History, Religion, and Politics in the Austrian Vormarz

Abstract

Modern German historians have frequently used the results of their scholarly investigations as points of departure for wider philosophical speculations. The same cannot be said of their Austrian counterparts, who have generally viewed their task as one of assembling and verifying documents and recounting the information contained in them. So astute and learned an observer of Austrian historiography as the late Alphons Lhotsky observed that to this day there is a persistent tendency among his countrymen to regard their subject as a legitimate field of knowledge only when it is written directly from the sources. Consideration of the forces lying behind or inherent in historical events has been foreign to almost all Austrian historians with the rare exception of Heinrich von Srbik.' This condition has not always characterized Austrian history, however. Lhotsky himself discovered that in the pre-1848 era, a considerable amount of discussion on the nature of history took place in the Austrian intellectual world. He also noted, however, that such questioning does not seem to have continued after the revolutionary year. Indeed, throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, Austrian historiography was distinguished not for its thinkers but for its technicians, some of whom were responsible for major advances in the ancillary historical sciences such as diplomatics, sphragistics, and paleography. The Institut fuir dsterreichische Geschichtsforschung, founded in 1854, had as its chief function the preparation of historians in the mechanics of their craft and did not encourage its students to reflect on philosophical or metahistorical problems.2 In some respects, post-1815 Austria was a rather unlikely arena for significant historical discussion. That paragon of a Biedermeier Emperor, Francis I, was intensely suspicious of knowledge in general and history in particular.