This volume of the Austrian History Yearbook puts contemporary intellectual creativity and innovative thinking in the field fully on display. Especially noteworthy are the six articles that grew out of a 2008 conference “Sites of Indifference to Nation and Nationalism.” In diverse geographic and chronological contexts, the authors use local studies to interrogate some cherished beliefs about the history of Habsburg Central Europe, especially the centrality of nationalist loyalties to the history of this region. The creative use of local studies by historians of the Habsburg monarchy and its successor states has already produced a wealth of scholarship that foregrounds contingent factors in the rise of nationalist forms of identification and nationalist movements. These scholars argue that indifference to nation, which they define in terms of political practices and identification, constitutes just as important a category of analysis as does its counterpart, the commitment to nationhood.
In his study of nineteenth-century communities in the Bihar/Bihor Mountains on the border between Hungary proper and Transylvania, Robert Nemes examines ways in which locals often confounded the expectations of nationalists from the outside. Rok Stergar examines the [simultaneous] coexistence of state patriotism, dynastic loyalty, and Slovene nationalist pride in veterans' associations during a particularly virulent period of nationalist conflict in early-twentieth-century Ljubljana. Caitlin Murdock investigates contradictions between local and official understandings of nationhood and national belonging in the border regions between Bohemia and Saxony in the years after 1918. For those who had migrated and who wished to become naturalized citizens of Germany, their potentially German identity now clashed with an official view that saw Bohemia as Czech. Tatjana Lichtenstein examines conflicts within Jewish communities in interwar Czechoslovakia, between those who sought to anchor Jewish rights in a Jewish nationality (now an official census category) and those Czechoslovakian Jews who saw themselves as Czechs and Germans. According to Lichtenstein, the efforts of the former to promote a separate category of Jewish nationhood also produced a racialization of the category of Jew in Czechoslovakia.
Two articles investigate indifference and national indeterminacy in regions of northern Italy that had been part of Austria-Hungary before World War I. Roberta Pergher examines the Italian Fascist regime's repeated failure to integrate the South Tirol/Alto Adige region into the new Fascist state. Her analysis traces conflicts between local Italian speakers from the Trentino (whom the regime viewed with some suspicion as not Italian enough) and Italian migrants from the rest of Italy, who moved north to the South Tirol/Alto Adige as settlers, for reasons of opportunity and nationalism. The question for the regime was how to judge potential settlers' ability to enact a local version of Italian-ness that would produce an appropriate image of Fascist Italy both for international visitors to the region and to its formerly Austrian natives. Pamela Ballinger examines the practices of post-World War II international organizations charged with providing for the welfare and integration of refugees and displaced persons. Noting these organizations' inability to arrive at a satisfactory national categorization of many of the people from Italian-speaking communities in Istria and Dalmatia, she analyzes how the organizations attempted to deal with “history's illegibles.”
In addition to these six articles on indifference to nation, we are extremely pleased to publish three additional articles, one each on topics from the sixteenth, eighteenth, and twentieth centuries. In his Kann Memorial Lecture, art historian Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann examines sculptural depictions of Charles V, Rudolf II, and Duke-Elector Christian II of Saxony. Analyzing the elements in these portraits that embodied general qualities of imperial rulership, Kaufmann shows how they could convey political messages, function as idealized representations of a ruler, and serve as models for popular reproduction. Madalina-Valeria Veres explores the relationship between cartography and the practices of Enlightened Absolutism under Maria Theresa and Joseph II in the second half of the eighteenth century. She demonstrates the variety of functions cartography served state centralization projects in furthering military control and in developing the economic exploitation of Transylvania. Andrew Harrod takes up the paradox engendered by Austria's obligation to neutrality anchored in the State Treaty of 1955 and the country's simultaneous commitment to free market laws and to international trade. The general demands of global interdependence, Austria's small size, and its integration into Western economic institutions often challenged the credibility of the proclaimed policy of permanent neutrality in the years from 1955 until the end of the Cold War.
The editors would like to express their extreme gratitude to Gary B. Cohen who stepped down from the directorship of the Center for Austrian Studies in June 2010. Gary's tireless efforts on behalf of the Austrian History Yearbook, especially his service as its executive editor for the past decade, contributed enormously to the quality, health, as well as to the growing international reputation of the journal. Gary oversaw several successful changes, including negotiating the contract with the Yearbook's current publisher, Cambridge University Press. We will miss Gary's sound leadership, good advice, and unfailing generosity with his time.
The editors wish to congratulate two authors from volume forty-two of the Yearbook: Matthew Rampley is the winner of the 2011 R. John Rath article prize for his essay “Peasants in Vienna: Ethnographic Display and the 1873 World's Fair.” Dominique Kirchner Reill received honorable mention for her article, “A Poet's Struggle for a New Adriaticism in the Nineteenth Century.” Mollie Madden continued as our extremely able assistant editor, preparing the manuscript of this volume for submission to Cambridge University Press. We are also grateful to Daniel Pinkerton of the Center for Austrian Studies for providing expertise on the graphics and other images in this volume and for preparing the cover. The editors and the Center for Austrian Studies are most grateful to the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science and Research for financially supporting 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. Finally, Pieter Judson would like to thank the many fine scholars who cheerfully donated their time and expertise to serve as anonymous reviewers for manuscripts to the Yearbook.
