How many of us can resist illustrating a lecture on the Habsburg Monarchy with a quotation from Stefan Zweig or Robert Musil? In The Afterlife of Austria-Hungary, Adam Kożuchowski charges that we too often allow such post-hoc literary assessments to substitute for rigorous historical analysis. He argues forcefully that contemporary Anglo-American historiography has unthinkingly incorporated myths fabricated during the interwar period by post-Habsburg writers, whose perspectives on the moribund empire were anything but objective. Indeed, he even claims that much of what we continue to find fascinating about the Monarchy owes more to interwar myth-making than to historical reality. Much has been written about the invention of the “Austrian Idea” or the “Habsburg Myth,” but Kożuchowski's study is, nonetheless, a welcome contribution, particularly because he draws on Polish sources alongside German ones.

The book is organized to show how different genres, fiction and nonfiction alike, contributed to the same historical myths. The first chapter does a good job of introducing non-expert readers to Austria-Hungary and to its significance as a theme of political debate in the immediate aftermath of its collapse. From there, Kożuchowski surveys three genres of interwar writing on Austria-Hungary: history, political essays, and literary fiction. Some of these sources will be new even to expert readers, and Kożuchowski is an effective and entertaining guide to them. The chapter on history writing limits itself to historians who engaged with the Monarchy “as an intellectual problem,” rather than simply as a “prison of nations” (24, 64). According to Kożuchowski, this body of literature has the character more of a “public trial” (61) than of sober professional scholarship: it constituted a debate over who should be held to blame for the Monarchy's fall. Not until World War II, he asserts, did it become possible for “politically neutral” (35) histories to be written, typically by refugees from Central Europe living in West Europe and North America. The following chapter examines works of political theory. According to Kożuchowski, the authors of these essays and treatises tended to see Austria-Hungary as an embodiment of timeless ideals, not as a contingent historical formation. Like the historians, they produced an image of the Monarchy geared to the preoccupations of interwar Europe. Their principal themes were the fate of “Central Europe” and the problem of what it meant to be “Austrian” after 1918. Kożuchowski laments a shortage of attention in this literature as well to the realities of the Monarchy's existence.

One might think that fiction writers would be exempt from this line of criticism, but they are not. Kożuchowski holds interwar fiction to a realist standard, arguing that “its authors were making real claims about [past realities]” (108). Accordingly, he argues that literary fiction imparts “involuntary, unintended information” (122) about the past, and he occasionally faults fiction writers for getting the past wrong. For instance, he questions the pro-Habsburg feelings that anti-nationalist writers like Joseph Roth attributed to some members of the Monarchy's minority ethnic groups. Some readers may feel that this “naive” reading of interwar fiction, as Kożuchowski himself terms it, is not altogether satisfying when applied to modernist writers like Musil and Franz Kafka. To read The Man without Qualities or The Castle as realism is, arguably, to do these masterpieces an injustice. Yet, Kożuchowski's key point—that historians should be wary of projecting interwar versions of the Austrian Idea back in time—is well taken.

A final chapter traces the figure of Franz Josef across these various genres, demonstrating how the emperor was repeatedly portrayed as the embodiment of his empire. As the only chapter that deals with more than one genre, it plays an important role in Kożuchowski's overall argument, illustrating what he refers to somewhat elliptically in his conclusion as the process of “osmosis” (188), by which distinct genres of writing on the Monarchy influenced one another. The accusation seems to be that scholarly authors uncritically absorbed popular discourses. For instance, historians “simply adjusted” their descriptions of Franz Josef “to his popular image” (162).

Kożuchowski writes in the tradition of Claudio Magris, whose classic 1963 study of the Habsburg Myth, Il mito absburgico nella letteratura austriaca moderna, has never been translated into English. Yet, The Afterlife of Austria-Hungary stands on its own as a diagnosis of the distorting effects of memory on the study of this multinational empire. The style is lively and breezy, as if trying to emulate the feuilletonists of late imperial Austria. Occasionally, Kożuchowski goes for the bon mot instead of careful analysis, and his editor failed to catch some odd errors—for instance, when Franz Grillparzer's phrase “Vorwärts! ist ungarisch und böhmisch” is misattributed and misspelled, then mistranslated as “Czechish-Hungarish” (43). This is nonetheless a substantial and provocative book that could be used profitably in undergraduate and graduate courses.