European imperialism has been a trendy topic in the field of history for the last two decades, and Habsburg historians have subsequently conducted research in this field, despite the lack of an overseas Habsburg empire. Because Austria-Hungary lacked such an empire, historians must look at various expeditions, often undertaken for scientific reasons, or in the case of Tropics of Vienna: Colonial Utopias of the Habsburg Empire, colonial fantasies that novelists expressed. Tropics of Vienna adds a literary dimension to this growing body of literature and analyzes Habsburg imperial projects, or imaginations of colonial designs, in connection with cultural and social changes in Austria-Hungary. In this work, Ulrich E. Bach analyzes the imagined utopias and imperial designs—which were reflections of conditions in Austria-Hungary—of well-known and lesser known writers, all of whom attempted to mediate social conflicts in the Habsburg Empire through fiction. The Habsburg Empire lacked an overseas empire, which leaves researchers to look at imaginary imperialism, which has limited historical value. However, Tropics of Vienna employs interesting methodologies inherent in literary analysis and provides a scholarly contribution to Habsburg studies.
This work is clearly organized and traces the writings of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Lazar von Hellenbach, Theodor Hertzka, Theodor Herzl, Robert Müller, and Joseph Roth. These authors imagined a variety of utopias and fictional social structures far removed from the anti-Semitism of fin-de-siècle Austria. These literary fantasies corroborate recent historical research about these topics. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's novellas inverted gender roles, embodied in the character Katharina, who smoked, whipped serfs, and displayed other seemingly masculine characteristics. His novellas sought to experiment with and revitalize Habsburg social structures; in addition, they reflected the anxiety-provoking decline of masculinity. This work, however, was set in remote Galicia, safely removed from bourgeois Vienna. These ideas align with historical research about Galicia as a region of experiments safely on the periphery, most notably Larry Wolff's argument in The Idea of Galicia: History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture (2010), which stated that Galicia was a “tabula rasa” (4) ripe for development and bold experiments. In addition, Bach's analysis of Hertzka's novel Freiland serves as a criticism of the racism in Vienna and a reflection of the lack of freedom for Viennese Jews. These observations mirror issues examined in and add a colonial aspect to the work of Carl Schorske, whose pioneering work Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (1981) analyzed the works of Sigmund Freud and other prominent Austrians, many of whom retreated to the arts and sciences as a flight from the crude reality of the decline of liberalism and the emergence of what Schorske called “politics in a new key.”
The most notable aspect of these analyses was the unconscious colonial motives of these writers, even if the authors Bach studies did not intend malice toward the imagined colonized subjects. Hellenbach's novel Insel Mellenta strove for global miscegenation, yet portrayed this new order as one that retained white supremacy and tamed the so-called wild races. Hertzka's Freiland imagined a pan-European society in the plains of Africa, with free associations in charge of managing the land and training Africans in the tenets of Western civilization. Furthermore, Herzl's utopian novel Altneuland depicted a Jewish state transforming the empty deserts of Palestine into a prosperous society, with the few Arab inhabitants assimilating and welcoming these new developments, much to the surprise of present-day audiences. Müller's colonial fantasies were even more obvious than the writings of the other authors. Müller viewed Austria-Hungary as an ideal colonial power because of its ability to rule over diverse peoples and argued that Habsburg expansion was necessary for Europe to fend off the United States and Asia. Ultimately, although these authors projected utopian outlooks, which were often veiled criticisms of the racism in Vienna and other shortfalls in Austria-Hungary, Bach's analysis of these writings is a keen reminder that few people, including farsighted intellectuals and writers, questioned the superiority of European culture around 1900.
Despite these interesting narratives, which reflected real conditions in Austria-Hungary and projected displaced desires, the impact of Tropics of Vienna on Habsburg history has limits. The book explores various potential colonial fantasies but offers few concrete historical conclusions or lessons about Habsburg imperialism. For example, the claim that the ideas of Sacher-Masoch were farsighted precursors to a European federation because of a reference in a letter to his brother to a “United States of Europe” in response to rising nationalism, appears colored by present-day events rather than by the historical significance of these ideas. Furthermore, Bach's discussion of rising nationalism and anti-Semitism addresses general conflicts with which historians are already familiar. The analyses of these texts reveal that people create representations for their own purposes, which reiterates what historians already know. In addition, Bach concludes that the distant places in these literary works sparked a consuming interest in an elusive ideal of such utopian places (128). However, evidence about how these works influenced the overall discourse on colonialism in Austria-Hungary is unclear in Tropics of Vienna. The work also leaves ambiguous how representative these authors were of Habsburg colonial ambitions. Overall, examining historical conflict and colonialism through literature has limits and requires speculation, even if the goal of the research is to provide literary analysis, which the work successfully accomplishes.
Overall, Tropics of Vienna provides a contribution to Habsburg literary history and, to a lesser extent, intellectual history, and adds to the growing historical knowledge of colonial fantasies and perceptions of imperialism in the Habsburg Empire. As is the nature of literary criticism, the work occasionally makes claims that are unproven or unprovable, or of which historians are already familiar. Tropics of Vienna is, however, accessible to nonliterary scholars, such as historians, and provides a useful scholarly contribution to overall Habsburg and Austrian studies.
