Literature is an indispensable source for historians interested in the changing semantics of time and space affecting the Habsburg monarchy. Historians occasionally refer to the novels of Joseph Roth or the works of Stefan Zweig, but even specialists in the field often ignore what once hugely popular authors such as Johann Nestroy or Franz Grillparzer can contribute to our understanding of the mental maps that determined ideas of the empire's place in Europe.

Arens's starting point in this collection of essays is Austria's position within a complex web of German-speaking cultures as well as within the Habsburg monarchy's own multinational setting. She makes a passionate plea to think about Europe's spatial and cultural dimensions beyond teleological assumptions concerning the development toward nation-states. Here she finds herself at the center of debates that have animated Habsburg historians for the past two decades. Therefore, it comes as a surprise that in her introduction Arens lumps scholars such as Pieter Judson, Marsha Rozenblit, and Tara Zahra together with an older generation of historians for whom “Austria appears as an entity doomed to fail” (14). There seems to be a misunderstanding as to what recent historians of the monarchy have tended to argue when operating with new categories such as national hybridity and national indifference. Many of these historians have in fact emphasized how religion, the experience of linguistic borderlands, or dynastic loyalty cut across a national sense of belonging, questioning the idea of an empire doomed to fail. Perhaps unwillingly, Arens's work makes a welcome contribution to exactly those trends in Central European history.

There are other examples where the book's contribution to historical scholarship is overshadowed by claims that are difficult to back up with evidence. For instance, chapter one speaks of an understanding of “national culture in Hohenzollern Prussia” that “is distinctively non-French and indigenous to Protestant Germany,” which Arens contrasts with eighteenth-century Habsburg Austria “that was less reticent about borrowings from French culture” (30). While she is right about Austria, where the liberal aristocracy engaged with the progressive thought of the French philosophes, its seems difficult to follow her argument about Prussia, where about a quarter of the population of Berlin were descendants of French Huguenots and where Frederick II made no secret of his preference for the French language and his Academy became a hotspot of French literary debates. With similar intentions, Arens invents the strawman of a “Prussian Empire” (no inverted commas) that apparently existed in the 1760s (58). It is this overstated theoretical and historiographical framework of analysis that make it at times difficult to appreciate Arens's arguments.

Notwithstanding these shortcomings, the literary sources she uses to examine Austrian ideas of Europe all represent authors that the monarchy's cultural and intellectual historians have too often neglected. The examples of Joseph von Sonnenfels and Franz Grillparzer show how an aesthetically abstract evaluation of these authors’ contribution to world literature might be quite irrelevant for historians interested in the specific social and historical context of their works’ reception. It is true that on a philosophical level it is difficult to compare Sonnenfels's role to the wider European impact of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, but the former's views of Austria's place within Europe's literary life deeply marked generations of readers and theatergoers exactly during the decades when the Austrian idea of state emerged. Arens's emphasis on Sonnenfels's view of the spectator seems particularly relevant in view of recent trends in theater and opera studies. Unfortunately, from a historical point of view, it makes little sense to talk in this context of “the ethnicity of an artwork or artist (like the political nation-state in which it originated)” (40; see similar 84). Likewise, her discussion of Nationaltheater (of which she never states what the nation here stands for) and her debate on eighteenth-century translations lack references to Denis Diderot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, authors to whom most of the texts she quotes contextually relate.

While it is not entirely clear how her fascinating reading of Adalbert Stifter's depictions of nature relates to the book's general European theme, Arens convincingly shows how popular genres of theater in Vienna formed an important contrast to the educational ambition of the classicism and romanticism associated with Weimar or the theaters in Hamburg and Berlin. But can a study of Austrian literature in that period dispense of Friedrich Schiller? One should not forget the references in the works of Karl Emil Franzos to the huge impact of Lessing and Schiller, not only in Vienna and the empire's regional capitals, but in the monarchy's most remote provinces, including the popular stages of the Shtetl in Galicia and the Bukowina.

Without an obvious link to the previous chapters, the book's second part examines how twentieth-century writers coped with Austria's crises of 1918, 1934, 1938, and 1945. Arens's essays on Hugo von Hofmannsthal's cosmopolitan ambition, Arthur Schnitzler's social criticism, and the postnational ideas informing the works of Peter Handke and the Wiener Gruppe are particularly illuminating for historians seeking to explain how the country responded to the empire's collapse. The lost world of Grillparzer, Nestroy, and Stifter remained a defining aspect of their work, if only as an attempt to come to terms with it. Arens rightly rejects the conventional argument about Austria's fin-de-siècle literature as being unpolitical; and it is here where her idea of a postnational culture based on a common language seems most persuasive. Although one could do without Otto von Habsburg to argue this case, she shows that there still exists a culture based on the German language that does not relate to the German nation-state and that is refreshingly free of the forms of cultural nationalism that marked twentieth-century Europe. Conversations across disciplines remain challenging; but Arens's book shows how necessary they are.