In 1960, Robert A. Kann pointed out in A Study in Austrian Intellectual History: From Late Baroque to Romanticism that “[h]istorians of the future will still have to meet the challenging task of writing the comprehensive German-Austrian intellectual history.” The value of the project Kann called for is generally acknowledged, but there is no clear agreement in the field about what a survey of German-Austrian intellectual history should look like. In 2007, I argued in an article for The Austrian History Yearbook that the scope of Austrian intellectual history still needs to be circumscribed and characterized adequately—geographically, linguistically, and comparatively. Rather than concentrating on Vienna or extending the field to the whole of the Habsburg monarchy, including Hungary and Galicia, I proposed that we concentrate our approach to this question on the historic core of the Austrian state: the Austrian and Bohemian Crownlands, a unity from at least 1749 to 1918. This was the region where state-building, centralization, and reform were most coherently pursued in the century after 1749, when the German language was dominant in education and public life. I contrasted this view to the disembodied approach to the German intellectual life of the entire Habsburg monarchy, which relies on conventions that were developed for dynastic and diplomatic history, conventions that also work quite well for economic history or even for cultural history, neither of which is so directly dependent on language. The region I have in mind is the southeastern part of the German Confederation that was included in the Frankfurt Parliament in 1848 but excluded from Bismarck's Germany in 1866. The very existence of this region, let alone its long and rich history since the Middle Ages, often gets lost in political narratives of German nationalism and the Habsburg monarchy (Figure 1).

For most scholars, the religious landscape of late medieval Central Europe is familiar terrain. Its geography was most famously mapped in the early twentieth century by the Dutch scholar Johan Huizinga. Casting this period as one of decay and decline, Huizinga shaped the historiography of the late Middle Ages for succeeding generations. The church's moral and institutional failings called forth the reforming efforts of first Jan Hus in Bohemia and then a century later Martin Luther in Germany. But as John Van Engen has recently reminded us, “any historical period called ‘late’ is headed for interpretive trouble.” During the past decade in particular, a number of scholars have reexamined this period and region with fresh eyes.

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 the middle of the fifteenth century, the Benedictine monks of Melk in Austria copied Hugh of Fouilloy's On the Wheel of True Religion, a moral treatise that contrasted well-disciplined and dissolute religious life. Two large images accompany the text. Atop an image depicting a dissolute cloister (Figure 1), an abbot reigns in pride and “curiosity.” He wears a red habit, a red tunic adorned with buttons at the wrists, a red beret, and red boots with golden spurs. A luxuriously adorned dagger hangs on a golden belt. The abbot also holds a falcon in his left hand, and nearby are a backgammon board and a lyre. To the left, a prior aspires to the abbot's glory. He wears fashionable long-toed boots and a red tunic adorned with buttons. He also clutches a blue bag, presumably filled with the cash that is said to fund his ascent “through simony.” To the right of the image, a deposed abbot, pulled down by a demon who clutches his habit, laments his fall from grace “through negligence.” A cloistered monk sleeps below with a pair of dice nearby. Atop the contrasting image of disciplined monks (Figure 2), a humbly clothed and properly tonsured abbot holds his office “in dignity, but humbly and with charity.” The abbot's successor, the prior, ascends reluctantly. His predecessor resigns his office out of true humility. A cloistered monk sits quietly below, reading diligently and embracing willingly his life of poverty and obedience.

Did the creation of Protestant churches in Germany during Luther's generation follow someone's intentions? Heiko Oberman, appealing to a medieval Luther, portrays the reformer as herald of a dawning apocalypse, a monk at war with the devil, who expected God to judge the world and rescue Christians with no help from human institutions, abilities, and processes. This Luther could not have intended the creation of a new church. Dorothea Wendebourg and Hans-Jürgen Goertz stress the diversity of early evangelical movements. Goertz argues that anticlericalism helped the early Reformation's gamut of spiritual, political, economic, and social trends to coalesce into moderate and radical groups, whereas Wendebourg suggests that the movements were only united in the judgment of the Counter Reformation.

This article deals with an early modern court historian's judgments concerning the political competence and incompetence of his contemporaries. Although the phrase “political competence” may seem anachronistic when referring to the second half of the seventeenth century, hardly any historian today would deny that, at least since the late medieval period, European intellectuals belonging to political elites had developed their own understanding of what constitutes effective statesmanship. That understanding was not always normative, or based on exempla of the classical past—it could be practical and expressed through evaluations of current events. In the middle of the seventeenth century, the future Habsburg court historian Galeazzo Gualdo Priorato wrote about Oliver Cromwell: “And let it be noted from his extraordinary example, that not the nobility of birth, nor riches . . . qualify one for high office, as it usually solely happens, but that it is the opportunity that . . . wakes up the spirits, and sharpens the minds.” This article will deal with Priorato's judgments of political competence (and incompetence) in the works that he wrote while in the service of the Austrian Habsburgs.

The second Ottoman-Egyptian crisis from 1839 to 1841 was one of the most important chapters in the history of the Eastern question. At that time, the fragile structure of the Ottoman Empire trembled in its foundations under the pressure of the ambitious, powerful Egyptian governor, Mohammed Ali, who at the end of the 1830s controlled Egypt along with Sudan, Crete, a considerable part of the Arabian Peninsula, and even Syria. Although formally he was the sultan's subject administering some Ottoman provinces, in reality Mohammed Ali governed his dominions as an independent ruler, hence dividing the Ottoman Empire into two parts, one of them ruled from Constantinople and the other from Alexandria. The sultan's attempt to terminate the existence of this dual system ended in disaster; and in the midsummer of 1839, the empire found itself without its army, navy, and monarch, who died at the end of June.

Since the 1980s, the eastern part of the nineteenth-century Habsburg province of Galicia has served as a testing ground for constructivist theories of nationalism and national identity. Historians who used these theories developed a variety of tools to analyze the practices and discourses that had allegedly created national communities. Galicia presented these historians many opportunities to weigh the value of “constructivist” theories by offering a rich supply of local empirical material. The Greek-Catholic or “Ruthenian” part of the Galician population has proved to be an especially gratifying object of investigation for these scholars.

At the beginning of June 1904, the Hungarian capital was in a state of frenzy. The bullfights, starring Pouly fils—a toreador from Nîmes, France—as the matador, and scheduled to take place in a recently built 15,000-seat bullring in the Budapest City Park, attracted everyone's attention. Reporting a wave of “Spanish fever” spreading among inhabitants of the city, the newspapers highlighted the fact that a large percentage of the population was talking about “toreadors, picadors, matadors, and bulls.” The toreadors dressed in their “exotic costumes” caused a stir everywhere they went (Figure 1). As the toreadors visited Budapest's tourist attractions many female passersby noticed their “suntanned faces and muscular bodies.” The matador's collar ornament, consisting of two studs representing two “miniature diamond bulls,” was a subject of conversation on everyone's lips. Local tailors proposed “Spanish collars” replicating those worn by Pouly as the ne plus ultra of fashion to their customers. Furniture makers and carpenters witnessed their sales of Spanish dressing-screens skyrocket. Surfing the wave of public interest, the Uránia, a local association for the popularization of science, scheduled slide shows about Spain. The Budapest Orpheum hired Tortajada, a well known Spanish female dancer, for several appearances on its stage. Parodic plays, mimicking a bullfight, were staged throughout June both on the site of Ős Budavára (Ancient Buda Castle), a historical theme park that opened in the City Park in 1896, and on an improvised outdoor stage on the Margaret Island. Theaters also claimed their share by scheduling operas such as Carmen, the Marriage of Figaro, and the Barber of Seville. Restaurants offered a new cocktail drink called “Krampumpouly.” Journalists turned into impromtu poets and wrote poems dedicated to the bulls. Even politicians joined in the popular enthusiasm for the bullfights, declaring in the Budapest parliament, as a journalist sarcastically remarked, that for the local political body from that moment on: “Vox popouly” is “vox dei.”

Each version of the European welfare state developed out of particular historical contexts. The modern Austrian welfare state was developed in “Red Vienna” as a response to the perceived dysgenic emergency of World War I and strong doubts about the Lebensfähigkeit (viability, “ability for life”) of the young nation itself. Eugenic thought was central to the Vienna Welfare Ministry's mission, activity, and appeal to both a local and international audience. The welfare system implemented in Vienna in the interwar years worked to sustain and amplify the city's viability by creating hygienic conditions that Dr. Julius Tandler, its founder, believed would positively alter the very constitutions of its citizens and make possible a “coming generation” of healthy children.

In the aftermath of World War II, Austria once again achieved notoriety as a “prison of peoples.” In 1951, the Ost-West Kurier, a newspaper in Essen, decried the degrading mistreatment of Austria's so-called “prisoners of the postwar.” Men, women, and children were wasting away in former concentration camps and were denied citizenship rights, the right to work or to travel freely, and basic social protections, the newspaper reported. These “prisoners” were not, however, former Jewish concentration camp inmates, prisoners of war (POWs), or displaced persons (DPs). They were German expellees from Eastern Europe—the very Germans on whose behalf the Nazi war for Lebensraum had allegedly been fought. “In the entire Western world, there is today no group of human beings who has been sentenced to live with so few rights as the so-called Volksdeutsche in Austria,” the newspaper's editors proclaimed:

Austria's status of neutrality contended with crises almost immediately after its founding along with the 1955 State Treaty. First, during the Soviet invasion of Hungary in October 1956, Austrian neutrality faced the threat of conflict when Soviet-Hungarian clashes spilled over into Austria. Then, in July 1958, Austrian neutrality contended with more benign, but nonetheless disturbing, provocations from the Cold War's Western superpower, the United States. As U.S. military planes transited Austria in broad daylight on their way to Lebanon, the cozy, covert Austro-American relationship became all too overt. Although many Austrians believed neutrality would end foreign (particularly Soviet) domination and would ensure an ultimate withdrawal from global upheavals, these events showed that neutrality by itself could not remove the strategic implications inherent in Austria's position in Cold War Central Europe. Indeed, partisan strategic calculations in both East and West had played a significant role in creating Austrian neutrality. As a result, preserving both Austria's neutrality and its links to the West required delicate maneuvering by a small, poorly defended country amid Cold War crosscurrents of Eastern threats and Western sympathies. Already in its early years, Austrian neutrality proved to be less of the holiday from history that many Austrians expected during the festive mood of May 1955.