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xi Foreword This book by the Swedish historian Fredrik Lindström makes an important contribution to a growing body of scholarship which is reassessing elite and popular thinking about the Habsburg state during the last decades before 1918. The recurring political crises in various provincial diets, in the Austrian and Hungarian parliaments, and in the ministerial councils deeply impressed observers at the time, both at home and abroad. Since the end of World War I, those political crises have also captured the attention of scholars interested in explaining the collapse of the monarchy. In the successor states of the monarchy and beyond, historians focused on the rising national loyalties during the late nineteenth century and the apparently irresolvable conflicts both among the nationalities and between them and the state, all of which was fuelled and exacerbated by growing democratizing pressures. In this oft-repeated narrative, the rigid dualist state structure, which was devised in the 1860s but based on old traditions of imperial prerogative and bureaucratic authority, could satisfy neither nationalist aspirations for self-government nor the growing demands for democratization. Unable to resolve the domestic political conflicts and fearing the growing nationalist agitation on both sides of the southeastern borders, the emperor and his chief officials responded to the international crisis of July 1914 with the conviction that they had to defend militarily the monarchy’s continued status as a Great Power as an indispensable part of the Habsburg state’s raison d’être. In conventional accounts, the combination of seemingly insoluble domestic and foreign dilemmas persuaded the monarchy’s leadership to take the enormous risk of entering into a major war and eventually to pay the ultimate price with the exhaustion of the state’s military, material, and moral resources and the loss of popular loyalty after four years of brutal warfare. Yet despite the manifold internal conflicts and external threats which had existed for years before 1914, it still took a prolonged war and significant changes of attitudes during those four years among the population , domestic elites, and foreign statesmen to seal the state’s doom. Research from the last twenty-five years points to the continuing ability of most political parties and interest groups in the Austrian and Hungarian halves of the monarchy before 1914 to work within the existing state institutions and to employ intricate modes of ostentatious protests, patient negotiation, and complex compromises, both major and minor. This scholarship also shows that, even after 1900, the Habsburg state, its laws, and the emperor commanded considerable loyalty among both the general population and a wide spectrum of political elites, despite the many unresolved demands and grievances. Historians today are engaged in vigorous debate and inquiry about how attitudes and loyalties to the Habsburg state were actually changing during the last decades before 1918; how and to what extent the general population and political and intellectual elites identified with the Austrian, Hungarian, or joint Habsburg state; and what they hoped or expected the character of the state to be in the future. We have known for decades that few people in the monarchy had given up on the state before 1914, but just what notions people actually had about their relationship with the monarchy and about its future has been little studied until recently. In the present book Fredrik Lindström offers intellectual and political biographies of three pairs of prominent Austrian German figures: the ministerial official and prime minister Ernest von Koerber, paired with the historian Heinrich Friedjung ; the poet and playwright Hugo von Hofmannsthal, paired with his friend, the poet and diplomat Leopold von Andrian; and the law professor, parliamentarian, and finance minister Josef Redlich, paired with the political theorist, parliamentary librarian, and socialist party leader Karl Renner. Lindström focuses on these six figures ’ critiques of the existing Austrian state structure and their desires to change its character and identity, its official and popular political cultures, and the state’s modalities for representing the needs, desires, and cultures of its peoples. In one form or another, all of these men engaged with the political or legal issues of the Austrian state problem, as it was understood in their time; and each tried in his own way to shape the state and how the citizenry could relate to it. At the same time, all of them also thought deeply about the larger issues of Austrian culture and identity and what it should mean to be...

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