Students of Austrian historiography will greet this volume as a useful reference work for finding the personal and bibliographical details of a large proportion of Austrian scholars who have contributed to the historical profession over the last century or so. Readers will be able to discover, for instance, that Waltraud Heindl's father was a veterinarian, that Ludwig Bittner's brother was Julius Bittner, the quasi-modernist composer, and that Ernst Hanisch's first monograph was his dissertation on Stefan George. There might also be some benefit, as the compilers of this substantive work claim, for future researchers who can use the data collected here to provide some analysis of the social and cultural aspects of the Austrian historical profession. Fellner and Corradini suggest avenues for further research in their introduction, especially the theme of the historical profession as an engine of social mobility.

The actual usefulness of this volume for such research purposes is limited, however, by its incomplete character. By the compilers' own estimation, roughly 40 percent of living Austrian historians who should be included in the volume are not present because they neglected—or refused—to fill in questionnaires that the compilers sent to them. This is quite a hefty number; and in the list of those self-excluded, which is conveniently furnished at the beginning of the book, appear many of Austria's best-known and best-respected historians, including, interestingly enough, two members of the very Commission for Modern Austrian History under whose auspices this volume was published and which is headed by none other than Fritz Fellner himself. It would be tempting to speculate why Professor Fellner was not able to persuade all members of his commission to sign up for inclusion in this volume, let alone the other almost three hundred absentees. Whatever the reasons, this large absenteeism, compounded by the compilers' decision, partly based on legal considerations, not to include available data on those nonrespondents, must necessarily pose a large qualification for the objectivity of any conclusions reached by the analysis of these data. This makes the volume from the beginning anything but comprehensive.

There are, in any case, some notable absences from the list of those either included or who were at least approached. Perhaps the most puzzling absence among living Austrian historians is the Austrian emigré, Frederick Morton, whose admittedly somewhat literary, perhaps even journalistic, but nevertheless well-researched books on Austrian history are among the most widely read in the English-speaking world. There are also unfortunate absences among those historians no longer with us. Neither Ilsa Barea nor Hilde Spiel, both of whom wrote or edited major works on Viennese history, are present. This might be due to the compilers' decision not to include scholars in literary history or the history of music because of difficulties of demarcation. Legal historians and art historians are excluded, on the other hand, apparently because of the career paths of graduates of the Institute for Austrian Historical Research at Vienna University. Even less understandable than the exclusion of literary history and history of music, is an almost complete absence of historians of science from the volume, thus perpetuating one of the traditional blind spots of Austrian historiography.

Another unfortunate absence from the book is any attempt to catalogue the various historians' religious background, which, in at least the cases of deceased historians, would have been easily available given Habsburg and Austrian data collection conventions. The obvious question here would be about the number of Jewish individuals included, but there is also a point to be addressed about the large number of Protestant historians in a land that was overwhelmingly Catholic. Such questions would not necessarily be dominant in any research project, such as the one mooted by Fellner and Corradini, but religious affiliation would surely be an important part of any thorough analysis of the data. As they stand, the complete absence of any religious data makes such analysis of these data impossible.

This volume represents a useful compilation of those historians whom Fellner and Corradini thought worthy of inclusion among the circle of Austrian historians and of those living Austrian historians who were prepared to be included. It falls quite a way short of being a comprehensive picture of the Austrian historical profession (especially, I suspect, regarding the Austrian emigration, history of science, and feminist history), and its data are only partially adequate for further research and analysis. In its own way, however, the volume does offer an interesting sociological and cultural-historical insight into the state of today's historical profession in Austria and the attitudes and limitations that some in that profession still retain.