Although the literature on nation building is truly vast, scholars have paid relatively little attention to the formation of regional identities. This is in large part because those who specialize in regionalism have argued that state and region form an essentially contradictory relationship. This article analyzes one example of how a hitherto indistinct geographical entity was fashioned into a federal province and how its political elite complied with a constant need to popularize and entrench the concept of the region. The new regional identity was thus designed to counteract two challenges to its very existence as a federal province: one from the former mother state, Hungary, and the other from Austria, where consideration was given to dividing the newly created entity between two neighboring federal provinces. The outcome of this attempt was the creation of a regional identity, albeit one mostly defined in negative terms.

On 24 August 1914, Lieutenant General Artur von Bolfras warned his peer Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf that the draconian measures directed against domestic suspects were causing a lot of trouble and amounted to throwing the baby out with the bath water by fostering internal animosity. “We should not,” Bolfras insisted, “unnecessarily antagonize the population who have so far shown themselves to be loyal and ready for sacrifice beyond all expectations.” He urged in particular that Conrad should use his influence to put a stop to the excesses of the military command in Temesvár in southern Hungary, where, starting in late July 1914, hundreds of arrests were made following the partial mobilization against Serbia, thus putting into practice Conrad's professed military rationale: “better lock up one hundred people than one too few.” The initial spate of arrests and internments that accompanied the mobilization for war continued well into the autumn of 1914, snowballing into virulent state-driven repression, targeting mostly, but not only, Serbs, a situation which Josef Redlich referred to in his journal as a “race war” and a “systematic policy of extermination.” To Bolfras's letter of notification, Conrad replied that orders had been wired to Temesvár to the effect that abuses should be avoided and the military should work harmoniously with the civilian authorities, but he also signified that “we here can't do anything about individual abuses.”

Many east central European towns and cities bear several names, reflecting the ethnic and religious diversity once characteristic of the region. The town chosen in 1772 by the Habsburgs as capital of their newly acquired province of Galicia serves as an example. In the second half of the nineteenth century Ruthenian national populists referred to the city as “Ľviv”; Russophiles designated the city “Ľvov.” For Poles and Polonized Jews the town was “Lwów,” and for Germans as well as German- and Yiddish-speaking Jews the city was “Lemberg.” The ethnic and linguistic reality was, in fact, much less clear than these divisions would suggest. For much of the period of Habsburg rule, language barriers remained permeable. The city's inhabitants were multilingual, often employing different languages depending on the type of communication in which they were engaged. By the

Much has been made in recent years about the vitality of parliamentary institutions in early modern Europe and of the existence of considerably more cooperation between monarchs and their estates than one had previously thought. While this trend constitutes a significant revision in the thinking of western European historians, it has long been accepted by those who have studied the Habsburg monarchy. Over the last few years specialists on the seventeenth-century monarchy such as R. J. W. Evans, Jean Bérenger, and John Spielman have reemphasized the existence of a consensual, symbiotic relationship between the dynasty and its corporate bodies, especially those of the Erblande.

Ifhigh culture, asTheodorAdornoonce proposed, promises a reality that does not exist, why, at the fin de siècle, did it hold such great attraction for Central Europe's populist politicians who were most attuned to the realities of everyday life? The answer, at least for imperial Austria, is that those politicians believed high culture to possess an integrative social function, which forced them to reconcile notions of “high” culture with “mass” culture. This was particularly true in Vienna, where the city's public performance venues for art, music, stage theater, and visual art stood as monuments to the values that the liberal middle classes had enshrined in the 1867 Constitution. A literate knowledge of this cultural system—its canon of symphonic music; the literature of tragedy, drama, and farce; and classical and contemporary genres of painting—was essential for civic participation in an era of liberal political and cultural hegemony. This article examines one cultural association that attempted to exploit the interaction between German high culture and two spheres, which are commonly thought to stand at odds with elite, high culture: popular culture and mass politics. Rather than a simple, cultural divide, this relationship created a contested “terrain of political and social conflict” in the decades preceding World War I. This terrain was of enormous consequence for Viennese of every social class.

It would be much easier to state what the relationship between the concepts of the “dynasty” and the “imperial idea” does not mean than to explain what it is supposed to mean. Before we can make any serious efforts to do so, we must, first of all, come to a clear understanding of the exact meaning of some of the terms involved. In English-speaking areas the word “empire” is generally understood to mean “an extended territory, usually comprised of a group of nations, states or peoples under the control or domination of a single sovereign power.” Frequently the determining factors are the assumption of a master-subject relationship between “a dominating conquering people and the conquered people,” either by way of a confederacy, in which “one strong member dominates its confederates,” or by even more direct subordination. Furthermore, the notion of an empire is generally associated with an area of considerable size and frequently “with the supreme or absolute power especially of an emperor.1

In anticipation of Czechoslovakia's 1930 population census, one observer, writing in the Zionist Jüdische Volksstimme, assessed the importance of this statistical event for the Jewish nationalist movement:

That there is as yet no good history of the Serbs in Austria-Hungary is not surprising. Such a work would have to treat not one but several separate Serbian communities. A number of Serbs had lived on imperial lands from the time they colonized the Balkans, but most of them settled in Austria-Hungary after the Ottoman invasion of the Balkan Peninsula in the fourteenth century.2 Some Serbian communities in Austria-Hungary were more oppressed than others and had less opportunity for social advancement. Certain of them were blessed with rich lands that yielded abundant crops, while others were settled on starved lands from which they could barely earn a living. A few made their homes astride important trade routes and near major centers of civilization and others in relatively isolated communities. A small minority became successful merchants and artisans and some of them amassed fair-sized fortunes. There were among the Serbs well-to-do landowners (including the Serbian Church) and a handful of Serbs who had titles. Eventually a number of Serbs became distinguished as high ranking officers in the emperor's army and as scholars and professional men.3 But most Serbs in Austria-Hungary were peasants and remained so.

These excerpts from critical reviews covering French dance tours in Vienna, Salzburg, and Innsbruck reflect the scale and variety of French cultural engagement and its growing public visibility in Austria. Out of the four Allied powers, it was France, and not the Soviet Union with its “ballet capital,” that made most use of dance and ballet for nation-branding purposes, both in sabots and on pointe. France's dance diplomacy exported all genres of dance to Austria in order to portray the politically and militarily weakened nation as a rayonnant cultural leader of Europe, whose diversity, supremacy, and grandeur were not undone by 1871 and 1940.

In 1863, the geologist Adolf Schmidl published a thick book on the Bihar/Bihor Mountains, a highland region on the border between the Hungarian Kingdom and Transylvania. Calling the Bihar/Bihor Mountains one of the “least known regions in the Austrian Monarchy,” Schmidl offered his work as small contribution to Vaterlandskunde and one, he hoped, that would inspire others to follow him into the region. The book provided a detailed analysis of the mountains' hydrography, topography, flora, and fauna. The biological diversity of the region especially excited Schmidl, and his discoveries included four new species of plants and a new species of animal (a leech found only in thermal waters). Schmidl was no less impressed by the ethnographic diversity of this region. Although Romanians belonging to the Greek Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches comprised the vast majority of the population, Schmidl counted six ethnic groups and as many religions in the mountains. According to Schmidl, “national agitation” was “entirely foreign” to the region, whose inhabitants enjoyed peaceful and fraternal relations with one another. The Romanians, he underlined, “are among the most loyal in the Austrian monarchy and their devotion to the dynasty is unfeigned and unshakeable.”

For nearly a century and a half the peoples of a large part of the old Polish state shared the destinies of the Habsburg empire. Annexed when the monarchy was entering the phase of Enlightened Despotism, Galicia commenced its history as a mere province of the Habsburg empire. When in 1918 this province broke away from Austria-Hungary, which by then had advanced far in the direction of constitutionalism and capitalism, Galicia had become almost a junior partner in the monarchy.

In a 1975 article in the Austrian History Yearbook, “The Migration of Galician Jews to Vienna, 1857–1880,” Anson Rabinbach asserted that the rapid growth of the Jewish community of Vienna in the second half of the nineteenth century was caused by the massive immigration of Jews from Galicia. He argued that the largest wave of Galician Jewish migration to the Austrian capital occurred between 1857 and 1869. After 1880, he observed, Jewish migration from Galicia declined markedly. Only one of the three people who commented on this article, Scott M. Eddie, pointed out the absence of substantive proof and the existence of logical inconsistencies in Rabinbach's arguments. Moreover, Eddie raised the important question, never addressed by Rabinbach, of the significance of Bohemian and Moravian migration in the expansion of the Jewish population of Vienna in the decades before World War I. Eddie wondered: “Why didn't greater geographical proximity and cultural similarities cause them (Bohemian and Moravian Jews) to be the principal source of Jewish influx into Vienna.”

The purpose of this brief presentation is to show that Lajos Kossuth was both a sincere nationalist and a sincere liberal and that these convictions did not contradict but strongly reinforced each other. It is also my intention to demonstrate that Kossuth was not a revolutionary but a reformer who in 1848 was forced by events beyond his control to promote revolution at home as well as to seek alliances with revolutionary circles outside Hungary. His ambition was not to accomplish a drastic reorganization of Europe but, by peaceful means, to make Hungary a great country. A great Hungary, he believed, would benefit all the inhabitants of the lands of the Crown of St. Stephen and contribute to peace, progress, and liberty in Europe.

If, as Meinig has suggested, the essential significance of colonization is that it produces a radical change and a totally new geography, there can be few regions in Europe which illustrate the process more vividly than the middle Danube plains, lying astride the modern borders of Hungary, Yugoslavia and Romania. Over four centuries the varied strategic and economic potentials of these countries have been viewed by successive individuals and state administrations from different standpoints with the result that each, whether peasant or feudal magnate, imperial official or socialist planner, has left his interpretation as one of a series of veneers or imprints on earlier cultural strata. Historically, the primary guiding consideration in formation of policy was strategic, as has generally been the case; yet beneath this politico-administrative structural level were numerous economic and social frameworks of action which in many ways achieved more enduring tangible expression in community and landscape alike. Within the concept of these two organizational levels, this paper will trace the emergence of the region from sparsely settled wilderness to dynamic multi-national agrarian complex in the period from the early sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century.

Two of the most iconic photos of the 1956 Hungarian revolution involve a colossal statue of Stalin, erected in 1951 and toppled on the first day of the anti-Soviet uprising. One of these pictures shows Stalin's decapitated head, abandoned in the street as curious pedestrians amble by. The other shows a tall stone pedestal with nothing on it but a lonely pair of bronze boots. Situated near Heroes' Square, Hungary's national pantheon, the Stalin statue had served as a symbol of Hungary's subjugation to the Soviet Union; and its ceremonious and deliberate destruction provided a poignant symbol for the fall of Stalinism.

This Essay Attempts to contribute to our understanding of the intellectual and cultural history of Central Europe by making explicit a variety of themes that haunt discourse about Austrian culture and by making some suggestions about periodizing the relationship between Austria and German culture. I originally developed these thoughts on Austria as a region of German culture for a conference in 1983 at the Center for Austrian Studies on regions and regionalism in Austria. Although the political institutions of Central Europe have undergone a revolution since then, the question of Austria's relationship to German culture still holds its importance for the historian-and for contemporary Austrians as well. The German culture I have in mind here is not the kleindeutsch national culture of Bismarck's Reich, but rather the realm that was once constituted by the German-speaking lands of the Holy Roman Empire. This geographical space in Central Europe suggests a more ideal realm of the spirit, for which language is our best point of reference and which corresponds to no merely temporal state.

Recalling the medieval pageantry of the coronation of the future emperor Joseph II as King of the Romans in Frankfurt in 1764, the sexagenarian Johann Wolfgang von Goethe mentions among the names of the special ambassadors attending the solemn occasion Prince Esterházy, the Bohemian envoy, [who] was not tall, though well built, vivacious, and at the same time of noble respectability, yet neither proud nor cold. I had a special liking for him, because he reminded me of the Marshall de Broglio.

On March 22 and 25,1854, on the eve of the outbreak of the Crimean War, a select group of Austrian ministers of state presided over by Emperor Francis Joseph met to reach some basic decisions on Austrian policy. Students of Crimean War diplomacy have paid considerable attention to these ministerial conferences, using the protocols and other documents bearing on them. The most thorough analysis, and for later historiography the most influential, is that of Franz Eckhart. This essay proposes another look at these conferences in the belief that an interpretation different from the traditional one sheds more light on the nature of the debate, the decisions made and postponed, and the fundamental nature of Austria's dilemma. It also suggests in some ways a more favorable view of the policy of Austrian Foreign Minister Karl Ferdinand von Buol-Schauenstein than the usual condemnation of it as a rash and aggressive policy of va banque, or a constant vacillation between East and West without program or goal, or both.