Peter Thaler, a US-trained historian now teaching in Denmark, has written an overview of Austrian identity, a narrative of the political events of the Counter Reformation in parts of the Habsburgs’ hereditary lands, a study of the ideology of resistance in the early modern period, and an archival source–based analysis of the role of Sweden's support for radical Protestantism in Austria during the Thirty Years’ War, all rolled together in this book. Divided into seven chapters and containing a straightforward literature review, the book both rehashes well-known themes and provides useful new information and interpretations. General readers may find it a useful overview, particularly of analyses written in English and German, but specialists may have to focus their attention on chapters 4 and 5 to find new material and perspectives. The rather polemical conclusion, which tells Austrians how they have to think to “fully understand themselves” (255), may grate on citizens of that country. Titled “Beyond Habsburg,” this conclusion asserts that Austrians’ “true history is the history of the people who inhabited and built their land, not the history of a monarchic family and its ever-changing conglomerate state” (255).
Aside from a rather puzzling 1912 map of the Habsburgs’ holdings between 1648 and 1795, there are no illustrations in the work. The index refers mostly to people and places. Thaler also includes three tables: two derived from the works of Georg Grüll and showing Upper Austrian subject hearths in 1620–25 (195) and in 1750 (196) and one titled “Structure of the Austrianist Conception of Identity,” based on an article dealing with Austrian identity after 1945 written by Albert Reiterer in the 1980s (17). This eclectic mix of illustrative material reveals the rather bifurcated conception of the book, as also reflected in its preface: Is it a study of “the minority of Austrian Protestants who actively resisted the Habsburg Counterreformation in the early seventeenth century” as well as “contemporary Swedish policy and the resulting Austro-Swedish relationship,” or is it a study of “the role of history in the creation of collective identities” (vii)? Given his previous works on German-Danish national identity (2009) and Austrian nation-building (2001), it is my suspicion that the latter theme is closer to the author's heart.
The book's archival research was conducted in Austria, Germany, and Sweden, and this research is most evident in chapter 5, “The Noble Warriors: Austrian Protestants in Swedish Services.” From many perspectives, this is the centerpiece of the book. When the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus and his armies reached southern Germany during the Thirty Years’ War they made contact with Austrian Protestant émigrés there and, “[f]or a moment, Habsburg history and Swedish history intertwined” (151). Thaler found many examples of Austrian noblemen who joined the Swedish cause, at times even moving to Sweden, where their descendants still live today. Many important Austrian noble families such as the Jörgers, Herbersteins, Stubenbergs, and Starhembergs were attracted by the “appeal of Gustavus Adolphus” (164). But Thaler admits that he was not able to fully determine the scale of this Austrian contribution to the Protestant cause because “[t]he contribution of Austrians to the Swedish intervention was too large and diverse to be fully reconstructed” (164). Ultimately, the chapter concludes, “Sweden's intervention barely altered the fate of Protestantism in the Austrian and Bohemian lands” (171). This leaves the story, then, in the realm of “what might have been.”
Chapter 4 provides important insights into the political ideology of resistance to Habsburg rule by men of the radical Protestant opposition. Focusing on the Upper Austrian resistance leader Georg Erasmus von Tschernembl and based largely on contemporary pamphlet literature, Thaler shows how the radical opposition was not simply following a Calvinist lead as has often been claimed in the past. Instead (after more than a dozen pages of background on alternative theories of legitimate resistance to political power that will probably be familiar to most students of this period), Thaler places Tschernembl within the context of the Austrian estates’ arguments, which were largely positivist in nature and “primarily operated within a framework of historical tradition and affirmed privileges” (125). This echoes some of the important insights of the Austrian historian Arno Strohmeyer in his 2006 work on the topic, Konfessionskonflikt und Herrschaftsordnung: Widerstandsrecht bei den österreichischen Ständen (1550–1650) and returns the discussion of Austrian resistance to an Austrian context, leaving Paris or Geneva, where such resistance has often been thought to have originated. This important turn by Thaler also ties the revolts against Habsburg (and Bavarian Wittelsbach) policies of forced religious and political conformity to dynastic policies and the fateful decision by the men of the Habsburg family to have Emperor-King Matthias followed by his cousin Ferdinand: “the elevation of the Styrian ruler [Ferdinand] brings the long-smouldering conflict between the Catholic dynasty and Protestant nobles to a head” (131).
Ultimately, this book is a complicated story of failure. The men who tried to resist, for whatever reasons, ended up in exile, dead, or defeated. As Thaler asserts, “Protestant resistance in the Habsburgs’ hereditary lands never evolved into an all-embracing mass movement comparable to its Hussite antecedent” (231). This was to a large extent, he explains, because “most nobles found it easier to relinquish their faith than their status” (232). Although the ruminations on Austrian identity and pronouncements of what Austrians should do can be off-putting, Thaler's close analysis of failure can and does provide an alternative to the narrative of success so often found in the literature on the Counter Reformation in Austria.
