Forty years ago R. J. W. Evans, in his now classic study of The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, observed that, in the absence of a coherent early modern central government, the Habsburg enterprise rested crucially upon the baroque court and Habsburg patronage of the arts. Evans especially noted that “two great synthetic achievements, alike commissioned by court, magnates, and Church, alike immortally associated with the age of baroque in the Habsburg lands: the dramatic extravagance of opera; and its physical counterpart, the monumental architecture of the years around 1700.” Evans argued further that baroque art, including opera, contributed to the ideological legitimacy of the court, and therefore the state. This became particularly important during the reign of Emperor Leopold I, who was himself a composer of some distinction and who sponsored one of the supremely monumental operatic productions of the seventeenth century, Antonio Cesti's Il pomo d'oro, on Paris and the prize of the golden apple, staged with twenty-four sets over the course of two days, in honor of the birthday of Leopold's teenage empress, the Spanish Infanta Margarita, in 1668. As a child, she had appeared as the artistic focus of the Spanish court in the painting Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez.

It is difficult for the historian to imagine how the scraps of paper encountered in the archive, filled with printed words and images, served as the first newspapers that were created, distributed, and read throughout early modern Europe. Taking an empathetic approach to history, the process could look something like this: In a village outside of Augsburg in late spring of 1595, a small crowd gathers around a well-worn tavern table, staring intently at a sheet of paper. Some focus their eyes on the brightly colored image filling the top half of the page: a bird's-eye view of a citadel in a heavily fortified countryside with throngs of armored figures mercilessly slaying their turbaned enemies. Others let their eyes wander through the two columns of text below, perhaps quietly sounding out the letters they recognize as they search for familiar words and phrases. One man, possibly the local notary, darts his eyes more rapidly across the lines, reading portions out loud to those still waiting to digest the contents of the sheet of paper. Everyone present knows the key points from the headline running along the top, having heard it called out by the street vendor who sold it in the square, a raspy voice crying: “The City and Fortress of Simbalt in Moldavia on the Danube, and other locations”; “2000 Turks slain with poleaxes”; “The army spared no one, men or women, young or old”; and “Lots of booty.” The peddler, who carried the sheet along with a variety of small wares as he moved around the countryside, had picked it up earlier that week from the courtyard establishment of Leonard Schweiger, in the Augsburg suburb of St. James. That morning, it had arrived in a stack of 100 to 500 identical sheets in the hands of the entrepreneuring publisher and Briefmaler, Georg Kress. Earlier, Kress had hurriedly added the finishing touches of paint to the image, the last of the white pigment still drying as he ran his latest batch of newssheets over to the shop. Time was of the essence. Kress needed to get his print out before his rival, Bartholomäus Käppler, overheard his source boasting about the events and created his own newssheet. This fresh news, of Christian forces defeating the Muslim Turks, sold quickly. Kress was ready to provide it, just in time for our hawker to pick up a stack of copies, one of which would eventually make its way into the hands of the villagers sitting around the tavern table.

Baron Franz von der Trenck might not now be a household name, but in the eighteenth century, he was notorious for the blood-curdling excesses of the soldiers under his command and an approach to war on behalf of Queen Empress Maria Theresa that appeared to defy the tenets of the age. As one biography described, “The thirty-eight year lifespan of the pandur general Franz Baron von der Trenck was a symphony of violence and death.” On the other side of the Prussian-Austrian conflict, Friedrich von der Trenck was iconic in different ways, with a career that careened from the military under Frederick II, to prison, and lastly to the guillotine in Paris. In service to their monarchs and in pursuit of personal advancement, security, and adventure, the Trenck cousins collided with each other at various points, demonstrating what it meant for nobles to be both architects and victims of fame, reputation, and slander. After Franz's death in prison, Friedrich, for his own reasons, had a hand in shaping the reputation of his cousin as a larger-than-life military man with an affinity for particular types of violence. However, Friedrich was not the only curator of Franz's legacy and others took part during and after Franz's life in the adulteration and appropriation of his life narrative. As a military man, Franz von der Trenck weaponized his own reputation, but its plasticity continued far after his death because he served as a stand-in for a variety of cultural inquiries, anxieties, and hopes beyond military practices and the laws of war. The subtexts of those narratives reveal particular cultural fault lines salient not just in the eighteenth century but also long after, including the constructed, imaginary boundary between the civilized and uncivilized in time and geography. Legends about Trenck drew on tropes about an uncivilized past through the ostensible space between a cultured European center and a wild Slavic or Turkic periphery. The boundary of civilization was not the only theme threaded through stories about Trenck. The nature of his violence was condemned by many and featured in his downfall, but there was also a subterranean admiration for a man who appeared to glorify war as an essential, formative masculine adventure and who romanticized the transgression of rape in war. Beginning with Friedrich and resonating still in twentieth-century nationalist iterations of Trenck is the idolization of a figure who seemed to transcend the petty morality or narrow-mindedness of those who judged him.

Nowadays employment in the civil service is often considered a well-nurtured, relatively well-paid position and a “safe” way to earn a living that is not overly stressful. In addition, a lucrative civil servant's pension is seen to ensure a leisurely retirement with medical insurance. However, this widespread assumption is based on misconceptions and obscures the reality of its conditions and circumstances. This article analyzes how the Habsburg state in the first half of the eighteenth century implemented modern concepts and ideas of social security and health in connection with public welfare and to support imperial officials. It focuses in particular on office-bearers employed in the Habsburg province Banat of Temeswar and their close relatives.

In the small, idyllic German Evangelical Cemetery in Prague-Strašnice, a simple tombstone stands in the back row of graves, dedicated to the memory of “Dr. Heinrich Rauchberg, Professor at the German University in Prague, 1860–1938” and his wife Freia (1874–1939) (see Figures 1 and 2). When the Viennese-born demographer passed away, he left behind him an impressive professional career in the Habsburg monarchy and later in Czechoslovakia: he published a massive body of professional studies in population statistics and was an important figure at the German University in Prague, where he founded the Institute of Political Science in 1898 and served as dean of the Faculty of Law (1902–3, 1916–17, and 1926–27) and as university rector (1911–12). Outside the academic realm, Rauchberg was also involved in a broad range of activities. In 1890, for instance, he headed the Austrian census, in which the Hollerith electric counting machine was employed for the first time in Europe; Franz Kafka, his student in 1905, would later craft a literary monument to Rauchberg, the machine expert, in the short story “In the Penal Colony.” Especially after the establishment of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1918, Rauchberg became a familiar figure among the local German minority, particularly because of his radio broadcasts on legal questions; his frequent articles in the German-speaking press on current issues; his numerous public lectures on social topics; his tireless engagement with housing assistance, tenant protection, and social insurance; and his involvement in the German League of Nations Union in the Czechoslovak Republic, which he cofounded in 1922. In short, he was a scholar very much in the public eye.

So read some of the subheadings in a 14 June 1920 article in the Wiener Montags-Presse, analyzing prostitution in post-imperial Vienna. Many journalists—sometimes, even the same journalists—continued to employ the very vocabulary, “contagion,” “contamination,” and “filth,” in their postwar exposés that they had used in their prewar and wartime reports on prostitution in the Habsburg monarchy. Viennese officials in the newly founded German-Austria (Deutschösterreich) continued to consider tolerated prostitutes a “necessary evil,” arrest women they found engaging in clandestine prostitution, subject them to pelvic examinations for venereal disease (VD), and treat these women as operating outside the bounds of society. In fact, women who practiced prostitution were a long-entrenched part of the female working class. In matters of commercial sex, Austria-Hungary's defeat in the First World War did not constitute a decisive break with the past, but rather a juncture in long-term historical processes, as this analysis of post-imperial Vienna through 1923, when postwar inflation had been tamed, reveals.

Whatever we call “treason”—Hochverrat, trahison, velezrada, veleizdaja, felségsértés—it has been a constant phenomenon in human history. The “traitor,” the individual who breaks a major bond of trust, has emerged in every era and is usually treated as a pariah in society. At the most significant treason trial of the late Habsburg monarchy, that of fifty-three Serbs in Zagreb in 1909, the main defense lawyer Hinko Hinković began his concluding speech with a typical legal adage: that treason was “the most loathsome thing” imaginable. Down the centuries, he said, humanity had singled out two types of traitors. First, there were those who betrayed God, best personified in Judas Iscariot. Second, there were traitors to the nation such as the Spartan Ephialtes who, according to Herodotus, fatally betrayed his homeland to the Persians at Thermopylae in 480 BCE. While both types were “repulsive and terrible,” Hinković quickly opined that the latter—the national traitor—was really the most terrible. However, with an eye on the Serbs he was defending, he added that some national treasons were not actually directed against the nation. For where national aspirations did not mesh with state aspirations, or where the state was not the same as the homeland (otačbina)—there, a deed that the state might consider treasonous could be viewed as a heroic, patriotic act by the nation. In other words, treason could be interpreted as liberation from oppression, and numerous examples might be cited in this regard from recent Habsburg history, not least the way that the Magyars were now able to celebrate and memorialize the traitor-liberator Lajos Kossuth.

In his office on 1 Union Square West in New York City, Samuel Buchler, president of the Federation of Hungarian Jews in America, sat at his desk and looked at the trees turning red, yellow, and brown in the park below the window. It was September 1924, and Buchler had just read the news from Hungary. After years of anti-Jewish violence—the white terror, passively condoned by the postwar regime—the Hungarian government had decided to honor Felix M. Warburg, president of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC, or Joint), with a Red Cross Decoration. The honor came directly from Admiral Miklós Horthy, regent of Hungary, who wanted to acknowledge the role the JDC had played in “mitigating misery in Hungary.” It was clear that the JDC had aided millions of Jewish war victims across the devastated landscapes of East Central Europe, including Hungary. But Buchler was skeptical. Since its founding in 1916, the Federation of Hungarian Jews had tried to ameliorate the fate of Hungarian Jews across the ocean, who in quick succession had felt the tremors of war, terror, revolution, social exclusion, and institutional antisemitism. It was ironic that the government Buchler held responsible for much of the anti-Jewish violence and agitation was now hoping to be on good terms with the most famous Jew in the realm of international humanitarianism. For Buchler and the Federation of Hungarian Jews, this was cause for concern.

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.