The author is Professor of History at the University of Vienna, A–1010 Vienna, Austria. The Kann Lecture was delivered at the University of Minnesota, April 5, 1989. The lecture has been slightly revised and expanded for publication.

¹ Winters, Stanley B., “The Forging of a Historian: Robert A. Kann in America, 1939–1976,” Austrian History Yearbook XVII–XVIII (1981–1982): 7Google Scholar.

² Kann, Robert A., Das Nationalitätenproblem der Habsburgermonarchie, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Graz and Cologne: Böhlau, 1964)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³ Stourzh, Gerald, “Robert A. Kann–A Memoir from Austria”, Austrian History Yearbook XVII–XVIII (1981–1982):25Google Scholar.

⁴ References are given in Stourzh, ibid., 25–26.

⁵ Kann, Robert A., “Das geschichtliche Erbe–Gemeinsamer Nenner und rechtes Maβ”, in Österreich–Die Zweite Republik, ed. Weinzierl, Erika and Skalnik, Kurt, 2 vols. (Graz: Styria, 1972), 1:19Google Scholar.

⁶ Ibid., 25.

⁷ Ibid., 48–49.

⁸ Kann, Robert A., A History of the Habsburg Empire 1526–1918, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 461Google Scholar.

⁹ “Nationale Gleichheit ohne die soziale Unterlage der Gleichberechtigung ist eine bloβe Travestie, die den übernationalen Ausgleich zu einer leeren Formel reduziert”. Kann, Robert A., “Die Habsburgermonarchie und das Problem des übernationalen Staates”, in Die Habsburgermonarchie 1848–1918, ed. Wandruszka, Adam and Urbanitsch, Peter, vol. 2: Verwaltung und Rechtswesen (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1975), 22Google Scholar.

¹⁰ For the following see Sigmund Freud, Die Traumdeutung (1900), in Freud, Sigmund, Studienausgabe, ed. Mitscherlich, Alexander, Richards, Angela, and Strachey, James (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1972), 218–26, 418–20Google Scholar. English translation in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans, and ed. Strachey, James et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1964), 4:208–19; also 5:431–35Google Scholar. Schorske, Carl, Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Knopf, 1980), 193–99 and 206Google Scholar.

¹¹ On Fischhof's approach to the nationality conflict (he greatly influenced Karl Renner) and his ideas of transforming the multinational empire into a monarchical Switzerland, see Kann, Nationalitätenproblem der Habsburgermonarchie, 2:149–55, and more recently: Stourzh, Gerald, Die Gleichberechtigung der Nationalitäten in der Verfassung und Verwaltung Österreichs 1848–1918 (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1985) 200–202Google Scholar, and idem, “Wandlungen des Österreichbewuβtseins im 20. Jahrhundert und das Modell der Schweiz”, in Schweiz– Österreich. Ähnlichkeiten und Kontraste, ed. Koja, Friedrich and Stourzh, Gerald (Vienna: Böhlau, 1986), 12–14Google Scholar. Ludwig von Mises has admiringly referred to “den fähigsten und reinsten aller österreichischen Patrioten, Adolf Fischhof”. Ludwig von Mises, Erinnerungen (Stuttgart and New York: Fischer), 20.

¹² Belter, Steven, “Modern Owls Fly by Night: Recent Literature on Fin-de-siècle Vienna” (review article).Historical Journal 31 (1988):665Google Scholar.

¹³ Stone, Norman, Europe Transformed, 1878–1919 (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984)Google Scholar: “But it was in Vienna that most of the twentieth century intellectual world was invented. Practically in every field, from music to nuclear physics, Austro–Hungarian subjects were leaders” (407).

¹⁴ See the excellent discussion by Beller, “Modern Owls”, particularly 667 and 669–71.

¹⁵ Kann, History of the Habsburg Empire, 564.

¹⁶ Ibid., 562–63.

¹⁷ Mauthner, Fritz, Erinnerungen, I: Prager Jugendjahre (Munich: Georg Müller, 1918), 32–33, 50Google Scholar. Mauthner's autobiography is a mine of information on mentality in a multinational and multilingual land. Of great interest is his account of the last event that united Czechs and Germans in Prague in a common demonstration–the centennial of Friedrich Schiller's birth in 1859. Ibid., 127.

¹⁸ “Angesichts des österreichischen Staates, der sich aus so vielen nach Rasse, Sprache, Religion und Geschichte verschiedenen Gruppen zusammensetzte, erwiesen sich Theorien, die die Einheit des Staates auf irgendeinen sozial-psychologischen oder sozial-biologischen Zusammenhang der juristisch zum Staat gehörigen Menschen zu gründen versuchten, ganz offenbar als Fiktionen. Insofem diese Staatstheorie ein wesentlicher Bestandteil der Reinen Rechtslehre ist, kann die Reine Rechtslehre als eine spezifisch österreichische Theorie gelten”. Quoted in Métall, Rudolf Aladár, Hans Kelsen. Leben und Werk (Vienna: Franz Deuticke, 1969), 42Google Scholar. Kelsen's autobiographical sketch has not been found. The passages in Métall's book are thus our only access to this most interesting document.

¹⁹ The greatest symbol of the passion for Bildung, uniting intellectual, moral, and political commitment, was the enthusiasm for Friedrich Schiller. This has been rightly stressed in the recent brilliant book by Beller, Steven, Vienna and the Jews, 1867–1938: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 150–51Google Scholar. One might add to the examples given by Beller the magnificent novel by the Austrian-Jewish writer Karl Emil Franzos (1848–1904), Schiller in Barnow, which impressively shows the redeeming promise of Schiller in a most miserable Jewish settlement in Eastern Galicia (“Barnow” of Franzos's novels is the town of Czortków, where Franzos spent his early youth). Beller discounts too much, however, the non-Jewish part of the bildungsbürgerliche developments in nineteenth-century Austria. Beller also exaggerates, perhaps, the difference between the “Puritan-like” life-style of the German (including Jewish-German) middle class in the Bohemian lands and the “hedonism” of Vienna (ibid., 169f.), given the vast influx of German, Jewish, and an also diligent Czech population from the Bohemian lands into Vienna in the nineteenth century. Of great general interest for the history of the central place of Bildung in the nineteenth century is the recent book by Engehardt, Ulrich, “Bildungsbürgertum”. Begriffs-und Dogmengeschichte eines Etiketts (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1986)Google Scholar.

²⁰ The recruitment of the student body of the philosophical faculties of the Austrian universities as distinguished from the faculties of medicine and law, as well as the social structure of the Gymnasialprofessoren of late nineteenth-century Austria, would deserve close analysis.

²¹ Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna, 148.

²² Wistrich, Robert S., The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph (London: Oxford University Press, 1989), 41–42Google Scholar.

²³ Rozenblit, Marsha L., The Jews of Vienna, 1867–1914: Assimilation and Identity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), 132Google Scholar.

²⁴ For this, see the remarkable observations by Borkenau, Franz,Austria and After (London: Faber&Faber, 1938), 110–14Google Scholar.

²⁵ See Beller, Vienna and the Jews, particularly 35–36 and 189–90. Also most recently Steinberg, Michael P., The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival: Austria as Theater and Ideology, 1890–1938 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), particularly 170–75Google Scholar.

²⁶ Rozenblit, Jews of Vienna, 132.

²⁷ An interesting comment on the frequency of mixed marriages in Vienna is in Stolper, Toni, Ein Leben in Brennpunkten unserer Zeit: Wien-Berlin-New York.Gustav Stolper, 1888–1947 (Tübingen: Rainer Wunderlich Verlag, 1960), 160Google Scholar. Ivar Oxaal has convincingly critized Marsha Rozenblit for underestimating the presumable frequency of mixed marriages in Vienna. Oxaal, Ivar, “The Jews of Young Hitler's Vienna: Historical and Sociological Aspects, ” in Jews, Antisemitism and Culture in Vienna, ed. Oxaal, Ivar, Pollak, Michael, and Botz, Gerhard (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), 32Google Scholar.

²⁸ Beller, “Modern Owls,” 682. On the centrality of the individualism theme in fin-de-siecle Vienna, both Jewish and non-Jewish, and the ensuing identity crises, see the suggestive book by Rider, Jacques Le,Modernité viennoise et crises de I'identite (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990)Google Scholar, and its German, translation, Das Ende der Illusion. Die Wiener Modeme und die Krisen der ldentität (Vienna: Österreichischer Bundesverlag, 1990)Google Scholar .

²⁹ On anti-Semitism in the last decades of imperial Austria, I would single out four outstanding contributions: Kann, Robert, “German-speaking Jewry during Austria-Hungary's Constitutional Era (1867–1918),” Jewish Social Studies, 10 (1948): 239–56Google Scholar; Boyer, John, Political Radicalism in Late Imperial Vienna: Origins of the Christian Social Movement, 1848–1897 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Pulzer, Peter, The Rise of Political Ant-Semitism in Germany and Austria, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988)Google Scholar; and Franz Borkenau, Austria and After. Borkenau's book has an original chapter entitled “Liberalism and the Jewish Question” (92–117). Without in any way minimizing the precariousness of the Jews' position in Austria, he has pointed to the contrast between countries like Romania and Russia, where the Jews were barred from all participation in public life and from many economic activities, and Austria, where such legal discrimination did not exist, but where “in actual fact the Austrian Jews had won an important place in public and in intellectual life”(ibid., 112–13). Julius Braunthal, a Socialist and assimilated Jew, could write in his autobiography: “In the invigorating air of this remarkable cosmopolis Jewish talent blossomed as vigorously as it did in Granada under Moslem rule.” Quoted in Pulzer, , Political Antisemitism, 13, from Julius Braunthal, In Search of the Millennium (London, V. Gallancz Ltd., 1945),17Google Scholar. On the legal and constitutional rights of the Jews of Austria in relation to assimilationist tendencies on the one hand and the newsurge of diaspora nationalism around 1909 on the other, see Stourzh, Gerald, “Galten die Juden als Nationalität Altösterreichs?, ” in Studia Judaica Austriaca 10 (1984): 73–117Google Scholar, reprinted in Gerald Stourzh, Wege zur Grundrechtsdemokratie. Studien zur Begriffs-und Institutionengeschichte des liberalen Verfassungsstaates (Vienna: Bohlau, 1989), 259–307.

³⁰ Quoted in Timms, Edward, Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist: Culture and Catastrophe in Habsburg Vienna (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), 6Google Scholar, from Kokoschka, Oskar, My Life, trans. Britt, D. (London, Thames & Hudson, 1974), 35Google Scholar.

³¹ Quoted in Beller, , Vienna and the jews 217, from Fritz Wittels, Sigmund Freud (London, 1924), 247Google Scholar.

³² Beller, “Modern Owls,” 681.

³³ I think, however, that Beller overextends his argument by speaking of Vienna's fin-de-siecle “cultural creativity, in which, to put it bluntly, Jews led and the rest followed” (ibid., 681). A more differentiated view emerges from a most suggestive ”diagram of creative interaction in Vienna” in Edward Timms's Karl Kraus, 8. See also Steinberg, The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival, 172.

³⁴ Kann, History of the Habsburg Empire, 560.

³⁵ Das Triumphgefühl der Befreiung vermengt sich zu stark mit der Trauer, denn man hat das Gefängnis, aus dem man entlassen wurde, immer noch sehr geliebt.“ To Max Eitington, June 6, 1938. Freud, Sigmund, Briefe 1873–1939, ed. Freud, Ernst L. (Frankfurt: S. Fischer Verlag, 1960):439Google Scholar.

³⁶ Thus Ignaz von Plener in the Austrian Herrenhaus (chamber of peers) on May 18, 1878. See Stourzh, Gerald, “Die dualistische Reichsstruktur, Österreichbegriff und Österreichbewuβtsein 1867–1918,” in Innere Staatsbildung und gesellschaftliche Modemisierung in Österreich undDeutschland 1867/71 bis 1914, ed. Rumpler, Helmut (Vienna: Verlag für Geschichte und Politik, 1991), 53–68Google Scholar, here 62. Attention to this speech was first called by Sutter, Berthold, “Die Ausgleichsverhandlungen zwischen Osterreich und Ungarn 1867–1918,” in Der österreichisch-ungarische Ausgleich von 1867. Seine Grundlagen und Auswirkungen. Buchreihe der Südostdeutschen Historischen Kommission, vol. 20 (Munich, 1968), 87Google Scholar, though there ascribed to Ignaz Plener's son Ernst von Plener. Sutter's study remains to this day the most useful survey of the Ausgleich issue from 1867 to 1918.

³⁷ Hanák, Péter, “Die Parallelaktion von 1898. Fünfzig Jahre ungarische Revolution von 1848 und fünfzigjähriges Regierungsjubiläum Franz Josephs,“ Österreichische Osthefte 27 (1985):366–80Google Scholar.

³⁸ Good, David F., The Economic Rise of the Habsburg Empire, 1750–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984)Google Scholar.

³⁹ Hanák, Péter, “Hungary in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy: Preponderancy or Dependency,” Austrian History Yearbook, III, pt. 1 (1967):260–302CrossRefGoogle Scholar; this article was republished in Hungarian and in German, , the latter appearing in the collection of many of Hanak's papers published under the title Ungarn in der Donaumonarchie (Vienna, Munich, and Budapest: Verlag für Geschichte und Politik, Oldenbourg Verlag, Akadémiai Kiadó, 1984), 240–80Google Scholar. Komlos, John, The Habsburg Monarchy as a Customs Union: Economic Development in Austria-Hungary in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), particularly 7ffGoogle Scholar.; and see Good, Economic Rise of the Habsburg Empire, particularly 135–46, 156–61.

⁴⁰ Good, Economic Rise of the Habsburg Empire 125ff.

⁴¹ Ibid., 249.

⁴² Good, ibid., particularly 232, 236, 238, 249, 251.

⁴³ This phenomenon was violently critizied by the noted legal scholar, sociologist, and sometime rector of the University of Czernowitz, Ehrlich, Eugen, in his booklet Die Aufgaben der Sozialpolitik im Österreichischen Osten, insbesondere in der Bukowina mit besonderer Beleuchtung der juden-und Bauernfrage (Czernowitz, 1909)Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ Good, Economic Rise of the Habsburg Empire, 256. Though slightly overdrawn, there is a point in Alan Milward's comment: “The ironic conclusion to be drawn from Good's work is that successful integration within the framework of a common market will do nothing to stop catastrophic political disintegration.” Milward, Alan S., Review of Good, David F., The Economic Rise of the Habsburg Empire, Economic History Review 38 (1985): 471Google Scholar.

⁴⁵ Good, Economic Rise of the Habsburg Empire, 7.

⁴⁶ See Stourzh, Gerald, “Zur Institutionengeschichte der Arbeitsbeziehungen und der sozialen Sicherung,” first published as introduction to Historische Wurzeln der Sozialpartnerschaft, ed. Stourzh, Gerald and Grandner, Margarete, Wiener Beiträge zur Geschichte der Neuzeit 12–13 (1986): 13–37, particularly 35–37Google Scholar; republished with slight modifications in Gerald Stourzh, Wege zur Grundrechtsdemokratie, 335–61, particularly 358–61. See also March, James G. and Olson, Johan P., Rediscovering Institutions: The Organizational Basis of Politics (New York: Free Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ Kann, Robert A., The Habsburg Empire: A Study in Integration and Disintegration (New York: Praeger, 1957)Google Scholar; idem, “Die Habsburgermonarchie und das Problem des übernationalen Staates,” in Die Habsburgermonarchie 1848–1918, vol. 2; idem, “Zur Problematik der Nationalitätenfrage in der Habsburgermonarchie, 1848–1918,” in Die Habsburgermonarchie vol. 3; Die Völker des Reiches (1980), 1304–38.

⁴⁸ See Gerald Stourzh, Die Gleichberechtigung der Nationalitäten; this is a revised reprint of my contribution to vol. 3 of Die Habsburgermonarchie 1848–1918, 975–1206, enlarged with a new introduction, a selection of annotated sources, and a bibliography. See also my Vom Reich zur Republik. Studien zum Österreichbewuβtsein im 20. jahrhundert (Vienna: Edition Atelier, 1990); and “Der Umfang der österreichischen Geschichte,” in Probleme der Geschichte Österreichs und ihrer Darstellung, ed. Wolfram, Herwig and Pohl, Walter (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1991), 3–27Google Scholar.

⁴⁹ It is perhaps worth recalling that both Redlich and Kann—the latter having dedicated his Multinational Empire to Redlich's memory—originally underwent the broad legal curriculum of Austrian universities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while Jászi was a sociologist by training rather than a historian.

⁵⁰ Both quotes taken from Jászi, Oscar, The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929Google Scholar; paperback ed. 1961), 321.

⁵¹ Quoted in English translation ibid., 181, from Bauer, Otto, Die Nationalitätenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie (Vienna: Deuticke, 1908), 373Google Scholar.

⁵² Musil, Robert, DerMann ohne Eigenschaften in English translation as The Man without Qualities, trans. Wilkins, Eithne and Kaiser, Ernst, vol. 1 (New York: Coward-McCann, 1953Google Scholar; Capricorn Books, 1965), 33 .

⁵³ See note 37 above.

⁵⁴ Musil, The Man without Qualities, 33.

⁵⁵ von Popovici, Aurel, Die Vereinigten Staaten von Groβ-Österreich (Leipzig, 1906)Google Scholar.

⁵⁶ See note 54.

⁵⁷ Robert A. Kann, “Die Habsburgermonarchie und das Problem des übernationalen Staates,” Die Habsburgermonarchie 1848–1918, 2:38–39. The sentence is important enough to be rendered fully in the German original: “Die einzige logisch folgerichtige Lösung der nationalen Frage, die Umwandlung des Gesamtreiches in eine bundesstaatliche Ordnung auf ethnischer Grundlage ohne Rucksicht auf die Staatsgrenzen zwischen Österreich und Ungarn, muβte voraussichtlich im Kriege wie im Frieden zur Reichsspaltung führen.” It should be added that Robert Kann, in the same essay, is skeptical regarding hopes (sometimes even retrospectively expressed) that the heir to the throne, Francis Ferdinand, might have been in a position to carry through a reform of the empire; Kann stresses the fact that Francis Ferdinand did not give priority to federalism per se but rather to the idea of a decentralized unitary state “in which the weight of power should reside in a significantly increased position of the crown.” Kann adds that it is unlikely that such goals could have been reached in the second decade of the twentieth century, even if the world war had not broken out. Ibid., 37.

⁵⁸ I must refer the reader to the evidence presented in my monograph Die Gleichberechtigung der Nationalitäten. Of particular interest as a case study is the way in which public elementary schools for minority populations were created by the case law of the Verwaltungsgerichtshof; cf. ibid., 166–76.

⁵⁹ There is no need for references to the writings of Renner and Bauer. I would like to draw attention, though, to Jellinek, Georg, Das Recht der Minoritäten (Vienna, 1898)Google Scholar, and Bernatzik, Edmund, Über nationale Matriken (Vienna, 1910)Google Scholar.

⁶⁰ For the following, see the detailed discussion in Stourzh, Die Gleichberechtigung der Nationalitäten, 189–240.

⁶¹ Cf. the evidence submitted in Stourzh, Die Gleichberechtigung der Nationalitäten, 14, 156, 221, 231, 244–45. Brilliant contemporaries recognized the expanding dynamics of the process of ethnicizing institutions-whose functions might not be connected with “national” questions— by adding rules concerning compulsory linguistic/ethnic attribution; like Joseph Lukas, a professor of public law in Czernowitz, did in 1908 (quoted ibid., 208–9). The compulsory ethnic separation of colleges of physicians, of engineers, and so forth, particularly in the Bohemian lands, are cases in point (ibid., 210, 229).

⁶² Ableitinger, Alfred, Ernest von Koerber und das Verfassungsproblem im Jahre 1900 (Vienna, Cologne and Graz: Böhlau, 1973), 198Google Scholar.

⁶³ Speech on June 15, 1917, Haus der Abgeordneten, Stenographische Protokolle, 7. Sitzung der XXII. Session, 338.

⁶⁴ A magnificent case study that has become a classic is Glettler's, MonikaDie Wiener Tschechen um 1900. Strukturanalyse einer nationalen Minderheit in der Groβstadt (Munich and Vienna: Oldenbourg, 1972)Google Scholar.

⁶⁵ The translation into English of the terms Volksrat and národni rada is not easy: “ethnic council,” “people's council,” “national council” all are possible. With the increasing politicization and self-articulation of the nationalities as “nations,” the term “national council” becomes the most appropriate rendering, and indeed there emerge in the fall of 1918 “national councils” as engines of national self-determination in various parts of the disintegrating multinational empire.

⁶⁶ Such persons were qualified as particularly suited to serve on the provincial school board in Moravia-a qualification approved by German and Czech representatives alike. See the evidence cited in Stourzh, Die Gleichberechtigung der Nationalitäten, 15 and 218.

⁶⁷ Such questionnaires, designed by the imperial authorities in Moravia, (Statthalterei) in 1911Google Scholar, have been found by the author in archival materials and will be published in a study devoted to the effectiveness of the Moravian compromise.

⁶⁸ Bernatzik, Über nationale Matriken, 84–86. See also the forthcoming study by Stourzh, , “Problems of Conflict Resolution in a Multiethnic State,” in State and Nation in Multiethnic Societies, ed. Ra'anan, Uri, Mesner, Maria et al. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 67–86Google Scholar.

⁶⁹ The unfortunate wording of Article 80 of the Treaty of Saint-Germain, which speaks of persons being “different by race and language” from the majority of the population—“racial” being then the word in Anglo-American usage corresponding to what today is indicated by “ethnic” —facilitated a most unfortunate judgment of the Austrian Venwaltungsgerichtshof of June 9, 1921, to this effect. See Moser, Jonny, “Die Katastrophe der Juden in Österreich,” Studia Judaica Austriaca 6 (1977): 91–92Google Scholar and a forthcoming Vienna dissertation by Oskar Besenböck.

⁷⁰ Jászi, The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy, 296.

⁷¹ This was four days before this Robert Kann Lecture was delivered at the Center for Austrian Studies at the University of Minnesota.

⁷² Spiel, Hilde, “Abschied. Vom Sinn der Monarchie,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 04 3, 1989, 27Google Scholar.