The Habsburg monarchy died in 1918. Ever since, its capital, Vienna, struggled to find a commensurate role, and a convincing identity. Vienna seemed a dying city for much of the twentieth century, until its place in Europe was partially restored due to the “turn” of 1989. Partly that image was based on demographics: The Viennese population was aging, and decreasing, and young Austrians were avoiding the decrepit capital. There is now a more positive spirit abroad in Vienna than in the early 1980s. Nonetheless, Vienna has long been associated with death and dying, whether it is the great Baroque tradition of the “beautiful corpse,” the Freudian dialectic of Eros and Thanatos, or the many assassinations and suicides associated with its history, Francis Ferdinand and Crown Prince Rudolf to name just two. I have never, however, heard Vienna called a “necropolis,” a city of the dead.

It is a dramatic-sounding term that Katherine Arens has used to describe her subject, which I think is an analysis of how Austrians have not been quite as backward looking in their attitude to their past as they might at first appear, but have rather had quite an intelligent approach, using the collective experience of the Habsburg past, “Habsburg nostalgia,” to shape the future understanding of Vienna and Austria. The account of the Mayerling murder-suicide by Marie Vetsera's mother, Helene Vetsera, is cited at length as a conclusive proof of this approach. Quite what Arens does want to say is somewhat clouded by the book's apparent lack of copyediting, making it typographically and grammatically flawed; also, Arens cites many interesting ideas and theories, but how they fit in with her evidence is not all that clear. To the extent that I do understand the argument, I have no objection to the idea that people use the past, even their past, to make points about their present and hence their future, but I do not see anything particularly Austrian or Viennese about this. Whereas the continued problems with the gap between the realities of Austrian history and how Austrians perceive and present that history remain a very Austrian phenomenon.

There are several interesting examples where Arens shows how Austrians have used the Habsburg past in a positive way to redefine or reaffirm Austrian identity, as in her extended discussion of the satirical science-fiction film, 1.April 2000, from 1952, or her well-informed discussion of the changing uses to which the biography of Empress Elisabeth has been put in the postwar era. The associated section on the role of operetta and the musical in the postwar image of Vienna is also of interest.

There are other instances where Arens's approach is undermined by inaccuracy in details, which goes beyond just typographical errors. Der Herr Karl is perhaps one of the most searing satires on postwar Austrian attitudes to the past, and part of the controversy around the one-act play was that television viewers identified with Helmut Qualtinger's character and concluded that all Austrians were being attacked as opportunistic fellow-travelers of Nazism, which is part of Arens's point, but “Herr Karl” was not an actual “grocer,” as Arens describes him, which suggests material success, but rather a lowly grocer's assistant, a marginal man, a loser condemned to the cellar to haul around crates. This changes significantly the message Merz and Qualtinger intended to send.

Similarly, in reading Arens's discussion of Western historiography of the monarchy, one would never guess that many Western historians in the last three decades or so have reevaluated the monarchy, positively. Arens does cite some of the relevant literature, such as Alan Sked's Decline and Fall of the Habsburg Empire, from 1989, but appears to think that because Sked was a pupil of A. J. P. Taylor, his book must be a continuation of Taylor's thesis of an empire in decline, when it will be clear to anyone who has read the book that Sked argues the opposite. It was a pioneering effort in rethinking the monarchy's history in just the sort of positive way Arens is suggesting, and it was followed by a slew of revisionist research, often published in the Austrian History Yearbook, which has contradicted the idea of a “dying” empire for decades. Much of Arens's discussion of the flaws in the approach of Carl E. Schorske to the history of Viennese modernism and modernity is interesting, but not as pioneering as presented. There has been extensive criticism of Schorske's approach from other historians, for instance as collected in Rethinking Vienna 1900, published in 2001. On the evidence provided here, much of the preexisting revisionist historiography appears to have eluded Arens's notice. This is unfortunate, because Arens's approach would have been significantly enhanced by incorporating this other, extensive body of historical knowledge.

Belle Necropolis is potentially a most interesting book, taking on some of the misconceptions of Habsburg history, and attempting to employ interesting concepts to explicate the Austrian approach to the past, but in its execution, the book falls short of its potential.