This volume aims to showcase a quarter century of the informal multinational research network, Kakanien Revisited. Fittingly, the publication also marks the thirtieth volume of the book series, Kultur—Herrschaft—Differenz, which started in 2002 with a title that focused on political, cultural, and social dynamics inside the Dual Monarchy while signaling the adoption of cultural and postcolonial studies approaches to dissect these dynamics: Kakanien Revisited: Das Eigene und das Fremde (in) der österreichisch-ungarischen Monarchie. The developments in methodology and focus since this inaugural installment inform the present anniversary volume. And yet despite this stated intention, the global importance of recent political events has given the project new, unintentional, and unforeseen urgency. While the launch of the project twenty-five years ago was also indebted to contemporary political contexts—the formation of a new political geography in East and Central Europe after the end of the Cold War and the disintegration of Yugoslavia—as well as paradigm shifts in humanities, the recent reemergence of imperialist aggression on the European continent has thrown questions of European values, of nationhood and supra-nationality, and of the modalities of co-existence and conflict management into sharp relief. The term, idea, and legacy of Mitteleuropa (Habsburg and its aftermath) permeates discussions throughout the volume.

The two concluding essays in this collection—non-academic, highly engaging personal reflections on the problematics—strike a particularly somber chord. The contribution about controversies at a Lisbon writers’ meeting in 1988 highlights how incompatibilities between an imperialist mindset displayed by Russian writers and aspirations espoused by the Central European representatives foreshadowed re-emerging tensions and discordance intrinsic to “Empire”. The impassioned recollection of the formation of a vision of Mitteleuropa as a construct that reconciles the Galician-Habsburg legacy, Ukrainian nationality, and the hope that the “Best-Europa” (cautiously identified with the EU) might take on the mantle of the oecumene of shared values culminates in the rather bleak diagnosis of the “disappearance of a European Eros” (225) characterized by, among other things, “Maß und Mitte” as well as the capacity for “Vermittlung”: “Es gibt heute kein Mitteleuropa mehr” (219). Here, Mitteleuropa as a mentality is attributed the “Kompetenz der Komplexität” (212); this virtue also characterizes the project Kakanien Revisited.

Contributions to the present volume reflect this complexity by, among other things, addressing the intricacies of conceptualizing problematics when the dichotomies of center and periphery, or dominant and marginal have lost their currency, or when periodicizations of imperial and post-imperial, the demarcation of “Empire” and “Nation State” have become so fluid (with institutions surviving and nation states themselves displaying “imperialist” attitudes toward minorities or peripheries). Similarly contested, and hence here re-evaluated, are concepts and terminologies derived from high theory (such as Juri Lotman’s Semiosphere, an idea which causes “Verlegenheit” [82; abashment]), from the vernacular (such as “Nostalgia” as a habitus of framing the Dual Monarchy since Claudio Magris’s original suggestion of a “Habsburg Myth”), or from a charged political debate (such as Balkanismus and Balkanisierung, interestingly here discussed by using 1980s Yugoslav pop music as material). On the other side of the scale are investigations of very concrete literary materials and their location in the overlayering complex grids of concern: examples are the reading of Ludwig Winder’s novel Die rasende Rotationsmaschine (1927) as a literary analysis of what undermined the Habsburg consensus from the inside, the exposure of dehumanization in an allegedly idyllic scenario in Ádám Bodor’s Hungarian novel Sinistra körzet (1992; trans. into English as The Sinistra Zone, here the German translation Das Schutzgebiet [protectorate] Sinistra is used), and the assessment of the usefulness of an ever more refined instrumentarium—for example as regards placing literary works in elaborate grids of interculturality, hybridity, and mobility—for the evaluation of a larger body of recent Austrian literary engagement (e.g., in the popular genre of multi-generational family novels) with k. und k. scenarios and problematics.

It takes insider knowledge to identify the concrete nature of the debates that individual articles engage with. The volume itself does not give much guidance in this respect: apart from a lucid reconstruction of the paradigm shift from Postcolonial Studies to Empire Studies in the history of the network, there is little that could be filed as “Rückblick”; a general evaluation of achievements (even if they only lay in the exchange between colleagues from a variety of disciplinary and national backgrounds) is also not forthcoming. Neither is it entirely clear what the “outlook” of the title is supposed to consist of, since there is little sense of direction either of theoretical framing of issues or concrete research proposed here; nor are there any concrete lacunae identified that could be addressed by further research. Rather, the volume shines a spotlight on ongoing debates and concerns. Mitteleuropa is firmly back on the agenda and, given current geopolitical constellations, this debate will gather even more currency into the future.

While the impassioned, and somewhat defiant reaction to the Russian attack on Ukraine illustrates the relevance of engagement with the unique model of a supranational empire that was the Dual Monarchy, what was not foreseeable during the preparation of this publication was the turn to ugly chauvinism, the radicalization of imperialist posturing, the weaponization of commerce, markets, and hegemonies, as well as the dismantling of “Maß und Mitte” in another empire, traditionally hailed as the home of commonwealth, melting pot, and federation. This might force researchers to adopt yet another optic, and it might give even more poignancy to the example set by Kakanien. In this light, the diagnosis of staleness, anachronism, or even self-sustaining routine surely emerges as vastly preferable to gratuitous, saber-rattling excitement.