The pleasure and honor attached to delivering the Kann Lecture is only outweighed by the responsibility of pursuing the high ideal of scholarship set by Professor Kann. Thus, to deliver the Kann Lecture is an especially daunting task if the challenge is to do justice to the multifarious developments in the field of Austrian cultural history since the appearance of his penetrating Study in Austrian Intellectual History. It will become clear in the course of my lecture that my praise of Kann is more than a pro forma courtesy. However, I should indicate at once that my concern is with his contribution—alas neglected—to the discussion of method in Austrian cultural studies.

The Utraquist Church of Bohemia was unique among the late medieval defections in Western Christendom from the Church of Rome in that it involved the separation of an entire church, organized on a national territory, not merely an underground resistance of relatively isolated and scattered groups of sectarians, like the Waldensians or the Lollards. Moreover, the Bohemian Reformation was linked with a major social upheaval, the Hussite Revolution, lasting from 1419 to 1434, which historians have viewed as an early specimen, if not a prototype or the first link in the chain, of the revolutions of the early modern period in the Euroatlantic world: the Dutch, the English, the American, and the French revolutions. Building mainly on the Bohemian Reform movement that had gathered momentum since the mid-fourteenth century, the Utraquists' defiance of Rome, leading to the Hussite Revolution, was sparked by the burning of Jan Hus at the Council of Constance on July 6, 1415.

On January 7, 1796, two days after Austrian rule came to Cracow in the wake of the Third Partition of Poland, Jan May resumed printing his recently established newspaper, the Cracow Gazette (Gazeta Kra-kowska), with a lead article brimming with enthusiasm for the new order: “Finally, the wishes of all have been fulfilled. The City of Cracow, destined for the rule of His Majesty, the Most Illustrious Roman Emperor, has, as of today, after the withdrawal of the Prussian armies, with the greatest satisfaction, seen within its walls the army of the desired Monarch.” Some of May's readers may indeed have been pleased to see Prussian troops leave. There may also have been a few aristocrats—if we credit accounts of a “Jacobin” fear—who were happy to see the Austrians come to Cracow. Probably many were relieved at having some sort of order after years of unrest. But many were also unhappy to find themselves under Austrian rule in those early days of the partitions. If readers recalled May's quite recent Jacobin leanings and his role as chief printer to the Kościuszko Uprising, they may have read his front-page effusions as a sudden servilism, a strategic response to political necessity, a bleak contextual joke in the form of excess flattery, or some combination of all these things.

For centuries Austria has enjoyed an enviable reputation for music and the fine arts, but not for literature. During the Enlightenment it was already widely regarded as a land devoid of books. This characterization was not totally fair. There had always been Austrian authors of high standing, but even they accepted their indiscriminate identification with a much larger German literary establishment. By the nineteenth century, it was not unusual for commentators like Ludwig Börne to characterize Austria as the “China of Europe,” where no literature could flourish. Only at the turn of this century–with the emergence of a new generation of writers who, over the past decades, have won belated recognition as important stimuli of modernism—did Austria finally shed the image of a country where dancing the waltz and eating famous cakes were foremost on people's minds.

The arrival in Vienna of over one hundred thousand Jewish refugees fleeing the Russian army's advance into Galicia and Bukovina in the first months of World War I had a profound impact on Viennese Jewry. The refugees became a constant and pervasive theme of wartime Jewish debate in Vienna, and their influence was felt in many areas of communal life—political, cultural, economic, and religious. Moreover, their very visible presence in the city served to highlight the always prominent “Jewish Question” in Vienna for Jews and non-Jews alike, precipitating an eruption of virulent anti-Semitism that initially targeted the refugees but was later directed at Viennese Jews in general. (Indeed, one Jewish newspaper commented in September 1917 that anti-Semitism had become a “national sport.”) As the welfare problem posed by the refugees developed into a highly charged issue in Viennese politics, welfare work also became an important arena of Jewish politics.

The startling events of the last five years in Eastern Europe have led to a surprising nostalgia for the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and Emperor Francis Joseph in the lands of the former Habsburg Empire. Politicians and journalists in Europe and America now compare the old empire to the disoriented East Central Europe of today and hold up the former as a positive model for a supranational organization. The current wave of nostalgia has been helped along by some recent historical works that certainly were not written for that purpose, but that contain generous assessments of the monarchy's positive qualities. For example, István Deák, in his highly acclaimed book, Beyond Nationalism: A Social and Political History of the Habsburg Officer Corps, 1848–1918, strongly recommends that the “Habsburg experiment” in supranational organization be reexamined: “I am convinced that we can find here a positive lesson while the post-1918 history of the central and east central European nation-states can only show US what to avoid.” Similar positive statements can be found in the recently published works of Alan Sked, Barbara Jelavich, and F. R. Bridge.

In the wake of independence in October 1918, the leaders of Czechoslovakia designated a multitude of national symbols for the nascent state, among them a flag, an anthem, an emblem, coinage, holidays, and stamps. Czech (and Slovak) art, drama, literature, and music commemorated new heroes and resurrected national historic figures ignored under Austria-Hungary. In this break with the past, national memory helped legitimate the new Czechoslovakia through celebration of the anti-Habsburg leaders in the struggle for independence and through denigration of former Habsburg rulers. Some nationalist Czechs, particularly the Czech legionnaires who had served in the Czechoslovak Army Abroad during World War I, were not content with the simple construction or reconstitution of Czech national symbols, but demanded in addition the destruction of numerous symbols of Habsburg rule. Thus, physical representations of the Habsburg past, many of which were to be found in the German-populated border regions of the Bohemian lands, became targets of their opprobrium.

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.