framework, he argues that the travelers, because of their origins in eastern Europe, exhibited a “multiplicity of selves” with ambivalent perspectives, characterized by a “disorienting interplay of (self)-orientalizations and (self)-occidentalizations” (14).

It has been argued that “Eastern Europe” itself was invented in the eighteenth century as a domain of demi-orientalism, with western Europe defining itself through the construction of a complementary other half, pejoratively conceived as less civilized.Footnote ² Escaping Kakania suggests the ways in which the tensions between self-orientalization and self-occidentalization constituted a characteristic dynamic for the peoples of eastern Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and framed their perspectives on the wider world. The travelers were, as suggested by the book’s title, inhabitants of Kakania, the fictive nickname for the Habsburg empire playfully proposed by Robert Musil in his long and unfinished novel from the 1930s: The Man without Qualities. The double K of Kakania came from the political brand of kaiserlich-und-königlich (imperial and royal) while also indulging a certain childish humor concerning the land of Kaka. Yet the double K also allows for Asian and Pacific allusions: Was Musil playfully aware that “kakanika” was a term for South Asian monetary currency? Or that Herman Melville’s Polynesian sailor Queequeg in Moby Dick came from the fictive island of Kokovoko? Or that Hofmannsthal’s spirit-deity of the Southeastern Islands was named Keikobad?

It was a real country, the Habsburg monarchy, that felt sometimes imaginary even to its own citizens, and all the more implausible in the aftermath of its downfall in 1918. Kakania, as Musil indicated, was not only intermediary in its central European geographical coordinates but also ambivalent in its commitment to European modernity: “A ship was now and then sent off to South America or East Asia, but not too often. There was no ambition for world markets or world power. Here at the very center of Europe, where the world’s old axes crossed, words such as ‘colony’ and ‘overseas’ sounded like something untried and remote” (11). On those intermittent ships to the Far East, departing perhaps from Trieste on the Adriatic, some of the travelers in this volume would discover that the words “colony” and “overseas” were real and meaningful after all.

The Asiatic Company of Trieste dated back to the eighteenth century, and the nineteenth-century Habsburg commitment to overseas commerce in Asia was sometimes more purposeful than Musil allowed. Escaping Kakania could have included a discussion of the ship Giuseppe e Teresa, sailing from Habsburg Livorno in 1776, sponsored by Empress Maria Theresa and Emperor Joseph II in Vienna and Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo in Habsburg Tuscany, on an expedition that attempted to establish a Habsburg imperial outpost in the Nicobar Islands in Southeast Asia, just northwest of Sumatra. The Vienna World Exhibit (Weltausstellung) of 1873, located in the Prater, featured an “Oriental Quarter” (Orient Assemblage) that included a display of products from China and Japan.Footnote ³ In the Chinese city of Tianjin, where an Austro-Hungarian concession was established after the suppression of the Chinese Boxer Rebellion in 1901, there still stands on the Haihe riverbank the modernist Sezession-style Kakanian consulate; it is surrounded by more architecturally old-fashioned neo-Baroque Habsburg palaces that were actually built in the twenty-first century, long after the demise of the Habsburg monarchy and the age of foreign concessions in China. Until 1918, the concession in Tianjin represented Habsburg interests and commerce in China, while today the area remains a sort of commemorative monument to Austria-Hungary, an imagined Kakanian Occident, a theatrical staging of the encounter between the late Qing and late Habsburg empires. Yet if this architectural complex feels fantastical today; in the early twentieth century the Sezession-style consulate actually represented Viennese modernist culture, while presiding over material Habsburg interests in Asia.Footnote ⁴

This Chinese example of displaced Habsburg architecture from the early twentieth century would continue into the post-Habsburg and post-Qing period of the 1920s and 30s when émigré communities from the former Habsburg lands would play a role in the republican China of Chiang Kai-Shek.Footnote ⁵ The Hungarian architect Laszlo Hudec created modernist masterpieces, often in Art Deco style, that are still scattered through the cityscape of Shanghai. The Park Hotel, built by Hudec in 1934, was then the tallest building in Asia, and supposedly inspired the young I. M. Pei to consider the construction of skyscrapers. While China lies outside the purview of the volume Escaping Kakania, which limits its terrain to Southeast Asia, this delimitation feels somewhat arbitrary, as Asian and Pacific travel often moved across conventional Asian regions. Similarly, travel among the tropical Pacific island archipelagoes of Indonesia often reflected broader Pacific interests that included the islands of Polynesia. It is therefore interesting to read Escaping Kakania alongside a recent volume on post-Habsburg architecture in Hawaii, Alfred Preis Displaced: The Tropical Modernism of the Austrian Emigrant and Architect of the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor, edited (and principally written by) Axel Schmitzberger.

Preis was born in Vienna in 1911, just as Adolf Loos was building the most important building of Viennese modernism on the Michaelerplatz, the radically unornamented “Looshaus.” Growing up in postwar Austria and coming from a Jewish family, Preis realized that he had to leave Austria and Europe in 1939 and was fortunate enough to find a job opportunity in Hawaii. His encounter with the islands of Hawaii (not yet a state, still semi-colonial in its relation to the US) was not simply an instance of escaping Kakania in an exotic context. Rather, Preis sought to transplant something of the Habsburg cultural legacy—the modernist architectural approaches of Loos and Otto Wagner, together with the American innovations of Frank Lloyd Wright—to the Pacific context. He pursued an amalgamated modernist style: Habsburg-Hawaiian-American architecture in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. While the title emphasizes Preis’s most famous achievement, the Pearl Harbor Monument, the volume is most interested in how Preis embraced a Hawaiian architectural vocabulary, looking to indigenous heiau temples and lanai courtyard spaces along with lava-rock construction materials. His buildings included a brilliant series of Austrian-Hawaiian private residences, as well as an elementary school, a Methodist church, a Labor Union hall, and even an early postwar shopping mall. While Escaping Kakania is most interested in the ways that Pacific Southeast Asia thoughtfully marked the cultural consciousness of Habsburg travelers, Alfred Preis Displaced is concerned with how post-Habsburg consciousness adaptively marked the cultural development of Pacific Hawaii.

Escaping Kakania, with its focus on east European travel writing about Asia, may be seen as a companion volume to the important collection Under Eastern Eyes: A Comparative History of East European Travel Writing on Europe, edited by Wendy Bracewell and Alex Drace-Francis.Footnote ⁶ Like that earlier collection, Escaping Kakania does not aspire to be comprehensive but, rather, takes a selective sample of travelers whose views sometimes overlap to produce, or perhaps synthesize, an “Eastern European” or “Kakanian” perspective on Southeast Asia. The broader insights suggested by these contributions are connected to east European sensitivity to colonial subordination, insecurity of identity as Europeans, awareness of the force of ethnographic or national solidarity, interest in anthropological observation of unfamiliar populations, and aesthetic engagement with the exotic and picturesque.

Nada Savković provides a contribution about Milan Jovanović, from Habsburg Temesvár/ Timișoara, who traveled as a ship’s doctor for the Austrian Lloyd shipping company in the late nineteenth century. He painted water colors from Malay life, published accounts in Belgrade about his Asian travels, and offered an indictment of European imperialism in Southeast Asia: “So called European civilization seems to be another form of primitive African barbarism,” with Asians “enslaved in their own country” (99). Savković concludes that Jovanović, as a Serb who was born within the Habsburg empire but later lived and worked in Serbia, “felt what life was like under foreign rule” and was therefore more sensitive to the cruelty of empire in Southeast Asia (103). Gábor Pusztai writes about László Székely, a Hungarian Jew who traveled to Dutch Sumatra and ended up working on a tobacco plantation. He did drawings and watercolors of the local population, envisioning in one image a future world-turned-upside-down in which the Europeans would be the coolies pulling rickshaws for the Asians (220). Pusztai suggests that Székely could be sympathetic to his Asian subjects because “his models were outsiders, just like him, the Hungarian Jew among the white colonial elite, dominated by the Dutch” (227). If some east Europeans, by virtue of their own semi-colonial legacy in Europe, were more sympathetic to colonial peoples in Asia, Escaping Kakania argues that other east Europeans looked to Asia in order to affirm their own insecure European identity.

Returning from Southeast Asia to eastern Europe, Székely lived in post-Habsburg Budapest in the 1920s, together with his Dutch wife Madelon Lulofs (formerly the wife of a Dutch planter in Sumatra). They both wrote fictional works about Southeast Asia that were similarly sympathetic and also commercially successful all over Europe, notably her Dutch novels Rubber (1931) and Coolie (1932), and his Hungarian novel From Primeval Forests to Plantations (1933), which was published in English in 1936 in Harper’s Magazine under the title Tropic Fever. In the 1920s British writer Somerset Maugham was traveling in Malaysia and was inspired to write a series of masterpieces of colonial short fiction, like “The Letter” in 1927 (the story of a restless planter’s wife, someone like Madelon Lulofs). Maugham’s work has even recently inspired a post-colonial response in the Malay fiction of Tan Twan Eng, whose novel The House of Doors, which reconsiders the characters and themes of “The Letter,” was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2023.Footnote ⁷ Escaping Kakania does not generally look to the possibility of considering Habsburg travelers in the broader cultural context of European travel to Southeast Asia. Maugham goes unmentioned, though some of the contributions do offer extended and very interesting examples of contemporary Habsburg travelers’ writings, including a kind of anthropologically observed quasi-fiction of Southeast Asia. Székely’s “The Career of Chaw A Hjong” is the tale of a Chinese coolie-entrepreneur in Sumatra, and Ilona Zboray’s “How a Native Helps Himself in Java, If He Has No Money” narrates the staging of a festival wayang kulit puppet play.

Some measure of east European sympathy for Southeast Asian colonial subjects also allowed these travelers to take an anthropological perspective on local peoples they encountered. Mrázek himself makes an excellent contribution on Czech medical doctor Pavel Durdík, who served in the Dutch Indonesian islands in the late 1870s and early 1880s; his own Czech national identity, Mrázek suggests, made Durdík sensitive to the Acehnese people of northern Sumatra and their fierce resistance to Dutch imperial rule. In fact, Durdík compared the Czechs unfavorably to the Acehnese, who appeared more committed to their independence: “Few fought for their native soil with such raging and persistent bravery and military skill as the Acehnese” (76). Durdík’s fellow Czechs back at home in Habsburg Bohemia appeared to him docile by comparison. The modern Aceh insurgency against the Indonesian government continued until 2005.

It might be noted that Benedict Anderson, in Imagined Communities, actually pursues comparisons between the Habsburg empire and Southeast Asia. Writing, for instance, about the possibilities of state-building through official nationalism, Anderson suggests that “a comparison between two such states, Siam and Hungary-within-Austro-Hungary, may prove instructive”Footnote ⁸ (99). Anderson’s idea of nations as “imagined communities” is inevitably cited in academic discussions of nationalism within the Habsburg monarchy, but it is not usually noted by Habsburgists that Anderson’s particular field of research was Southeast Asia and especially Indonesia. He died in 2015 on Java.

The intricacies of Polish national self-consciousness in Southeast Asia are also explored in Escaping Kakania, beginning with Dariusz Kołodziejczyk writing about Teodor Anzelm Dzwonkowski in Dutch service in Southeast Asia between 1788 and 1793; he is the earliest traveler in the volume, his perspective dating back to the late Enlightenment and the age of Polish patriotic affirmation in the Four-Year Sejm. Dzwonkowski mocks the archaic values of Polish Sarmatism and sometimes pretends to be Hungarian, but there is a sense of national pathos in his account of meeting a Polish patriot in 1791 on the spice island of Ambon, an exile who fought against Russia with the Confederation of Bar in the previous generation. “He was married to an Indian woman and had mulatto children, and he kept asking about Poland and the Poles as if he had never been there” (44). Dzwonkowski himself was probably not sufficiently informed about current affairs in Europe to tell the exile about the Polish Constitution of May 3, 1791, with its implicit (and doomed) declaration of independence from Russia. Dzwonkowski in the islands of Southeast Asia might have been put into dialogue with the most important Polish fictional traveler of the Enlightenment, Mikołaj Doświadczyński, the protagonist of a 1776 novel by Ignacy Krasicki. Doświadczyński, traveling in the naive spirit of Voltaire’s Candide, reaches the imaginary utopian island of Nipu.

Rafał Pankowski discusses Joseph Conrad Korzeniowski, who was present in Southeast Asia in the 1880s, and would later (as the novelist Joseph Conrad) write his first novel (in English) with a Dutch Southeast Asian setting, Almayer’s Folly (1895), followed by An Outcast of the Islands (1896). Conrad’s fictional Indonesian village of Sambir was casually named for the town of Sambir, where the Korzeniowski family once lived, in today’s western Ukraine. Pankowski argues that Conrad’s east European background was important for shaping his sense of empire, endowing him with the ambivalence that made him the “Anti-Kipling of Southeast Asia.” Pankowski also discusses Bronisław Piłsudski (the brother of the Polish national leader) who was deported as a revolutionary by the tsarist government to Siberia in the 1880s. He was sent to Siberia by sea, the very long way around, and almost intersected at Singapore with Conrad-Korzeniowski. Piłsudski ended up in the Japanese islands where he married an Ainu woman and anthropologically studied the bear-worshipping Ainu people of Hokkaido, an engagement with Asia that Pankowski partly credits to the anti-imperial impulse of Polish patriotism. Pankowski notes that Piłsudski would later discuss his Asian ethnographic interests with Bronisław Malinowski, one of the founding figures of modern anthropology. Malinowski, who did his fundamental research in the Australasian Trobriand Islands of New Guinea, might have merited a larger role in Escaping Kakania. He was born in Kraków, that is, in Habsburg Galicia, in 1884, an indigenous Kakanian.

The volume concludes with several pieces focused on the post-Habsburg twentieth century, including Marta Grzechnik’s discussion of the Polish Maritime and Colonial League, which sent a floating exhibition of Polish products to Singapore in the 1930s, and Jan Beranek’s study of how the Czech Bata shoe company established itself in Malaysia and Singapore in the 1930s, making use of regional rubber plantations. Bata’s beneficent imperialism involved creating living communities for local workers alongside the regional enterprises. One of the Czech rubber plantation managers explained, “I taught our people to wake up and get to work very early in the morning; established salary rewards based on delivered tasks and concrete results; ensured that every tree was given special care … In order to allow people to have a good night’s rest, I banned card games and introduced a ‘lights out’ rule after 9 pm … When I left five years later, my workers had tears in their eyes when they saw me go: their tuan was strict, but honest and righteous” (297). Indeed, self-righteous: the disciplinary agenda of colonial capitalism affirmed its own sympathetic beneficence, though Grzechnik claims that “the approach taken by the Bata management with respect to their local employees was not burdened with the racial segregation or assumed racial superiority commonly applied by the ruling British” (298–99). The Bata Singapore soccer club was almost entirely Malay and Chinese—but did include a Slovak goalie.

The final contributions actually move into the Cold War period and consider Southeast Asia from the perspective of communist eastern Europe. A thoughtful essay by Michał Lubina considers the important émigré Polish writer Gustaw Herling-Grudziński traveling to newly independent Burma (today Myanmar) in 1952 to speak as a Cold War anti-communist. He seems, however, to have prepared for his journey by reading George Orwell’s Burmese Days, which also made him sort of “Anti-Kipling” (as Orwell was) in his ambivalence about the impact of European colonialism. Lubina notes Herling’s implicit orientalism as filtered through a Polish-Jewish perspective, as when the writer describes the oppressed Karen minority in Burma: “ethnically one may consider Karens a kind of Polish Ukrainians, while geographically an equivalent of Polish Jews” (313). Milovan Djilas was in Burma in 1953, and Nemanja Radonjić offers a fascinating study of Cold War Yugoslav travelers, framed by Yugoslav participation in the non-aligned movement that brought Djilas to Rangoon in 1953 and Tito himself to the Bandung conference in Indonesia in 1955.

Radonjić also considers the anti-communist Yugoslav royalists who ended up in the French Foreign Legion fighting for French imperial rule in Vietnam after World War II. An article from communist Belgrade, published by the newspaper Politika, describes the Yugoslav legionnaire in Vietnam as the ultimate heir of European imperialism, exclaiming, “In Indochina I am a God” (349). It would have been interesting to add to the volume some discussion of Polish architect and archaeologist Kazimierz Kwiatkowski, who was sent from communist Poland in the 1980s to lead the archaeological teams exploring and conserving the Vietnamese sites of My Son, Hoi An, and Hue in post-war Vietnam. He died at Hue in 1997, having outlived communism in Poland but continuing his work in communist Vietnam.

Alfred Preis Displaced, read alongside Escaping Kakania, emphasizes the aesthetic dimensions of identity, that is, what it meant for Preis as an Austrian émigré to engage with a new civic identity as an American and an Hawaiian and, at the same time, to reconsider his sense of architectural style in relation to American and Hawaiian issues and elements. His Pearl Harbor monument at the site of the sunken USS Arizona was certainly an affirmation of his American civic identity and, implicitly, a monument against Japanese imperialism in the Pacific. It was an abstract concave structure, explained thus by Preis: “Wherein the design sags in the center but stands strong and vigorous at the ends, expresses initial defeat and ultimate victory,” while “the overall effect is one of serenity.” The monument seems to float in the water, as if it were itself a white concrete man-made island. Preis was initially interned as a German alien following the bombing of Pearl Harbor (since Austrian Jews emigrated as German citizens following the Nazi annexation of Austria in the Anschluss of March 1938), but later had the opportunity to refashion himself as an American at the same time that Hawaii itself was following the path to statehood, eventually achieved in 1959. The Pearl Harbor Memorial was dedicated in 1962.

In the “tropical modernism” that defined Preis’s domestic and community architecture “serenity” was also clearly a value, with tropical Hawaiian elements making the connection to the Hawaiian landscape. Preis brought to his Hawaiian work the Viennese Raumplan architecture of interlocking spaces, rather than divided rooms, as preached and practiced by Adolf Loos in Vienna, the “organic architecture” of Frank Lloyd Wright, integrating building and landscape, and, finally, the indigenous elements of Hawaiian tropical construction, dating back to before the island was “discovered” by Captain Cook in the eighteenth century. For Preis, emigration was itself a voyage of Pacific discovery, giving him an architectural vocabulary that never existed for his teachers at the Technische Hochschule in Vienna. The elongated Laupahoehoe Elementary School, designed after the tsunami of 1946 and completed in 1952, was built into a hillside on the Big Island of Hawaii, with elongated latticed bands of glass windows, a modernist structure that also made use of local lava-rock. The Moanalua Shopping Center of 1954 in Honolulu, an early American mall, also used lava-rock and created canopy coverings for shade in the indigenous tradition of the lanai. The entrance to the Honolulu Zoo, built in 1963, has a modernist “butterfly” roof with low-rising wings on either side, each of those sides supported by an A-frame hale in indigenous Hawaiian style. The First United Methodist Church in Honolulu brings together diverse indigenous sources, as described by Schmitzberger: “The 1953–1954 constructed sanctuary continued the sourcing of local materiality and referenced pre-contact Hawaiian structures—the hale (house) and the lanai (covered exterior porch). Preis employed characteristics from both elements to create a unique covered open-air structure for worshipping” (155). Escaping from the post-Kakanian maelstrom in 1938, Preis adapted as an Austrian to his new home in Hawaii through what Carl Schorske regarded as the profoundly Viennese medium of aestheticism. Indeed, it is worth remembering that for Schorske aestheticism in fin-de-siècle Vienna functioned as an “escape” from uncomfortable political realities.Footnote ⁹

Kakanian travelers were often aesthetically engaged by Southeast Asia, sometimes in the orientalist mode of exotic fantasy. Iveta Nakládalová writes about Czech writer and traveler Enrique Stanko Vráz, who traveled in New Guinea, Borneo, and Thailand in the 1890s and published in Prague in 1901 his account In Siam, the Land of the White Elephant. It was not, however, white elephants but rather a childhood fantasy of birds of paradise that sent him to New Guinea to discover them in all their natural splendor. His account of Siam was a work of exoticism and aestheticism, the “Fairy Tale of Oriental Lands and the City of Pagodas” (159). He lamented the encroachment of modern civilization on his oriental fairy tale, already nostalgic for a fantasy of the traditional past that existed before his arrival, without quite acknowledging that his own presence, as he traveled with his modern photographic equipment, was a part of the modernizing transformation.

In 1901, the year that Vráz published his book about Siam, Polish botanist Marian Raciborski returned from five years on Java and staged in eastern Galicia, just outside Lʹviv, a Javanese wayang kulit shadow puppet show. Marianna Lis, a Polish theater scholar who herself studied wayang kulit in Indonesia, attempts to reconstruct Raciborski’s puppet show, based on slender documentary testimony, trying to imagine what it might have meant to his audience. She considers Raciborski’s Javanese puppet collection, donated to the ethnographic museum in Kraków (established in 1911) and speculates on which puppets he might have employed in 1901. She cites a novel about Raciborski (written by Bolesław Mrówczyński), published in communist Poland in 1958, viewing Raciborski from a fictive Javanese perspective as someone who combined wayang kulit puppet theater with his nationalist devotion to Polish Romantic poets like Mickiewicz and Słowacki. The novel thus suggests the possibility that Javanese puppet theater might have served as a vehicle for Raciborski to present in stylized oriental form a drama with an implicit Polish national significance.

Lis might also have considered the coincidence that Raciborski’s wayang kulit presentation in 1901 in Habsburg Galicia coincided with the Galician premiere in that very same year of Stanisław Wyspiański’s modernist masterpiece, Wesele (The Wedding), a drama in verse about a poet-groom who marries a peasant-bride, somewhere in the Galician countryside outside Kraków. The marriage represents a spousal consummation of the Polish national community, and the characters, some of them making ghostly appearances from Polish history, sometimes seem more like phantasmagorical shadow puppets than flesh-and-blood individuals. Their final trancelike dance makes them almost into marionettes, their stylized movements beyond their own bodily control.Footnote ¹⁰ The convergence between the culturally imported drama from Southeast Asia and the modernist theater of Młoda Polska (Young Poland), presented coincidentally in the very same year in Habsburg Galicia, might encourage a more parallel approach to the cultural histories of Kakania and Southeast Asia, with vectors of influence and resemblance that go beyond the orientalist perceptions of the European travelers. Ten years later in 1911, when the Kraków ethnographic museum was established, the Viennese poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal had the idea for his opera libretto about the “Empire of the Southeastern Islands,” which was itself perhaps a dreamlike transposition of Habsburg Kakania.