In the context of Austria's Anschluss to Nazi Germany in March 1938, Stefan Zweig, whose memoirs The World of Yesterday have repeatedly and justly been accused of historical inaccuracy, in five sentences skillfully summarized the double-edged nature of modern (national) citizenship; although it guarantees inalienable rights to individuals included in the nation, it degrades “aliens” to mere supplicants whose fate is at the mercy of bureaucracies and bureaucrats. Zweig conceded that his fantasies about being a citoyen du monde abruptly faded the day he lost his (national) passport. Nevertheless, on the next page, he praised the supranational, multiethnic character of the Habsburg monarchy as a lost paradise that allowed people to travel and migrate without permits and visas; it was allegedly destroyed by nationalism after World War I. In the “Golden Age of Security” before World War I, the Jews' right of residence in this paradise seemed indisputable to Zweig.

Hannelore Burger investigates the transition Zweig describes. In the first part of her new book Heimatrecht und Staatsbürgerschaft österreichischer Juden (Right of Residence and Citizenship of Austrian Jews), Burger describes the bumpy road that finally led to full legal emancipation and inclusion of Jews into the Austrian part of the Habsburg monarchy (Cisleithania) with the “Fundamental Law Concerning the General Rights of Citizens,” issued in December 1867. Although the topic itself is hardly new, Burger's focus on citizenship and Heimatrecht (right of residence) certainly provides new insights into the process of Jewish emancipation, especially regarding features of migration (77–82) and settlement patterns (83–86). The book contains nine chapters (plus an introduction and conclusion), greatly varying in length and quality, which discuss legal inclusion and exclusion practices in the Austrian part of the Habsburg monarchy, respectively the territory of the Austrian Republic from the late eighteenth century until today. In the introduction, Burger formulates the interesting—though not entirely convincing—thesis that the process of depriving Jews of their legal rights during the Nazi period mirrors, in a condensed form, the stages of their legal integration into the Habsburg monarchy and Austrian society.

This assumption could have provided a stimulating framework for systematically reassessing the consecutive steps for legal integration of Jews into Austrian society (except for the last two chapters that deal with the restoration of Austrian citizenship after 1945; these present the biographies of Elias Canetti and Manès Sperber as respective case studies for “stateless” Jews). However, it does not serve as a guiding principle in the book's organization. The material, which in general is presented in chronological rather than in thematic order, betrays that Burger is clearly more at home in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries than in the earlier period. Thus, the depiction of Jewish history until 1867 hardly broadens our understanding of the subject and even lacks reference to standard literature (e.g., Jacob Katz, ed., Toward Modernity: The European Jewish Model [Leo Baeck Institute, 1987]; and Jonathan Frankel and Steven J. Zipperstein, eds., Assimilation and Community: The Jews in Nineteenth-Century Europe [Cambridge University Press, 1992]).

Burger is at her best when she discusses the intersections between the intrinsically modern concept of citizenship and the premodern Heimatrecht that originally grew out of the communities' responsibility to provide for their poor; therefore, even in times of constitutionalism, the communities retained their right to object to the naturalization of the poor (Jews). In several case studies (see especially 92–96), Burger vividly portrays the political and social obstacles for Jews when applying for the right of residence, even after 1867. Despite many drawbacks described in the preceding chapters, Burger in her conclusions implicitly confirms Stefan Zweig's nostalgic assumption (see above) that the supranational character of the monarchy, with various inner discrepancies and contradictions regarding civil rights and citizenship, implied a chance for minority groups. Because it was not governed by one guiding principle, well-intentioned bureaucrats could pragmatically decide to introduce Jews into the frame (219–20).

Although the book certainly has its merits, also in the fields of education and nationalism during the last years of the monarchy in Moravia and Bukovina, numerous inconsistencies seem to indicate that it is rather a collection of disparate papers, without an overarching concept and research question.