Insofar as its present organizational structure is concerned, the Finanz- und Hofkammerarchiv is a new archive established in 1945. Before that year the only connection between the two archives, which had previously been administered separately, lay in the continuity of the records housed in both repositories. During the course of the years the documents stored in the two archives remained unchanged in type even though they were written in offices that bore different names. What led to their amalgamation shortly after the end of World War II was the uninterrupted continuity of the records in both archives.

The idea that the South Slavs constituted a single ethnic whole has long received considerable support in Croat intellectual circles. Ljudevit Gaj's Illyrian movement of the 1830s and 1840s, which represented the initial stage of the Croat national awakening, recognized this idea and attempted to construct a common culture for all South Slavs under the neutral Illyrian name. Given the increased pressure of Magyarization in the first half of the nineteenth century, the linguistic and regional particularisms of the Croats resulting from the breakup of Croat lands in the medieval and early modern periods, and the presence of a considerable Serb minority in the Croat lands, the Illyrian idea became a necessity. It enabled the “awakeners” to overcome the particularisms that complicated the creation of a national consciousness among the Croats and deeply implanted in this consciousness the commonality of the South Slavs. Illyrianism eventually became a political force that found expression in the revolutions of 1848–49, but it was largely rejected by the Slovene intelligentsia and the Serbs of the Serbian principality and the Vojvodina. It remained a force and retained its significance only in the Croat lands.

Austria emerged in 1955 from a ten-year occupation administered by the four major powers of the successful anti-Third Reich coalition of World War II—France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States—as a united, independent state. The 15 May 1955 State Treaty signed by these countries and Austria spared Austria the fate of Cold War division suffered by Austria's neighbor to the north (in the ultimate East-West breakdown of Germany's parallel postwar quadripartite occupation). Paving the way for Austria's good fortune was a political quid pro quo agreed between Austrian leaders and their Soviet counterparts in Moscow the previous April. In the 15 April 1955 Moscow Memorandum, Austria consented to becoming a permanently neutral state modeled on Switzerland. This neutrality precluded a possible Austrian membership in NATO in exchange for a long-delayed Soviet assent to an end of Austria's occupation regime with a concomitant abandonment of the Soviet occupation zone and the withdrawal of all occupation troops. After the completion of this withdrawal, a fully sovereign Austria made good on its pledge with the passage on 26 October 1955 of a constitutional law declaring Austria to be “permanently neutral” and foreswearing all military alliances.

The idea of reform still supplies the guiding principle for most accounts of late medieval religion in Bohemia. Like a brightly colored thread, reform marks a trail leading forward from Jan Hus (d. 1415) to the leaders of the sixteenth-century Reformation, as well as backward to a series of precursors in the fourteenth century. This essay takes a different path through the religious culture of fourteenth-century Bohemia and of Prague, in particular. Rather than following the traditional historiography in identifying a handful of fourteenth-century Prague preachers as revolutionary forerunners of Jan Hus, this essay situates these and other figures within a more complicated and multivalent local religious culture, a culture that was carefully molded by Central Europe's most powerful authority. No one shaped Prague's local religion more dramatically than the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles IV (r. 1346–1378), as three examples offered here will illustrate. Like an architect, Charles IV designed much of Prague's vibrant local religion. Nevertheless, neither he nor anyone else completely controlled it.

The question of whether the Poles were an integrating or a disintegrating factor within the Habsburg monarchy has yet to be fully studied by Polish historians. Up to now they have concerned themselves mainly with the part played by the Austrian empire in the history of the Polish nation after the eighteenth century partitions and have overlooked the role of the Poles in the Austrian empire. They have concentrated their attention on the fate of the territories of the historic Polish state which fell under Habsburg rule and have studied the social, cultural, and political transformations which affected Galicia during the century and a half of Austrian domination. Polish historians have even studied the contributions made by former Habsburg subjects to the reconstruction of the Polish state after the dissolution of the monarchy, but they have rarely discussed the part which the Poles took in the political life of the multinational empire.

Forty years ago R. J. W. Evans, in his now classic study of The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, observed that, in the absence of a coherent early modern central government, the Habsburg enterprise rested crucially upon the baroque court and Habsburg patronage of the arts. Evans especially noted that “two great synthetic achievements, alike commissioned by court, magnates, and Church, alike immortally associated with the age of baroque in the Habsburg lands: the dramatic extravagance of opera; and its physical counterpart, the monumental architecture of the years around 1700.” Evans argued further that baroque art, including opera, contributed to the ideological legitimacy of the court, and therefore the state. This became particularly important during the reign of Emperor Leopold I, who was himself a composer of some distinction and who sponsored one of the supremely monumental operatic productions of the seventeenth century, Antonio Cesti's Il pomo d'oro, on Paris and the prize of the golden apple, staged with twenty-four sets over the course of two days, in honor of the birthday of Leopold's teenage empress, the Spanish Infanta Margarita, in 1668. As a child, she had appeared as the artistic focus of the Spanish court in the painting Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez.

The private letters of statesmen, diplomats and generals, as historians know, often are more valuable than voluminous official documents because they reveal more of the personalities and attitudes of the writers and illuminate more of the surrounding sociopolitical context in which they acted. With that in mind, the purpose of publishing the appended letters is two-fold. First, they offer new sources of information on Austro-Hungarian internal politics in the period 1867–1918, particularly the convulsive Czech-German language conflict of 1897–1899. Second, they serve to introduce historians to the private correspondence of Baron (after 1909, Count) Alois Lexa von Aehrenthal, Austro-Hungarian foreign minister from 1906 until 1912.

After the Habsburg empire rose to the position of a great power and successfully defended itself against the expansionist drives of Ottoman imperialism, both the population and the territory of the southeastern part of the monarchy began to increase. As a consequence of this expansion, an increasing number of Orthodox peoples were incorporated into the multinational empire on various legal bases. The Orthodox population of the empire certainly did not constitute anything resembling an undivided unit, whether in regard to the language which the people spoke or the length of time they lived in the area or belonged to the Habsburg monarchy. A real community of interests existed only insofar as folklore, tradition, and their common legal struggle for religious freedom were concerned. This was especially true of the Serbs and the Rumanians. During the course of their struggle to attain religious freedom a hierarchical social structure, dominated by the Serbian higher clergy, came into being which remained in existence for a long period of time.

Most World War I belligerents, including Austria-Hungary and Germany, experienced severe copper shortages because of insufficient domestic ore deposits and the extensive use of the copper alloys, brass and bronze, in the munitions industry. Both Germany and the Dual Monarchy, their foreign sources of copper limited because of the British blockade, were forced to use substitute metals and to curtail the use of copper even in the armaments industry. In 1913 Austria-Hungary's domestic production amounted to only 4,052 tons of pure copper. Austrian industrial demands were met only with the importation of 36,500 tons of the metal. Consequently, when the Allied blockade cut off most of her copper imports at the same time that military needs sharply increased demand, Austria-Hungary faced a dilemma. Moreover, before Austria-Hungary was able to develop substitutes for copper, brass, and bronze, domestic supplies had been seriously reduced.

In March 1983, germany annexed the Republic of Austria, incorporating it into the Greater German Reich. Thereafter, about 1.2 million Austrians eligible for military service were draft ed into the German armed forces: the Wehrmacht. Although we know where largely Austrian contingents fought in World War II, little is known about what, if anything, set them apart from their Reich German comrades. Nor do we know much about their attitudes, their “mindset,” or their subjective experience of military service and war.1 Because we know so little about the attitudes of Austrian soldiers in the Wehrmacht, and since army service—in contrast to membership in the SS or NSDAP—was largely mandatory, it is still possible to argue that Austrians were unwilling soldiers, sacrificed in a war that was not theirs, and that discrimination by foreign rulers fostered an Austrian national consciousness.

Veni, CreatorSpiritus! From the triumphant chorus of Gustav Mahler's Eighth Symphony to the muse-choir adorning Gustav Klimt's Beethoven Frieze, the Vienna Moderns celebrated the inspirational powers of the feminine. Muses, or the spiritual forces guiding acts of artistic and literary creation, have long been associated with the creative output of the Vienna Moderns, the groups and individuals responsible for the development of modernism in the arts and literature in Vienna from 1890 to 1910. These inspiring women—commonly personified as femmes fatales, femmes fragiles, and femmes savantes—played a crucial role in bringing the art, architecture, and writing of Viennese Modernism to fruition.

The Austrian school reforms of the 1850s and 1860s, inspired by the mindset of the democratic and civic revolutions of 1848, turned a predominantly feudal and religious school system into a modern one and brought basic education to the masses. In the following decades, literacy increased, basic knowledge spread, and the overwhelming influence of the Catholic church in school matters diminished. Yet, as an “unintended consequence,” these reforms also had great implications for the process of building what turned out to be “the Slovene nation.” This article aims to illustrate that the formation of Slovene national identity—based on the use of the Slovene language as the main marker of Slovene ethnicity—was implemented to a large extent with the help of the Austrian school system and its efforts at centralization, systematization, and modernization. Measures like the creation of a school subject for the Slovene language, Slovene reading materials in school textbooks, and statistical categorization within school administrations played a crucial role in that process.