Tropics of Vienna, volume 19 of the Austrian and Habsburg Studies series published by Berghahn Books, takes as its subject the proliferation of what author Ulrich E. Bach calls the colonial utopian visions emanating from Habsburg subjects between roughly 1870 and 1930. These visions, Bach argues, were set in locations ranging from the Balkans and the Indian Ocean to East Africa and Palestine. These spaces permitted authors to produce “configurations or cognitive mappings of cultural space or history in the making” (4). While these fantasies do not perhaps tell us much about the material practices of empire, they do contain much useful information about a “set of narrative utopias that point to an imaginary imperialism” (5). Bach explains that the importance of these utopian visions, which were “organized around a neutral discursive space that creates narrative energy and performative force” (4), is in the ability of these mental excursions to “produce rather than reflect the colonial and utopian discourse of the time” (5, 129). Austrian colonial utopian fictions, in other words, not only showed Austrians what might exist, but they also actively shaped the terrain of material possibility.

Bach's argument about the significance of these colonial utopias unfolds over the course of five chapters. He begins with an analysis of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's novels Der Kapitulant (1870) and Paradies am Dniester (1877). Bach reads these texts, set in the “utopian periphery” of the Habsburg Empire, as evidence of how images of the wild East could shape other utopias as well. Lazar Baron von Hellenbach's Insel Mellonta (1883), a tale of cross-cultural exchange set in part in an idyllic Indian Ocean, suggests similar possibilities in the multiethnic Empire. Bach interprets Theodor Hertzka's Freiland (1890), a novel set in East Africa, as evidence for the ways the colonial endeavor was also a way to upend metropolitan possibilities. The main text concludes with Bach's analysis of Theodor Herzl's Altneuland (1902), a novel that functioned as a blueprint for a Jewish state in Palestine, what Bach calls Herzl's “world-renowned manifesto of Zionism” (7–8). Bach includes an epilog to the book focusing on the works of Joseph Roth and Robert Müller. The texts by these authors—written between 1915 and 1938—reflect the political realities and the utopian potentials of the post-Habsburg state.

Bach's thesis in the book is a compelling one, and his nuanced readings of the evidence permit readers access to an intellectual world of fantasy production that reminds us of the unsettled nature of the European fin de siècle and the potency of the revolutionary utopias that informed the politics of both left and right. Reading the various chapters, however, one wonders whether the colonial nature of the various thought-experiments committed to the page by Bach's late-nineteenth-century subjects were not in some fashion predictable. Colonial utopias, after all, were not exactly unheard-of formulations at the time. These visions perhaps speak to nothing more than a conservative bourgeois frustration with the social proprieties of a leaden society, one that actively impeded the mobility of its talented educated class.

Bach's willingness to dive into these issues and use these texts to probe the distinctions between overseas colonization and internal consolidation, between utopian and dystopian visions of alternative political and social possibilities, and between the imagined and the material consequences of these intellectual products is ultimately of great value to the reader. By situating these fantasies of internal and external colonization within a historical context of imperial decline, modernization, frustrating social immobility, and the proliferation of new political experiments (including right-wing populism and Zionism), Bach can ask fresh questions of the source material. That said, readers might be left wondering at the end of the book whether the fantasies discussed in the volume are usefully described as ones that in fact “produced” rather than merely “reflected” broader cultural, intellectual, or indeed material expressions of empire? Herzl comes closest to the standard here, yet it remains difficult, for example, to see how Sacher-Masoch, despite publishing a magazine dedicated to pan-Slavism, might be said to produce and not just reflect colonialism.

These are ultimately minor critiques of a valuable book. Bach's reading of these texts produces a useful picture of an unsettled political and cultural landscape. That these diverse intellectuals sought to clarify the political questions of late-Habsburg Austria within the context of utopian colonial thought-experiments remains a valuable indication of the importance of the exercise. Readers from many fields, from history and literature to cultural criticism and social theory, will find in Ulrich E. Bach's book a welcome introduction to the vibrant and politically central question of colonialism and its relationship to utopian thinking in late-nineteenth-century Austria.