A study of the nineteenth-century Croatian diarist Dragojla Jarnević is the real highlight of this volume of fifteen short essays. Jarnević was based in the town of Karlovac on the border between civil and military Croatia, and from 1833 to 1873 she set down in a very introspective diary her thoughts about tumultuous local events. It is a remarkable egodocument. In his chapter, Drago Roksandić focuses on Jarnević's experience of the revolutionary year 1848, asserting that it is a “first-rate personal testimony of the rise and fall of ‘48er Yugoslavism … and of the building up of patterns of mutual exclusion and denial on both sides” (213). Certainly, we encounter here her firm patriotism (she idolized Ban Josip Jelačić), but also her disdain for the “wild folk” of her nation who flooded into Karlovac from the Lika region. We are faced too with some queering of gender relations, for Jarnević repeatedly wished she was a man so that she could participate actively in Jelačić's invasion of Hungary. This might suggest a female perspective wholly different from that of an aristocratic and patriotic diarist like Teréz Brunszvik (in 1848 Budapest). In fact, Jarnević like Brunszvik experienced the full gamut of emotions as her hometown became a chaotic transit point for refugees and soldiers.
This book of essays is based on a conference organized jointly in October 2019 by the universities of Graz and Novi Sad. If the regional focus hails from that collaboration, a basic theme is the way that the Habsburg monarchy's southern territories, especially around the Sava and Drava rivers, experienced social and economic instability as a major transit zone for trade, military campaigns, and refugees across the centuries. Many of the chapters note, albeit tangentially, not only how this affected everyday lives but also how the Habsburg state increasingly interfered to stabilize the lands bordering the Ottoman Empire. The evolving situation of the prečani Serbs is particularly well-discussed. However, this is largely fortuitous, for the volume otherwise lacks a strong editorial hand. Readers may find the very title of the book bizarre, but that is compounded by Harald Heppner's introduction titled “The Struggle for Commonness.” This proves to be an attempt in stilted prose to create some unity for the volume, and it includes a false definition of the English word “commonness.” After this, the book's chapters tend to float in isolation with little coherence beyond that imposed by the reader (or this reviewer).
Where the volume is useful, however, is in showcasing, with extensive bibliographies, some of the recent research by Serbian and Croatian historians about a conflicted and confusing Habsburg territory. The emphasis in most essays may be empirical, and a map of the region is sorely needed to make sense of the detail, but a number of stronger contributions do emerge. One set of chapters suggests the different ways in which the Habsburg enlightened state tried to impose reform and control. Isidora Točanac Radović is illuminating on the campaign, started by Maria Theresa in 1769, to reduce the holy days in the Serbian Orthodox calendar to mold a more effective and secular workforce; after seventeen years the number had been reduced from 150 to 18, but not without fierce resistance at the grassroots (“a traumatic process for believers”; 93). In two other essays, Sabine Jesner and Jelena Ilić Mandić assess how the Banat was organized in the decades after its acquisition in 1718, with waves of foreign officials imposed by Vienna to exploit the new province economically and militarily. By 1775, this part of the military frontier was settled and stabilized; German officers or colonists were selected for the skills they could supply to the border zone.
A second grouping of chapters is authored by historians from the University of Novi Sad and illuminates well the history of prečani Serbs through two centuries. While Branko Bešlin explains how the city of Novi Sad slowly grew and flourished as a vital strategic and economic hub, Dejan Mikavica hints at his own impressive publications with a short chapter about the tactics used in the 1860s by Serb Liberal politicians from southern Hungary. The most substantial contributions however are by two of the editors and concern the controversial role of the Serbian Orthodox Church. Based on his extensive research, Nenad Ninković describes the crucial influence of the eighteenth-century archbishops of Karlovci in sustaining Serbian culture and traditions. While Habsburg influence was seeping into the border region and even beginning to shape the art and architecture of Sremski Karlovci, the archbishops maneuvered firstly to protect the historic privileges conceded to Serbs in the 1690s and secondly to obstruct the reforms that Maria Theresa from the 1760s was determined to impose on Orthodox religious practices.
A hundred years later, the Orthodox hierarchy faced a different kind of secular challenge. In one of the book's best chapters, Goran Vasin details the bitter conflict between the Orthodox Church and the Serb Liberals led by Svetozar Miletić. While most historians have ignored this, Vasin shows that by the late nineteenth century such anticlericalism “was the crucial feature of the social and political scene of Serbs in the Monarchy” (241). Miletić led a vigorous campaign against the church's wealth and its archaic educational practices, but he also targeted the Orthodox hierarchy for what he saw as its persistent collusion with the Hungarian authorities. From the Serb Liberal perspective, senior clergy like German Anđelić, who in 1882 was imposed as patriarch by the Hungarian prime minister Kálmán Tisza, were traitors who had sold their souls to the Hungarian devil. It was therefore something of a triangular power struggle where Liberal politicians were usually at a disadvantage in the face of their hierarchical foes. It persisted into the twentieth century, until 1912, when Budapest abolished the church's political and educational autonomy, curbing an institution that for two centuries had been one element of unity across a battered transit zone.
This then is a volume with some intriguing nuggets of research. It is just a pity that the project lacks the coordination that would provide the reader with more focus and clarity.
