Despite a generation of revisionist scholarship that has reframed teleological assumptions about centrifugal nationalism and imperial decline-and-fall, when describing religion, narrative conventions about decay and degeneration loom large. Rupert Klieber's book is a counterweight to the standard tale of declining or insignificant religiosity. If the work strays at times into a nostalgic normative advocacy for the overall positive effect of religion on Habsburg society, Klieber's book nonetheless presents an admirably ecumenical outline of the religious beliefs and practices of all the main confessional groups of the monarchy's inhabitants, not just the educated upper classes of the major cities.
Directly stated in the foreword, the book is a companion piece to the author's essay in the Habsburgermonarchie series (Rupert Klieber, “Soziale Integration durch Religion? Die konfessionellen Milieus der Habsburgermonarchie und ihr Einfluss auf die Lebenspraxis der Bevölkerung,” in Soziale Strukturen 9, pt. 1, Die Habsburgermonarchie 1848–1918, ed. Helmut Rumpler and Peter Urbanitsch, 743–81, Vienna, 2010). Whereas the latter is a confessionally intertwined examination along ideal-type categories of religious affiliation, the present book is textually related but vastly different in scope and material.
Drawing on the theoretical apparatus of the social history of mentalities and the history of everyday life, Klieber's book sketches a series of Lebenswelten (“living environments” does not capture the term's full essence) of religious believers in the various main religious groups of the monarchy. The book draws its material mostly from German-language secondary sources, supplemented by memoirs. As an innovative attempt to destabilize hierarchies based on confessional strength or an assessment of state privileges, the group portraits proceed according to the age of the religious traditions in question: thus, Jewish, Eastern Rite, Catholic, Muslim, and finally Protestant.
For the disparate religious traditions, the book does an excellent job of viewing belief systems both in terms of popular religion, as well as more established official beliefs. In many places, the work reads as historical anthropology exploring little-known peasant realms, often in vivid detail. One enters into an Eastern Orthodox Ukrainian peasant cottage to find bundles of blessed herbs and holy portraits (of both saints and the emperor) along the east wall (79). Similarly, one reads of peasants in German Catholic regions of Bohemia ringing hand bells at the bedside of a dying loved one; after death, the bell-ringing continues in a solemn procession in order to lead the recently deceased's soul out of the house (106). On the whole, the book underscores the vast socioeconomic gulf between the monarchy's rural inhabitants and the modern reader. This world was largely agrarian and premodern in fundamental ways: High child mortality, the health of livestock, and weather conditions all mattered greatly.
Interspersed throughout the text, Klieber's book contains a wealth of photographs, mostly of religious rituals, processions, and family portraits. Overall, the photos help to reaffirm the anthropological quality of the investigation. In addition to a copious bibliography, the book also contains the color maps of confessional statistics based on the figures from the year 1910.
The book succeeds in its main purpose of evoking Lebenswelten, especially of the rural peoples who formed the majority of the monarchy's inhabitants. There are, however, several problems with the group portraits. The thematically separate religious traditions result in rather static portraits of the groups. When touched upon at all, dynamic moments of intertwining, commonality, and cultural exchange are not explored, such as the affinities between Reform Judaism and cultural Protestantism in the Habsburg monarchy. Similarly, the Lebenswelten are mostly dated to the pre-1914 period. Thus, aside from a few isolated remarks, the reader does not get an impression of how World War I affected religious believers both during and after the conflict. Furthermore, the overall argumentative frame no doubt will displease many readers. Although Klieber writes of deeply ingrained ideological hatred, such as the anti-Semitism that erupted into persecutions at Tiszaeszlár, Polná, and Zabolotiv (26), he argues that, “All in all, one can venture in conclusion that the positive effects of the factor ‘religion’ in everyday life in the Habsburg monarchy between 1848–1918 preponderated” (217).
Such unjustly sweeping generalizations aside, the book remains a useful starting point for accessing the mentalities of the Habsburg monarchy's major religious groups, particularly from rural regions. That is no small achievement, especially for a sole author writing in an era of increasingly narrow historiographical specialization.
