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.

The Pragmatic Sanction (pactum mutuae cessionis et successionis), formulated in 1703 and first made public in 1713, has been regarded as the legal basis for the unity of the disparate lands under Habsburg rule until the mid-nineteenth century. Although the Pragmatic Sanction did not prevent foreign powers from trying to seize Austrian territory, it did provide legal justification for the existence of the monarchy as an indivisible whole for well over one hundred years.

In discussing the Austrian State Treaty it is necessary to start with an explanation of terminology. Why “State Treaty?” Generally speaking, any treaty concluded between independent states or nations is a “Staatsvertrag,” as the German term goes. Then why is the Austrian treaty of 1955 known as the “State Treaty?” The origins of the term are to be found in Austrian legal terminology after World War I. In 1919 the Austrian government championed the legal thesis, developed by the distinguished legal theorist Hans Kelsen, that the Austrian Republic had not been in a state of war with the Allied and Associated Powers since it had not been in existence while the war was being fought; consequently, the Austrian Republic refused to be the legal successor of the defunct Austro-Hungarian empire.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.