Carlo Moos's book reads at times like a collection of essays. However, it is not a volume of previously published pieces. Rather, the seeming disjuncture of the book reflects the complexity of the multilayered narrative that the author seeks to investigate. The histories of Austria-Hungary's many afterlives resist homogenization, and Carlo Moos, professor emeritus at Zurich University and noted specialist of Italian and European modernity, was clearly not inclined to reorganize the divergent threads into a single grand récit. The complex nature of the subject matter in and of itself, and the author's manner of engaging with it, yields a book divided into three, roughly equal parts, devoted to politics, memory/identity, and culture.

The basic claim of the book is as straightforward as its subject is complicated. The introduction promises a demonstration of the manifold continuities that together make up the Dual Monarchy's afterlife. This is accomplished at times with great historiographical virtuosity. The author's assumption that “the end of the Monarchy could well [durchaus] have been avoided” is left largely unargued, but this does not add to or detract from the actual aim of the book (12). The predetermined or contingent nature of the dissolution of a historical formation does not correlate with the strength of said historical phenomenon to exert an influence over successive generations.

Thanks to the approach of parallel narratives, a number of topics add significantly to our understanding of the Empire's “post mortem” in regards to “the state that no one wanted,” republican and later corporatist Austria. The very first chapter—detailing the difficulties of maneuvering between the desire for Anschluss and the victorious powers’ preferences (separate statehood, possibly with the topping of closer postimperial, Danubian cooperation between the successor states)—impresses in its portrayal of Social Democrat Otto Bauer and his thought regarding this dilemma. The obvious and popular option is checked by international politics, and the less obvious by the regional animosities that great powers pretended not to notice. From this follows the great moral trap in 1938: to welcome or refuse annexation by Nazi Germany. Here, Moos does not present new details, but the careful presentation of the 1918–19 dilemmas considerably enriches our understanding of the ambiguity of positions taken by prominent representatives of the Austrian Left. Karl Renner's acceptance and Bauer's refusal in 1938 of the new status quo prefigure, as Moos perceptively notes, the moral quagmire of post–World War II Austria, founded on the fiction of Austrian innocence and German conquest. This chapter is a very valuable addition to thinking about the afterlives of the Dual Monarchy: We are made to understand, with more nuance than before, how the dissolution left a void in the place of Austrian identity and how that void, slow to fill, was impacted by the power political shifts of Central Europe.

Similarly instructive is the section on post-1920 legitimist movements and their subsequent integration into the corporatist state under Engelbert Dollfuss, a key component of the second track in the volume, focusing on memory and identity. Austrian legitimism was a perhaps singularly unsuccessful political venture on its own in the 1920s, which might explain how severely underresearched its early history has remained and makes one appreciate the work accomplished by Moos using archival—mainly police—documents. Yet it played a significant role in creating a mytho-political, highly ritualized vocabulary about the Habsburg past in the mode of the conservative revolution. Mystical conservatives, Frontkämpfer-type figures, and some genuine heirs to the far more liberal spirit of the defunct empire converged around organizations and publications (only partially preserved) in the first postwar decade. Many of them had a far greater impact in the 1930s, even in their death in some cases, when the emergent corporatist regime sought a formula around which to construct a discourse of loyalty to Austrian statehood, affection for conservative-völkisch German cultural identity, and stiff resistance to Borusso-German influence. Unlike the ambiguous historical realities of Austria-Hungary, with its mix of imperial dominations and supranational ethos, arch-conservatism, and freewheeling liberalism, the Habsburg myth created in the 1920s provided just such a discourse. Ethnic but cultural rather than racial, authoritarian but not totalitarian in implications, it was a great fit for the Patriotic Front.

The author admits that not all parts of the volume are strictly scholarly, and some parts—which provide more a systematic review of sources and secondary literature—hold fewer surprises. But they succeed as meaningful additions to the political and memory/identity tracks of the book, and while the cultural legacy of Austria-Hungary has attracted more attention than any other aspect, its inclusion rounds out and adds to the volume. Only when considering the triumphant cultural legacy can the afterlives of the Empire be judged.

The three tracks and afterlives—politics, identity/memory, and culture—together do justice to the Empire: Deeply ambiguous, rich and irrational, the Austro-Hungarian legacy was a failure as a humanizing political force in the age of inhumanity, but animated subsequent generations and yielded a spirit at once inquisitive and ironic. Despite the multilinearity of the threads in the volume, it is incomplete, as any such undertaking will unavoidably turn out to be. Most successor states of the Habsburg Empire—such as Czechoslovakia, Romania, and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes—barely figure on its pages, and the Hungarian perspective, too, is only investigated cursorily. At the same time, the vortex of Habsburg afterlife, Austria, is treated in impressive detail—incidentally, the parts where the author immerses himself in one or another smaller aspect of the story are also the most interesting to read. Furthermore, one aspect missing—worthy of a fourth, separate track and chapter—is that of competing nationalisms that blow up the Empire and impact the successor states. The book treats this question fleetingly in an interesting but incomplete digression about borders and maps, an addendum to the first part (politics). Given that this fourth track would have broadened the scope beyond Austria and Hungary and perhaps necessitated twice the research, this might be too high a price to pay, and the book stands on its solid three pillars as is. It is an inspiring work, in many places a demonstration of scholarly virtuosity and meticulousness, in other parts of careful intellectual exegesis. As long as the caveat about the missing aspect, that of the parallel, somber history of the multiple conflicts amongst the nationalities that composed the Empire is kept in mind, it functions as a useful and important guide to those who wish to tackle the conundrum that is the “Habsburg post mortem.”