The question of how to categorize and study science in multicultural empires has in recent years increasingly occupied historians of science and of empires. Issues of intercultural mediation, brokerage, or cultural translation have been particularly influential in the study of science in colonial empires. However, the question for continental empires was about science as a reaction to pluricultural reality. Ernest Gellner, Deborah Coen, and Johannes Feichtinger, among others, have taken a similar approach to the Habsburg monarchy, which notwithstanding its legal status as a monarchy shared several characteristics of an empire. These reactions to empire also included nationalisms, which, as recent publications have shown, largely defined the shape of the late-nineteenth-century scientific landscape in Central Europe. In this article, I want to look at the imperial scientific landscape from yet another perspective, concentrating on itinerant scholars and the circulation of knowledge in the Habsburg Empire. In my view, this constitutes an imperial culture of its own that has not yet been thoroughly analyzed.

From the late eighteenth century until the present, suicide has become a fundamental issue for professional Europeans' understanding of themselves and especially of the supposed health of their societies. From the second half of the eighteenth century onward, medical doctors, moral statisticians, sociologists, psychologists, and other professionally trained and university-educated experts produced increasing numbers of studies on suicide. Prior to 1750, suicide had been a popular theme for commentary from moralists, philosophers, and, above all, theologians and clerics. Of course, these groups of commentators have continued to write on the topic through the modern period, but the emergence of doctors, sociologists, and psychologists, among others, in the debates surrounding suicide has been a hallmark of the modern era. Claiming to offer complete or partial answers to the issue and causes of suicide, these professional groups increasingly asserted their own pivotal roles in analyzing the problems of European societies. Suicide was supposedly a modern problem that required expert commentary and intervention.

The demise of Parliament in March 1933 was the most significant single act in the march to semifascism in Austria, which began with the formation of the Heimwehr in the early days of the First Republic and was well under way when significant changes were made in the government on September 21,1933, and a concentration camp was established at Wöllersdorf a few days later. Traditional democratic means were employed to abolish Parliament. Dollfuβ, the Heimwehr, and the Christian Social Party only did what parties in power in democracies do when under attack. They used all the means at their disposal to protect their government from being overthrown. The Social Democrats and Greater Germans, likewise, employed only democratic means in their effort to overthrow the Dollfuβ regime and to preserve a democratically elected Parliament. Dollfuβ and the leaders of all but the National Socialist Party in Austria were well aware of the great danger to Austria that stemmed from the intensification of National Socialist efforts to overthrow a democratic form of government in Austria after Hitler came to power in Germany and knew that the German National Socialists were providing financial support to the Austrian Greater German Party to support them in their efforts to take control of Austria.

This essay addresses the political role of nationally defined scholarship in multiethnic milieus. The focus is on Transylvania, one of the marginal provinces of the Habsburg Empire without stable, state-funded institutions of higher learning and research. The time frame is the Hungarian Vormärz, known as the Reform Era, which extended from the 1830s until the revolution of 1848 and was a pivotal moment in the maturation of the national perspective in scholarship and politics, challenging the traditional order of the composite monarchy. The liberal and national impetus of the period was manifest in the foundation of numerous regional voluntary associations intended to serve the public good, and further education, scholarship, and “national improvement.”

It is fitting that a story about charitable donations and their provenance should begin with a gesture of gift giving. In 1849 a group of Habsburg subjects came together with the intention of raising money to purchase a gift for Josip Jelačić, general of the Habsburg army and Ban (Governor) of Civil Croatia. Jelačić was identified as one of the notional “saviors” of the Habsburg Empire, whose actions in the field had helped quell the revolutionary and military perils of the previous months. The proposed gift was a suitable symbol of imperial honor and military prowess: a ceremonial sabre designed especially for the Ban. Jelačić was apparently moved by the gesture but had a more practical idea: better to use the money raised for his gift to help those less fortunate (and less celebrated) than himself, it should be put toward a fund to support soldiers who had served in his units and militias and who had been injured in fighting—and also to the families of those that had been killed. To this end, a committee was already operating, based in Vienna, but collecting funds through the Ban's Council (Bansko Vijeće) in Zagreb. This would become a mobilization of Habsburg society whose impetus rested on precisely the same values of dynastic loyalty and respect for the Habsburg military as the ceremonial sabre, except that many more people would have a chance to show their devotion and support to the “heroes” of 1848–49.

From the mid-1890s, Habsburg Austria began to follow European trends and experienced a gradual democratization of voting rights, which involved not only an expansion of the electorate but also an innovation of procedures that attempted to modernize elections. In this context, the article calls for a more systematic study of voting practices and attempts to point at some issues that have thus far received insufficient analysis. These include not only the occasional massive violent conflicts at elections that could accompany democratization until World War I but also the presence of women as voters at local and diet elections and the gradual introduction of polling booths. Measures such as allowing single women to cast their vote personally in a few crownlands or attempting to guard the secrecy of the vote suggest the level of experimentation in this period. The state's objective of orderly, “modern” elections is particularly called into question when we consider the extent to which government agents, including policemen and the army, were involved in election conflicts that resulted in fraud and sometimes bloodshed.

In Joseph Roth's novel Die Kapuzinergruft, a Polish count bemoans the fate of a chestnut seller. “He is only a chestnut roaster, but he is quite symbolic. Symbolic for the old Monarchy. This gentleman once sold his chestnuts everywhere, through half of Europe one might say. And everywhere where his roasted chestnuts were eaten was Austria, and the Emperor Franz Joseph reigned. Now there is no chestnut without a visa.”

The Serbs occupied a unique position among the nations living in the Habsburg empire in the eighteenth century. They were the only Orthodox Christians who had full religious equality, and collectively they enjoyed the advantages of a privileged and autonomous group. Beginning in the early part of the eighteenth century, when it gradually became apparent that the Serbs would be integrated into the monarchy as permanent residents rather than as temporary refugees and allies, the special status of the Serbs posed difficult problems for the Habsburg government. The Magyar authorities, the central government offices in Vienna, and the Serbs themselves became involved in recurrent struggles within the bureaucracy as each faction continually maneuvered to gain advantages for its position.

This article was first conceived as a commemorative address for the centenary of the extinction of the Habsburg monarchy, which occurred in November 1918. It seeks to take a correspondingly broad view, geographically and chronologically, of the factors that occasioned that collapse. It addresses three main themes, structured loosely around three classic historiographical analyses of the monarchy as a whole. The great irony of the last phase of Habsburg rule in Central Europe is that it was undermined by precisely those elements in the politics and society of the region that seemed, on the face of things, to derive most advantage from it. The article concentrates on the long-term dysfunctionality caused by the evolution of the Hungarian and German problems, and by the progressive enfeeblement of dynastic institutions. It also engages more briefly with a countervailing phenomenon, that some of those interests most conspicuously spurned by central government might have been the readiest to rescue it. On the argument presented here, World War I, which finally brought the monarchy low, was a catalyst rather than an independent determiner of that outcome.

Engelbert Dollfuss has not been enshrined in history as a popular political figure. The National Socialists vilified him as a Satanic evildoer who embodied everything they hated. Dollfuß's widow and two children found it imperative to flee to Switzerland immediately after the Anschluss and eventually went to Canada, where Mrs. Dollfuß and their daughter remained until 1956. Their son still lives there.

On 4 October 1948, József Cardinal Mindszenty preached a sermon for the rosary feast in front of 35,000 Catholic faithful. He began by reminding his congregation of the origins of the feast day that they were celebrating: the victory of Europe's Christian states over the Ottoman Turkish fleet at the naval battle of Lepanto in 1571. This great victory in the struggle of universal Christendom against the infidel enemy recalled to Mindszenty a second, more particularly Hungarian parallel: the victory of Habsburg forces over the Ottoman Turkish enemy at the battle of Temesvár in 1716. “Hungarian history recalls too such a rosary victory—the Hungarian Christians won it over the Turks in 1716 at Temesvár.” Both military victories represented moments when Europeans had repelled a force seen at the time, and ever after, as hostile to Christian civilization.