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.

Few memoirs are as rich in detail as those of Field Marshal Count Francis Conrad von Hötzendorf, chief of the Austro-Hungarian general staff from 1906 to 1911 and from 1912 until 1917. The numerous documents cited in the text and appended to each of the volumes make Conrad's memoirs an invaluable source for historians interested in Austro-Hungarian diplomatic, political, and military developments prior to and during the early months of the first World War.

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.

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 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.

In this concluding lecture I wish to express my thanks for the excellent papers presented at this carefully prepared and in many ways unique conference. In one who grew up, now more than half a century ago, under the reign of Francis Joseph and who has always retained some emotional loyalty to those years of his own youth and his own student days, who went to war in 1914 under the black and yellow flag of the Austrian monarchy—in such a person the fact that here in faraway Midwestern America the problems of the long defunct monarchy are being discussed with a sense of actuality in an international scholarly gathering by men of diverse ideologies and nationalities arouses a feeling of satisfaction and some melancholy.

The end of World War I marked a turning point in European history: Europe was dismembered into nation-states from the former territories of the German Reich and the Danubian monarchy, creating a belt of borders stretching approximately twenty thousand kilometers. The dissolution of the Habsburg monarchy alone brought about destabilization not only to the region but to Europe as a whole.

The austrian habsburg court under Empress Maria Theresa has been characterized as combining an informal domesticity with a rigid ceremonial structure inherited from her predecessors. In this picture of life at the Habsburg court, the strict protocol and elaborate calendar of ceremonies only partially designated how the imperial family structured its time; protocol and ceremony coexisted, it would seem, with more casual and relaxed forms of familial interaction. Popular Austrian writing on Maria Theresa has stressed the image of the empress as mother, and the maternal quality of this portrait has colored some modern notions of how her palaces were occupied and used. Tourists visiting Schönbrunn palace, for example, are often told that many of its rooms were designed with familial contact in mind, and the resulting picture of the palace's use and habitation is curiously modern. The notion that an “imperial domesticity” governed actions at Maria Theresa's Schönbrunn has found its way into scholarly literature as well; one scholar has gone so far as to describe Schönbrunn's admixture of ceremonial and intimate spaces as vorbiedermeierlich, that is, prefiguring the family-oriented, bourgeois culture of nineteenth-century Vienna. The instigator of this myth may be Stefan Zweig, who in 1932 described Marie Antoinette's childhood at Schönbrunn as one filled with carefree play, personal freedom, and adventure, all of which prepared her inadequately for her future role as queen of France. The modern visitor to Schönbrunn might be forgiven for thinking that, despite the palace's sumptuous rooms and elegant decoration, it differs minimally from the modern single-family home.

The complex of events linked to the second Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683 often has been characterized as a turning point in East Central, indeed even European history, an argument which probably can be disputed only on semantic or philosophical grounds. For example, the late Hugo Hantsch once stated in private conversation that he firmly believed that the abortive Ottoman assault upon Austria's capital fundamentally determined the future of the Habsburg empire. Assuming that this judgment is valid, the purpose here is to refine, extend—and correct a bit—certain conclusions drawn in two earlier books, one in English and the other in German, concerning the subject in question. These observations are occasioned by the avalanche of writings evoked by the tercentennial celebration of the sieges in Vienna and elsewhere and by personal discussions of the author with the Hungarian historians, László Benczédi and Géza Perjes. It is convenient to treat the topic under three headings: the antecedents of the Ottoman offensive, the significance of the events per se, including the delicate question of Polish participation, and the consequences of the allied victory and the subsequent campaigns in Hungary.

Of the various causes of the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy, nationalism was certainly one of the most important. In an age of integral nationalism like the latter part of the nineteenth and the early part of the twentieth century it proved extremely difficult for a multinational empire like the Austro-Hungarian monarchy to survive. Not only did the Habsburgs face the question of how to retain the loyalty of a dozen different nationalities within the framework of a single empire, but they also had to reconcile ever increasing differences between the Slavs and the Germans and Magyars and between the Germans and the Magyars themselves. In the end, the Habsburg government failed to meet the challenge.

Under The Influence of Enlightenment ideals of rational administration and cameralist notions of increasing the productivity and welfare of the populace, Joseph II and his ministers embarked on an aggressive program of reform for the Habsburg monarchy in the late eighteenth century. Their view as to what needed change was wide-ranging, but among their chief concerns was the desire to restructure the relationship between the Catholic church and Austrian society. As the largest and most powerful religious denomination in the Habsburg monarchy, the Catholic church possessed immense human and material resources, which could possibly be exploited to benefit the Austrian people and state. For Joseph II, the process whereby Catholicism could best be put to use in Austrian society necessarily involved seizing partial administrative control over the Catholic church. The Catholic church, he believed, did not distribute material and moral benefit to the Austrian people evenly, and changing this situation required the active intervention of the Austrian government.

As Richard L. Rudolph correctly observes at the beginning of his article, Austrian economic history has not been adequately examined in international, comparative studies of the problems of economic growth. Undoubtedly this is attributable both to the traditional orientation of Austrian historians toward national and regional studies and to the interest of so many historians in various aspects of the preindustrial age. Macroeconomic approaches have, therefore, been deemphasized, even though they have led to significant new conclusions in regard to the nature of preindustrial economy and society, partly because of the difficulty in applying this methodology to an analysis of the increasingly complex affairs of a modern industrial society.

Since World War II Hungarian historians have expressed great interest in the period between the revolution of 1848 and 1918. In studying this period, however, they have not been able to take advantage of an extensive heritage or of solid earlier works. Earlier Hungarian historians paid scarcely any attention at all to this era. Believing that the writing of contemporary history was a job for journalists and not for scholars, they kept away from it in most instances. Moreover, at that time it was ticklish for historians to touch upon the problems of the monarchy. As a consequence, they devoted their attention mostly to medieval history, which provided richer material for Hungarian nationalism.

Until the end of the second World War the statue of Ban Jelačič, his sword pointing towards Budapest, stood on the main square of Agram as a symbol, not only of Croatian national pride, but also as a reminder of the country's proverbial attachment to the Habsburg dynasty. The “man who saved Austria” and the prowess of the Croatian Military Border became the most cherished historical legends of the old Austro-Hungarian empire and have attracted the attention of many historians. It is not my purpose to restate the case for or against Jelačič or to give yet another account of the complicated relationships between Agram, Pest, and Vienna but to disentangle legends which have been all too widely accepted and which have obscured important aspects of the role played by the Military Border in the revolution of 1848. In general, writers have concentrated on the picturesque appearance of the frontier troops and on their ferocity and their allegedly unshakable loyalty to the imperial cause and have neglected the military and political considerations which must be taken into account if one wishes to make a more accurate evaluation of the Croatian intervention in the revolution and its failure and ultimate repercussions.

On April 14, 1918, Charles I, the last ruler of the Austro-Hungarian empire, dismissed his foreign minister Count Ottokar Czernin. The immediate circumstances of Czernin's fall from power have been known for many years, and the recently opened documentary collections in the Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv in Vienna add little of substance to what is already known. Since neither the Czernin nor the Habsburg families have opened their private papers to the scrutiny of scholars, our information is still based on contemporary accounts of high government and court officials. From the evidence at hand we know little more than that Czernin had often treated Charles in a high-handed manner and that the foreign minister's refusal to assume full blame for the Sixtus Affair so angered the emperor that he accepted his minister's resignation. Thus, according to the consensus of his contemporaries, the reasons for Czernin's dismissal were emotional: the wounded pride and momentary anger of Emperor Charles. Certainly few would contend that these factors were unimportant; the emperor had often rendered similar imprudent judgments earlier in his brief reign. Still, one should be cautious about accepting this reason as the only one without searching for other more complex causes.