Embers of Empire. Continuity and Rupture in the Habsburg Successor States after 1918 by Paul Miller Claire Morelon

Abstract

Reviews 252 This reviewer has only one minor criticism of Fiddler’s highly accomplished The Art of Resistance. Genre is unarguably an effective way to organize diverse artistic interventions, yet it appears to be at the expense of developing a cohesive theory of protest art that matches the insightful introduction and conclusion on Austrian politics. Summarizing her revealing insights on individual pieces in a grand finale under categories like space, gender or language might have been helpful for readers taken by surprise at the wealth of material, which leaves one wanting to know more about the transformative, interactive dimension of protest art in a city with such a strong affinity to culture. Thesereservationsaside,TheArtofResistanceisalucidlywritten,meticulously researched magnum opus surveying Austria’s, but above all Vienna’s, culture of dissent at the turn of the millennium. The passionate archivist Fiddler expertly disentangles the complexities behind protest art in a country once dubbed Insel der Seligen (p. 17). Eva Kuttenberg Penn State Behrend Embers of Empire. Continuity and Rupture in the Habsburg Successor States after 1918. Ed. by Paul Miller and Claire Morelon. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2019. x + 332 pp. £69. ISBN 978–1-78920–022–5. The year 1918 has conventionally been cast as a decisive turning point in Central European history, with imperial structures completely dissolved in the wake of military defeat and replaced by entirely new national polities. In the 1920s and 1930s, this assumption formed a common thread between the otherwise very different cultural phenomena of Habsburg nostalgia, inward- and outwardlooking ethnic conflict and triumphalist, nation-state centred historiographies. Whether they mourned the empire’s passing, or denounced it as a stale anachronism, all agreed that it had gone forever. Only the left voiced occasional concerns about a possible monarchist restoration, with the London-based Bureau of Austrian Socialists issuing a fresh warning to this effect as late as 1943 in an English-language pamphlet entitled The Habsburgs — Never Again! The central argument of this new volume of twelve essays edited by Paul Miller and Claire Morelon is that the standard narratives of imperial ‘dissolution’ fail to capture the complexities, ambiguities and hidden continuities behind the — actually far from absolute — transition from empire to successor states after 1918. They also ignore manifestations of popular and communal indifference towards developments in ‘high politics’. As Gábor Egry shows, beyond the prevailing nationalizing discourses, local knowledge and expertise, not past imperial loyalties or rebel credentials, often decided whether former Habsburg officials stayed in post or not. Furthermore, the redrawing of borders did not prevent the survival of older ‘ethnic contact zones’ embedded in the civic life of particular districts, as seen, for instance, in the continuance of voluntary bodies such as joint Romanian-Hungarian firefighter associations in Transylvania (p. 32). Reviews 253 Individuals, too, could use their former imperial networks to advance the national interests of the new states they served, as Iryna Vushko suggests in relation to Leon Biliński, Finance Minister under the Habsburgs and again, albeit briefly, in independent Poland in 1919. And while the Monarchy had gone, other imperial-era institutions survived in various guises, including army, church and nobility. Indeed, according to Christopher Brennan, public displays of mourning for the ex-Emperor Karl in 1922 were more useful to the fortunes of political Catholicism — especially in the shape of the Austrian Christian Social party — than they were to monarchism. The old army of Franz Joseph was no more, but some of its top generals joined the national armies of successor states, without feeling this to be in any sense a betrayal of their former identities as soldiers serving a cause ‘beyond nationalism’. Irina Marin, for instance, shows this in her case study of several high-ranking officers of Romanian nationality. Surprisingly, given the emphasis that the editors place on the non-revocation of existing Habsburg laws, especially in Czechoslovakia, there is no mention in the volumeofCarloMoos’sseminalworkHabsburgpostmortem.Betrachtungenzum Weiterleben der Habsburgermonarchie (Vienna: Böhlau, 2016). More convincing are the discussions of imperial ‘afterlives’ in national and transnational variants of Central European fascism. John Paul Newman addresses this especially well in his piece on the Ustaša, the Croatian right-wing paramilitary movement which...