Imperial identity, local identity, confessional identity, class identity: all of these identities and more competed and coexisted with national identity in the human lives that populated the dynastic empire which once stretched from Bregenz in the west to Czernowitz in the east and from Krakow southward to Sarajevo. Even after the Great War had broken out in 1914, the famed violinist and composer Fritz Kreisler recalled his brief service in the Austro-Hungarian officer corps as “service to my Fatherland.”Footnote ¹ Having entertained his comrades with virtuosic concerts and tirelessly campaigning with them for months in the trenches of the Galician Front, Kreisler professed his faith in the unifying Habsburg patriotism they shared.

Integral to the rise and ultimate hegemony of nationalism is its temporally backward-reaching monopolization on human group identities. This is why I have found the Habsburg empire to be so relevant for classroom discussions on the constructedness of nationalities: perhaps more than any other modern entity on the map of Europe, this vanished dynastic power few students have ever heard about lacked a seeming national “core” like Germany or France. Hardly a “prison of nations” that shackled the “self-determination” of nationally conscious people, Austria-Hungary was shattered from above by nationalist agitators in the courts of ultimately victorious Entente powers: a geopolitical earthquake condoned by Woodrow Wilson’s mistaken conflation of national liberation with democratic freedom.Footnote ² Thanks to recent decades of demanding multilingual research, the overlapping multitude of human identities that had been self-evident to most of the increasingly literate, civically active peoples of the late Habsburg empire now constitute the starting point for critical scholarship.

Eternalized national histories still predominate outside the academy, however, for we live in an age of nation-states. Students usually arrive on campus with an inculcated belief in the organic veracity of national belonging. Tropes about national destiny reign over international policy at the expense of rationally addressing urgent supranational, local, and global crises. Environmental degradation, pandemics, famines: the list is as endless as it is existential. This essay therefore proposes to review an inevitably selective survey from the library of collegial exchange that has systematically disproven that peoples of the late Habsburg empire embraced singularly organic and exclusionary national identities. Against this backdrop, it will then unpack two ambitious new monographs that assess identity in late-Habsburg urban spaces on radically differing canvases: whereas Catherine Horel zooms out to compare evolving late-Habsburg identities across twelve midsized cities, Claire Morelon zooms in to examine everyday desires in Prague from the wartime experience through the first two years of the “national” Czechoslovak Republic. Given Morelon’s finding that, even in the Czech-national bastion of Prague, public expectations still drew from a heritage of hybrid identities as late as 1920, this essay concludes by looking back on its opening question: when did national identities take over Habsburg cities?

After nation-states prevailed as the leading basis for sovereignty after 1918 (one thinks of the League of Nations), renowned historians such as Hans Kohn, Peter Sugar, Hugh Seton-Watson, and A.J.P. Taylor caricatured the Habsburg empire as a rigid, oppressive, intolerant, and inherently authoritarian entity, just as they celebrated its nation-state successors as natural, democratic, and modern. Revision of this thesis began in earnest during a conference at Indiana University in 1966, when István Deák challenged his expert colleagues that “there were no dominant nationalities in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. There were only dominant classes, estates, institutions, interest groups, and professions.”Footnote ³ Himself born in the aftermath of the empire’s collapse, he imparted his skepticism about the “prison” trope to generations of students at Columbia, some of whom feature in this article, and he demonstrated how imperial loyalty predominated in the Habsburg officer corps.Footnote ⁴ In 1981, Gary Cohen continued this progression in earnest with his analysis of the German minority in Habsburg Prague, positing that national identity could be chosen based on social interests. Rather than springing from primordial national attachments, he argued, “the Prague Germans essentially created an identity and group solidarity de novo after 1848 in reaction to the Czech nationalist challenge to their dominance.”Footnote ⁵ If nations are invented rather than eternal, if they are based upon contingent rather than inherent factors, could it not be that they were just one of many possible group identities? Two years later, Benedict Anderson, Ernest Gellner, and Eric Hobsbawm published their seminal works demonstrating the modernity of national group identities and deconstructing their “timeless” iconography.Footnote ⁶

To boost the legitimacy of their nationalizing projects, nation-states retroactively invented the conception that non-national political entities were “backward,” Cohen later added. In fact, “by European standards of the era, the Austrian half of the Habsburg Monarchy after the 1860s enjoyed broad freedom of speech, the press, association, and assembly, and widely respected guarantees of legal process. Popular expectations about guarantees of justice were sufficiently high by the 1880s and 1890s that blatant governmental abuse of the judicial system was an infrequent and loudly protested phenomenon.”Footnote ⁷ The late Habsburg Empire was evolving into an accountable democracy, whose public sphere was as dynamic as in its neighbors to the west. It was for this reason, as Pieter Judson expositions in his ambitious monographic synthesis, that few residents of the empire expected or even wanted it to end in 1918; nationalism only destroyed it after the war had weakened its popular legitimacy and nationalist missionaries had prevailed in the halls of power as the war reached its end.Footnote ⁸ Given the vitality, modernity, and popular reliance on imperial institutions before 1914, the nation-state successor states perpetuated many Habsburg-era regulations in the war’s aftermath, not least the right to public expression.Footnote ⁹

If Cohen, Judson, and their many colleagues are right and the late Habsburg empire had produced a thriving civil society—to the point that nationalists only triumphed thanks to the empire’s declining fortunes in the war and a crisis of imperial legitimacy—it is crucial to excavate why people had not become exclusively national, and precisely what they were instead. Here the concept often termed “national indifference” offers a useful theoretical contribution. Drawing principally from microstudies that feature borderland peoples or imperial elites, historians have shown that national agnosticism survived despite narrowing options through the empire’s final years, as citizens had to register nationality to exercise basic civil rights like voting or primary school education.Footnote ¹⁰ Only “the collapse of the Habsburg empire into self-declared nation-states in 1918 rendered the outright refusal of nationality nearly impossible,” Tara Zahra concludes, as “the Czechoslovak, Polish, and Yugoslav governments all forcibly classified citizens, hoping to boost the legitimacy of their states domestically and internationally by reducing the number of people counted as members of minority groups.”Footnote ¹¹ Nonetheless, as Eagle Glassheim shows, even immediately after 1918 the “imperial, supra-national elite [of] the Bohemian nobility resisted nationalism and its more virulent Czech and German advocates.”Footnote ¹² Only the tensions brought on by Czechoslovak predations and especially Nazi invasion swept away the viability of the classic noble tactic of adaptation to conserve their interests.

If borderlands, military barracks, and noble estates were sanctuaries for non-national identities, what was happening in the increasingly literate cities of the empire, from which nationalist missionaries often evangelized out to the countryside? Turning toward urban studies, both books under review uphold the scholarly consensus that nationality is a modern construct, just as they illustrate how non-national identities vied with emerging national ones (usually based on language) as the late empire progressed. Even after 1918, non-national self-understandings sustained some of their viability amid overlapping personal loyalties. Although each work under review differs considerably in reach and focus, both benefit from the field work and theories of preceding urban studies such as Jeremy King’s analysis of how national identities steadily took hold in Budweis/BudějoviceFootnote ¹³ and Nathaniel Wood’s exposition of how Krakow—seemingly the most “Polish” of Austria’s cities—engaged in Habsburg-imperial and local civic pride, not least in its competition with eastern-Galician Lemberg.Footnote ¹⁴ On the basis of this and much additional scholarship, both books under review exhibit urban space and urban life as a lens for understanding everyday negotiated, multilayered identities in Habsburg cities.

Building on decades of investigation, Catherine Horel (research director at the French National Center for Scientific Research, CNRS) draws from historical periodicals, memoires, and decades of scholarship in Czech, English, French, German, Hungarian, and Italian to compare public reception of dueling national, imperial, and local identities in twelve mid-sized cities numbering 50,000–200,000 people across the empire (Arad, Brünn/Brno, Czernowitz/Chernivtsi, Fiume/Rijeka, Lemberg/Lwów/Lʹviv, Oradea, Pozsony/Pressburg/Bratislava, Sarajevo, Subotica, Temesvár/Timișoara, Trieste/Trst, and Zagreb). Explicitly leaving out big cities like Budapest (the subject of her 1999 monograph), Vienna, or Prague and depending on the archival research of preceding scholarship, this award-winning tome has accomplished something of an urban analogue to Pieter Judson’s aforementioned new synthesis on Habsburg political, economic, social, and cultural life. Featuring local politics, religious life, urban planning, and cultural institutions, Horel’s thematically arranged chapters uphold the scholarly interrogation of “two main simplifying discourses: the idealization of the monarchy as a paradise of understanding and peaceful multiculturalism on the one hand, and the exaggeration of [national] conflict on the other” (4).

Language statistics in Horel’s rich appendix may offer the greatest treasure for specialists. Especially in the Hungarian half of the empire, the censuses of 1880, 1890, 1900, and 1910 demonstrated the prevalence of second, third, or even fourth languages among each ethnic group, which dominated to varying degrees over time from city to city. To the dismay of nationalists, a pragmatic approach to language usage seems to have predominated, and censuses could not capture the rich lingual mishmash people spoke on an everyday basis. Building on scholars like Zahra and Judson, pragmatism also accompanied the advent of mass education. Aspiring Slovene-speaking workers went to Italian schools that Slovene nationalists decried as a “factory of Italians,” converting Slovenes into bourgeois Italian-speaking urbanites (183–84). Racism and a sense of superiority, meanwhile, appears to have weakened supposedly dominant national groups. Whereas Czechs often learned German through secondary education, bilingualism was “an advantage that their German counterparts could not have because they continued to consider Czech an inferior language. The Czechs had two schooling systems at their disposal and made use of it, gaining more opportunities in the labor market” (73). The same could be said of Hungarians and Italians, who tended to remain monolingual, even as Slavic peasants, workers, and domestics had to learn the language of their employers. Meanwhile, Yiddish was never accepted as a census language (in part because integrated Jews discriminated against Orthodox Jews). Rather, Jews were a pillar for imperial identity, as they tended to be better educated, multilingual, and connected with people across the empire through extensive travel (86–87).

In all twelve urban landscapes, pride in one’s city emerges as a chief unifying affiliation. The city itself became an imagined community of common belonging, Horel observes, “for people rarely use the entire urban space but are concentrated in their neighborhood and places of reference in the city” (5). Civic life flourished across lingual and confessional boundaries, as each city vied to prove it was more cultured than urban rivals. Architecture and associations were a key means of expressing this dominance, even as they generated an overarching sense of sameness from city to city that any visitor still feels when traveling across today’s national borders. The same architects and firms often constructed the historicist, later Secessionist train stations, opera houses, and other cultural edifices that dominated each town. Cafés and hotels often had the same names, while planners from the same schools laid out gracious green spaces that defined and often still define civic life. Notwithstanding enthusiasm in nationalist presses, residents seldom saw a new theater or school as victory for one national group or another, “but more often as a sign of modernity that all citizens could be proud of” (320).

Along with cultural associations like operas and cultural houses, pageants and exhibitions showcased pride in local accomplishments that simultaneously appealed to imperial, national, and civic patriotism.Footnote ¹⁵ For instance, the 1894 exhibition in Lemberg attracted 1.5 million visitors to sixty-three pavilions.Footnote ¹⁶ While its architecture and layout drew inspiration from across the empire, much of its content served the national interests of Lemberg’s Polish majority and elites. Highlights were the panorama commemorating the centennial of the Battle of Racławice (emphasizing peasant support for the Polish nation) and a pavilion with paintings by Polish Romantic Jan Matejko. Only one pavilion celebrated eastern Galicia’s Ruthenian/Ukrainian history with a Hutsul church and decorations; this “extremely limited” presence coincided with exhibition publications that portrayed Ruthenian backwardness. The end result, Horel argues, is that “the exhibition succeeded in combining Polish nationalism and city patriotism” (470).

Longstanding mayors like Károly Telbisz (Temesvár) and Tivadar Brolly (Pozsony) furthered civic identity and stability. Although both encouraged gradual Magyarization throughout their long reigns, they also respected the rights of various ethnicities, and (like Mayor István Tisza in Budapest) “personified the new trend of turning mayors into experts and technicians as well as politicians,” eager to coordinate ideas amongst themselves (394). Around the turn of the century, however, elderly “neutral” mayors were leaving office, and nationally divisive politics gained sway. While Italian irredentism started destabilizing Trieste, Romanian minority delegates in Czernowitz spoke only Romanian during meetings, which the German mayor could not understand.

Perhaps the only downside of Horel’s prodigious sourcing of urban examples is the understandable neglect of rural hinterlands. Even outskirts only appear in rare instances, such as when Trieste and Brünn (Brno) exploited dense railway networks to attract proletarian commuters. As a result, urban-rural presumptions sometimes manifest. While comparing Trieste with Lemberg (Lʹviv), for instance, Horel repeats the age-old narrative that Lemberg’s lack of industrialization reflected “the mediocre economic status of Galicia” (35). Aside from passing mention (471), there is no indication that dynamic international players were constructing an oil infrastructure immediately south of Lemberg that made Galicia far more industrially relevant on a regional and even international scale than its traditional reputation as an agrarian backwater would suggest.Footnote ¹⁷

The second book in this review—a substantially revised version of Claire Morelon’s dissertation—applies Czech, English, French, and German-language periodicals and repositories including Prague’s municipal and national archives, the Austrian State Archives, and the Czech Military Archives to exhibit how Prague’s population sustained hybrid identities within sustained total-war conditions before and after 1918.Footnote ¹⁸ The sights, sounds, and sensations of wartime and immediate postwar Prague were continuous in their grayness, hunger, and degeneration of cultural vivacity residents recalled before the war. Whereas in late 1918 Entente visitors naively projected nationalist tropes of an eternalized national city “waking up” after a three-century slumber, reality was an everyday experience of continuities between wartime Habsburg and immediate postwar Czechoslovak bleakness. “Both glorious war narratives and triumphant national liberation narratives were put in a stark light on the street,” Morelon argues. “It was the place where the collision between the aspirations and reality of the wartime and postwar period was made tangible” (2).

One could say that Prague puts earlier scholarship about hybrid identities and contingency to the ultimate test. Given that by 1914, 90% of the city’s inhabitants spoke Czech and Prague was the indisputable center of the Czech national movement, few residents were “nationally indifferent.” Yet Morelon assesses, “even if feeling intensely patriotically Czech, it was hard not to succumb to the ‘suggestive force of war’: the state was invaded and in danger, peers and family members were fighting” (293). People in Prague celebrated Czech soldiers going off to struggle for Austria-Hungary, to the point that Viennese authorities could shelve their concerns that residents might empathize instead with fellow Slavs in Serbia and Russia. Even the Sokols (falcons), typically considered Entente sympathizers, were actually “pillars of the Austrian war effort on the home front,” raising funds, turning their gymnastics halls into hospitals, opposing anti-state activities, and cheering imperial victories like the retaking of Lemberg (91). Even if people did not buy into all the imperial war slogans, there was general agreement in the patriotic goal of victory.

Although Prague’s architecture was undamaged during the war, street life changed through the gray days of wartime deprivation. Goodwill declined as Prague’s streets were militarized and by 1916 the seeming randomness of repression prompted protest letters from residents. “The sacrifices of the nation in the war were presented as poorly repaid by a state that persecuted its Slavic population,” Morelon observes, concluding that for Prague’s general population the military helped to delegitimize the authority of the imperial government (67). Wounded soldiers and refugees in the streets further conveyed a sense that the imperial state no longer cared for its citizens. Even worse were the food shortages that grew acute in the last two years of the war. Animosities were urban-rural rather than nationalist, Morelon notes: “Having to beg peasants for food during their trips to the countryside and sometimes being turned down constituted a humiliation for the urban workers and petit bourgeois who, before the war, had felt superior to their rural counterparts” (195).

The protest scene that unfolded in 1918 was not just anti-imperial, anti-German, and antisemitic, but also anti-hunger. Proof that “homegrown concerns and local conditions” spurred local action is proven by the fact that strikes in Bohemia had actually increased by 1919 and even more by 1920 (208). Once the nationalist parades were over after the national Republic was declared in October 1918, “postwar Prague still looked a lot like wartime Prague. Passing through the streets, the observer was likely to be struck by the continuation of wartime practices and the elements of continuity with the old regime, whose institutions, personnel, and habits could not be erased as easily as street names” (276). As late as November 1920, the streets were still dark at night, facilitating crime sprees. War deprivation combined with Spanish Influenza to spread panic. Calls for democracy foundered as imperial-era officials remained in power. People wanted food and housing. Unrest spread in part because Czech police were less interested than their imperial predecessors in quelling it (252). If there is one missing element in Morelon’s account, it is the retribution—often framed in national terms—through which Czech-speakers stole from the sudden minorities in their new republic.

In the end, Morelon demonstrates that, even in a national stronghold like Prague, local and imperial patriotism were as important as nationalism. Rather than euphoric belief that national liberation meant democratic freedom (as President Wilson expected), in October 1918 “people in Prague took a chance on another state that could potentially fulfill demands that mattered to them, in terms of welfare, participation in the political process, and democratic processes” (12). That the new regime at first failed to meet these expectations was proven, Morelon argues, when people were somber on the Republic’s two-year anniversary in October 1920. Rather than the opulent urban life they recalled before 1914, they were experiencing a continuation of shortages, hunger, and darkness.

When did national identities take over Habsburg cities? Even after the empire’s unexpected end, national identities were still competing in a larger marketplace of identities. Well after Morelon’s work ends in 1920, imperial structures, memories, social expectations, and patterns of patriotism persisted in a national capital like Prague. The richness of prior hybrid identities only dissipated with the violence, death, and cultural impoverishment of ethnic homogenization processes that followed from 1938–48. Amid the Holocaust and ethnic cleansing of millions, the choice (or ascription) of national affiliation became a matter of life and death. Out of this horror, most of the cities in this review essay became monolingual, culturally monochrome, and largely isolated from the larger region. Small wonder, as Horel observes, that there is “touristic kitsch promoting nostalgia for the lost empire” (496). Like any nostalgia, yearning for the vanished Habsburg empire is not about recapturing what it really was; rather, it reflects the needs of our own present age. And how terrible are such desires for multicultural amity—evoked perhaps when we look at a historicist opera house or train station in one of Horel’s cities—when compared with the far more mainstream nationalist nostalgias like Viktor Orbán’s irredentist imaginings of a greater Hungary before Trianon? Nationalist nostalgia rarely accounts for these territories’ multiethnic past in a combined Habsburg-imperial polity. Given the violent dead-end of exclusionary nationalist politics for contemporary Europe’s cultural, economic, and political vitality, a far better alternative is to publicize for students and lay readers alike the hybrid possibilities of self-understanding that open up when we explore the marvelous library of recent scholarship on the Habsburg empire and its cities.