This volume serves as a continuation and companion to the 2011 compilation issued by the same team, a productive collaboration between the Masaryk Institute and the Austrian Theater Museum, and, like its predecessor, it brings together primary materials, a very useful bibliographic apparatus, and interpretive essays by a distinguished roster of scholars. Die Zeit was among many journals that contributed to the extraordinarily vibrant media landscape in late imperial Austria, and is a testament to the complex legacy of political, literary, and artistic modernism that it produced. Central to its editorial approach was giving voice to a broad spectrum of avant-garde movements throughout the crownlands, with particular emphasis on the dialogues that emerged between the various centers of activity and what was taking place in Vienna. Although Die Zeit’s editorial approach was to promote and give voice to innovations in a wide variety of fields, it did not privilege one particular movement over another: “In individual areas, Die Zeit did not promote any one (artistic, political, economic, etc.) direction, but it was interested in comparing various opinions and the voices of representatives of the younger generation from all parts of Europe and from abroad, to foster their mutual familiarizations and hence the intellectual and political transformation of the whole” (381–82). While the first volume emphasized the emergence of Czech modernism and how it was reflected in the pages of Die Zeit, this second volume broadens the focus not just in terms of language and geography, but in terms of the various disciplines in the arts and sciences that were reflected in what was published.

The journal's managing editor, Isidor Singer, used the metaphor of “Spring” to characterize the potential that existed within the monarchy for transcending the divisive forces of nationalism, antisemitism, and misogyny that bedeviled political life to an increasing degree, hoping that political culture would instead be informed by innovation in a wide variety of artistic approaches—not a retreat into the aesthetic realm. Singer promoted the transnational, multiethnic, and multilingual ideals of Austria-Hungary, turning Die Zeit into a forum for a wide variety of inquiries into the arts, sociology, politics, philosophy, and religion, with a special emphasis on relations between emerging centers of modernism and their relations with the imperial capital. The volume under discussion here takes a balanced and critical approach: The fourteen essays address the central question of cultural transfer and translation in a series of inquiries into particular representative individuals who published in Die Zeit (e.g., Ivan Franko, Tomáš Masaryk, Georg Brandes) and how they articulated a particular strain of artistic modernism. The section of critical essays is followed by a representative sample of original pieces that appeared in the journal between 1894 and 1904, and the volume concludes with a very useful listing of the secondary literature on authors who were published in Die Zeit.

The collection's best essays tease out the fraught nature of the enterprise itself, that an implicit hierarchy (German- and Vienna-centric) undermined the autonomy and appreciation of Czech, Hungarian, Ukrainian, South Slav, and Polish centers of artistic and scientific activity, sometimes subconsciously, sometimes overtly: “they [the authors] follow the political and cultural preconditions, the dependencies and stereotypes and the cultural hierarchies (dominance and subordination) which determined the nature of mutual relations and the opportunities for dialogue and indicate the interconnections or mere coexistence of various contexts” (382). Taken together, the essays thus perform an important service: They show the centers of creativity in Austria-Hungary to be part of a complex network of mutual benefit and influence, while at the same time emphasizing the capacity for Vienna-centric bias—seen most potently in the battles over language—to undermine the potential for cooperation and understanding. The volume itself is easy-to-use and logical in its conception and execution, and will be a welcome addition to academic libraries, while also being a useful resource for advanced students and scholars of Central European literary and artistic modernism.