Imperial Austria Research Articles

Military Culture and Popular Patriotism in Late Imperial Austria

Military Culture and Popular Patriotism in Late Imperial Austria

‘White slave’ trafficking in turn-of-the-century Bukovina and Galicia: the experience of imperial Austria’s eastern provinces

Few forms of socially deviant behavior received so much attention in the sexually saturated Austrian fin de siecle as Madchenhandel or trafficking in girls. Trafficking in women and girls, also known as “white-slave trafficking,” had also existed in preindustrial Cisleithania, but the discourse from the turn of the century focused above all on Bukovina and Galicia, two impoverished provinces in the eastern reaches of the Monarchy with large Jewish populations. This discussion reflected concerns about the need for social control in an increasingly anonymous, modernizing, urbanizing, and capitalist society. Certainly, Madchenhandel was in many ways a modern crime, a crime associated particularly with Jews, who were popularly believed to supply white, unwilling girls to serve as prostitutes in brothels worldwide. Modernizing communication and transportation networks, together with the anonymity of the growing metropolises in Habsburg Central Europe not only permitted largescale immigration and women to travel alone as never before, but also facilitated trafficking in women. Indeed, commercial sex was a flourishing enterprise in the expanding urban centers of the nineteenth-century Habsburg Monarchy where prostitution was tolerated and regulated by the police rather than the courts. Bukovinian and Galician newspapers regularly advertised the Austro-Americana, Cunard, and Hamburg-Amerika lines’ “newest, most comfortable, fastest, and least expensive” steamers from the port cities of Central Europe to New York, and elsewhere in North America, as well as to Buenos Aires, Africa, and East Asia.

Business Fluctuations in Imperial Austria's Regions, 1867-1913: New Evidence

This paper presents annual estimates of total and per-capita GDP at 1910 prices for the regions of Imperial Austria from the origin of the Dual Monarchy (1867) to the eve of WWI (1913). The time paths of regional GDP are estimated from the yield of the tax on the transfer of real and financial property which is itself very highly correlated with the Schulze (2007) estimates of regional GDP for census years (1870, 1880, 1890, 1900, and 1910). The relative continuity or discontinuity of per-capita GDP growth partitions Austria's regions into two groups. Clear evidence of discontinuity (a "take-off") is present in Carniola, Carinthia, Salzburg, Styria, Littoral, Tyrol, and to some extent Moravia. In Lower and Upper Austria, Bohemia, Silesia, Galicia, Bukovina, and Dalmatia there is instead no evidence of structural break in their growth rates. Significant drops in the level of per-capita GDP do occur (as in Lower Austria and Bohemia after the 1873 financial crash) but have moderate effects on the growth of subsequent years. Regional (per-capita) inequality is also evaluated using standard measures. The coefficient of variation and Theil index follow a U-shaped curve: after a decline lasted about 15 years they both rise and point to, from ca. 1885, growing divergence.

Cultural Crossings in Prague, 1900: Scenes from Late Imperial Austria

Scenes of deep national division, competition, and conflictdominate standard historical narratives about the Austro-Hungarian monarchy during the late nineteenth century and most of its successor states in the 1920s and 1930s. Nationalist political movements flourished in this multicultural environment as capitalist agricultural and industrial development encouraged popular social ambitions and resentments over inequalities, while the advance of modern civil society and constitutional government provided public space for political movements. After the 1860s, political parties committed to nationalist interests increasingly dominated middle-class politics, and by 1900 national loyalties created growing fissures even in the ostensibly international Social Democratic movement. Some of the most intense nationalist social and political competition developed in the Crownlands of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia between Czech and German national interests. The Bohemian capital, Prague, became the stage for repeated mass nationalist demonstrations and rioting in the 1890s and after 1900 (see Figure 1).

ENVISIONING JEWISH CENTRAL EUROPE: FRIEDRICH TORBERG, THE AUSTRIAN ÉMIGRÉS, AND JEWISH EUROPEAN HISTORY

This essay uses the Viennese remigré writer and journalist, Friedrich Torberg (1908–1979), his Austrian Jewish cohort, and their invented “Central Europe” and “Austrian Literature” to argue for a paradigmatic shift in émigré historiography. The cosmopolitan narrative predominating in émigré historiography has marginalized traditional Judaism. By shifting the focus from the German to the Austrian émigrés, and from the European nation state to the Austrian Empire, historians can reclaim traditional Jewish culture and pluralize the hegemonic narrative. Late imperial Austria, constitutionally federalist and ethnically and culturally diverse, made room for a Jewish national culture in ways that Germany did not. The Austrian émigrés shaped visions of Central Europe that foregrounded Jewishness and provided wider space for Jewish life than comparable visions of leading German émigrés. Yet, even Austrian émigré visions remained largely incognizant of rabbinic culture, the core of traditional Jewish life. To make traditional Jews agents of Jewish European history, European historiography must now move to incorporate rabbinic culture.

Shatterzone of empires: coexistence and violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman borderlands

Acknowledgements Introduction: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands Omer Bartov and Eric D. Weitz Part 1. Imagining the Borderlands 1. The Traveler's View of Central Europe: Gradual Transitions and Degrees of Difference in European Borderlands Larry Wolff 2. Megalomania and Angst: The Nineteenth-Century Mythicization of Germany's Eastern Borderlands Gregor Thum 3. Between Empire and Nation State: An Outline for a European Contemporary History of the Jews, 1750-1950 Dan Diner 4. Jews and Others in Vilna-Wino-Vilnius: Invisible Neighbors, 1831-1948 Theodore R. Weeks Part 2. Imperial Borderlands 5. Our Laws, Our Taxes, and Our Administration: Citizenship in Imperial Austria Gary B. Cohen 6. Marking National Space on the Habsburg Austrian Borderlands, 1880-1918 Pieter M. Judson 7. Travel, Railroads, and Identity Formation in the Russian Empire Frithjof Benjamin Schenk 8. Germany and the Ottoman Borderlands: The Entwining of Imperial Aspirations, Revolution, and Ethnic Violence Eric D. Weitz 9. The Central State in the Borderlands: Ottoman Eastern Anatolia in the Late Nineteenth Century Elke Hartmann Part 3. Nationalizing the Borderlands 10. Borderland Encounters in the Carpathian Mountains and Their Impact on Identity Formation Patrice M. Dabrowski 11. Mapping the Hungarian Borderlands Robert Nemes 12. A Strange Case of Antisemitism: Ivan Franko and the Jewish Issue Yaroslav Hrytsak 13. Nation State, Ethnic Conflict, and Refugees in Lithuania, 1939-1940 Tomas Balkelis 14. The Young Turks and the Plans for the Ethnic Homogenization of Anatolia Taner Akcam Part 4. Violence on the Borderlands 15. Paving the Way for Ethnic Cleansing: Eastern Thrace during the Balkan Wars (1912-1913) and Their Aftermath Eyal Ginio 16. Wiping out the Bulgar Race: Hatred, Duty, and National Self-Fashioning in the Second Balkan War Keith Brown 17. Failed Identity and the Assyrian Genocide David Gaunt 18. Forms of Violence during the Russian Occupation of Ottoman Territory and in Northern Persia (Urmia and Astrabad), October 1914-December 1917 Peter Holquist 19. A Zone of Violence: The Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Eastern Galicia in 1914-1915 and 1941 Alexander V. Prusin 20. Ethnicity and the Reporting of Mass Murder: Krakivs'ki visti, the NKVD Murders of 1941, and the Vinnytsia Exhumation John-Paul Himka 21. Communal Genocide: Personal Accounts of the Destruction of Buczacz, Eastern Galicia, 1941-1944 Omer Bartov Part 5. Ritual, Symbolism, and Identity 22. Liquid Borderland, Inelastic Sea? Mapping the Eastern Adriatic Pamela Ballinger 23. National Modernism in Post-Revolutionary Society: The Ukrainian Renaissance and Jewish Revival, 1917-1930 Myroslav Shkandrij 24. Carpathian Rus': Interethnic Coexistence without Violence Paul Robert Magocsi 25. Tremors in the Shatterzone of Empires: Eastern Galicia in Summer 1941 Kai Struve 26. Caught in Between: Border Regions in Modern Europe Philipp Ther List of Contributors Index

Spectacle and Space in the Creation of Premodern and Modern Polities: Toward a Mixed Ontology of Collective Identity1

Much recent work on culture and identity in International Relations (IR) has emphasized the causal role of ideas and institutions. I articulate a broader socialization process for collective identities via material elements of identity construction. I argue that combined with rituals and linked to myths and symbols, material representations of culture such as monuments and architecture form the collective memories of polities in a similar manner to the socializing effects of educational institutions and vernacular literature. I illustrate these claims with a comparison of materiality and praxis elements of identity construction in imperial Rome and late-modern Austria–Hungary, with concluding analysis of the role of material culture in the future of “European” identity in the EU.

The Municipal and the National in the Bohemian Lands, 1848–1914

Between the Revolution of 1848 and the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, imperial Austria experienced an extraordinary expansion of nationalism and of national conflict. German, Czech, Polish, Ukrainian, Italian, Slovene, and other national movements became major players and rivals, transforming public life in the process. This essay examines that process through a municipal lens. What was particular about the intersection of the national in imperial Austria with the municipal? How did municipal and national politics affect one another, and what can we understand, through their dynamics, about Austrian politics more generally?

Changing Perspectives on the “Revolutionary Emperor”: Joseph II Biographies since 1790

Previous articleNext article No AccessReview ArticleChanging Perspectives on the “Revolutionary Emperor”: Joseph II Biographies since 1790Franz A. J. SzaboFranz A. J. SzaboUniversity of Alberta Search for more articles by this author University of AlbertaPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 83, Number 1March 2011 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/658104 Views: 263Total views on this site Citations: 3Citations are reported from Crossref © 2011 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Christos Aliprantis The afterlife of Enlightened Absolutism: commemoration of Maria Theresa and Joseph II and the politics of liberal reform in nineteenth-century imperial Austria, European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire 26, no.22 (Sep 2018): 305–330.https://doi.org/10.1080/13507486.2018.1480596Bruno Aguilera-Barchet From the Conservative King to the Reformist Monarch: The Stage of Enlightened Absolutism (Eighteenth Century), (Dec 2014): 257–286.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11803-1_10William D. Godsey Habsburg Government and Intermediary Authority under Joseph II (1780–90): The Estates of Lower Austria in Comparative Perspective, Central European History 46, no.44 (Apr 2014): 699–740.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008938914000016

Destination: Alexandria, Buenos Aires, Constantinople; "White Slavers" in Late Imperial Austria

f e w f o r m s o f s o c i a l l y d e v i a n t b e h av i o r received so much attention in the sexually saturated Austrian fin de siecle as Madchenhandel, or trafficking in girls, also called white slave trafficking. Trafficking in women and girls had not been unknown in preindustrial Cisleithania, but the discourse from the turn of the century embodied concerns about the need for social control in increasingly anonymous, modernizing, urbanizing, and capitalist society. Certainly, Madchenhandel was in many ways a modern crime, a crime associated particularly with Jews, who were popularly believed to supply white, unwilling girls to serve as prostitutes in brothels worldwide. ever-expanding and improving communication and transportation

Climate and Circulation in Imperial Austria

Previous articleNext article No AccessArticlesClimate and Circulation in Imperial Austria*Deborah R. CoenDeborah R. CoenBarnard College, Columbia University Search for more articles by this author Barnard College, Columbia UniversityPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 82, Number 4December 2010Science and the Making of Modern Culture Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/656078 Views: 160Total views on this site Citations: 14Citations are reported from Crossref © 2010 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Franz Leander Fillafer Imperial Diversity, Fractured Sovereignty, and Legal Universals: Hans Kelsen and Eugen Ehrlich in their Habsburg Context, Modern Intellectual History 19, no.22 (Feb 2021): 421–443.https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244320000542Matthias Heymann The climate change dilemma: big science, the globalizing of climate and the loss of the human scale, Regional Environmental Change 19, no.66 (Jun 2018): 1549–1560.https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-018-1373-zChad Bryant , Central European History 51, no.11 ( 2018): 56.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008938918000225Ruth A. Morgan Climate and Empire in the Nineteenth Century, (Jan 2018): 589–603.https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-43020-5_37Matthias Heymann, Dania Achermann From Climatology to Climate Science in the Twentieth Century, (Jan 2018): 605–632.https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-43020-5_38Franziska Hupfer Ein Archiv für Wissenschaft, Staat und Nation, NTM Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Wissenschaften, Technik und Medizin 25, no.44 (Sep 2017): 435–457.https://doi.org/10.1007/s00048-017-0178-3 An Imperial Dynamo? CEH Forum on Pieter Judson's The Habsburg Empire: A New History, Central European History 50, no.22 (Jun 2017): 236–259.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008938917000310Timothy Olin Cultivating an Orderly Society: Physical and Mental Landscapes on the Habsburg's Southern Frontiers, Austrian History Yearbook 48 (Apr 2017): 159–172.https://doi.org/10.1017/S006723781600062XGabriel D. Henderson Helmut Landsberg and the evolution of 20th century American climatology: envisioning a climatological renaissance, WIREs Climate Change 8, no.22 (Nov 2016).https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.442 Bibliography, (Oct 2015): 566–665.https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119072218.biblioVladimir Janković A historical review of urban climatology and the atmospheres of the industrialized world, WIREs Climate Change 4, no.66 (Aug 2013): 539–553.https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.244Mitchell G. Ash, Jan Surman The Nationalization of Scientific Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Central Europe: An Introduction, (Jan 2012): 1–29.https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137264978_1Deborah R. Coen Fault Lines and Borderlands: Earthquake Science in Imperial Austria, (Jan 2012): 157–182.https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137264978_8 Deborah R. Coen Imperial Climatographies from Tyrol to Turkestan, Osiris 26, no.11 (Jul 2015): 45–65.https://doi.org/10.1086/661264

Voting across ethnic lines in late Imperial Austria1

ABSTRACT. The Austrian party system, following the introduction of universal manhood suffrage in 1907, has conventionally been characterised as being divided along ethno-national lines, reinforcing perceptions that politics within the Habsburg Empire was overwhelmingly driven by nationalism. However, the electoral results in a number of districts only make sense if one assumes that voters cast ballots for their alleged ethnic opponents. A systematic analysis of election results, utilising a simple process of elimination and drawing on the highly detailed statistical records available, strongly suggests that such voting was commonplace. Furthermore, alternative explanations based on differential voting qualification rates, errors in the census, and electoral fraud do not withstand close scrutiny. One must therefore conclude that although ethnic conflict did occur, it was paralleled by inter-ethnic bargaining and compromise, thereby supporting more positive appraisals of Austrian electoral and parliamentary politics and of representative political institutions in ethnically divided societies.

Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria

Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria

“Soul Is But Harmony”: David Josef Bach and the Workers' Symphony Concert Association, 1905–1918

Ifhigh culture, asTheodorAdornoonce proposed, promises a reality that does not exist, why, at the fin de siècle, did it hold such great attraction for Central Europe's populist politicians who were most attuned to the realities of everyday life? The answer, at least for imperial Austria, is that those politicians believed high culture to possess an integrative social function, which forced them to reconcile notions of “high” culture with “mass” culture. This was particularly true in Vienna, where the city's public performance venues for art, music, stage theater, and visual art stood as monuments to the values that the liberal middle classes had enshrined in the 1867 Constitution. A literate knowledge of this cultural system—its canon of symphonic music; the literature of tragedy, drama, and farce; and classical and contemporary genres of painting—was essential for civic participation in an era of liberal political and cultural hegemony. This article examines one cultural association that attempted to exploit the interaction between German high culture and two spheres, which are commonly thought to stand at odds with elite, high culture: popular culture and mass politics. Rather than a simple, cultural divide, this relationship created a contested “terrain of political and social conflict” in the decades preceding World War I. This terrain was of enormous consequence for Viennese of every social class.

“Years of Blood and Darkness”: Czech Extra-Parliamentary Representation and Austrian Democratization during the Hilsner Affair, 1899-1900

This article re-evaluates the Bohemian Hilsner affair by considering it in terms of the democratization of imperial Austria’s nationally divided body politic. It treats the participation of Thomas Garrigue Masaryk and Karel Baxa in Leopold Hilsner’s blood ritual murder trials in 1899 and 1900 as a form of extra-parliamentary representation and draws connections between their informal representative activities and formal parliamentary matters. It consequently assesses how this larger picture of representation hinged on practical strategies, tactics, and active public debate. But in so doing, it also addresses the critical problem of representing identity vis-à-vis the Habsburg state, locating within this spectrum of civic action examples of sub-national, non-linguistic group identification. Hence, Masaryk’s and Baxa’s battle over Hilsner’s guilt became an argument over how Czech identity addressed anti-Semitism, but also over what sort of popular leader Czechs should have and how Czechs should behave democratically, whether as street rioters or as a loyal opposition. Thus, the article’s main argument posits that representation, broadly conceived, became a mechanism by which these sub-national expressions of identity were associated with state power. Ultimately, this thesis challenges the idea that these nationalist politicians anticipated their people’s engagement with the state in purely linguistic or ethno-cultural national terms, even as it suggests that their instrumentalization of the Jewish question to this end confirms a different developmental trajectory for Austrian minority representation.

Guardians of the nation: activists on the language frontiers of imperial Austria

Preface Note on Language Use Maps 1. Introduction 2. Constructing an Imagined Frontier: Schoolhouse Fortresses 3. Encounters on the Rural Language Frontier 4. Reluctant Colonists on the Frontier: The Sudmark Settlers 5. Tourists to the Frontier: Consumption and National Identity 6. Violence in the Frontier Village 7. Language Frontier and Nation State Abbreviations Notes Index

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Looking East: East Central European ‘Borderlands’ in German History and Historiography

Focus Questions How does the history of East Central European borderlands complicate traditional links (in both scholarship and politics) between nationality, ethnicity, language, and citizenship? Historians, as the article suggests, are increasingly interested in ‘transnational’ history, or histories which seem to transcend national borders and nationalist frameworks. In the case of German history, does this trend seem more likely to ‘normalize’ Germany’s past, downplaying the role of the Holocaust, or to emphasize so‐called German ‘peculiarities’ or ‘pathologies’? Author Recommends * Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity Without Groups (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).This collection of theoretical essays suggests some of the dangers of what Brubaker calls ‘groupism’ in the social sciences‐assuming that historical subjects belonged to collectives they would not necessarily have identified with themselves. * Jeremy King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).A study of the relationships and intersections between local, imperial, and national loyalties in one Bohemian town between 1848–1948. King challenges many traditional assumptions about the development of nationalist politics in East Central Europe, particularly the idea that ‘ethnicities’ came before ‘nations.’ He shows how national affiliation in the Bohemian Lands typically reflected political choices rather than pre‐existing ethnic or cultural differences. Also excellent as a general narrative of East Central European political history in the 19th and 20th centuries. * Pieter Judson, Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontier of Imperial Austria (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).Judson’s study of nationalist activism on the so‐called ‘language frontiers’ of East Central Europe offers a challenge to traditional accounts of East Central European history as a story of escalating nationalist conflict which culminated in ethnic cleansing. This book focuses on the failures and frustrations of nationalist activists as they mobilized to make loyal nationalist activists out of local populations which were often bilingual, nationally ambivalent, or completely indifferent to nationalism. * Thomas Bender (ed.), Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002).This collection of essays situates American history in a global or transnational context. It includes both theoretical reflections on the value of transnational or global history and examples of what such a history might look like in practice.Online Materials 1. Integrated History http://www.einaudi.cornell.edu/europe/integrated_history/contact.asp An online archive of primary sources on the history of East‐Central Europe for educators, students, and scholars. 2. American Bibliography of Slavic and East European Studies http://www.library.uiuc.edu/absees/ Searchable bibliography of academic works published on Eastern Europe since 1990.

Accident risk compensation in late imperial Austria: Wage differentials and social insurance

We test for substitutability of wage differentials and accident insurance benefits in late imperial Austria. We establish that workers earned compensating wage differentials and that accident insurance benefits acted as substitutes for those market-based differentials. We estimate that an average expected value of insurance benefit reduced the compensating wage differential by about one-third. The shift from negligence liability to compulsory accident insurance thus induced both gains to workers in the form of income certainty, and losses in the form of smaller risk differentials and thus lower wages.

Relations among Internal, Continental, and Transatlantic Migration in Late Imperial Austria

Relations among Internal, Continental, and Transatlantic Migration in Late Imperial Austria

Relations among Internal, Continental, and Transatlantic Migration in Late Imperial Austria

The article investigates the relations among internal, Continental, and transatlantic migration in late imperial Austria by combining information from passenger records of ships to the United States and internal district-level migration data from the Austrian census. Combined with other statistical sources, a snapshot of migration to the United States is provided in the context of long-standing patterns of internal and Continental migration and the changing socioeconomic structures of the empire. The relationships between internal and transatlantic movements and the determinants of migration to the United States are analyzed by means of regression analysis. In late imperial Austria internal mobility was negatively related to transatlantic migration. This suggests the existence of different migration systems with different patterns of internal, Continental, and transatlantic migration.