In few Austrians were preoccupations with post-empire culture and politics stronger than in Hans Eibl, Richard von Kralik's most enthusiastic disciple. Like may young Austrians who had wintnessed the crumbling of the Habsburg empire, Eibl longed for vanished glories, for an all-encompassing Germanic community, and for a leader who combined regenerative religious qualities with political greatness. Though Eibl himself tried to fill these needs with a synthesis of religion and politics, he fell victim to his own endeavors. Given his personality and professional specialization, as well as him mentors, plus the instability of the First Republic, it perhaps could not have been otherwise.

In a memorandum presented to the Hungarian-Czechoslovak Boundary Commission on 23 February 1922 by the inhabitants of the southern Slovak town of Viškovce (Hungarian: Ipolyvisk), the twenty-five signatories requested “humbly for consideration and well-meaning settlement of the following concern.” The municipality was bordered on three sides by the Ipeľ (Hungarian: Ipoly) River, but had been cut off from the only usable road by the border, making communication extremely difficult. In winter and at high water in the spring and autumn, the place was “completely cut off from the outside world.” For three years, they had observed how provisional boundaries were continuously redrawn, and bore the brunt of these changes. The inhabitants said that all alternative routes had become inaccessible during that time and the center of Šahy (Hungarian: Ipolyság), which was just ten kilometers away, had become extremely difficult to reach even in urgent cases. Thus, they requested that the only existing road “be opened to us as quickly as possible and our traffic given back to us.”

This article deals with an early modern court historian's judgments concerning the political competence and incompetence of his contemporaries. Although the phrase “political competence” may seem anachronistic when referring to the second half of the seventeenth century, hardly any historian today would deny that, at least since the late medieval period, European intellectuals belonging to political elites had developed their own understanding of what constitutes effective statesmanship. That understanding was not always normative, or based on exempla of the classical past—it could be practical and expressed through evaluations of current events. In the middle of the seventeenth century, the future Habsburg court historian Galeazzo Gualdo Priorato wrote about Oliver Cromwell: “And let it be noted from his extraordinary example, that not the nobility of birth, nor riches . . . qualify one for high office, as it usually solely happens, but that it is the opportunity that . . . wakes up the spirits, and sharpens the minds.” This article will deal with Priorato's judgments of political competence (and incompetence) in the works that he wrote while in the service of the Austrian Habsburgs.

Thereis something in a historian that loves wreckage. I am confident that scientists will one day identify a gene on our chromosomes that predisposes us to destruction. As a young graduate student, I listened in rapt attention as Lawrence Stone mesmerized our seminar describing the one opportunity he had in wartime to “sack a house.” Most of us, however, sublimate these illicit desires, and the urge to destroy only becomes evident in our scholarship. Following Gibbon and Huizinga, we relish the study of decay and decline. Humor aside, R. J. W. Evans was well aware of this instinct as he began The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy with a simple but profound observation, “Many historians, in a dozen languages, have sought to explain why the Habsburg Monarchy declined and fell; none has ever seriously investigated the causes of its rise.”

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.

In 1848–49 Austria could have introduced reforms which conceivably might have insured her continued existence for many generations and possibly might have finally made a true state out of the Habsburg domains. … [In] the course of the two [subsequent] generations until 1918 there never appeared an equally promising opportunity for the empire to carry out reform without risking its disintegration. This is not to say that Austria should not have taken this risk, which was smaller at the time of the compromise in 1867 than it was in 1905 and smaller in 1905 at the height of the Hungarian crisis than it was in 1917, when Engels' ominous prediction finally came true that with the victory of the Russian Revolution Austria would disintegrate.

Scenes of deep national division, competition, and conflict dominate 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).

The purpose of this article is to clarify the relative roles of Austria and Prussia during the Wars of Liberation of 1813 and 1814. It uses the very latest research concerning the military strategy adopted and emphasizes the input of Radetzky, using his handwritten account of the campaign, a document previously ignored by historians, despite the general's position as chief of staff of the allied coalition. The fact is that Anglo-American historians have failed to investigate the politics of the military alliance of 1813–1814 that constituted the Fourth Coalition. Myself apart, the only historian to examine that alliance with any regard to the Austrian viewpoint has been Gordon A. Craig in a brief but excellent analysis published as long ago as 1966. German historians have done little better. They simply neglect the Austrian archives.

Austrian historians owe Richard Rudolph, Nachum Gross, and David Good a great intellectual debt for their repeated attempts to apply quantitative methods to the study of intricate economic developments in the last century of the Habsburg monarchy. In his present paper, Rudolph gives us a résumé of the results thus far attained by the trio of scholars and broadens the scope of his own research somewhat by extending the period of investigation to include what Franklin Mendels has called the phase of “proto-industrialization.”

Even before the war in Europe ended formally on 8 May 1945, there could be no serious misconceptions—either among defeated and liberated peoples or among the victorious Allied powers—as to how complex the challenges of reconstructing physical infrastructure and social networks would be.1 This was particularly true in urban areas within what had been Germany's 1938 borders, where the impact of air raids had reduced many areas to rubble and had damaged the rail and road connections that supplied foodstuffs and other necessities. In Berlin and other cities, images of people clearing debris from lunar landscapes dominated the popular imagination in the late 1940s and over the following decades. Indeed, when images of immediate postwar reconstruction have been invoked, it would appear as if there existed a heroic, unbroken connection between the initiative of these largely female volunteers (Trümmerfrauen) and the economic miracle associated overwhelmingly with largely male labor in West Germany a decade later. If a remarkable preparedness to come to terms with the exigencies of the present manifested itself during the initial postwar months, historians have subsequently offered insights into how problematic a consistent and thorough confrontation with the Nazi past proved to be during the later 1940s and beyond.