Building the Habsburg Subject: Scholarly Historical Fictions

Abstract

Whereas "standard histories" of Habsburg Central Europe rest on the historiographic traditions highlighting exile, emigration, and twentieth-century political genocides, the "Habsburg histories" of the 1960s and 1970s were often political, until Carl Schorske refigured the Empire's political tragedy through Vienna's psychobiography. A decade later, specialized histories predominated: the history of disciplines (sciences, philosophy, literature, or technology); particular institutions or movements (the coffeehouse, "Jung Wien"); or cultural tropes (sexuality, language policy, decadence, liberals). This essay recovers two great, almost-forgotten historians of such material networks of culture and intellectual production: William Johnston and Albert Fuchs. Their historiographies run parallel to that of David Luft and show the way to a new generation of postnational Western history outside nationalism that embraces both material culture and the critique of ideology.