Kouchowski, Adam. The Afterlife of Austria-Hungary: The Image of the Habsburg Monarchy in Interwar Europe (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 377 wisdom concerning modern empires with their metropolises (the ‘mother country’) and overseas colonies, and also concerning the concepts of ‘nation’ and ‘empire’ themselves. One only has to think of the complex territorial history of the United Kingdom and Ireland (the English conquest of Wales and Ireland and attempted conquest of and eventual union with Scotland), or the status of such territories as the United States, Canada and Australia as white settlement empires, to realize that the Russian imperial experience is hardly exceptional. It is the imperial experience of Russia, at once unique but also unexceptional, and what it brings to our understanding of imperial histories, which this book analyses so well. University of Birmingham Denis J. B. Shaw Kożuchowski, Adam. The Afterlife of Austria-Hungary: The Image of the Habsburg Monarchy in Interwar Europe. Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA, 2013. viii + 219 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $25.95 (paperback). Habsburgnostalgia,supportedbyeagertouristliteratureandlocalgovernment budgets, is a present-day phenomenon that visitors to cities like Vienna and L´viv (Ukraine) cannot fail to notice. However, as this book suggests, mythmaking around a ‘golden age’ of tolerance and civility, accompanied by an outpouring of world-class music and art in the Monarchy’s final years, began in earnest after 1918. Some of it, particularly from Austria, is already well known beyond Central Europe: Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s essayistic and literary endeavours to define a separate Austrian cultural identity, but also Robert Musil’s satirical yet appealing characterization of the Monarchy as ‘Kakanien’, are key examples. Other perspectives are equally important but rarely adduced. This slim, accessibly pitched volume is a welcome attempt to round out the picture, at its best, bringing a panoply of perspectives and voices to life, not just from the dismembered heartland of post-1918 Austria, but also some of the successor states. Written in an accessible, at times almost whimsical style (possibly a facet of the translation), the author, an assistant professor at the Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, rattles through an impressively diverse range of sources. These divide into four succinct chapters, dealing in turn with historiography, essayism and political theory, then literary fiction, before ending with an multi-perspectival examination of Franz Josef himself, as the symbolic epitome of the monarchy and its perceived virtues in hindsight. Throughout, the main arguments in favour of and against the Monarchy SEER, 93, 2, APRIL 2015 378 are well captured, quoting historians such as Josef Redlich who believed it guaranteed fairness, despite nominal failings, to others believing it to have been a necessary bulwark against the barbarism of the East and German imperialism simultaneously. Cultural arguments pivoting on the state’s core virtues as ‘supranational, monarchical and Catholic’, argued by figures such as the diplomat, aristocrat and writer Leopold von Andrian, are also covered, together with how they helped shape the short-lived, fascistoid ‘Corporate State’ that held sway in Austria from 1933 until Anschluss in 1938. Clearly, as the author recognizes, legitimizing this particular version of Austria meant pulling off a rhetorical feat: being somehow culturally German (p. 90), yet inherently different from, and indeed superior to, Hitler’s dynamic proposition just across the border. Here, the book is on less firm ground and does not satisfactorily unpack the dilemma. As Michael P. Steinberg has shown with reference the Salzburg Festival, or myself regarding Vienna’s Burgtheater, supporters of such separatism in literature defined culture as a space of differentiation, in specific terms: ethnicity and language were shared with Germany, but personal characteristics, historical experience, including the Monarchy, plus literary form, religious inclination, and a host of other features deemed cultural, were not. Theatre is a key example of this thinking in action, with a host of nostalgic plays (not mentioned here) staged prominently in the early 1930s. By this time, literature and programmatic politics overlapped, both in terms of many an author’s intentions, and the contextual way in which work was framed, interpreted and received by an ideologically primed press and audience. ‘Culture’ was therefore less of a liminal space in which Austria was ‘still German’, but one of the few in...