This rich and original collection of essays explores Habsburg Central Europe through the lens of centers and peripheries, an analytic model most often associated with postcolonial studies. Center/periphery long served as an organizing rubric for the study of British and French overseas colonialism. Generally speaking, the center (metropole) served symbolically to produce culture, while the periphery served as the subject of this production (1). When applied to more tangible historical relations, the clean dichotomy broke down. Scholars discovered half-peripheries, inner-peripheries, in-between peripherality, and various other upside-down and inside-out ways of using the two terms to understand imbalances of power. The pairing of center and periphery is now so ubiquitous that the editors of this volume have shortened it to the (German) abbreviation: Z + P.
Right off the bat, the editors consider whether postcolonial theory can be useful for understanding the historical, social, cultural, and economic relations in Central Europe. Does “borrowing” theory actually allow us to look at things in a new way, to ask new questions, to shake up the map (cartographic, mental, or otherwise)? What happens when the Habsburgs meet Homi Bhabha? When Francis Joseph runs into Foucault? A lot, it turns out, if you are willing to wade around in some abstractions.
Working with the rubric of Z + P in Central Europe is not tidy at all. The editors and contributors do not attempt a synthesis but present instead “a preliminary patchwork of methodological approaches” (2) whose usefulness will be tested in various case studies both in this volume and in a follow-up project entitled, not surprisingly, Zentren/Peripherien.
Theoretically challenged readers who want something concrete (or cast in iron and steel) are advised to start with Günter Dinhobl's excellent essay on geopolitics and the building of the railways in “Kakanien.” Using 1841 as a starting point, Dinhobl investigates the ways that “railway imperialism” created centers and peripheries throughout the monarchy. He argues that while the private sector was interested in connecting established centers of trade, the state was concerned with planning a railroad network with Vienna at the center (83). The Lokalbahngesetz of 1880 had paradoxical effects. True, regions were connected to the main corridors of the larger rail network, but the access by Lokalbahn marked an area as peripheral. (Today one can still feel this “journey to the periphery” when transferring from a high-speed IC train to the local connectors.) Dinhobl studies isochronal maps from the early twentieth century that allowed one to calculate travel times from cities to “outlying” areas. White spaces on these maps, denoting areas without rail service, suggested something like a “furthest periphery” reachable by means similar to those in “darkest Africa” (94).
Center/periphery need not be read so literally as places on a map. Waltraud Heindl uses Z + P to examine the production of gendered heroes at the state (imperial) and Crownland levels. She compares the Austrian Ministry for Education's production and dissemination of imperial heroes in schoolbooks and children's literature (Maximilian I, Prince Eugene, Maria Theresa, etc.) to competing hero production occurring at the Crownland level—for example, Andreas Hofer for Tirolean boys, Libuše for Czech girls. Heindl's analysis effectively weaves gender, the geographic conceptions of home and belonging, and the symbolic production of multiple political and emotional loyalties.
Several other essays on gender use center/periphery as a starting point or organizational frame. Daniela Strigl demonstrates how stereotypes about the “character” of different Habsburg nationalities were read onto men who served in the military. Bravery, ability to follow commands, and loyalty to the kaiser were seen not as individual traits of the man but as collective traits of soldiers from the various lands of the monarchy. Another essay breaks away from center/periphery as a geographical concept altogether and uses the term “inner-periphery” to analyze female subjectivity and men's writings on the women's movement at the turn of the century. Readers curious about the ways Maria Todorova's Imagining the Balkans (New York, 1997) has been received and debated among young Austrian scholars will profit from several essays that discuss the peripheral (or not) status of the Balkans vis-à-vis ostensible centers.
After reading these essays, one could challenge the proposal made at the outset of this review that scholars of Central Europe are “borrowing” theory (postcolonial) and applying it to new contexts (Central Europe). In fact, some of the questions underlying these essays quite strikingly resemble ones that have occupied Habsburg scholars for decades. In her essay “Innere Peripherien als Ersatz für Kolonien?” Andrea Komlosy breathes new life into the study of Austria's internal markets and position within the international economy. Smaller scale center/periphery relations within certain regions (Bohemia, Moravia, Lower Austria, Upper Austria, and Styria) should “als wesentlicher Faktor für die Stabilität des Gesamtstaates angesehen werden” (77). Recalling, as it does, older debates about centripetal and centrifugal forces at work in the late imperial period, such a conclusion draws as much on Oskár Jászi as Edward Said. It turns out that Z + P is not merely a theoretical import but rather allows scholars of Central Europe to revisit some familiar themes with a new vocabulary.
