Scenes of deep national division, competition, and conflict dominate standard historical narratives about the Austro-Hungarian monarchy during the late nineteenth century and most of its successor states in the 1920s and 1930s. Nationalist political movements flourished in this multicultural environment as capitalist agricultural and industrial development encouraged popular social ambitions and resentments over inequalities, while the advance of modern civil society and constitutional government provided public space for political movements. After the 1860s, political parties committed to nationalist interests increasingly dominated middle-class politics, and by 1900 national loyalties created growing fissures even in the ostensibly international Social Democratic movement. Some of the most intense nationalist social and political competition developed in the Crownlands of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia between Czech and German national interests. The Bohemian capital, Prague, became the stage for repeated mass nationalist demonstrations and rioting in the 1890s and after 1900 (see Figure 1).

Sermons represent the main type of sources related to convent entry ceremonies in early modern Central Europe. Other textual sources seem to be quite rare (e.g., songs) or formulaic (e.g., written professions). Visual and material sources (portraits, strands of hair) are also scarce. Yet the significance of entry or monachization sermons in this respect has hardly been recognized. The aim of this article is to contribute to their due scholarly appreciation by demonstrating the interpretative possibilities that their research can offer. I will attempt to do so by exploring these sermons from a wide range of approaches—above all from the perspectives of media and communication studies, gender studies, cultural and social anthropology, and literary and visual studies. This complexity of approaches will enable me to answer a series of questions: Why were the monachization sermons widely popular? What were their functions and uses? What parallels can be drawn between monachization sermons and other sources? Finally, how can their research contribute to a greater understanding of early modern convent culture?

Amid the preparations for the abortive Russo-Ottoman peace talks at Fokschan in April 1772, Anton Wenzel Kaunitz instructed the Austrian Internuntius in Istanbul, Franz Maria Thugut, to elect a colleague to accompany him to the congress. Kaunitz, eager to maintain Austria's unique relationship with both belligerent parties, suggested two young orientalists, Bernhard von Jenisch and the Hungarian noble Karl Reviczky as suitable companions. In character with many thirty-somethings in the Habsburg bureaucracy in the 1770s, Thugut, Jenisch, and Reviczky were fluent in Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish and possessed an exceptional knowledge of Ottoman affairs. As members of the Austrian embassy to the Ottoman Porte, they had each spent long sojourns in Istanbul. The recruitment and education of such men had been one of Kaunitz's priorities since the 1750s. Thugut knew both candidates well, especially Jenisch, an old chum since their student days at the Oriental Academy in Vienna. Despite Reviczky's recent successes as a translator of an Ottoman treatise on government and some ghazals by the Persian poet Hafez, Thugut did not share Kaunitz's esteem for the young noble, explaining that Reviczky “is as ingenious as he is faint-hearted; he turns pale at the mere mention of plague and would take objection to travel over the channel with sharp winds.”

The purpose of this article is to clarify the relative roles of Austria and Prussia during the Wars of Liberation of 1813 and 1814. It uses the very latest research concerning the military strategy adopted and emphasizes the input of Radetzky, using his handwritten account of the campaign, a document previously ignored by historians, despite the general's position as chief of staff of the allied coalition. The fact is that Anglo-American historians have failed to investigate the politics of the military alliance of 1813–1814 that constituted the Fourth Coalition. Myself apart, the only historian to examine that alliance with any regard to the Austrian viewpoint has been Gordon A. Craig in a brief but excellent analysis published as long ago as 1966. German historians have done little better. They simply neglect the Austrian archives.

During the nineteenth century, history developed into an independent discipline with important cultural and intellectual functions in both the academic world, as well as in society at large. Specific circumstances contributed to the rise in importance of this discipline: On the one hand, the emergence of an educated bourgeoisie and rising nationalist movements influenced the study of history; whereas on the other hand, public demands for assurances of continuity, as well as conservative efforts for restoration, also played an important role in history's growth in importance. Historicism, which began to establish itself in late-eighteenth-century Germany, had its forerunners in research approaches that grew out of the late Enlightenment. Concepts of cultural science [Kulturwissenschaft] developed by scholars of the late Enlightenment paved the way for the rise of the historical discipline during the first half of the nineteenth century.

On 28 May 1914, the Viennese press reported that a young man from the sixteenth district in Vienna had attempted suicide. Sitting on a bench at the Pezzlpark, twenty-one-year-old laborer Karl P. shot himself in the head with a revolver. “The motive,” one newspaper reported, “was said to be unrequited love.” By chance, the same park bench would see more action later that day. Pregnant twenty-three-year-old laborer Marie B. was on her way to a birthing clinic when she went into labor. Sitting on what the newspaper now deemed the Selbstmörderbankerl, with the help of two nearby watchmen, she gave birth to a girl. The headline “Death and Life on a Bench” highlighted one extraordinary coincidence in an otherwise ordinary day in the city.

The scholarship on twentieth-century refugee movement highlights the persecution of national, ethnic, and religious minorities arising from state and nation-building. The very structure and function of modern nation-states made specific populations within them vulnerable outsiders. The nation-state limited and defined in new ways those groups for whom the state would take responsibility. “In practically every way we can imagine,” writes Michael Marrus, “the First World War imposed on contemporaries the awesome power of the nation-state.” Refugee movement has also been tied to policies of wartime persecution and the chaos of imperial collapse. Populations in flux mark a regime no longer in control, a state in dissolution and decay.

On 16 July 2011, the funeral procession for Otto Habsburg marched through the first district of Vienna to the Habsburg dynasty's traditional vault, the Kapuzinergruft. It was the entombment of a remnant of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Yet, the procession also carried an important chapter of the First Republic of Austria to the vault. After the death of his father and former Emperor Charles in exile in April 1922, Otto became the figurehead of a political current of interwar Austria: the Legitimist movement. Its aim was to restore the Habsburg monarchy that had been dissolved at the end of World War I.

Since the 1970s, historiography about the pre-World War II phase of the Croatian Ustaša concentrated on Italian and Hungarian state support for Ante Pavelić's national-separatist/terrorist organization from approximately 1929–1934, and identified Nazi support when it became more significant in the late 1930s and put the group in charge of the Independent State of Croatia in 1941. More recent scholarship has investigated the support of Croatian exiles in the United States and Argentina for the Ustaša movement, as well as how the Ustaša regime, once in power, tried to legitimate its policies of racial “cleansing” and social revolution against capitalism and secularism. The first aim of this article is to return to the early period of the Ustaša, when it was a terrorist organization, and to show that it had an important base in Austria that senior Austrian police officials tolerated. The article, therefore, takes a somewhat different position from that of historian Arnold Suppan, who argued that the Austrian police could find no evidence that the Ustaša in Austria had been involved in terrorism, and that the Austrian government had made a good faith effort to expel Ustaša members. The fact that elements of the Austrian police indeed knew about the Ustaša network and protected certain senior members supports historian Gerhard Jagschitz's argument that the Vienna police had not turned over a new leaf in the postwar period and had not shed all political activities. However, Jagschitz concentrated on the problems surrounding the establishment of a domestic intelligence agency in the 1920s, showing how it ultimately was not effective. This article concentrates on 1929–1934, demonstrating that while the Austrian political police was not all-knowing, certain decisions not to share what it knew about ultra-nationalist Croatian terrorism damaged the Austrian police's international reputation. Second, this article argues that the Yugoslav police possibly turned to shadowy extra-judicial groups to carry out assassinations against Ustaša figures, in part because the Austrian police were not aggressive enough in repressing the organization. This adds an additional factor to the interpretations of historians James Sadkovich and Mario Jareb, who contend that Yugoslav police violence was an extension of the Serbian dictatorship's attempt to repress Croatian nationalism by any means necessary.

Burschenschaften, as a particular type of German-nationalist (völkisch) student fraternity, have partaken in shaping Austrian politics in numerous ways since the nineteenth century. Acting as the standard-bearers of German nationalism in Austria after 1945 and being strongly represented in the ranks of the Freedomite Party of Austria (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs/FPÖ), they have been able to maintain a degree of political relevance up until the present day—their intimate ideological, personal, and institutional entanglement with the National Socialist regime notwithstanding. Nonetheless, their history has so far almost exclusively been written by fraternity members themselves, and mostly in an affirmative, if not apologetic fashion; critical assessments for the post-1945 era in particular are limited to a small number of articles that, for the most part, are based on secondary literature rather than on primary sources.