What does Austro-Hungarian urban history look like when we begin with “entangled histories” rather than stories of conflict, division, and exclusion? What sources and methodologies are most likely to yield such histories? Does this approach in turn shed light on the experiences of students, artists, and others who left their home regions to work and study in other parts of the monarchy? This edited volume answers these questions in seventeen essays, eleven in German and six in English. Although the contributors come from across Europe, one of the virtues of this book is that it brings to a wider audience the work of scholars at the University of Zagreb.
The essays are divided into four thematic clusters. The first is urban contexts, and in the book's opening chapter, Moritz Csáky explains that linguistic and cultural heterogeneity defined urban Central Europe. This often created a multifaceted, dynamic process of exchange and mixture, and Csáky uses the example of food and drink to illustrate the cultural hybridity that could emerge in these settings. That nationalism could alter or obscure such practices is made clear in Catherine Horel's chapter on nineteenth-century Budapest. Horel reconstructs Budapest's multicultural past, even as she shows how demographic changes, the 1867 settlement, growing nationalism, and other forces turned Budapest into an increasingly “Hungarian” city. In his study of Zagreb, Filip Šimetin Šegvić usefully reminds us that a hybrid urban culture can emerge not just from within the city itself, but also through interaction with other urban centers. In this respect Zagreb occupied a pivotal place in Austria-Hungary, at once subject to the gravitational pull of Vienna and Budapest yet also exerting a strong influence over its hinterlands. Šegvić concludes that although Croatian scholars have frequently neglected or criticized the Habsburg era, it nonetheless left a profound mark on twentieth-century Zagreb.
The second section, with its focus on art and culture, picks up where Šegvić left off. The five chapters use architecture, literature, drama, and beauty contests to examine connections between Zagreb and other parts of the monarchy and the world. Several common themes emerge here. The first is how many people took the Habsburg framework as a given. In Zagreb, they included the business leaders who wanted to participate in the 1896 Millennial Exhibition in Budapest, theater directors who staged Franz Grillparzer's plays, and architects who closely followed developments in other cities. Nationalists opposed this easy movement and ready borrowing, and thus some Croatians boycotted the Hungarian exhibition and denounced Grillparzer as unfit for the Zagreb stage. But other forces also shaped urban culture. Vienna may have exercised a strong influence over Zagreb, but, as Ida Ograjšek Gorenjak points out in her fascinating chapter on interwar beauty contests sponsored by Hollywood, when it came to the film industry, both cities took a back seat to America. Another interesting chapter looks at two nearly identical houses built in the late 1800s in Budapest and Zagreb. The three authors carefully describe the buildings, their owners, and the surrounding neighborhoods; in the absence of firm evidence, they propose several theories as to how a home designed for a successful craftsman in Budapest was copied several years later by a Serbian lawyer in Zagreb. This chapter offers the useful lesson that we can often see the results of cultural exchange and hybridity, even if it can sometimes be difficult to reconstruct the specific influences and pathways that created these artifacts.
The book's third and longest section turns to students. Although László Szögi's chapter describes the many students who left Hungary for universities across the monarchy and Europe, the other four chapters all focus on students from Croatian-speaking regions (Dalmatia, Istria, and Croatia-Slavonia). The authors explain why nearly one-third of all Croatian university students sought degrees outside their homelands. Iskra Iveljić’s chapter, in particular, skillfully recreates the everyday life of Croatian students in Vienna, from the poverty of those who could only afford to rent beds to the close relationships others had with their professors, including one Croatian philologist who asked his students to help him move into a new apartment. These chapters emphasize the solidarity and political activism of Croatian students; they also emphasize the “cultural transfer” that occurred when students and artists returned to Croatia from Vienna and other cities. This yields some valuable findings. But these chapters pay surprisingly little attention to how these students interacted with the wider population. It is revealing that Iveljić buries in a footnote the fact that one Croatian student in Vienna married the sister of an Austrian painter. In these chapters, “entanglement” is largely limited to Croatian students from different regions finding and supporting each other far from home.
The final section examines elites. The most substantial chapters look at Croatian elites in Vienna (Budapest is not examined here). What emerges plainly is that for many Croatians, Vienna was a significant destination for education, professional training, and employment, and one that evoked powerful, opposing feelings: love and hate, pride and resentment. As in the previous section, these chapters conceive of “entanglement” largely in terms of Croatians working away from home and what this meant for Croatia proper; much work remains to be done on those who stayed, adopted multiple identities, made themselves part of different communities, and transformed, however incrementally, the culture of their adopted cities. But even if this book does not reveal as much “entanglement” as it could, its willingness to study history within a Habsburg rather than a Croatian national framework is especially welcome.
