German History Vol. 31, No. 2, pp.

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Forum
Habsburg History

Few historical relationships and entanglements have been as present across the longue
dure of German history, and few historical themes are harder to integrate into the
master narratives of German history than those relating to the Habsburgs, their lands
and politics. The nature of the presenceor absenceof the Habsburg issue in
German history and historiography has been shaped by a number of often contradictory pressures and tendencies over the decades. The pluralization of the discipline and
the move away from traditional diplomatic history has rendered one set of questions
in whose answers the Habsburgs might prominently figure apparently less pressing;
the greater exploration of the Habsburgs many other peripheries and encounters in
which Germans did not figure has also rendered the German issue less central to
Habsburg historiography than it might once have been. Yet even as critical study of
the origins of the discipline and the field has unmasked the roots of many narratives
in the pursuit of legitimacy for the little German (kleindeutsch) outcome of 1871 and
dissected the teleologies they embody, many inherited categories and habits of thought
remain: much of the writing of modern German history, in particular, remains
beholden to kleindeutsch patterns of thought. At the same time, the opening up of new
ways of connecting German and Habsburg history, for example through the study of
cultural imaginaries, transnational encounters and histoires croises, is a reminder that
many histories which sit at the interstices of these two national/imperial historiographies remain unexplored. To consider the recent trajectories of scholarship on this
subject and the ways in which we might fruitfully reconnect German and Habsburg
history the editors invited Robert Evans (Oxford), Tara Zahra (Chicago), Nancy
Wingfield (Northern Illinois) and Mark Cornwall (Southampton) to participate in
a forum. The questions were posed by the editors.
1. Writing the history of the Habsburg lands has always posed particular challenges for a discipline so firmly rooted in the national paradigm,
recent trends towards micro-history, regional history and transnationalism notwithstanding. Does the nationalities question still serve a useful
purpose in the study of the Habsburg territories, or should we be asking
different questions of this history?
Zahra: Until very recently the nationalities question was the bread and butter of
Habsburg history. A major contribution that historians of Habsburg central Europe
have made to the social sciences in general has been in the realm of nationalism
studiesfrom Hans Kohn and Ernst Gellner to Miroslav Hroch and Rogers Brubaker.
But there is still a significant gap between the ways in which specialists of east central
Europe see the region and how those outside of the fieldincluding our students, as
well as historians of Germanytend to perceiveit.
The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the German History Society.
All rights reserved. doi:10.1093/gerhis/ght016

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We now have three decades of scholarship by specialists on eastern Europe demonstrating that nationalist conflict is rooted in modern politics and not primordial hatreds.
Specialists of the Habsburg Empire and successor states are arguably suffering from
a justifiable bout of nationalism fatigue. The field is moving on to other topics and
themesenvironmental history, cultural history, international history. At the same
time, however, most European history textbooks still assert that the eastern half of
the continent was plagued by so-called demographic realities that determined the
regions destiny. Whether that diversity is romanticized or pathologized, it is presumed
to have set east European societies on a radically different path from that of their west
European counterparts.
Orientalist assumptions about east European nationalism also remain potent.
Histories of violence and bloodshed sell, both to publishers and students, and so people
will continue to write books that focus on the dark side of east European history. These
topics are not unimportantthey have huge political, moral and historical importance.
But to my mind, the relentless focus on violence and bloodshed in so-called borderlands has also prevented Habsburg and east European history from being fully integrated into broader histories of Europe and the world. And it has resulted in a lack
of attention to social history, cultural history, the history of gender and sexuality, the
history of science, and other fields.
There has also been a long-standing tendency in Habsburg history, as in other fields,
to organize historical narratives into discrete sub-histories starring presumed national
collectives: with the Czechs, the Germans, the Serbs, the Poles, and so on. Even
the new transnational history can be guilty of this. Ahistory of Poles in Germany or
Germans in Poland, for example, does not really do much to break down nationalist
assumptions or categories.
On the other hand, Ithink historians of Habsburg central Europe are poised to contribute a great deal to the new transnational scholarship on Europe. In the Anglophone
academy, at least, Habsburg historians have always had to think transnationally by
default, whether because few of our students or colleagues in the United States care
about Habsburg history for its own sake (so you have to frame your work in terms of
broader questions) or because we have been forced to develop the toolsresearch in
multiple languages and countries in particularthat are critical to writing transnational history in general.
I see a future for the field in which new questions and issues begin to take precedence
over histories of nations and nationalism, but that doesnt mean that we will ever be
able simply to ignore nationalism either. Its more a matter of putting it into context,
and into a comparative perspective (was eastern Europe really so different?), and asking
what other issues might have been relevant in a particular time andplace.
Cornwall: Yes, the nationalist paradigm distorted our conception of late Habsburg
history throughout the twentieth centuryespecially much of the historiography originating in east central Europe itself, which privileged a national perspective and read it
primordially back into the past. To a degree this has had an unfortunate new lease of
life since 1990 thanks to the national states arising out of communism (in some Czech,
Slovak or Croatian historiography for instance). That said, several American historians
including Pieter Judson have over the past decade tried to challenge the ethnicist

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paradigm with fresh frameworks, emphasizing that the national dynamic was neither
the leading force in most peoples lives nor in fact in the functioning of the Monarchy.
This has produced excellent provocative case studies by Judson, Jeremy King, Tara
Zahra and others, promoting a concept of national indifference, consistently sceptical
of simply buying into a nationalist discourse. They have tried to reappraise the overlapping series of constructed identities that prevailed in the nineteenth century and to
critique, sometimes severely, what national allegiance really meant for ordinary subjects
of the Monarchy. Iam only partly convinced by this. Ifeel that the indifference camp,
if we can call it that, sometimes overstates its case and (equally) does not adequately
reflect the degree to which national loyalties and questions actually dominated the public discourse from the 1880s and were steadily ingrained in everyday thinking.
So Iwould say that the nationalities question still has a lot of mileage in itwhether
one studies the actual nature of Magyarization; the fusions between dynastic and
national loyalty in Croatia and Galicia; or, to focus on the German lands, the ways in
which German-Austrians understood their identity and their relationship with other
peoples in the Monarchy. It is not possible to take the nationality conflict out of late
Imperial history. Rather it needs repositioning, and setting alongside the dynastic and
historic state right agendas against which it steadily interacted in the political sphere
at least. This interaction was only too clear to contemporaries during the 1848 revolutions and was still present in 1900. So Iam suggesting that there may be two big issues
for historians to engage with. First, that posed by Joseph Redlich in the 1920s as to
why this Monarchy never developed a real concept of statehood (Staatsidee) beyond the
Habsburg (dynastic) justification for its existence. And second, to revisit how this empire
really functioned in the dualist period (18671918). This means continuing to reveal,
through regional case studies, the impact of the dynasty and other centripetal forces in
individuals lives: Daniel Unowskys study of dynastic loyalty in Galicia is a model in
that regard. But the supranational dynamic of the empire is equally crucial. Much has
been written in terms of the Monarchys foreign mission or foreign policy, much less
about how the Imperial crownlands and kingdoms interacted and (for example through
the army) perpetuated the notion of a united Monarchy for ordinary citizens. These
questions both feed into a third, about why Austria-Hungary did not survive long in the
twentieth century. That is an age-old question but one which Ifeel is still worth revisiting since (as Redlich himself noted) it was and became a fundamental European question. Not least, the disappearance of Austria-Hungary dramatically affected Germanys
development in twentieth-century Europe.
Wingfield: Of course, the nationalities question still serves a useful purpose in
the study of Habsburg territories, although the questions many historians of AustriaHungary have been asking about nations and nationalism have changed significantly
over time. Among the most interesting aspects of this topic they have been addressing in the last decade or so, one should include the role and importance of collective
memory, gendered nationalism and national indifference in Habsburg and central
European history. The issue of the role of national identity in the collective memories of the region has stimulated a large literature since the 1990s, including important studies by Patrice Dabrowsky, Peter Stachel and Heidemarie Uhl, among others.
More recently, national indifference has been attracting sustained attention, as the

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international, interdisciplinary forum in the 2012 number of Austrian History Yearbook

demonstrates. Moreover, in the last decade or so, there have been interesting and
useful revisions to nationalism theory. But, Habsburg historiography has long focused
on more than the nationalities question. The historiography of the Monarchy is not
somehow the Other owing to the nationalities question, but rather follows many of the
same trends that the historiography of other geographic regions do, including those
mentioned in your question.
Certainly, since Matti Bunzls Desiderata for a History of Austrian Sexualities that
appeared in an Austrian History Yearbook forum on sexual minorities in 2007, there has
been small, but growing, cohort of Habsburg historians concentrating on various issues
of gender and sexuality, including homosexuality, pornography, prostitution and trafficking in women. They include Mark Cornwall, Scott Spector, Keely Stauter-Halsted
and me. While some of our research incorporates nationalism as an important category of analysis, other work does not. Much of this work is located in the context of
European-wide, indeed worldwide, developments that include eugenics, immigration,
modernization, urbanization and thelike.
Evans: The cosmopolitan character of the region so long ruled over by the
Habsburgs should be an attraction, and a justification for the attention of outsiders. No
one has a proprietary interest. The modern nationality question already looked tired
to me decades ago, when Icame to it from study of the early modern period, hoping to
concentrate on other issues. But perforce Ifound myself drawn back to it. There really
is a caesura in east central Europe around 1800. The agenda of primarily languagebased national contention really was inseparable from the process of expanded political participation in the Habsburg lands; and it quickly became a cultural constanttoo.
Current work on national indifference, investigating the many domains where ethnic awareness or assertion seems to have played no part, is a valuable corrective to
previous accounts, but in my view no replacement for them. Two examples. In 1848
many of the bitter strugglessay in southern Hungary already operated at a very
local level and with a clear consciousness of national difference, a category by no
means merely imputed or dictated by social superiors; whereas for the last years of the
Monarchy, Iwas forcibly reminded while wading through the more than 2,000 pages
of the magnificent collective series volume Die Habsburgermonarchie, vol. VII: Verfassung
und Parlamentarismus (2 vols, Vienna, 2000), how ungovernable the multinational polity
had become by thatstage.
Of course, the Monarchy remained a working and largely unquestioned reality on
various planes; it continued to enjoy considerable reserves of domestic cooperation and
loyalty. National issues only intermittently came to the fore; social problems, cultural
frictions, or economic inequalities often determined day-to-day interactions. Yet, and
by the same token, the cumulative effect of all these issues did become debilitating,
and was only exacerbated after the turn of the twentieth century. As Edmund Gibbon
once observed about that former polity to which the Habsburgs long liked to trace the
origins of their authority (and at his own expense, we might think, given all the learning
and craft he had devoted to the subject!): The story of [the Roman Empires] ruin is
simple and obvious; and instead of inquiring why [it] was destroyed, we should rather
be surprised that it had subsisted so long.

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2. In recent decades, historians have rewritten the history of various empires of the early modern and modern world in terms of a new
emphasis on the agency of Imperial peripheries. Has there been an analogous trend in the historiography of the Habsburg Empire? If so, which
Habsburg peripheries have shaped this reassessment, which ones have
notand why?
Cornwall: The Imperial peripheries, defined usually as regions on the eastern borders, were a perpetual concern for the Habsburg authorities throughout the empires
existence. The situation of those peripheries and the questions they posed were constantly mutating (sometimes speedily, as in the Napoleonic era), but essentially they tell
us much about the Habsburgs perceived mission in Europe (whether as Catholic power
against Islam or Protestantism, or as Great Power amidst dangerous rivals) and the
offensive or defensive means used to promote that mission. For the nineteenth century
the danger on the peripheries was slowly redefined to mean a series of potential irredentist threats to the Monarchy: whether by Serbs, Romanians or Italians in the south,
or Germans, Poles and Ukrainians in the north. Although it is truism that the Habsburg
Monarchys domestic and foreign policies were completely intertwined, some Imperial
peripheries have received more recent historical attention than others. The case which
has usually been scrutinized to assess the Monarchys late imperialist mission is that of
Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Balkans. This partly reflects the self-evident way in which
that region was viewed after the 1860s as the empires colonial back-yard; thus it is
a preeminent model for how the Habsburgs reconceived their civilizing mission in the
modern age (the work of Robin Okey on Bosnia: 2007). Less attention surprisingly, in
view of Viennas paranoia in 1914, has been paid to the so-called South Slav menace. But here some case studies suggest an enticing way forward: for example, that
of Nicholas Miller about Serbs in Croatia (1997) since he explains their mixture of
loyalties and how their regional leaders interacted with the power centres in Vienna,
Budapest and Belgrade. Otherwise, it is Galicia in the north-east which has seen the
richest historiography of a peripheral zone (in English at least). Im not sure there
is any overriding rationale for this, except that that region contains all the ingredients necessary for understanding the dilemmas facing the Monarchy: whether an irredentist threat or a social and ethnic complexity that Vienna tried to manage through
concessions. The significant Jewish element in the north-east has also drawn research
and interest in a way that, so far, the situation of Romanians in Transylvania has not.
Indeed, the whole question about peripheries depends of course on which centre one is
focused upon. Here there is always a danger that historians who equate the Habsburg
Monarchy with its German lands (and Vienna) ignore the steady influence of Hungary
or a Budapest-focused agenda. To understanding how the empire functioned means
analysing a variety of power centres and especially reintegrating the Hungarian power
centre fully into our discussions.
Wingfield: Two issues are at play here: agency and periphery. One of the first
things that Habsburg historians have had to decide is what constituted an Imperial
periphery in the Habsburg context. Any number of historians have been able to demonstrate that local actors soughtsuccessfullyto manipulate the Imperial centre

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towards their own peripheral, often provincial, ends. In his influential 2003 article
Machtansprche und kulturelle Muster nichtperipherer Regionen: Die Kernlande
Bhmen, Mhren und Schlesien in der spten Habsburgermonarchie, Robert Luft
argued that the Bohemian Lands could not be considered to constitute a periphery but
were rather a core region of Habsburg rule. Although nationalist Czech historians long
wrote of an era of temno, or darkness, under Habsburg rule, by the late nineteenth
century, the Bohemian Lands were among the most industrialized, most literate and
wealthiest provinces in the Monarchy. Recent studies have demonstrated that what was
long interpreted as national conflict between Czech- and German-speakers in these
provinces at the fin de sicle was rather more a triangular relationship that included not
only these two groups but also the non-national Imperial centre. Moreover, representatives of other less overtly national political groups also jockeyed for influence at the
Imperial centre as Cisleithanian Austria moved slowly towards universal male suffrage.
In another case, although Galiciawhich became part of the Habsburg realm in
1772was among the poorer, more rural, less developed provinces on the eastern
reaches of the Monarchy, one can still talk about agency along the periphery. Galicia
was indeed a periphery in terms of being on the edge of the Monarchy, but it was also
a centre, in that it was the Piedmont (Paul Magocsis term) for both the Polish and the
Ruthenian/Ukrainian national re/unification movements beginning in the late nineteenth century. Having their own provincial Diet (the Sejm), educational system and
social services in Polish, and newspapers in Polish, Ruthenian/Ukrainian and Yiddish,
all permitted Galicians to feel themselves culturally and politically at the centre of the
Monarchy. Moreover, as in the Bohemian Lands, local actors sometimes attempted to
employ the Imperial administration against their provincial enemies; in the eighteenth
century, peasants sought protection from their lords from Empress Maria Teresa, and
later Ruthenians/Ukrainians sought protection from the Poles. Beginning in 1869, deputies to the provincial diet sometimes attempted to convince officials in Vienna to provide Imperial funds for local and regional projects as the province slowly modernized.
Finally, although residents of peripheral provincial capitals such as Trieste (Triest/
Trst) and Czernowitz (Chernivtsi/Cernuti/Czerniowce) may have feared being on
the Imperial peripheryin the case of the latter, even being considered Asiaticthey
are more peripheral today in their respective nation states, Italy and Ukraine.
Zahra: It doesnt make a lot of sense to me to apply models of empire developed
to study overseas, colonial empires to the Habsburg Monarchy. Yes, this was certainly
an empire, with Imperial symbols and rituals that served to bond the citizenry to its
rulers. Daniel Unowskys work is excellent on this topic, showing how Imperial jubilees
and festivals cultivated dynastic loyalties. But can we even talk about a single Imperial
centre in Habsburg central Europe? Vienna, Budapest, Prague and Lviv all functioned as centres of Imperial politics and society. Furthermore, the Habsburg Empire
never had the hierarchical relationships of domination or economic exploitation that
generally characterized overseas empires. Jane Burbank and Fred Cooper, for example,
have defined empire as a political structure that is based on hierarchical differentiation
between colonial subjects and metropolitan citizens, or between different nations or
social classes. In this model, those at the centre are typically privileged and those at
so-called peripheries are disadvantaged. The focus on agency within post-colonial

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studies has served as a way to highlight the ways in which those on the so-called peripheries have shaped the centre. This in turn has caused scholars to question the very
distinction between centre and periphery in colonial contexts.
But did the Habsburg Empire really have the same kind of hierarchical structure
or relationships? In Austria, the liberal constitution of 1867 guaranteed equal treatment to all citizens, including equal linguistic rights to all of the recognized linguistic
groups. The relationship between Vienna and Galicia or Bohemia was not the same
as the relationship between London and India. The relationship between Germanspeakers and Czech-speakers in the Bohemian Lands cannot be compared to the relationship between French subjects and Algerians, even if there was a presumed linguistic
or cultural hierarchy, since German served as the language of the bureaucracy and the
armed forces. After 1918, nation-builders in the Habsburg successor states tended to
compare their status in the Austrian empire to that of colonial subjects. But this rhetoric was explicitly intended to consolidate and legitimize the nationalizing projects of
those new states.
Recent work in Habsburg history tends to be critical of the narrative of a centre
dominating peripheries. Alison Franks book Oil Empire has shown that Galician rulers
actually had too much agency and autonomy when it came to the control of the oil
industry there. Alittle less autonomy might have resulted in a more sensible and less
destructive use of that resource. Pieter Judson has also argued compellingly against the
application of post-colonial frameworks to Habsburg history.
It does make sense, of course, to think in terms of empire when talking about
Habsburg rule in Bosnia after 1878. There is a lot of literature on this topic and Ihope
well see even more in the future. Anyone interested in thinking about the Austrian
empire in comparison to an overseas empire should also look at Bruno Gammerls
book, which compares the British and Habsburg empires in terms of questions of citizenship, nationality and race. Well also be seeing more research on the ways in which
Austria-Hungary attempted to project its power abroadwhether through economic
ventures, emigration or cultural transmission. Alison Frank is working on a new project
that examines Austrias ambitions to secure world power status through trade; Maureen
Healy has a project looking at ties between the Habsburg Empire and the Ottoman
Empire and Turkey. Ithink both will shed important light on the imperial qualities
and ambitions of the Habsburg Empire.
Evans: Yes, there has been a tendency to see the maintenance of order as a series of
negotiated arrangements between centre and regions, especially via forms of mediated
authority, networks of patronage and clientage, and personal interplay. At the same
time there is a recognition that the language of core and periphery is itself inadequate:
sometimes even Vienna could be on the edge of things; and Bohemia, in particular,
often stood at the heart of Habsburg operations.
The most conspicuous revisions have occurred in relation to the Bohemian Lands
and the German provinces. Hungary, whereas it is seen to have become, for better or
worse, ever more indispensable to the state as a whole (Gesamtstaat), and to have called
for adroit handling on its own terms, has still been little integrated into a wider picture. Within historic Hungary the boot has been rather on the other foot. Since 1918
its peripheries have taken on a full historiographical life of their own, in the guise of

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a separate past as purportedly Slovak, Romanian, Croat, Serb or Ruthenian lands

ab initio; while the master narrative from the centre, discredited in many quarters,
has been too often distorted by association, deliberate or accidental, with ethnically
Magyar assumptions.
However, major advances in linguistic preparedness among younger generations of
historians, and the gradual crumbling of stereotypes, which together are fuelling radical revisions on the Austrian side, encourage me to trust that it is only a matter of time
before the history of the old Hungarian kingdom can also be better served by those outside its borders, and its denizens, in their various communities today, seriously examine
their past in its relation to the other Habsburg lands. Theres the related larger question
of comparative imperial studies. Austria and the Holy Roman Empire are only just
being brought into these global debates. One important area where they can advance
the discussion relates to the ideology and terminology associated with the status of formal empire (which the Holy Roman Empire explicitly was and the Habsburg polity, by
and large, and despite popular misconception, wasnot).
3. Is there a Habsburg history after 1918?
Evans: In dynastic and related terms, certainly not. Having worked a good deal
on the successor states of late (driven not least by the priorities of my pupils), Ifind
it remarkable how little the Habsburgs themselves and the main traditional props of
their system, church, aristocracy and army, were politically or even socially salient in
the region as a whole after the collapse. Thats significant, Ithink, as a caution for those
who stress the potential durability of that system if other options had been adopted in
1914 and the war years. Nor is it easy to claim much of an afterlife for the overarching
linkages between the lands in the old Monarchy. Subsequent diplomatic pacts, economic associations and the like always excluded at least as much as they included.
We might liken the successor states to the fragments of a shattered mirror: irreparably estranged and reflecting at different angles; yet still made of the same glass. So
there were strong survivals of social and administrative structures, with distinct but
overlapping Austrian and Hungarian models dependent on pre-1918 allegiances. Then
the Warsaw Pact decades, even as they introduced a new kind of imperialist ideology
from without, set in aspic many existing attitudes across much of the region. The evidence of long-standing cultural correspondences, from (most famously) cuisine to kinds
of vocabulary and even some deeper linguistic hard-wiring, would be worth serious
research.
Its not difficult to see why such research hasnt been conducted till now. The controverted historiographies of the region, with their frequently rather provincial concerns,
are an authentic legacy of contested pasts in the days of the Monarchy. Against them
the Imperial story, with its dual Austrian and Hungarian variants, has tended to lose
ground, leaving outsidersparticularly from the USAto reconstruct a good deal of
the earlier traditions that characterized the Monarchy as awhole.
Zahra: The ghosts of the Habsburg Empire were everywhere in Europe after 1918,
and not just among the Habsburg nostalgists that Joseph Roth brilliantly satirized in
The Bust of the Emperor. Almost immediately, myths about and memory of Habsburg

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rule served the nation-building process in the new east European successor states. This
is how the notion of the empire as a prisoner of the peoples wasborn.
But in spite of narratives of radical rupture, there were also important legal and
political continuities between the empire and its successor states. As Gary Cohen has
pointed out, the first general law of the new Czechoslovak government, written in 1918
by nationalist deputy Alois Ran, stated that all previous provincial and Imperial laws
from the empire would remain in effect. So much for radical revolution! In my own
research Ive seen continuities in everything from social welfare policies to migration
policies to minority rights to the practice of census-taking. There simply was no zero
hour (Stunde Null) in 1918. Many Habsburg legal traditions also shaped international
institutions after World War I, especially in the Minority Treaties of St Germain and in
the League of Nations, which basically anchored Habsburg conventions with respect
to minority and linguistic rights in new forms of international law. After 1945, Sudeten
German expellees even made claims on the Austrian Second Republic for citizenship
and social rights based on their former status as citizens of the Habsburg Monarchy.
In intellectual and cultural terms, the ideas of Habsburg jurists, social scientists, and
scientists in fields ranging from international law (Edmund Bernatzik) and psychoanalysis/psychology (Sigmund Freud, August Aichhorn, Anna Freud, Alfred Adler, Ernst
Papanek) to physics and biology (see Deborah Coens work on the Exner family) radiated across Europe between the wars and beyond. The realm of high culturemusic,
painting, art, operaprovides further examples of how the cultural heritage of late
Imperial Austria outlived the empires demise. The afterlife of the Habsburg Empire
whether understood in intellectual, political, cultural or social termsis an incredibly
fruitful topic for future research, and Ithink well be seeing even more studies that cross
the 1918 divide in comingyears.
Cornwall: This question implies that with the disappearance of a state or empire
the history of that entity has no real afterlife or resonance. In fact, as both Robert
Evans and Tara Zahra have just indicated, the Habsburg successor states, while largely
scorning their Habsburg heritage (partly as a natural way of legitimizing themselves),
effectively continued a great many traditions first learnt and cultivated in the framework of Austria-Hungary before 1914. Giving voice to this reality however fell victim to
the national straitjacket that dominated the region for the rest of the century, something
very evident in the nationally focused historiography. It is also easy to forget that into
the 1930s the question of a Habsburg restoration remained a vibrant issue in Czech
and Austrian international diplomacy, so here Imight query Robert Evanss minimizing of any dynastic echoes in the postwar decades. After all, the Hungarian head of
state for twenty-five years was Regent Horthyregent in other words for a missing
Habsburg monarch. But perhaps more importantly for a subtle resonance in these successor states, Iwould mention how the pre-1914 political experience, or lack of experience, had a direct impact on the mentality of those who tried to run the New Europe
in the interwar period. It was clear in the practice of interwar Czechoslovak party
politics and in the kind of state right arguments perpetuated by the Croat Peasant
Party in interwar Yugoslavia.
Here there is also a deeper point Ithink, one which Iwould label generational history. All of us involved in this forum discussion have researched and written history that

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crosses traditional time periods, and have seen real advantage in this for understanding
how ideas are transmitted across generations. In the Habsburg case this means pursuing mentalities from the late Habsburg period through into the 1930s or beyond; in
my own case, for example, trying to understand how the mindset of Sudeten German
nationalists in the 1930s could be grounded in their late Habsburg experience, whether
positive or negative. The work of Nancy Wingfield and Tara Zahra has followed a similar track for the Bohemian Lands, forcing us (admirably!) to think outside the national
parameters of the Czechoslovak national state created in 1918. So Iwould say there
is a vibrant Habsburg afterlife still waiting to be researched by historians who have
the necessary linguistic skills. It involves most obviously the slippery case of Austrian
identity and how that has been shaped through the ubiquitous Habsburg heritage (as
one observes through any visit to Vienna). But there are abundant cases too of the
Monarchys hidden resonance at work throughout the twentieth century. Not least
I would mention how the multi-national Habsburg Monarchy gave way to another
multi-national entity in Yugoslavia. Acomparison of the rituals, political practice and
social conventions surviving in the latter is instructive, showing that more than whiffs of
the Habsburg spirit lived on under both King Alexander and MarshalTito.
Wingfield: Ido not think of 1918 as constituting a great break in the history of
Habsburg central Europe, although Imight if Ifocused on diplomatic and political history. This question can be answered as part of a discussion of periodization, which posits that particular temporal delimitations have too often reflected the focus and interests
of diplomatic, economic and political historians. Certainly there were changes in the
administrative and bureaucratic structure of Monarchy during the war, occurring after
1914 in response to the war. And, some of these changes were maintained after the
war in various parts of the region. In fact, the war years are arguably one of the most
important periods for understanding continuity and change from the Monarchy to the
successor states. So, yes, of course, there is a Habsburg history after1918.
Certainly some of the most influential histories of Austria-Hungary to appear in
the last decade or so address some aspect of the Great War. The wartime history of
the Monarchyhome front, fighting front, occupation and the postwar periodconstitutes one of the most active areas of research, much of it revisionist. Im thinking both of Maureen Healys paradigm-breaking book, Vienna and the Downfall of the
Habsburg Empire, and Alon Rachamimovs POWs and the Great War: Captivity on the Eastern
Front. Moreover, the young Austrian historian Tamara Sheer has done fascinating work
on Habsburg occupation regimes. Finally, useful nationally focused monographs of
the war, drawing heavily on archival sourcesfor example, Ivan edivs ei, esk
zem a Velk vlka 19141918are still appearing. Much of this work posits continuity
rather than simply change after 1918. Isuspect at least some of the many collections
commemorating the centenary of the First World War that are starting to appear will
address one aspect or another of Habsburg history through 1918 and beyond.
Pointing to the often-cited bureaucratic and legal continuities between AustriaHungary and many of the successor states, one could certainly argue that there was
Habsburg history after 1918. It should be no surprise that many of the laws promulgated in the successor states built upon or responded to the Habsburg legal system.
In some cases, the continuity took material form. When Bukovina became part of

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Romania in the wake of the First World War, not only did laws governing prostitution
initially remain the same, Habsburg German-language protocols were employed until
they were translated into Romanian in the1920s.
Habsburg history remains alive in the collective memories of residents of Habsburg
central Europe, of course, and not only in memoirs and in the ongoing battles over
historiography but also in what shouldor should notbecome or remain part of the
built landscape. Some historic myths remain the same on both sides of the post-1918
borders; the conclusions are simply different, as for example in the myth of Czech soldiers disloyalty to the Monarchy during the First World War. As ediv has observed,
German nationalist propaganda created the myth of Czech soldiers as traitors and
defectors, which Czech nationalists built upon between the wars to represent every
Czech soldier as a nationally conscious resister. In addition, there are sometimes echoes of the Monarchy in contemporary discussions of the European Unions future, not
that these are necessarily helpful.
To return, however, to the issue of periodization, which is how Iinterpret this question: like other European historians, Habsburg cultural and gender historians, but also
revisionist political historians, have increasingly been producing articles and books
whose arguments move relatively seamlessly from the Monarchy to the successor states.
In these works, 1914, or, more often, the entire war and the subsequent end of the
Monarchy in 1918, do not constitute the introduction to or conclusion of an analysis,
but rather a building block within it. This is the case in Borut Klabjans ekoslovaka
na Jadranu and Timothy Snyders The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke,
among many others.
4. What can historians of Germany learn from Habsburg history?
Wingfield: First, some German historians, often those who focus on the nineteenth
centuryHelmut Walser Smith comes immediately to mind (The Continuities of German
History: Nation, Religion, and Race across the Long Nineteenth Century)do pay attention to
Habsburg history and incorporate it as an integral part of their work. They are, perhaps, the exception that proves the rule. Understandings of a German past rooted in an
essentially kleindeutsch framework concentrate too much on German exceptionalism and
ignore the ongoing and important interaction among German speakers in the various
states of Germany and those in the various provinces of Cisleithanian Austria before
1918. Closer attention to the common cultural and social experiences in Germany and
the Monarchy of German-speaking university students in turn-of-the-century Graz,
Prague and Viennamany of whom were virulent nationalistsfor example, would
not only enhance analysis of student fraternities and university life in Wilhelmine
Germany, it could also help explain some of the nineteenth-century, central-Europeanwide roots of virulent racial anti-Semitism and nationalism during the interwar period.
Indeed, greater focus on Habsburg history challengesand expandscontemporary
understanding of Nazi Germany and issues such as the Shoah. Certainly, more attention to traditions of anti-Semitism and populism in Vienna in the last decades of the
Monarchy, and to the German Nationalist Partiesincluding the German National
Socialist Workers Party (the DNSAP, as opposed to NSDAP) in northern Bohemia
helps explain the attraction Nazi Germany held for many ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche)

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in the 1930s, as well as the active roles of Germans on the peripheries of the Nazi
empire. This material complicates, and certainly enriches, our understanding of developments in Weimar Germany following the First World War by contradicting some
of the assumptions of Sonderweg enthusiasts. Many twentieth historians doing this kind
of research, including Andreas Luh and Volker Zimmermann, have been trained as
Habsburg or eastern European historians. Some of their work still stands outside the
mainstream of German historiography. Especially historians of Germany concerned
with issues of transnationalism would benefit from examining Germanys interactions
with the Monarchy or Austro-Hungarian foreign-political strategies during the age of
imperialism. Caitlin E.Murdocks Changing Places: Society, Culture, and Territory in the SaxonBohemian Borderlands, 18701946 is one of the rare transnational analyses that is also a
fascinating local case study. The author demonstrates cross-border interaction under
the Monarchy, during the First World War, between the wars and under Nazi occupation. Murdocks doctoral training was in both eastern European and German history.
This is, of course, key: Isuspect far more Habsburg historians, at least those who concentrate on Austria, are au courant in the historiography of Germany than vice versa.
Another fertile area for transnational analysis is cultural exchange networks, particularly modern art and design, between Austria-Hungary and Germany.
Cornwall: The Czech historian Jan Ken has written that central European history
can only be explained through entering and answering a labyrinth of intertwined questions. He duly set his own major study of nineteenth-century CzechGerman relations
in a broad European context, since a little Czech or kleindeutsch context made so sense.
Ithink that the challenge so evident to all Habsburg historiansto strive beyond the
national or regional parameters, to get out of their comfort zone if you likeis equally
applicable to any historian of Germany. Indeed, just as the Habsburg mission was
always conceived through the centuries as a European mission, just as the removal of
the Austrian problem in 1918 left a gaping hole which had to be filled in the centre
of Europeso the same might be said of the European German problem that has
always had ramifications far beyond any kleindeutsch framework. It is rather difficult to
interpret many aspects of German history without reference to a framework that was
also Habsburgwhether the Holy Roman Empire, the German Confederation or the
economic and cultural interactions of 1900 fin de sicle.
To focus on some concrete case studies, Iwould echo Nancys point that to understand modern anti-Semitism in Germany, one must study the phenomenon in late
nineteenth-century Vienna; in order to understand some roots of Hitlers National
Socialist ideology, exploring its partial origin in the CzechGerman nationalist struggle of 1900 Bohemia is rewarding (for example, the impressive but neglected work of
Andrew Whiteside). The reverse, where Habsburg historians can learn from German
historiography, is equally true, especially because the depth and variety of questions
asked in the latteras with Soviet historyfar exceeds what exists in Habsburg historiography. Especially it is the case that Habsburg historiography is less coherentless
advanced if you likefor in the twentieth century it has been so splintered and also (in
the east European states) long beholden to a Marxist interpretation. Iwould therefore
turn the question on its head and argue thatfor example in terms of research on
gender and sexualityHabsburg historians are unfortunately often behind historians

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of Germany in tackling certain controversial themes. Meanwhile, scholars of Germany,

without understanding the Habsburg Monarchy, cannot really comprehend the German
diaspora in all its complexity. In short, the space occupied by the Habsburgs for four
hundred years steadily evolved in tandem with Germany. Striving for more of a supranational approach, while sensitive to national or regional discourses, seems to me realistic and perhaps essential for any historian of this common central Europeanspace.
Evans: Before 1866 few people would ever have doubted that Austria was part
of Germany. Had they been able to understand the question, that is. The Austrian
Monarchy squarely belongs as a component of German history till that date and in
major respects beyond, with an active legacy at least as late as the Anschlu and World
War II. In fact Austria was historically hardly less of a German state than Prussia:
both straddled overlapping German and non-German worlds, even if proportionately
more Habsburg territory was located outside the borders of the Reich and then of the
Confederation.
The question of Austrias involvement has been vigorously debated recently for
the early modern period. Georg Schmidts thesis of a national German Reichs-Staat
includes arguments for Austrian marginality from 1648 onwards. Its also true that
after the rupture of the 1740s Habsburg emperors gave priority to separate Austrian
institutions and free-standing foreign policies at considerable cost to the old mutuality of Kaiser and Reich, thus contributing to that hollowness of Imperial structures
which 1806 would lay bare. Their priorities became more those of greater Austria
(Grosterreich) than of greater Germany (Grodeutschland). Yet ideologically, culturally
and emotionally they remained part of a central Europe (Mitteleuropa) where German
values were uppermost; and common perceptions survived across the internal frontier.
Kleindeutschland was a (perhaps temporary) second best for many in and after1848.
That has frequently been overlooked by subsequent German historiography from
the Second Reich onwards. But its equally mischievousand Im better qualified to
pronounce on this!if historians of Austria neglect the German dimension of their
subject. Even when historians of Germany make only passing reference to Austria,
they at least have the thriving distinct discipline of research on east central Europe
(Ostmitteleuropaforschung), which folds large aspects of the Austrian past into a discrete category of area studies with strong German connections. By contrast, there often seems
to be no Austrian view of German history at all. Naturally it is legitimate, on one
hand, to reconstruct the antecedents of Austria within its present-day frontiers (just as
Slovaks or Slovenes, say, write national histories for peoples who possessed no kind of
state, or even administrative separateness, until very lately); and, on the other hand, to
chronicle and analyse the story of an Austria which embraced at various times many
of the neighbouring territories, Czech, Polish, Hungarian, Romanian, South Slav or
Italian. Yet a crucial element, indeed the most crucial, in the Austrian historical experience is seriously lacking; and Germany needs to be readmitted into our understanding
of it. The resulting style of analysis would in its term challenge restrictive kleindeutsch
assumptions on the otherside.
Zahra: I tend to think about this question in both concrete historical terms and
in more theoretical or historiographic terms. In historical terms, the history of the

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Habsburg Empire and its successor states is essential for anyone interested in the
dynamics of Nazi occupation in eastern Europe. Idont think you can really understand how the Nazi empire worked (or didnt) in the East without the historical context
of long-standing conflicts over issues of Germanization, Czechification, Polonization,
and so on in Habsburg central Europe.
I do think that there is a tendency among Germanists, however, to project the oppressive relationship of Nazis with east Europeans back onto the nineteenth century. In this
framework, the history of German-speakers in Habsburg central Europe is a long story
of unbroken domination that culminates in the brutality of Nazi conquest and ethnic
cleansing. Its a kind of Habsburg to Hitler Sonderweg. Thats a mistake, Ithink. Deeper
reading in Habsburg history certainly complicates the trope of eastern Europe as a laboratory for the realization of German Imperial fantasies, particularly when one looks
at local and regional histories. Idont mean to whitewash Habsburg history, or to say it
was all peace and love: there were certainly nasty social, national and cultural conflicts
at all levels of society. But there was also a lot of coexistence, cooperation and national
indifference. And Czech-speakers, Polish-speakers, or Slovene-speakers were not simply
innocent victims when conflict did occur. There is, for example, a long history of Czech
anti-Semitism that historians are only just beginning to explore indepth.
Habsburg history also offers methodological tools and insights for historians who aim
to think beyond the framework of the nation state. Recent Habsburg historiography
not only offers insight into the diversity of German-speaking cultures and experiences,
it challenges the very notion of a common German identity or a German diaspora.
Mark Cornwalls recent book, The Devils Wall, shows how even the most ardent Sudeten
German nationalists in the 1930s preferred a settlement that gave them regional autonomy to outright incorporation in Germany. Even within the Habsburg Monarchy, it is
clear that the concept of Germanness was extremely locally and regionally inflected.
I hope that the new interest in international or transnational history will produce even
more studies looking at political, social and cultural connections between Germany and
the Austrian Empire and its successor states. This will be good for the Habsburg field,
as Ithink we need to be thinking about Habsburg history as an integral part of European
and world history. But it will also broaden and expand the history of German-speakers
beyond the kleindeutsch framework.

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