Despite its intriguingly mysterious title, the book by Tamara Scheer attempts to tell a story of the everyday in late Austria-Hungary. The perspective it proposes is examining everyday language in its aspect that is most vulnerable to the passing of time, or, if you like, most closely related to history. Hence, one can view the book in two ways. It may seem to be a piece of historical journalism that offers an overview of the Austro-Hungarian reality under the pretext of reexamining the political jargon of the time. However, it may also be seen as a challenging attempt to approach language as historical evidence, which might illuminate the aspects of the past realities that are not accessible with other research methods.

Except for the introduction—which desperately tries to present the book and its method, and to provide its readers with a brief overview of the history of Austria-Hungary with its main social and political developments in twelve pages—the book consists of fifty-five mini essays inspired by the contemporary sociopolitical vocabulary. Each entry concerns a term with which (some of) the inhabitants of Austria-Hungary labeled a particular place, region, person, or social phenomenon. The vocabulary Scheer explores originates from the press, diaries, and private letters rather than from official documents or publications. It consists of popular metaphors and slogans that mirrored the mentality of their time, but also signaled some of the fundamental sociopolitical processes of the late Habsburg era, which Scheer defines as modernization, bureaucratization, medialization, and nationalization. Each of these problems inspired dozens of specialized studies, and I am afraid that Scheer's book does not seriously challenge any academic interpretation of these complex issues. Instead, it elucidates the ways in which the contemporary public reacted to these developments. To be sure, most of the terms Scheer analyzes were ironic or sarcastic, and their main purpose was to express criticism of those who employed them. Emperor Charles was nicknamed Amnestiekarl because some found his amnesty for political criminals scandalous; Galicia was nicknamed Skandalizien because it was believed to have been scandalously governed; and the jargon that the multinational Austro-Hungarian army spoke was labeled as Armeedeutsch or Armeeslawisch because it was neither proper Germannor any of the Slavic languages of the monarchy.

Ultimately, the true area of Scheer's expertise seems to be the Austro-Hungarian army and World War I. The most detailed and insightful of the essays she offers concern developments related to the military and the last years of the war, and the most interesting evidence she analyzes are officers’ diaries and letters. Indeed, her method seems to fit these problems the best because it is in the army and the propaganda of a belligerent that is losing its ultimate conflict that the official jargon and the realities most evidently split apart. Popular nicknames and labels may be of great help while getting through the mist of official optimism, patriotism, and discipline.

In some other aspects, however, the book is desperately general. One learns very little about Magyar nationalism, the position of Galicia within the monarchy, or the mysterious land of Sliwowitz from the entries that are two to four pages long. The fundamental difficulty the book faces is the multinational and multicultural nature of Austria-Hungary. Obviously, Scheer notes these factors, and indeed she emphasizes the impact of foreign languages on German and the multidimensional processes of cultural transfer as mirrored by language. Still, the book concerns the German language, and it views the realities of Austria-Hungary—from Sandjak and Cattaro to Bukovina—through the spectacles of German idioms. The brief essays it offers on non-German parts of the monarchy may be so general because they are short, but what they demonstrate is also the extremely vague, and not-always friendly image of the provinces and their inhabitants. Eventually, Scheer attempts to deconstruct most of the stereotypical and simplistic images of non-Germans as present in the idioms she analyzes; however, what the idioms testify for is mostly the sense of superiority and mistrust between those who employed them and the numerous “others.” In other words, what the book demonstrates is not only the multicultural character of the monarchy but also the depth of the social and national divisions within it.