In his great 1848 historical drama, Ein Bruderzwist im Hause Habsburg, the Austrian playwright Franz Grillparzer has Emperor Matthias utter the words that have often been applied to understanding the whole history of the Habsburg monarchy:

Das ist der Fluch von unserm edeln Haus:
Auf halben Wegen und zu halber Tat
Mit halben Mitteln zauderhaft zu streben.
[That is the curse of our noble house:
Striving hesitatingly on half ways
to half action with half means.]

Historians and political scientists have already begun to explore different aspects of modern Austria's political culture. But as Helmut Konrad has reminded us, this relatively new concept is loosely defined; he considers “political culture” to mean “the values held by individuals, groups, and society as a whole that affect the behavior of peoplewithin and in relation to the political system of a country.” Lucian Pye stresses the behavioral approach in political analysis to make “more explicit and systematic” our understanding of “such long-standingconcepts as political ideology, national ethos and spirit, national political psychology, and the fundamental values of a people.”

Beginning with the profound geopolitical changes created by the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and the creation of the Czechoslovak and Yugoslav states, this article examines how medical knowledge about maritime climate and sea-based therapies was mobilized in Czech popular touristic writing about Yugoslavia's Adriatic coast in the 1920s. The analysis of archival documents as well as non-specialist medical publications of Czech or Prague-trained doctors show that Czech tourists and curists (travelers in search of health treatments) were offered a freeform, all-encompassing therapeutic environmental approach. Inspired by Neo-Hippocratic principles, doctors stressed the importance of factors such as salt water, clean air, temperature variation, sunshine, flora, and modern facilities for disease prevention or the restoration of one's health. These doctors’ relative success in promoting the therapeutic virtues of the Adriatic Sea is explained in large part, this article argues, by a broad nexus of intertwined interests (such as the growth of tourism, concerns about public health, and the influence of Neo-Slavism) embedded in the project of transforming the Adriatic Sea into a therapeutic site.

LikeRobert A. Kann, I too am a historian by profession. Despite the close links between their subject and disciplines such as sociology land political science, historians on the whole avoid attempting to analyze contemporary politics. This lecture will therefore concentrate on the first twenty-five years of the Second Republic. Yet I am well aware that in the Kreisky era (notably as a result of the reforms introduced by Hertha Firnberg and Christian Broda) Austria's progress toward Western Europe took on a new character, and the country underwent what was, for the time being at least, its final major modernization. But it was an analysis of the wholly different steps taken toward the West between 1945 and 1970 that laid the foundation on which the single-party Social Democratic (SPÖ) government of the 1970s was able to build. It therefore seems legitimate to focus upon that first half of the history of the Second Republic, and to see the turning point marked by the student movement of 1968 and the election results of 1970 as a natural cutoff point for this discussion. Broadly speaking, the main concerns of the new state in its first two and a half decades were to provide a framework of order for the very disparate elements that it had inherited and to deal with the immense problems now confronting it. NaCenter for Austrian Studiestional Socialism, by its policies and the effects of all-out war, had left behind a country in ruins in every sense—not only materially through the destruction of housing, infrastructure, and industrial plant, but also intellectually and culturally. Most of the leading figures in Austria's cultural and intellectual life had been driven into exile or murdered.

The article analyzes reactions to the outbreak of World War I in the Habsburg Crownland of Salzburg. Based on a detailed examination of local sources, such as diaries, memoirs, church and gendarmerie chronicles, regional newspapers, and administrative records, the study sheds light on the complexity of responses and emotions elicited during the summer of 1914. Engaging with recent historiography on the question of “war enthusiasm” and the “August experience,” the ensuing analysis allows for profound insights into how the local population reacted to the news of the Sarajevo assassinations, Austria-Hungary's ultimatum to Serbia, and the subsequent declaration of war, mobilization, and the first weeks of the conflict. The article highlights the role of the press, governmental policies, and repression as key factors in creating an agitated atmosphere to which people responded in different ways, depending on age, class, gender, and the urban–rural divide. At times, frenzied patriotic mobilization occurred alongside not only a widespread acceptance of the obligation to do one's duty, but also—and equally—great uncertainty and anxiety. This highlights the complexities of public reactions in the summer of 1914, thereby challenging from a regional historical perspective the notion of an “enthusiastic” welcoming of the war.

The historian of the seventeenth century who bewails the absence of a creditable biography of Louis XIV or of William III underlines a significant development of historical writing in the twentieth century. Overpowered by those who deny that biography can be history and convinced that the masses have never secured their due share of attention in early modern times, the scholar uneasily plots an investigation of underground discontent in the gilds of Colbert's day or resolutely pens an essay that destroys once and for all the idea that the workers of France admired Napoleon. Meanwhile, in classes which race from Petrarch to Waterloo, the scholar turned teacher admits that there actually were an age of absolutism and an age of enlightened despotism, for the royal touch is inescapable.

This article examines Austrian perceptions of the people and landscape of Bosnia-Herzegovina from 1878 to 1908. It traces Austrians’ fantasies about and encounters with Bosnian Muslims, whom they often categorized as “Turks.” Following the Congress of Berlin, Austrians claimed to be doing the civilizing work of “Europe” in Bosnia. The article investigates the meanings of border and borderlands between the Habsburg Empire and Ottoman Bosnia, focusing in particular on crossings of the Sava River. Drawing on the writings of soldiers, administrators, journalists and travel writers, the essay considers a number of mental maps, imagined geographies of what Habsburg authors thought they knew about the land and people they occupied. It contributes to a growing scholarship on the Habsburg-Ottoman borderlands.

In consolidating his hold over the Austrian, Hungarian, and Bohemian territories which he acquired between 1521 and 1526, Ferdinand I (1521–1564) enjoyed one especially notable success: the suppression in 1547 of a Bohemian uprising during Emperor Charles V's (1519–1556) campaign against the Protestant Schmalkaldic League in Germany. Relying on the promise of the Schmalkaldian leader Elector John Frederick of Saxony to protect them, the Bohemian estates formed a league in 1547 which challenged, among other things, Ferdinand's rights to summon the diet, to have his son crowned during his lifetime, and to oversee the administration of his treasury.

Hungary has a long, rich history of wine production. Historians have emphasized wine's importance to the development of both the Hungarian economy and Hungarian nationalism. This article ties together these historiographical threads through a case study of a small village in one of Hungary's most famous wine regions. Tracing the village's history from the 1860s to World War I, the article makes three main claims. First, it demonstrates that from the start, this remote village belonged to wider networks of trade and exchange that stretched across the surrounding region, state, and continent. Second, it shows that even as Magyar elites celebrated the folk culture and peasant smallholders of this region, they also cheered the introduction of what they saw as scientific, rational agriculture. This leads to the last argument: wine achieved its place in the pantheon of Hungarian culture at a moment when the local communities that had grown up around its production and stirred the national imagination were undergoing dramatic and irreversible change.