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1 INTRODUCTION Biographies of the Austrian State Problem “[The book about Austria] will become a work that . . . describes and explains the origins and development of ‘the Austrian problem’ and how the rulers with the assistance of the peoples turned it into ‘the Austrian chaos.’ . . . If I succeed in properly explaining the origins, character, and effects of this chaos, then surely it will be easy to demonstrate how we can overcome it and again forge a stable and durable order.”1 Josef Redlich (1915) Josef Redlich, one of the main personalities of this book, spent a large part of his life trying to understand what he variably called “the Austrian problem,” or “the Austrian problem of the state and empire.” When writing the letter from which the above quotation is taken, a few months after the outbreak of World War I, Redlich still felt confident that he would also participate in the political work of finding and realizing a solution to this problem. In 1906, he had taken the step from the academic study of it (he was a noted expert in constitutional and administrative law) to the political sphere in which it existed. During the following years, Redlich had engaged politically with this problem, an engagement that peaked in his leading-role activities in the Imperial Commission for Administrative Reform of the Austrian state in 1911–1914. During the war years his participation remained strong, but it also went through many changes resulting from the difficulties he suffered as a result of the upheavals of the war. During this time he also worked intensely on the book he mentions in the above quotation. However, when the first volume of this grand attempt at laying bare the foundations of the Austrian problem was published in 1920, Redlich noted in the foreword that because of the dissolution of the Habsburg empire in 1918, the purpose of his work had changed decisively and was now one of pure historical scholarship.2 One might argue, however, that despite this change, the 2 ◆ INTRODUCTION work has retained a special quality as a result of its origins as a work aiming to find the solution to a problem that was strongly present in the life of its author. In its subject, the present book is closely related to this main scholarly work of Josef Redlich. What I refer to as the Austrian state problem has two main aspects. First, it concerns the problems of institutional adaptation that the multinational imperial Austrian state experienced during the accelerating modernization process of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Especially important here are the political effects of this process, which can be defined broadly as the twin tendencies of the democratization and nationalization of society. Inherent to the modernization process, together they put severe stress on the political institutions of the old Austrian Obrigkeitsstaat. Under the heading of the “nationality problem,” this problem has received a great deal of attention in historical scholarship.3 However, interest has mainly been centered on nationalism and the political movements leading to the erection of nation-states on the ruins of the empire in 1918, and less on the problem of the multinational state as such.4 As a search for the origins of the present, this is also completely understandable because of the dominant role of the sovereign nation-state in Europe during the twentieth century. At the beginning of the twenty- first century, however, the time might have come for a more unmediated interest in the multinational state as such, a cognitive interest that is also more directly akin to that of Josef Redlich’s. I find that the second aspect of the Austrian state problem as defined here is its “softer” side, the side pertaining to questions of culture, mentality, and identity. Because I approach the Austrian state problem as it was addressed at the center of the empire, in the German-speaking elite culture centered on Vienna, this mainly becomes a problem of imperial mentality and of Austrian culture and identity. These two different aspects of the Austrian state problem will be introduced in the two main sections that follow this introduction. The method of the present investigation into the problem is biographical. It departs from the above suggested special quality of Josef Redlich’s strong personal engagement with the Austrian problem. As I will demonstrate, all the six individuals represented in this book approached the Austrian problem as a problem of...

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