To Liberate Me from the detestable yoke of foreignness,… I implore you to change my surname,” Umberto Terchig begged Italian authorities in Venezia Giulia, Italy's new northeastern border territory incorporated in the wake of the Habsburg collapse. In Venezia Giulia, comprised of several of the provinces of the former Austrian Adriatic littoral, some 1,000 individuals in the population of approximately 350,000 requested surname changes over the period from the end of World War I in 1918 to the Fascist takeover in 1922. Most petitioners hailed from Trieste and the city's immediate surroundings. Their level of education and relative sophistication varied. Nonetheless, these individuals shared a particular “nationality consciousness” that led them to choose name change as a means to establish national belonging in Italy. Former Habsburg subjects, like Umberto Terchig, living throughout the successor states sought to rearticulate ethnic and national identities to reflect personal affinities and ambitions consistent with institutional arrangements and associations in emerging state frameworks.

The expositions staged by Hungarian liberals in the nineteenth century—the modest Pest industrial fairs of the 1840s; the agricultural hibitions of the counterrevolutionary 1850s; the Pest agricultural exhibition in 1865; the three provincial industrial exhibitions of the 1870s in Kecskemét, Szeged, and Székesfehérvár; the successful national exhibition in Budapest in 1885; and the lavish Millennium Exhibition of 1896—conformed to the wider European and American pattern of expositions. Between 1876 and 1916 some one hundred million Americans attended expositions; over 20 percent of the U.S. population attended Philadelphia's Centennial Exposition of 1876. Over forty-eight million people passed through the turnstiles of the Paris Exposition of 1900. The three million who attended the 1896 Hungarian Millennium Exhibition were well aware that they were participating in a distinct rite of industrial civilization. Although the Hungarian numbers were far smaller, it is wrong to assume that the Hungarian nationl fairs were copycat undertakings.

I am often asked, by students, colleagues, and friends, why and how I came to devote my professional life to the study of Central and Southeastern European history and current events and, in the process, how I came to spend thirty years living in the area. I have two stock answers, both of them true.

The purpose of this article is to clarify the relative roles of Austria and Prussia during the Wars of Liberation of 1813 and 1814. It uses the very latest research concerning the military strategy adopted and emphasizes the input of Radetzky, using his handwritten account of the campaign, a document previously ignored by historians, despite the general's position as chief of staff of the allied coalition. The fact is that Anglo-American historians have failed to investigate the politics of the military alliance of 1813–1814 that constituted the Fourth Coalition. Myself apart, the only historian to examine that alliance with any regard to the Austrian viewpoint has been Gordon A. Craig in a brief but excellent analysis published as long ago as 1966. German historians have done little better. They simply neglect the Austrian archives.

Encompassing the final decades of Habsburg rule and the rise of modern culture, the cosmopolitan and Jewish Vienna of the fin de siècle was a despised locus in the Nazi historical imaginary. Vienna 1900 was a polyglot, multicultural city, a place where European Jewry had risen to unforeseen heights of economic prosperity and cultural influence; many Nazi ideologues, historians, and authors focused on the verjudet nature of late imperial Vienna. A variety of strategies were employed to distance the Nazi present from Vienna 1900; it was alternately suppressed and ignored, or deeply vilified. Yet the period was also inseparable from two figures celebrated in Nazi Vienna: Mayor Karl Lueger and artist Gustav Klimt. This article examines Nazi discourse on Vienna 1900, especially that originating from Viennese writers, ideologues, and political figures. Reflecting both scholarly and popular views, I examine academic texts, books for popular readers, films, and art exhibitions. After examining the perception and appropriation of Vienna 1900 between the years 1938 and 1945, I end by exploring its instrumentalization in a different context. In an ironic twist of history, the very period suppressed and derided in Nazi discourse would in turn be called upon, by the 1970s, to distract from the shadow of the Nazi era that still hung over the city.

As one of the original partitioning powers of the eighteenth century, Austria shared equally with Russia and Prussia in the responsibility for destroying the independent Polish kingdom. Maria Theresa may have felt troubled by this violation of sovereignty, but, to paraphrase Frederick the Great, she (and her successors) still took. The fact that conscience did not prevail over reason of state, even in the case of such a pious empress, set the pattern for the future relations between Habsburg Austria and its Polish subjects. As they had in 1772, Austrian interests took precedence over Polish ones and, until 1866, the demarcation between ruler and ruled was clear.

On April 23, 1526, Suleiman, the Turkish sultan, left Constantinople at the head of an army numbering around 120,000 men. He marched in a northwesterly direction, his apparent purpose being the conquest of the Kingdom of Hungary. The Magyars and their subjects had once been a formidable barrier to the westward expansion of the Ottomans, but they were now badly weakened by the ineptness of their youthful king Louis and the rapacity and shortsightedness of their nobility.

The meaning of the term “state language” is certainly so obvious that it hardly need be defined. A state language is simply the language used in conducting the official business of a state. The language of the state serves in many areas of life. It is the language which authorities are expected to employ in communicating with each other and with citizens and which citizens speak in dealing with officials; it is the language used in courts of justice, the language of the railway and postal services, the language in which the transactions of representative bodies are conducted and in which the minutes of the debates in those bodies are recorded, and, finally, the language in which the texts of laws and decrees must be written to be legally binding.

During the years 1765–1767, there was serious peasant unrest in Transdanubian Hungary, a region where large estates owned by a few prominent families such as the Esterházy, Batthány, and Festetics were prevalent. Especially in Vas, Zala, and Somogy counties, located in western Hungary across the border from Styria, peasant inhabitants protested the growing demands for services and other payments placed upon them by landlords eager to increase the income produced by their lands. No uniform standards existed; both the size of peasant land holdings and the obligations attached to these holdings varied markedly, determined by various contracts or, more often, by custom.

On the surface, there would appear to be little cause to explore the connections between Jews and the bureaucracy of the Austro-Hungarian foreign office in the last decade before the outbreak of World War I. During the tenures of foreign ministers Count Alois Aehrenthal (1906–12) and Count Leopold Berchtold (1912–15), no Jew belonged to the diplomatic corps, and only one functionary from the central office in Vienna is known to have entered the service professing Judaism. The situation within the Ballhausplatz certainly did not reflect that found in the other mainstay of the unified Dual Monarchy, the Habsburg armed forces, which contained an extraordinarily high percentage of Jewish officers, particularly in the reserves. Our knowledge of the experience of Jews in Central Europe's other major foreign office, the Wilhelmstraβe in Berlin, merely reinforces the view that few formal ties existed between Jews and diplomacy.

No one who has investigated the high culture of Vienna in the era of liberal ascendancy can fail to be impressed by the sturdy integration of its components. Not only were political, scientific, and aesthetic culture closely related to each other in principle and in practice, but the very social life and cultural forms of the elite sustained the synthesis achieved. Yet by the end of the nineteenth century, this complex was breaking apart, with aesthetic culture often going its separate way from the liberal-rationalist political and academic culture with which it had been linked. The character of this union and its breakup will provide my theme.