AUSTRIAN STUDIES, I3, 2OO5 249 Die Karpaten. Balthasar Hacquet und das 'vergessene' Gebirge inEuropa. Ed. by Kurt Scharr. Innsbruck: StudienVerlag. 2004. 332 pp. 36,00. isbn 3-7065 1952-6. A substantial but little-known body of travel writing dating from the late eighteenth century deals with the eastern territories of the Habsburg Empire. Besides the works of Ignaz von Born (1774), Joseph Ratschky (1783), Franz Kratter (1786) and Joseph Rohrer (1804), that of Balthasar Hacquet rewards attention. These men did not travel for (or with) pleasure. Either they had administrative posts inGalicia, the province Austria had acquired in 1772, or they were sent on journeys of scientific inquiry. Hacquet (1739/40-1815), who in 1787 became professor of natural science at Lemberg, explored the Carpathians in order to describe their geology, their natural history, and the agricultural and industrial practices of their inhabitants. His bulky four-volume work, Hacquet's neueste physikalisch-politischeReisen in denJahren ij88 und 1789 durch dieDacischen und Sarmatischen oder N?rdlichen Karpathen ( 1790-96), has now been abridged and edited by the geographer Kurt Scharr. To the editor, Hacquet's work is important because he tried to see the Carpathians as a single geographical unit, something subsequently made more difficult by themountains' division among numerous states. Admittedly, Hacquet's travels were often hindered by Habsburg officials, especially in the Military Frontier zone whose inhabitants were obliged to provide constant defence against the Turks. Despite such petty harassment, he compiled much information about geology, botany and ornithology, with an account of the habits of the beaver, alongside descriptions of mining, salt-extraction, the making of tar from birch-bark and washing for gold. But what has Hacquet to offer the cultural historian? Hacquet, originally from Brittany, was an extreme proponent of the Josephinist Enlightenment. He calls himself a 'Kosmopolit' motivated solely by the good of the state. He often praises Joseph, not only for such humane measures as building hospitals for syphilitic patients, but also for his unpopular attempts toGermanize the Hungarians. He is extremely anti-clerical, mocking the ignorance of Greek Orthodox monks and the crudity of their paintings, and (unlike Joseph) irreligious, wondering how the Bible's absurdities can have been reverenced formillennia. Such dismissiveness is overwhelmingly apparent in Hacquet's comments on the Empire's nations. There ismuch ethnographic value in his detailed descriptions of physical appearance, costumes (with illustrations) and customs (for example, his account of a Ruthenian peasant wedding he attended), but his remarks on national character are astonishingly bilious. The 'Wallachen' (Romanians) are murderous and deceitful; Hungarian immigrants to the Bukovina are lazy and destructive; German settlers are no better; the Saxons who have lived in Siebenb?rgen since medieval times are hard-working, but as deceitful as Italians; the 'Filipovaner', a strict Greek Orthodox sect, are hypocrites and zealots ('Schw?rmer'); Armenians, though good-looking, are even more dishonest traders than the Jews; and the Polish Jew is 'gewis das niedertr?chtigste und s?uischste Gesch?pf [...], das mit aller Falschheit und 25? Reviews National R?nken angef?llt, nur seinen Nebenmenschen, es sey auch um noch so wenig als es wolle, zu betr?gen sucht' (p. 132). The editor has considerably shortened Hacquet's anti-Semitic diatribes, omitting passages where he proposes thatJews should be forbidden tomarry and thus caused to die out (see vol. 1, 202, and vol. in, 223 and 232, of the original edition). InHacquet, we see the dark side of the Enlightenment. He thinks in general categories that are negatively charged, so that individuals in these categories are always prejudged. Sympathy for individuals is rare. The ethnographic gaze is at itscoldest when Hacquet describes how he watched a Ruthenian woman giving birth unassisted, beginning: 'Da ichmerkte, da? sie zur Geburt gieng, so blieb ich so lang, bis sie ihrer B?rde loswar' (p. 201). Fortunately, there are more humane passages, where Hacquet denounces the sufferings caused by warfare, the folly of maintaining armies too large for the population to support and the maltreatment by the Hungarians of their Romanian serfs,whose situation he compares to that of slaves in theAmerican plantations. He insists that the Romanian too is a human being, whose heart could...