My Subject Today is the Austrian Revolution of 1918 and its aftermath, a staple subject in the general history of the empire and the republic, but one that has not seen vigorous historiographical discussion for a number of years. In a recent review of new historiography on the French Revolution, Jeremy Popkin has argued that recent neoliberal and even neo-Jacobin scholarship about that momentous event has confirmed the position of the revolution in the “genealogy of modern liberalism and democracy.” The endless fascination engendered by the French Revolution is owing to its protean nature, one that assayed the possibilities of reconciling liberty and equality and one that still inspires those who would search for a “usable liberal past.”1 After all, it was not only a watershed of liberal ideas, if not always liberal institutions and civic practices, but it was also a testing ground for the possibility of giving practical meaning to new categories of human rights.

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

East and east central European cities are a neglected field of research in urban history. While a certain number of publications exist on select urban phenomena such as urban Jewry, only recently have attempts been made to focus research on entire cities. Studies published in the last decade have tried to discover the unknown urban world of multiethnic societies in countries such as Russia, Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltic states. Researchers must cope with specific problems. General city histories are very rare, with the exception of several “city biographies” dating from the 1920s and 1930s. Archival sources are rather poorly documented in inventories, and holdings (especially on the territory of the former Soviet Union) suffered wartime losses and are often scattered. Multilingual skills and knowledge of “exotic” languages such as Ukrainian, Lithuanian, or Yiddish are mandatory. And finally, the usual approaches do not lead to satisfactory results. “Traditional” urban history deals with Western European and North American urban societies that were shaped by a special set of social, economic, and juridical circumstances, in which longstanding city autonomy, rapid modernization since the eighteenth century, a powerful city bourgeoisie, and highly developed and differentiated public spheres played important roles. When one applies the standards of Western city development to the multinational Central and Eastern European cities during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the latter appear to be underdeveloped and lacking in many of the institutional preconditions that make a mere urban agglomeration a city. Such considerations may even be applied to a city such as Lemberg (L'viv in Ukrainian, Lwow in Polish), which belonged to Austria-Hungary until 1918, and was always regarded as a stronghold of “Vienneseness” and “Europeaness” in the “East.”

Recent surveys on post-soviet Eastern Europe reveal that ethnicity and ethnic differentiation are gradually losing their salience among local citizens, while social identification (for example, identities of workers or businesspeople) has become increasingly important as a way for people to perceive both themselves and ongoing political and economic changes. This tendency purports to herald the emergence of a society in which citizens compete for rewards and opportunities on the basis of merit rather than ethnic heritage. In Lithuania and Western Ukraine, however, this is not the case. National identification axes are the most important, and a strong national identity promotes democracy and opposition to communism.

Paradox and Contradiction often characterized the formation and evolution of national identity in the Hungarian Kingdom. Starting in the mid nineteenth century, an explosion occurred in efforts to recover supposedly ancient “ethnic” memory as historians, linguists, and archeologists produced one great breakthrough after another, revolutionizing their conceptions of the past. At the same time, an equally strong forgetting of the complex multicultural and multiethnic reality of the region also transpired.1 The parallel processes of recovering and forgetting intensified after the end of World War I. By the 1930s and 1940s, Slovak historians had reconstructed their history on the foundations of the Great Moravian Empire, Romanian textbooks became dominated by the Daco-Roman continuity thesis, and Hungarian historical narratives were almost exclusively concerned with the history of the Magyars. While historians did occasionally write books that were not biased in favor of their respective ethnic-national groups, they remained marginalized and, most importantly, the mass of students learning history at the middle, high school, and university levels were only superficially introduced to the role other ethnic groups played in their history.

For almost three weeks the scenes repeated themselves: cannon fire, chiming church bells, massive crowds, peasant bands on horseback, school girls in white dresses laying flowers along the emperor's path, torchlight parades, mountaintop bonfires, city illuminations, serenades, court dinners, aristocratic balls, early morning prayers at cathedrals and synagogues. During Francis Joseph's 1880 inspection tour of Galicia,2 today divided between Poland and Ukraine, millions of Galicians either saw the emperor, talked with someone who did, read about his visit in the paper, or heard abąout it at a village reading hall or gathering, or from the local priest

The known anti-Semitic leader Prince Lichtenstein once said in a meeting of Christian women that anti-Semitism would never have achieved such success without the assistance of women, and this is unfortunately very true. Dr. Lueger proved himself a good judge of character when he called for the help of his “Amazons,” who overall did such powerful work for him. For better or worse, wherever women engage themselves in great numbers in the service of a party, they are desirable and highly regarded.

Although galician jewry constituted one of the largest Jewish communities in the world before World War I, it has attracted too little scholarship. Galician Jews sat on the frontier between East and West. Religiously and economically, they were similar to Russian and Romanian Jewry, but since their emancipation in 1867 they enjoyed wideranging civil and political rights akin to those of their Western brethren. Historians focusing either on the numerically more significant Russian Jewry, or the politically and financially more important Western Jewry, have tended to avoid Galicia, even though the region was home to almost a million Jews by the turn of the century. Most Zionist historiography has also underemphasized the importance of this community, particularly in the pre-Herzlian period, by which time Galician Zionists could already boast a considerable degree of organizational infrastructure. This neglect is partly a reflection of the general historiographical trend within modern Jewish history. It also reflects, however, the unusual nature of Galician “Zionism,” which was largely Diaspora-oriented—directed toward national cultural work in the Diaspora as well as political activities designed to secure national minority rights—long before Zionists in either Russia or the West had begun to engage in such activities.

An Enthusiastic Group of Romanians gathered in Sibiu at the 1905 annualassembly of Astra, the largest Romanian cultural association in Transylvania, to celebrate their nation and their future. Moved by the gathering and the festivities, the editor of the association's paper, Transilvania, expressed a hope he and thousands of his compatriots shared: “Never before has this people been in a more favorable position as a superiorethnic element, as an important factor of civilization, and as a gifted nation with vitality, character, and great talents that guarantee it a bright future and a distinguished place among the peoples of eastern Europe.”1 Like many prominent Romanians of his time, the editor firmlybelieved that his nation would enjoy equal status with other European national groups in the near future. Equal standing had been a central goal of theRomanian intellectuals and clergy who founded the Transylvanian Associationfor Romanian Literature and the Culture of the Romanian People, or Astra, in 1861. Since the eighteenth century, Romanian elites in Transylvania had worked to obtain recognition for their national community so that they couldparticipate fully in the political life of the region. Two centuries later Astra members still hoped they were on the verge of forming a Romanian nation that could achieve the right to control its own destiny.

There was always much that was ordinary about the house numbered 207-V up to the time of its disappearance from Prague's built landscape in 1905. Like many other buildings sheltering some of the city's most underprivileged residents, this place had no artistic worth; no one had contemplated hanging a plaque on its exterior to commemorate a well-known person having slept inside its walls; no published material pointed out any history-altering event that took place behind or in front of its doors. The ordinariness of house 207-V becomes even greater when its final years are situated within the history of a common process taking place, with some exceptions, throughout nineteenth-century Central Europe. Many of the structure's last experiences were part of the growth of what German historians of Germany have called the “Leistungsverwaltung,” and what Austrian historians of Austria- Hungary have called “die aktive Stadt.”1 These two different lab ls are used to describe the fact that during the course of the nineteenth century, a great many Central European cities expanded tremendously, not only in terms of their territoriesś populations, but also in terms of the number and extent of public projects that their municipal governments managed. The public projects included, among others, gas and electric works, transportation lines, sewers, baths, parks, libraries, museums, market halls, slaughterhouses,

On November 27, 1905, leading members of the Czech and German communities in Moravia agreed to a political compromise that divided power in the provincial diet between Czechs, Germans, and members of the landowning and ecclesiastical aristocracy. Over the next few years, the Moravian agreement was used as a model for political compromises in Bukovina (1910) and Galicia (1914).1 For decades historians hailed the Moravian compromise and its successors as evidence that the feuding nations of the late Habsburg monarchy could indeed find sufficient common ground to live together in peace. Although in the past decade scholars generally have taken a more cautious approach to the results of these compromises, much of this work betrays a sense of disappointment over a missed opportunity. Somehow, the Czech-German compromise in Moravia might have become a model for ethnic cooperation, proof that the monarchy's contentious national communities could work out their differences and live together, or at least a sign

With the creation of the Czechoslovak First Republic in October 1918, politicians began debating the fate of the great estates the new country had inherited from the Habsburg monarchy, and within six months, the National Assembly enacted a sweeping land reform. With some of the land, the state sponsored colonies—new or expanded agricultural settlements. The announced purpose of the colonization program was to relieve land hunger, which was a genuine concern. Equally important in the minds of many who administered the program and participated in it, however, was altering the ethnic composition of the border areas, where most of the colonies were located.