In the autumn of 1874, Austrian popular society seemed ablaze with talk of ice. The Habsburg monarchy's first major polar expedition was returning, and, as the German geographer August Petermann put it, “No field commander, returning home with his army victorious from battle, could be received more magnificently and enthusiastically than this small band of twenty- two men.” The first published narrative of the expedition was released in Vienna around 24 September and had sold out of its print run of forty-five thousand copies by 27 September. This figure, however, is dwarfed by contemporary estimates of the multitude that turned up to welcome the explorers to Vienna on 25 September: around a quarter million, or approximately one-fourth of the city's entire population. Although such figures should be taken with a grain of salt, the festivities that greeted the explorers involved possibly the largest crowds seen on the streets of Vienna between the revolutions of 1848–49 and the mass marches of the Social Democratic Party in support of universal male suffrage around the turn of the century.

It is not very often that the lands of Central Europe are uppermost in the historical consciousness of Western public opinion. Chamberlainesque ignorance has been the norm. In recent years, however, this situation has been at least partially remedied by two events: the dramatic series of revolutions in Eastern Europe, and—the topic of this essay—the perception of, and fascination with, Central Europe as the place from which our modern world sprang.

The general congress, designed either to end wars or to prevent them, dominated the diplomacy of peacemaking in eighteenthcentury Europe. When writing about these peace conferences historians understandably have focused their attention on those that achieved success. Equally important, however, were those that failed. They revealed, more clearly than the successful congresses, the difficulties governments faced in judging military and diplomatic conditions, the vicissitudes of negotiation, and the frustrations of policy making. One of these futile congresses was the Congress of Nemirov, which was convened in southern Poland in 1737 for the purpose of ending the Austro-Russian-Turkish war begun the year before. Hopefully, examination of the conference from the Austrian point of view will offer insight into the general policy of one of the participants, the results it expected to achieve, the problems its plenipotentiaries encountered both in preparing for and attending the sessions, and the question of why the congress disbanded without resolving the differences between the belligerents.

This is an essay about the cultural, political, and geographical location of Austrian intellectual history and the special place of Bohemia and Moravia in that history. A great deal has been written about the multinational and supranational quality of Austrian culture and intellectual life. In practice, however, the Austria referred to in such arguments is usually the Habsburg monarchy of the two generations before World War I. Austrian intellectual history has generally been either strongly centered in Vienna or oriented to a very broad concept of Austria that includes the monarchy as a whole in the late nineteenth century. What is lost between the metropolis and the vast monarchy of many peoples is the centuries-long relationship between Austrian and Bohemia that was the basis for Austrian intellectual life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I argue here that we should think of Bohemia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as part of Austrian intellectual history in a way that other regions and historic lands in the Habsburg monarchy were not.

Liberal political changes in the Habsburg monarchy during the 1860s and 1870s, especially those caused by the December Constitution of 1867 and the ensuing schooling laws, created the necessary legal framework for German and Czech school associations to establish national monolingual schools in Bohemia—the so-called minority schools. These local organizations, however, were soon superseded by central school associations, namely the German association in Vienna (Deutscher Schulverein) and the Czech one in Prague (Ústřední Matice Školská). Founded in 1880, these associations were aimed at schools in the linguistically, and therefore nationally, contested regions along the “language frontier.” This study focuses on the dynamics of the national contestation over schooling prior to World War I and compares the activities of these two associations against the background of political democratization, mass mobilization, and the social questions of the fin de siècle. The comparative analysis of the proclamations, activities, and political contacts of the competing central school associations aims at revising theses about the position and meaning of these organizations and shows their very close interdependence upon political processes, especially on the unsuccessful Czech-German negotiations on a national compromise for Bohemia.

The Enlightenment seems out of kilter. Until fairly recently, its trajectories were beguilingly simple and straightforward. Devised by Western metropolitan masterminds, the Enlightenment was piously appropriated by their latter-day apprentices in Central and Eastern Europe. This process of benign percolation made modern science, political liberty, and religious toleration trickle down to East-Central Europe. The self-orientalizing of nineteenth-century Central European intellectuals reinforced this impression, making concepts that were ostensibly authentic and pristine at their “Western” sources seem garbled and skewed once appropriated in their region.

The development of nineteenth century Europe was marked by the evolution of the principle of nationalism, the democratization of political and social life, an economic boom, the progress of technology, and a spirit of realism and materialism in both science and culture. The diffusion of new national, social, and political ideas inevitably seriously disturbed the established order. Whereas in countries with a relatively homogeneous population from the point of view of nationality the resulting conflicts assumed the form of internal social and political crises, in multinational states such as the Habsburg and Ottoman empires national movements became disintegrating forces. Under the pressure of self-conscious nationalities, the old nationally heterogeneous monarchies entered their final period of crisis and gave way before those national forces which represented the dominant movements and ideas of a new era. The old integrating forces—the socially dominant feudal nobility and the army and bureaucracy, which were the most cohesive political elements and which were permeated with absolutism and legitimism—were destroyed by new and disintegrative nationalist and democratic movements that championed ideas of national, social, and political freedom. All the great national liberation movements of nineteenth century Europe from the time of the unification of the Italian and German nations and the liberation of the peoples of the Balkans until the collapse of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires took place at the expense of these two empires. The national crisis caused by the disintegrative aspirations of the various peoples within its boundaries made it difficult for the Habsburg monarchy to adjust to the new currents of democracy and social reform. As a result, the nationality question became more and more closely linked with the growing internal social and economic crisis. At the beginning of the twentieth century these three forces merged into a violent centrifugal force.

Certain events sometimes exert a decisive influence on the future direction of a person's life. In my case one of the more determinative occurred during a brief week spent in Vienna in early February 1957 For one thing, I discovered in the Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv highly significant documents in some cartons that had just been returned to Austria from Italy, by mistake as it turned out. The director of the Austrian archives, Gebhard Rath, put these records at my disposal. These papers, together with material of lesser import in the Archivio di Stato in Milan, provided the documentation for an article showing how Austrian officials had thwarted the efforts of an Italian scoundrel to extort money from them. More important than this discovery were my conversations with Professor Hugo Hantsch, of the University of Vienna, during the course of which I promised to supply as complete a list as possible of United States and Canadian writings on the history of the Habsburg monarchy, take the initiative in founding some kind of association for American scholars interested in Habsburg and Austrian history, and endeavor to help the Austrian professor obtain a grant from the Ford Foundation for a large international project on the history of the Habsburg monarchy from 1848 to 1918.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, the rapid urbanization of Europe sparked a set of complex, often contradictory reactions to life in the large modern city. Europe's urban population grew sixfold from 1800 to 1910 as a result of overall population growth and considerable migration to cities, with the greatest expansion occurring in the latter half of this period. Adapting to the needs of industrial capitalism and the development of the nation-state, “central place” cities such as Vienna and Paris began building projects that destroyed old neighborhoods and tore down medieval walls to allow new construction. Growth of this magnitude created the sensation of constant change and instability. For many citizens the big city came to represent modernity itself, characterized by flux and spectacle.

On the night of December 1,1908, the city of Vienna was lit up like a giant birthday cake in celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of the reign of Emperor Francis Joseph I. This final night of the monarch's diamondjubilee was the culmination of an entire season of ceremonial occasionsranging from visits to Vienna by the German emperor William II to a seemingly endless series of fětes—everything from concerts by children's choirs to the most magnificent royal balls Vienna could muster. The streets of the imperial capital were filled with the myriad languages of the empire asmore than one million citizens crowded the Ringstraßre and its many side streets and alleys hoping for a glimpse of their emperor-king. That evening the streets of Prague were filled with thousands of angry Czechs, whose moodwas much different from that of the crowd in Vienna. In contrast to the Viennese festival of light, the Czech demonstrators were extinguishing the street lanterns of Prague, hoping that darkness would decrease the likelihood that they would be arrested. According to the Neue Freie Presse, the Old Town(staré město/Altstadt) district of Prague was experiencing a “schrecktlichstag.”

At nine o'clock in the evening of March 13, 1848, Prince Clemens Wenzel Nepomuk Lothar von Metternich resigned as imperial chancellor. With the “coachman” in absentia, Central Europe's peoples struggled to gain more freedom in that remarkable revolutionary movement of 1848. The Habsburg monarchy, although teetering on the verge of dissolution, survived the mid-century's most tumultuous year. Despite weakness at the helm of government, improvement of dynastic fortunes had gathered momentum by mid-summer as the imperial army under Prince Alfred Ferdinand zu Windischgrätz, Count Joseph Wenzel Radetzky, and Count Josip Jelačić od Bužima advanced irregularly but steadily on the peripheries of the realm. By autumn provision of a coherent Habsburg policy to be applied throughout the far-flung empire became mandatory. To provide a strong man to enforce the policies, Field Marshal Windischgrätz recommended for minister-president his forty-eight-year-old brother-in-law, Prince Felix Ludwig zu Schwarzenberg, an individual who possessed both the confidence of the army and considerable diplomatic experience.

Fin-de-siècle Vienna continues to supply historians and the general public alike with a paradigm of the modernist subversion of rationality. From the birth of the unconscious, to the artistic expression of feral sexuality, to the surge of populist politics, Vienna 1900 stands as the turning point when a nineteenth-century ideal of rationality gave way to a twentieth-century fascination with subjectivity. In fact, we know little as yet about what rationality really meant to those to whom we attribute its undoing. Allan Janik writes that today the “‘big’ questions about Viennese culture” center on “just how ‘rational’ developments there have been,” and to answer these questions, Janik argues, we need research on the history of natural science in Austria. Indeed, as Steven Beller notes, the topic of science has been “strangely absent” from the animated discussions of fin-de-siècle Vienna over the past three decades.

Although the fortress at Terezín attained a dubious international distinction during World War II as the Nazi concentration camp. Theresienstadt, it already possessed a gloomy history as a place of imprisonment, having held Austrian political offenders since the first half of the nineteenth century. Gavrilo Princip had been confined there along with his fellow conspirators after assassinating Archduke Francis Ferdinand at Sarajevo; the young man ultimately died in the garrison hospital. During World War I, Terezín became the largest prisoner-of-war camp in Bohemia, housing its mostly Russian prisoners in makeshift subcamps scattered outside the fortress. In 1919 the new Czechoslovak state employed some of these same facilities to intern various “suspicious elements” from Slovakia. Unfortunately the zeal with which the authorities took people into custody produced a flood of internees for which Terezín was ill prepared, and conditions in the debilitated Austrian camp soon threatened to provoke a public scandal. The circumstances of this rather unpleasant episode provide a revealing—though ambiguous—glimpse of the sterner side of the Czechoslovak First Republic, and by extension, post-Habsburg Central Europe.

Historians and political scientists have already begun to explore different aspects of modern Austria's political culture. But as Helmut Konrad has reminded us, this relatively new concept is loosely defined; he considers “political culture” to mean “the values held by individuals, groups, and society as a whole that affect the behavior of peoplewithin and in relation to the political system of a country.” Lucian Pye stresses the behavioral approach in political analysis to make “more explicit and systematic” our understanding of “such long-standingconcepts as political ideology, national ethos and spirit, national political psychology, and the fundamental values of a people.”