On 19 June 1911, dozens of Jews and Ukrainians were killed by the Austrian militia in Drohobycz at the command of the Jewish leader of the city, Jacob Feuerstein, to ensure the victory of the Jewish assimilationist candidate, aligned with the Polish elite, over the Zionist candidate. While dominating news at the time, reaching front pages around the globe, this event remains relatively unknown today even among specialists. This study for the first time explicates the history of this remarkable event while challenging the nationalist narratives that successfully shaped Jewish, Ukrainian, and Polish collective memory in its aftermath. It questions the extent of the role nationalism plays in violent political conflict, even in a seemingly hypernationalized environment, and demonstrates how nationalist rhetoric masks other motivations of actors. This microhistory builds on recent efforts to locate national indifference in the modern period, in the eye of the nationalist storm. At the same time, the success of nationalists to reframe this event in nationalist terms demonstrates how nationalism could shape historical memory and successfully push back against this indifference. The massacre demonstrates that nationalization was a gradual process, during which other identities persisted and other factors guided political events, while exposing how nationalist leaders paradoxically used such moments to obfuscate this reality and advance their own agendas.

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.”

In his great 1848 historical drama, Ein Bruderzwist im Hause Habsburg, the Austrian playwright Franz Grillparzer has Emperor Matthias utter the words that have often been applied to understanding the whole history of the Habsburg monarchy:

Das ist der Fluch von unserm edeln Haus:
Auf halben Wegen und zu halber Tat
Mit halben Mitteln zauderhaft zu streben.
[That is the curse of our noble house:
Striving hesitatingly on half ways
to half action with half means.]

On January 13, 1843, the executive committee of the Hungarian Industrial Association (Országos Iparegyesület) held its weekly meeting in Pest. The Industrial Association, a voluntary association dedicated to the spread of useful knowledge and the promotion of industry, had been founded fourteen months earlier. More than twenty men were present at the meeting, most of them untitled nobles, yet four counts, two master artisans (both button makers), and a Jewish merchant were present as well. Records suggest that this was a busy meeting, in which the executive committee passed a dozen resolutions on topics ranging from the printing of the association's bylaws to its plans to establish a library and launch a newspaper. Among other matters, the committee acknowledged receipt of a fifty-florin contribution from the Pest Jewish community and welcomed as a branch association a society dedicated to promoting industry and agriculture among Hungarian Jews.

Growing scholarly and popular appreciation of achievements in the arts, letters and technology of early twentieth-century Europe reflects an increasing conviction that these achievements laid the groundwork for Western culture and sensibility in our century. Continuing interest in early twentieth-century European social and political problems also testifies to an appreciation that these problems very much resemble, and have in some instances conditioned, the development of comparable problems today.

Emperor Maximilian I spared no expense or eff ort to ensure that he would be remembered the way that he wanted to be remembered. Th roughout his reign he concentrated on his image, crafting it to suit his political and dynastic goals. He justifi ed his efforts by claiming that, “Whoever prepares no memorial for himself during his lifetime has none after his death, and that same person will be forgotten along with the sound of the bell that tolls his passing. And so the money I spend on my memorial is not lost; rather, to spare expense on my memorial is to suppress my future reputation. For what I do not produce toward my own memorial during my lifetime will not be celebrated after my death by you or anybody else.” A key aspect of the emperor's memorial was his patronage of and skill in astrology. The image of Maximilian as patron and student of astrology was one of his own making. In his autobiographical writings, Maximilian emphasized his efforts to learn and practice astrology. His personal secretary and adviser, Joseph Grünpeck, who worked on early draft s of the emperor's autobiography and wrote a biography of Maximilian, consistently portrayed the emperor as an avid and gift ed student of astrology. In the biography, which he dedicated to Emperor Charles V, Grünpeck recounted Maximilian's enjoyment in reading astrological and astronomical literature, especially Ptolemy. Not long after Maximilian died, Johannes Schöner praised the emperor for his efforts in astrology and numbered him among the most important patrons of astrology. Toward the end of the sixteenThcentury, Henry Ranzovius, in his history of great patrons of astrology, singled out Maximilian and labeled him a lover of the art.

The breakup of the Habsburg monarchy was perhaps the most exceptional change made in the political geography of the European world of our times. It would be too much to say that the shot fired at Sarajevo destroyed the Austro-Hungarian empire. But it is hardly an exaggeration to suggest that the young assassin was a living embodiment of the principle of nationalism in the South Slavic lands and that the shot which he fired was a deliberate blow at the political-geographic structure of the Habsburg monarchy. Those competent to discuss the question are almost unanimous in their verdict: the dissolution of the empire was brought on by a combination of external forces and an internal disintegration. The internal disintegration actually impelled the state to expose itself to the external forces. The works of scholars from many countries and disciplines2 who have carefullyanalyzed the structure and function of the Habsburg empire have been scrutinized with the view of studying the regions which formed this empire, their different characteristics and associations, and their connections with each other and to the state in order to ascertain to what extent the area of the empire constituted a state in the modern sense and to note any weaknesses in its morphology and physiology that helped to account for its collapse. The contribution of political geography to this critical evaluation of nationalism as a disintegrating force of the Habsburg empire lies in an analysis of the major problems of the internal situation of that empire.

In 1713 Austria acquired the duchy of Milan, even then the richest part of Italy, and after 1748 it extended its ascendancy over all the states of the Italian peninsula. Not only did they accept Austrian hegemony without resistance, but the Italians played a part in the administration of the empire. At the court of Maria Theresa Italians did not find themselves in an alien environment. The Vienna of that age, to use Franco Valsecchi's happy phrase, delighted in “the melodious culture of Italy.” Viennese operas were composed to Italian libretti. Mozart was hardly less an Italian than a Germanic composer. The empire drew on its Italian-speaking subjects to fill important posts in the administrative and diplomatic services and courts of law. During the later years of Maria Theresa's reign, sons of the conservative Milanese patriciate, imbued with the ideas of the Enlightenment and led by Pietro Verri, Cesare Beccaria, and their associates of the Accademia dei Pugni, cooperated willingly and fruitfully in planning the reforms that Maria Theresa carried out, even though those reforms were undermining the autonomy of their country. The Enlightenment developed simultaneously in Italy and Austria, and for a period the leaders of that movement in Italy looked to Vienna rather than Paris as the citadel of their intellectual and reformist conceptions.

LikeRobert A. Kann, I too am a historian by profession. Despite the close links between their subject and disciplines such as sociology land political science, historians on the whole avoid attempting to analyze contemporary politics. This lecture will therefore concentrate on the first twenty-five years of the Second Republic. Yet I am well aware that in the Kreisky era (notably as a result of the reforms introduced by Hertha Firnberg and Christian Broda) Austria's progress toward Western Europe took on a new character, and the country underwent what was, for the time being at least, its final major modernization. But it was an analysis of the wholly different steps taken toward the West between 1945 and 1970 that laid the foundation on which the single-party Social Democratic (SPÖ) government of the 1970s was able to build. It therefore seems legitimate to focus upon that first half of the history of the Second Republic, and to see the turning point marked by the student movement of 1968 and the election results of 1970 as a natural cutoff point for this discussion. Broadly speaking, the main concerns of the new state in its first two and a half decades were to provide a framework of order for the very disparate elements that it had inherited and to deal with the immense problems now confronting it. NaCenter for Austrian Studiestional Socialism, by its policies and the effects of all-out war, had left behind a country in ruins in every sense—not only materially through the destruction of housing, infrastructure, and industrial plant, but also intellectually and culturally. Most of the leading figures in Austria's cultural and intellectual life had been driven into exile or murdered.