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187 PART THREE Josef Redlich (Karl Renner) ◆ The Problem of the Austrian People(s) ◆ Already as a ten- or twelve-year-old boy, I had thoroughly and often studied the Viennese revolution and the struggles of 1848 in a multivolume work at my parents’ home. However, unable to properly understand why, I instinctively felt myself to be on the side of government and the dynasty. . . . Strangely, the story of the struggle of the Austrian army in Hungary and Italy had made me feel very patriotic, and in my boyhood I dreamed that I would once collect an army and defend Austria. . . .1 In Josef Redlich’s voluminous writing on the Austrian imperial state and its history, his personal identification with the destiny of this state constitutes a strong undercurrent . This is nowhere more evident than in the foreword to those never-finished memoirs that Redlich began writing in his new home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the fall of 1928, shortly after having concluded the last of a series of historical works on Imperial Austria, a preoccupation of his that stretched back to the last years before World War I. In this foreword, Redlich recounts how he strongly felt that something was lacking in these attempts of his to come to grips with the destiny of his fatherland and Heimat. The idea had slowly matured that the best vessel for reaching this goal was the story of his own life-career: It became increasingly clear to me that to describe old Austria—its peoples and lands—I could find no better vantage point than my own life, which was unthinkable without the particularities of the old empire and the life of its population. So intimately connected with Austria was my personal destiny and development.2 188 ◆ PART THREE: REDLICH RENNER The fragment of Redlich’s memoirs as such are quite interesting even though they are incomplete—he finished only the parts on his childhood and school years—and they do not at all address his scholarly or his political career, the two media he used to channel his engagement for Austria.3 The fragment nevertheless contains keys for understanding crucial aspects of Redlich’s development. For one thing, his personal close identification with the destiny of the imperial state emerges clearly. Furthermore, Redlich’s memory of being intensely interested in the struggle for popular and national sovereignty in 1848 signals his lifelong political and scholarly engagement in the problem of the democratization of the “multinational empire.” However, Redlich here in a very short space also signals his ambivalent relationship to the imperial Austrian state when he recounts his surprise over how he instinctively took the side of the government and dynasty in the struggles of 1848–49. Normally, Redlich is very closely identified with an idealizing view of the “liberal revolution of 1848.” But the contradiction here is only apparent. It is mainly because the image of Redlich has been strongly shaped by his public and controversial engagement in 1917–18 for peace and national democratic reform of the imperial state. However, this engagement came only at the end of a long, winding political development, which in its entirety contains an eminently interesting story for the investigation of the Austrian state problem. Redlich’s project was not simply a struggle for democratization; it was also a struggle for the preservation of the imperial Austrian state, which Redlich identified himself with deeply. Throughout his life, Redlich circled around the problem of how that Austrian imperial state founded by Maria Theresia in the mid-eighteenth century should develop to cope with the transition into modernity: how could a balance be struck between, on the one hand, the need for unity in such a disparate agglomeration of lands and peoples as there was in Austria and, on the other hand, the need for popular sovereignty and local autonomy to modernize this state so that it could face up to the requirements of a new age. Because Redlich in 1928 recalled how he in his youth had identified with the carriers of the historical unity of this imperial state in part reflects that in the end, the struggle for popular sovereignty and political autonomy did break up that multinational state that Redlich merely wanted to modernize. However, for most of his political career the problem rather seemed the opposite, i.e., the problem of devolving and modernizing an imperial state apparatus that threatened to suffocate the development of...

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