The articles in this volume ofThe Austrian History Yearbook illustrate well the great talents of scholars who currently write on the history of Habsburg Central Europe. Several of the articles open whole new areas of inquiry, whether by raising important new questions, addressing topics that have long been neglected, or by breaking old political taboos. Others apply new analytic concepts and methodologies to familiar topics such as ethnic and national loyalties or the relationship of peripheral territories to imperial and national centers.
The forum in this volume is devoted to political, social, and cultural contestation over the Adriatic Sea in the centuries after the abolition of the Venetian Republic in 1797. The essays examine changing notions of space, boundaries, and territorial and national identities during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Dominique Reill discusses the Italian poet Francesco Dall'Ongaro who often identified with the Slavic peoples of the Adriatic and saw the region as a place where many nations might coexist in some harmony. Trieste, as opposed to Venice, typified that productive coexistence for Dall'Ongaro. Borut Klabjan reassesses the ways in which both the European great powers and local polities developed discourses and policies of conquest for the Adriatic before and after World War I, treating it as an open space to be conquered much like Africa in the late nineteenth century. Igor Tchoukarine casts new light on efforts to create a meaningful Yugoslav identity during the 1920s and 1930s by examining the lobbying activities of the Adriatic Guard to develop the Dalmatian coast and make Yugoslavia a significant maritime power. Such a project suited the ambitions of King Alexander, but it ultimately foundered as a result of insufficient investment in Dalmatia and Belgrade's suspicion of Croatian separatism. Pamela Ballinger and Larry Wolff bring to bear their own extensive research on the Adriatic region in their learned comments.
Three of the articles in this volume offer new insights into the complex and dynamic relationship of local communities to the imperial center in the Habsburg monarchy. Börries Kuzmany examines political, social, and cultural change during the nineteenth century in the eastern Galician border town of Brody, a peripheral town in what was a peripheral province for the monarchy. Long an important center of Jewish life in the region, Brody entered a period of long-term economic decline that ultimately led to its reorientation away from Vienna to the Galician capital, Lemberg/Lwow/Lviv, and to the polonization of crucial institutions. Historians of political life in late-nineteenth-century Austria have often pointed to the ways in which the legal and administrative autonomy of the communes made them important staging areas for political parties and movements. Jeremy King analyzes the legal and institutional bases of communal autonomy in Bohemia and Moravia, showing how nationalist groups made political advances in the communes at the cost of the central state. How differences between peasant culture and that of the urban bourgeoisie were represented and understood in Austria in the 1870s is the focus of Matthew Rampley's article. As he explains, exhibits of bourgeois dwellings at the 1873 World Fair in Vienna provoked little debate, but the presentation of peasant dwellings from different parts of the monarchy led to a lively discussion of ethnography, nationalist and cultural differences, and the levels of civilization among the monarchy's regions and peoples.
The end of Communist strictures on historical research in East Central Europe in 1989 and the opening of archives there produced increased research on the period between the two world wars, especially on topics that were long neglected or taboo—either to the Communist authorities or to anti-Communist emigré scholars. Bela Bodo opens new vistas on Hungary's White Terror, examining the social composition, backgrounds, and attitudes of officers’ units, and tracing the careers of several perpetrators of the Terror. He finds that the units were not necessarily made up of representatives of the gentry class nor of déclassé loser groups, as is commonly assumed. Their violence represented less their anger at their own social decline—everyone declined during and just after the war—than their quest for greater access to power and wealth. A number of minor leaders of these units achieved positions and some even prominence in the Horthy regime.
Heidemarie Uhl takes up an interesting aspect of the long-standing popular taboo in Austria in the first decades after World War II against discussing participation in the National Socialist system. She shows that in contrast to the official state myth of Austria as Hitler's first victim, many Austrians talked about and even memorialized the heroism of Austrian soldiers in World War II without discussing National Socialism. Outside Vienna, from the 1950s onward, war memorials (and the rituals of “hero worship” that accompanied them) dominated the monument landscape, whereas the commemoration of victims of the Nazi regime found only a marginal position. The article goes on to investigate the place of contested memory in the cultural system of today's Austria, long after its self-image of victimization was shattered and the focus of remembrance finally shifted to the victims of National Socialism and the Holocaust.
Jacqueline Vansant's article on the 1940 MGM film Florian reflects the growing recognition of film as an important focus of research in cultural and intellectual history over the last three decades. She examines how Hollywood filmmakers, many of them recent refugees from Hitler, portrayed Austria in the years just after the Anschluss in a way that invoked traditional cultural tropes about Vienna in order to distinguish Austria from Germany. The makers of Florian presented Austria and Austrian emigrés to American audiences, who were often skeptical about refugees from Nazism, as European bearers of American cultural values. Even so, the film insists that the refugee must quickly give up everything European and become culturally as American as possible. Even before the United States entered World War II, American views of Austria and its people were already highly conflicted.
The editors are particularly grateful to two friends of the Yearbook, Stanley B. Winters and Doris Bergen, for contributing mementos of two major scholars of modern Austrian History. Professor Winters, news of whose untimely passing reached us during the final preparations of this volume, provided us with a fascinating unpublished lecture by his doctoral mentor, Robert A. Kann, in which Kann speculates on whether the Habsburg monarchy should have been saved. Professor Bergen was a close friend and colleague of the late J. Robert Wegs when they both taught at the University of Notre Dame. She has written a touching and insightful appreciation of Wegs’ life and work. Thirty-six book reviews round out this volume.
The editors congratulate an author from volume forty-one of the Yearbook, Tara Zahra, for winning the R. John Rath Article Prize for 2010 for her essay, “‘Prisoners of the Postwar’: Expellees, Displaced Persons, and Jews in Austria after World War II.” Matthew Konieczny began the work of assembling the contents of this volume during the 2009–2010 academic year. He stepped down as assistant editor in May 2010 to devote himself to research and writing his dissertation and to service as an instructor in the University of Minnesota's Department of History. Mollie Madden took up the duties of assistant editor in August 2010 and has ably prepared the manuscript of this volume for submission to Cambridge University Press, assisted the other editors, and served as liaison between the authors and the Cambridge Press copyeditor and typesetter. We are grateful to Daniel Pinkerton of the Center for Austrian Studies for providing his graphical expertise in preparing the cover photograph and other images for this volume. As a newly elected member of the executive committee of the Society for Austrian and Habsburg History in 2010, Paul Hanebrink has joined the Editorial Board.
The editors and the Center for Austrian Studies are most grateful to the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science and Research for supporting financially the position of assistant editor and to the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York for subsidizing the publication of the Yearbook through the purchase of copies.
