Habsburg Post Mortem: Betrachtungen zum Weiterleben der Habsburgermonarchie, by Carlo Moos

Abstract

In his recent history of the Habsburg Empire (2016; rev. ante, cxxxii [2017], 1,341–3), Pieter Judson shows how elements of the monarchy’s legal and administrative practice survived in its Central European successor states, despite their efforts to distance themselves from imperial legacies. Legacies closer to the Empire’s core are the topic of this wide-ranging survey by Swiss historian Carlo Moos. In Vienna and in Austria’s regional capitals reminiscences of Empire are inescapable even today. Notwithstanding its traces in architecture, the toponymy and musical life, contemporary Austrian politics are largely free of imperial nostalgia. Austria’s extreme right has its ideological roots not in the monarchy, and not in Austro-Fascism, but in volkish German nationalism associated with the National Socialist regime. Thanks to the Allies’ bizarre propagation of a theory according to which Austria was Hitler’s first victim (rather than his breeding ground), Austrian society still feels less inclined than Germany to distance itself from its role during the Second World War. These particular circumstances left the imperial past open to various appropriations, which have always formed a fertile ground for artistic dissections by authors from Musil to Bernhard. In addition to the arts, today’s imperial past plays a role mostly in the culinary and tourist industries.