A reevaluation by historians of political life in late imperial Austria and the capacity of the state to accommodate modern modes of popular political engagement is long overdue. Over the last twenty years lively discussions have developed about the extent of political modernization in Germany and Russia during the last decades before World War I. A number of historians have argued that modes of government and popular politics changed much more significantly in those empires than was previously recognized. In the meantime an important new monographic literature has arisen on popular political action, government, and civil administration in the Habsburg monarchy that suggests that much the same may have taken place there, too.

On November 27, 1905, leading members of the Czech and German communities in Moravia agreed to a political compromise that divided power in the provincial diet between Czechs, Germans, and members of the landowning and ecclesiastical aristocracy. Over the next few years, the Moravian agreement was used as a model for political compromises in Bukovina (1910) and Galicia (1914).1 For decades historians hailed the Moravian compromise and its successors as evidence that the feuding nations of the late Habsburg monarchy could indeed find sufficient common ground to live together in peace. Although in the past decade scholars generally have taken a more cautious approach to the results of these compromises, much of this work betrays a sense of disappointment over a missed opportunity. Somehow, the Czech-German compromise in Moravia might have become a model for ethnic cooperation, proof that the monarchy's contentious national communities could work out their differences and live together, or at least a sign

Robert Kann in his Day famously asked large questions about nationality, revitalizing and imbuing with new academic rigor an already classic debate on ethnic sins of omission and commission in Central Europe. Language was, of course, always recognized as somehow intrinsic to this discussion; and it has exercised a fascination, whether lasting or just casual, for many with interest in the region. The Habsburg lands are renowned as the locus classicus of a polity whose ethnicities were notably marked by language. Moreover, they encompassed a large number (eleven in all, though it is a trope too to exaggerate the total!) of widely divergent languages: German; two Romance tongues, Italian and Romanian; a range of Slavonic languages from all the three branches—western, eastern, and southern—of that family; and Hungarian, or Magyar, from the Finno-Ugric group.

What is a myth? This question cannot be easily answered; the notions and concepts used in various scientific disciplines are too divergent and, as with many other terms, they possess different meanings in different societies. For the purpose of this article, a definition by Philip Manger is useful. According to this author, a myth is “a form of poetic truth, the sifting out of an essence, a hypothetical, metahistorical core that contained an intrinsic meaning,” a meaning that joins the past to the present and thus establishes another, perhaps higher, form of reality. This holds true for all kinds of myths, but especially for the “political” myth that will be dealt with in this paper.

As the hundredth anniversary of November 1918 approaches, this article suggests some ways in which historians might rethink dominant narratives about the character of the Habsburg monarchy in its final years, the reasons for its collapse, and its complex legacies to the postwar world. Currently, most accounts that narrate the fall of the empire are still shaped to some extent by outcomes whose character was defined at the time by the nationalist architects of the states that replaced the monarchy. Even accounting for a sensible revisionism of their versions of events over the past century, their general reasoning, their ideological claims, and their worldviews frame the predominant explanations for why the monarchy fell when it did. Concomitantly, they continue to influence our understanding of the character of the regimes that replaced the monarchy after its fall.

The startling events of the last five years in Eastern Europe have led to a surprising nostalgia for the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and Emperor Francis Joseph in the lands of the former Habsburg Empire. Politicians and journalists in Europe and America now compare the old empire to the disoriented East Central Europe of today and hold up the former as a positive model for a supranational organization. The current wave of nostalgia has been helped along by some recent historical works that certainly were not written for that purpose, but that contain generous assessments of the monarchy's positive qualities. For example, István Deák, in his highly acclaimed book, Beyond Nationalism: A Social and Political History of the Habsburg Officer Corps, 1848–1918, strongly recommends that the “Habsburg experiment” in supranational organization be reexamined: “I am convinced that we can find here a positive lesson while the post-1918 history of the central and east central European nation-states can only show US what to avoid.” Similar positive statements can be found in the recently published works of Alan Sked, Barbara Jelavich, and F. R. Bridge.

Gaucia occupied an important place in the history of the Jewish Diaspora. Galician Jews made up a majority of Habsburg subjects of Mosaic faith and formed a cultural bridge between Westjuden and Ostjuden. Numerous outstanding Jewish political figures and scholars, such as Isaac Deutscher, Karl Radek, and Martin Buber, were born or raised in Galicia, where Zionist and Jewish socialist movements flourished at that time. The unique atmosphere of a Galician shtetl was recorded in Hassidic tales, in the books of Emil Franzos, Manes Sperber, Bruno Schulz, Andrzej Kuśniewicz, and others. Scholarly works on Jewish Galicia are, however, mostly outdated and relatively short. Consequently, scholars who use information on Galicia only as supplementary data often make numerous errors, and even for an educated American or West European Galicia remains a land of mystery. Marsha Rozenblit is absolutely right when she concludes a review essay, “The Jews of the Dual Monarchy,” with the following observation: “Indeed, it would be nice to know more about the traditional Jewish population of Moravia, Galicia and Hungary.” The present article is a contribution to filling that gap with regard to Galicia.

With the creation of the Czechoslovak First Republic in October 1918, politicians began debating the fate of the great estates the new country had inherited from the Habsburg monarchy, and within six months, the National Assembly enacted a sweeping land reform. With some of the land, the state sponsored colonies—new or expanded agricultural settlements. The announced purpose of the colonization program was to relieve land hunger, which was a genuine concern. Equally important in the minds of many who administered the program and participated in it, however, was altering the ethnic composition of the border areas, where most of the colonies were located.

In Tony Judt's historical essay on postwar Europe's political myths, Austria serves as a paradigmatic case for national cultures of commemoration that successfully suppressed their societies’ involvement in National Socialism. According to Judt, the label of “National Socialism's First Victim” was applied to a country that after the Anschluss of March 1938 had, in fact, been a real part of Nazi Germany. “If Austria was guiltless, then the distinctive responsibilities of non-German nationals in other lands were assuredly not open to close inspection,” notes Judt. When the postwar Austrian myth of victimhood finally disintegrated during the Waldheim debate, critics deemed the “historical lie” of the “first victim” to have been the basis for Austria's failure to confront and deal with its own Nazi past. Yet, one of the paradoxes of Austrian memory is the fact that soon after the end of the war, the victim thesis had already lost much of its relevance for many Austrians.

Early on in volume 3 of his massive political memoirs, German Liberal party leader Ernst von Plener offhandedly introduces the reader to a I new word that had entered Austrian political discourse in the 1880s. The word is Nationalbesitzstand, or “national property,” and Plener calls it “ a word taken from our party's rhetoric.” Most historians remember Plener as the quintessential Austrian centralist, a Liberal party leader of the bureaucratic mold whose annoyance with German nationalist agitation was equaled only by his discomfort with the public demands forced on him by constituent politics. And yet in the late 1880s and early 1890s we find the sober Plener increasingly resorting to an aggressively nationalist rhetoric organized around this concept of Nationalbesitzstand, a rhetoric often invoked by the very radical nationalists, populists, and anti-Semites he scorned. In this article I explore the growing use of such rhetoric by Liberals like Plener in the 1880s as a way to suggest some new approaches to understanding the development of German nationalism among nineteenth-century Austrians. In particular I consider how the concept of Nationalbesitzstand mediated a transformation in the rhetoric employed by self-identified Germans in the monarchy to justify their privileged position vis-à-vis other national groups. Where formerly German nationalists had rejected arguments based on empirical data like population or land ownership statistics to legitimize their political claims, in the 1880s and 1890s they began to embrace such arguments.

In the accounts of life in Austria-Hungary at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, one reads about a world dominated by nations and nationalism. Both contemporaries and historians describe a nationality conflict in which politics, economy, literature, music, journalism, sports, and science were all placed in the “service of the nation.” According to Helmut Rumpler, it was a time when even the once-powerful state and its bureaucracy were forced to withdraw in the face of different nationalisms. Primary sources often paint a similar picture: A German from Celje/Cilli, Fritz Zangger, claims that in his home town even “the God of Germans and of Slovenes had nothing in common.” Contemporary newspapers described incessant nationalist conflicts between Czechs and Germans, Germans and Slovenes, Slovenes and Italians, or Croats and Hungarians. Minutes of parliamentary sessions tell us about obstructionism carried out by nationalist parties, and in the War Ministry the “Disciplinary Measures to Prevent National Endeavours from Invading” [the Military] (Massregeln zur Verhütung des Eindringens nationaler Bestrebungen) grew longer every year. Therefore, it is no surprise that descriptions of a different reality in which nationalism had hardly played a role, like those of the novelist Joseph Roth, were often dismissed as figments of a nostalgic imagination or depictions of a vanishing world.

In the age of modern nationalisms, the first attempt that Poles made to construct a national landscape came in the last third of the nineteenth century. The stateless Poles, subjects of three different imperial powers, somehow managed to transform a remote mountain borderland along the internal Austro-Hungarian frontier into a recognizable and important national icon. While many attempts have been made to transform the natural environment into a national environment since then, this accomplishment helped to make the Carpathian Mountains, and in particular a section of them known as the Tatra Mountains, one of the most recognizable parts of “Poland,” however it is defined.

The student of twentieth century European history who looks for a good example of the contrast and interplay of continuity and change will hardly find a better case than the story of the First and Second Austrian Republics. In the First Republic the various political camps operated in a potential and actual civil war atmosphere; in the Second Republic there has been genuine cooperation between the two major political parties. In the First Republic economic difficulties were so staggering that they proved insurmountable; the Second Republic has had remarkable economic stability and prosperity. The First Republic was to a considerable degree “ein Staat wider Willen”—a country whose sovereignty and independence were largely imposed upon the populace from the outside. Since they felt that their country could not stand on its own feet, the Austrians looked for salvation, first, in union with Germany or a Danubian federation and then in some kind of political combination with Italy and Hungary.

To view the church-state problem from Vienna in 1900 is to view it from the capital of an ancient Catholic state in a multiethnic cultural arena, a world in which Catholicism strove, at least officially, to be supranational, and in which, although there was no Catholic nation, there was a preeminent and distinguished Catholic dynasty. This was a world in which large numbers of Austrians—many of them in rural areas—continued to affirm popular religious affections and loyalties throughout the century—values and practices that if not always consonant with official Catholic doctrine, at least afforded the hierarchical church and sympathetic aristocratic and bourgeois elites the ready opportunity to claim Catholicism as not only a historic and true but also a public and mass religion. At the same time, the long-term heritage of Josephinist state control of the church had powerful negative effects on active religiosity and religious identity, especially among the emergent Bürgertum and urban inhabitants of the monarchy. The Concordat of 1855—coming after the failed revolution of 1848–49 and on the heels of the imposition of neoabsolutist rule—was an imprudent decision precisely because it alienated both the Josephinist state and incipient bürgerlich society.

My Subject Today is the Austrian Revolution of 1918 and its aftermath, a staple subject in the general history of the empire and the republic, but one that has not seen vigorous historiographical discussion for a number of years. In a recent review of new historiography on the French Revolution, Jeremy Popkin has argued that recent neoliberal and even neo-Jacobin scholarship about that momentous event has confirmed the position of the revolution in the “genealogy of modern liberalism and democracy.” The endless fascination engendered by the French Revolution is owing to its protean nature, one that assayed the possibilities of reconciling liberty and equality and one that still inspires those who would search for a “usable liberal past.”1 After all, it was not only a watershed of liberal ideas, if not always liberal institutions and civic practices, but it was also a testing ground for the possibility of giving practical meaning to new categories of human rights.

At midday on Thursday, 1 May 1873, the Emperor Francis Joseph I officially opened the Fifth World's Fair in Vienna. Timed to coincide with the emperor's twenty-fifth anniversary, the fair aimed to confirm the status of Austria-Hungary as a major European power and as an advanced industrial and economic state. As the opening address of Archduke Karl Ludwig to the emperor asserted, the fair served to “direct the gaze of the world toward Austria and ensure the recognition of the participation of our fatherland in the promotion of the wellbeing of mankind through work and instruction.” Its significance was signalled by the presence at the opening ceremony of, among others, Crown Prince Frederick of Prussia, Edward Prince of Wales, and the Crown Prince of Denmark, with their spouses.

“How long will the jackals continue to feed upon our live bodies?” So begins a Polish newspaper's depiction of the rapacious activities of twenty-seven alleged international traffickers on trial for transporting girls from Austrian Galicia to brothels and harems in the Middle East, Africa, and the Americas. Aft er years of veiled discussion in the Polish-language press about the mysterious disappearance of poor female workers and peasant daughters, the case erupted in the fall of 1892, with lasting implications for the way trafficking and the domestic sex trade would be understood in the Habsburg lands and the former Polish territories alike. Seventeen men and ten women—all of them Jewish—stood trial for a decades-long conspiracy to scour the Crownland in search of “human goods” and “sell them to … local public houses or transport [them] abroad.” The affair helped define the public's perception of the sex trade in Eastern Europe between the 1880s and 1930, as thousands of young women were smuggled out of the region and into sexual servitude. The trial played out in the Galician administrative capital of L'viv, a city of mixed Polish, Jewish, German, and Ukrainian population. Trial transcripts and newspaper coverage provide a rare glimpse into the secret world of commercial sex at the turn of the twentieth century. More importantly, commentary from the journalists and local citizens attending the proceedings offers a window into the way the Galician public understood the commercial sex trade, a tolerated practice that employed medical doctors, police inspectors, landlords, pimps, and procurers, alongside the prostitutes themselves. The trial attracted attention as far away as Cracow, Warsaw, and Vienna, where the Austrian parliament devoted a fiery session to its outcome and to a discussion of the “shameful outrages of the Jewish people” in the aff air. In the Galician setting, public exposure to the horrors of international prostitution networks contributed to a new and more militant direction in Polish nationalist sentiment, one that inextricably linked sexuality with ethnicity.

The history of Central Europe at the end of the nineteenth century (as indeed at the end of the twentieth) is to a large extent the history of the furies of nationalism. The attempt to understand that fact has for a long time been dominated by understandings of nationalism and the mobilization of national identity that are rooted in conceptions of a particularly modern social and political crisis. In this paradigm the rise of nationalism is associated—as it was for many critical observers at the time—with the failure of liberal politics and the general breakdown of an elite-dominated, rational-liberal society in the face of mass politics and the clamor for cultural and political participation by the lower classes. Nationalism in this view is a rejection of the whole liberal paradigm—a turn to a militant, populist “politics in a new key,” to use Carl Schorske's evocative phrase; or, following another imagery, the revenge of the traditionalist, irrational “dark gods” against the rationalism, secular optimism, and elitism of Enlightenment society.

Robert kann's first book, The Multinational Empire, published in two large volumes in 1950, has become a classic in its field. As Stanley Winters has well said, “It is rare when a scholar's first book establishes its author in the front rank of his field, and it is rarer still when the book remains a standard work for the balance of his lifetime”. In 1964, a considerably enlarged German edition was published.