Throughout the world, historians expand the history of their nations and states into periods when these polities did not yet exist. The French speak of their first dynasty and mean the Frankish Merovingians. Until recently French history textbooks even for students in the French overseas territories started with “Nos ancêtres, les Gaulois.” In the German Kaiserreich between 1871 and 1918, let us say, little Jan Kowalski in Poznan had to accept the Germanic peoples as his forefathers, as every textbook on German history dealt with them at length. Needless to say, not only German medievalists speak of Germans long before theodiscus or teutonicus came to mean deutsch. All over the world people search for the roots of their identity. Take, for instance, the present preoccupation with Celtic ancestors. Not only the Irish, Welsh, Scots, and Bretons, but a great many other Europeans also want to be Celts by origin. “Their successors in Brittany, Wales, or Ireland do not threaten anybody with Anschluss or war. The Celtic origins, therefore, fit the Austrian neutrality perfectly well,” as Erich Zöllner ironically put it in 1976 after Chancellor Bruno Kreisky had openly declared that the Celts and not the Germans were our forefathers.

Beginning in September, 1902, Karl Kraus turned his critical vision and poison pen toward what he saw as a misguided encroachment on private matters by the public organs of the state and the press. He saw it as more of an attack than an encroachment—he decried a campaign, conducted with “sword and fi re,” to battle “immorality,” a charge he saw hailing from diverse if linked quarters from legislature to judiciary to the daily newspaper of record. Th e whole off ensive, Kraus maintained, originated in a “grandiose misunderstanding,” a slip, a logical or even linguistic fallacy: instead of protecting society from the off ense of public indecency, the crusaders inverted their task when they sought to provoke public indignation in response to private morality.

“How long will the jackals continue to feed upon our live bodies?” So begins a Polish newspaper's depiction of the rapacious activities of twenty-seven alleged international traffickers on trial for transporting girls from Austrian Galicia to brothels and harems in the Middle East, Africa, and the Americas. Aft er years of veiled discussion in the Polish-language press about the mysterious disappearance of poor female workers and peasant daughters, the case erupted in the fall of 1892, with lasting implications for the way trafficking and the domestic sex trade would be understood in the Habsburg lands and the former Polish territories alike. Seventeen men and ten women—all of them Jewish—stood trial for a decades-long conspiracy to scour the Crownland in search of “human goods” and “sell them to … local public houses or transport [them] abroad.” The affair helped define the public's perception of the sex trade in Eastern Europe between the 1880s and 1930, as thousands of young women were smuggled out of the region and into sexual servitude. The trial played out in the Galician administrative capital of L'viv, a city of mixed Polish, Jewish, German, and Ukrainian population. Trial transcripts and newspaper coverage provide a rare glimpse into the secret world of commercial sex at the turn of the twentieth century. More importantly, commentary from the journalists and local citizens attending the proceedings offers a window into the way the Galician public understood the commercial sex trade, a tolerated practice that employed medical doctors, police inspectors, landlords, pimps, and procurers, alongside the prostitutes themselves. The trial attracted attention as far away as Cracow, Warsaw, and Vienna, where the Austrian parliament devoted a fiery session to its outcome and to a discussion of the “shameful outrages of the Jewish people” in the aff air. In the Galician setting, public exposure to the horrors of international prostitution networks contributed to a new and more militant direction in Polish nationalist sentiment, one that inextricably linked sexuality with ethnicity.

The trial of forty-six-year-old Regine Riehl, who was charged with embezzlement, fraud, pandering, and other crimes associated with the operation of her tolerated bordello, opened in Vienna on 2 November 1906. Residents of the imperial capital and in the wider Habsburg monarchy and beyond avidly followed the five-day trial, which incited public debate on the subject of prostitution throughout the monarchy. Indeed, prostitution became a “topic of the day,” a theme that became “salonfähig” (acceptable for good society), due to the extensive newspaper coverage of the trial.

The history of sexuality is a recent field. As a domain of scholarly inquiry, it emerged in the late 1970s, partially the outgrowth of women's history and partially the product of the lesbian/gay movement. Its foundational text is the first volume of Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality, published in French in 1976 and translated into English two years later. This is among the rare books that are truly pathbreaking, taking what was regarded as a “natural” phenomenon and showing its deep historicity.

Emperor Maximilian I spared no expense or eff ort to ensure that he would be remembered the way that he wanted to be remembered. Th roughout his reign he concentrated on his image, crafting it to suit his political and dynastic goals. He justifi ed his efforts by claiming that, “Whoever prepares no memorial for himself during his lifetime has none after his death, and that same person will be forgotten along with the sound of the bell that tolls his passing. And so the money I spend on my memorial is not lost; rather, to spare expense on my memorial is to suppress my future reputation. For what I do not produce toward my own memorial during my lifetime will not be celebrated after my death by you or anybody else.” A key aspect of the emperor's memorial was his patronage of and skill in astrology. The image of Maximilian as patron and student of astrology was one of his own making. In his autobiographical writings, Maximilian emphasized his efforts to learn and practice astrology. His personal secretary and adviser, Joseph Grünpeck, who worked on early draft s of the emperor's autobiography and wrote a biography of Maximilian, consistently portrayed the emperor as an avid and gift ed student of astrology. In the biography, which he dedicated to Emperor Charles V, Grünpeck recounted Maximilian's enjoyment in reading astrological and astronomical literature, especially Ptolemy. Not long after Maximilian died, Johannes Schöner praised the emperor for his efforts in astrology and numbered him among the most important patrons of astrology. Toward the end of the sixteenThcentury, Henry Ranzovius, in his history of great patrons of astrology, singled out Maximilian and labeled him a lover of the art.

Historians interested in Habsburg policy in Hungary at the end of the seventeenth century have long focused their attention on the Einrichtungswerk des Königreichs Ungarn, a reform program drawn up under the direction of Cardinal Leopold Kollonich in 1688–89. Like a small number of similar “essential” documents—here the 1627 Verneuerte Landesordnung for Bohemia and the Pragmatic Sanction of 1723 spring to mind—the oft-asserted signifi cance of the Einrichtungswerk has long overshadowed the document itself: although most historians studying the Habsburg Empire know of Kollonich's plan, few actually know very much about it. Instead of a realistic appraisal of its actual provenance and place in the historical development of Habsburg policy, the document—or rather its impression—has been applied as an open-ended description of the ambitions of the imperial court. In the words of Austrian historian Oswald Redlich, Kollonich's plan for Hungary was fully “characteristic of the outlook and spirit of the Vienna ruling circles” at the end of the seventeenth century, and as such provides a reliable guide to imperial policy. Hungarian historians have turned to the Einrichtungswerk as a source from which to divine the Habsburgs' intentions toward Hungary—debating whether its proposed measures refl ect a genuine “anti-Magyar” spirit or only an antipathy toward the Hungarian nobles. It is carefully regarded as reflecting a genuine and largely missed opportunity for change, full of meaning for the future development of the kingdom.

This is an essay about the cultural, political, and geographical location of Austrian intellectual history and the special place of Bohemia and Moravia in that history. A great deal has been written about the multinational and supranational quality of Austrian culture and intellectual life. In practice, however, the Austria referred to in such arguments is usually the Habsburg monarchy of the two generations before World War I. Austrian intellectual history has generally been either strongly centered in Vienna or oriented to a very broad concept of Austria that includes the monarchy as a whole in the late nineteenth century. What is lost between the metropolis and the vast monarchy of many peoples is the centuries-long relationship between Austrian and Bohemia that was the basis for Austrian intellectual life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I argue here that we should think of Bohemia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as part of Austrian intellectual history in a way that other regions and historic lands in the Habsburg monarchy were not.

On 8 March 1849, Upper Austria's first liberal governor, Alois Fischer, stood on the balcony of the Rathaus in Linz's market square and proclaimed the closing of the democratically elected Austrian Reichstag in Kremsier. The newly crowned emperor, Francis Joseph, had written in the proclamation that Fischer now read to the crowd that the Reichstag delegates took too long in their deliberations, wasting time on “dangerous theoretical discussions.” Their labors had become redundant, and the emperor would decree his own constitution. After reciting the imperial proclamation, Fischer retired to the side and let his assistant read out the new constitution. Named after its principal architect, Minister of the Interior Franz Stadion, the new “Stadion” constitution was mildly liberal, although, unlike its unfinished predecessor, it was wholly unambiguous when it came to the monarch: his powers were immense and—the document made sure to point out—derived from God, not from the people. In practice, the constitution was mostly ignored. Fittingly perhaps, those assembled in front of the Rathaus that day could barely make out what was being said. As one participant described the scene, the wind was so strong “that our neighbors disappeared in the dust.” The return of absolutist government thus came to Linz unintelligibly, wrapped in a dense cloud of dust.

Fin-de-siècle Vienna continues to supply historians and the general public alike with a paradigm of the modernist subversion of rationality. From the birth of the unconscious, to the artistic expression of feral sexuality, to the surge of populist politics, Vienna 1900 stands as the turning point when a nineteenth-century ideal of rationality gave way to a twentieth-century fascination with subjectivity. In fact, we know little as yet about what rationality really meant to those to whom we attribute its undoing. Allan Janik writes that today the “‘big’ questions about Viennese culture” center on “just how ‘rational’ developments there have been,” and to answer these questions, Janik argues, we need research on the history of natural science in Austria. Indeed, as Steven Beller notes, the topic of science has been “strangely absent” from the animated discussions of fin-de-siècle Vienna over the past three decades.

In March 1983, germany annexed the Republic of Austria, incorporating it into the Greater German Reich. Thereafter, about 1.2 million Austrians eligible for military service were draft ed into the German armed forces: the Wehrmacht. Although we know where largely Austrian contingents fought in World War II, little is known about what, if anything, set them apart from their Reich German comrades. Nor do we know much about their attitudes, their “mindset,” or their subjective experience of military service and war.1 Because we know so little about the attitudes of Austrian soldiers in the Wehrmacht, and since army service—in contrast to membership in the SS or NSDAP—was largely mandatory, it is still possible to argue that Austrians were unwilling soldiers, sacrificed in a war that was not theirs, and that discrimination by foreign rulers fostered an Austrian national consciousness.

In the first issue of Settlement (Osidlování), the weekly paper of the Czechoslovak Settlement Office, an article entitled, “So That It Is Not Forgotten,” explained the reasons for the Czech hatred of Germans: “[I]t is hatred as the reaction for the most ruthless attack which was undertaken by Germans against humanity and not least against us.” After invoking the authority of Jan Hus, the fifteenth-century religious reformer and longtime Czech national icon, the author concluded: “It is the spontaneous wish of the entire nation that we completely get rid of the Germans with final certainty, even at the price of clear material loss. It is up to us to prove that all Germans are replaceable, and that we not only have the ability, but especially enough good will and self-sacrifice to prove this in deed.” This column became a regular series that provided different examples of Germans betraying the Czech nation and thereby helped to justify the need to expel them from the country. Coming as it did in the spring of 1946, when the pace of the Allied-sponsored “population transfer” began to accelerate, the column seems somewhat out of place. Hundreds of thousands of Sudeten Germans had previously been expelled in 1945; with current Allied support there was no apparent need to justify the policy further. Yet the attempts to rekindle the atmosphere of hatred spawned by the war came at a time when some Czechs sought to retain Sudeten Germans for labor needs, especially in the borderland regions where the vast majority of these German speakers lived and worked. The “spontaneous wish of the nation” to expel every last German needed some prodding.

In January 1954, the French embassy in Vienna reported to Paris a conversation between Chancellor Julius Raab and a politician from western Austria concerning the State Treaty. Raab is reported to have said: “I'll swallow everything.”—“Ich fresse alles.”

Two questions arise immediately. First: Why was Raab ready to “swallow everything” in order to get the State Treaty? Second: What was this “everything” that Raab was ready to swallow?

To the fi rst question. Th e principal aim of Austria's eff orts to obtain the State Treaty was the termination of four-power control and the withdrawal of the occupation troops from Austria— especially, it needs to be stressed, the withdrawal of Soviet forces. We are used to referring to the “allied” occupation of Austria, yet the “Allies” of World War II had not been allies for some time, at least since 1947–48, and certainly not in 1954 or 1955—even if they cooperated correctly in the “Allied Council.” In terms of military strategy, I deem it useful to speak of the “East-West occupation” of Austria because, de facto, the occupation forces had become part of the two military power agglomerations that had come into being in the course of the Cold War. A secret instruction from the British Foreign Office in 1951 noted that, in peace time, the forces of the Western allies in Austria were not under NATO command; in case of war, however, they would be part of the NATO forces. Since military planning in times of peace obviously prepares for the case of war, it is easy to see that the independence from NATO of the Western occupation forces in Austria has to be taken with a grain of salt.