Teaching the Empire: Education and State Loyalty in Late Habsburg Austria by Scott O. Moore (review)

If in the first half of the twentieth century Habsburg scholars doomed the monarchy as a relic having outlived its time, incapable of reform and too fossilized to deal with the multiple nationalisms of its various people, historians have since reinterpreted the Empire's disintegration. Rather than blaming it on long-standing internal causes, more recently historians like John Deak have shifted focus to wartime developments in Austria that resulted in political control being vested in the military elites, eager to erase constitutionalism and punitively distrustful of ethnic minorities.

Scott Moore's book Teaching the Empire: Education and State Loyalty in Late Habsburg Austria, one of several English-language studies timed around the centenary of the Empire's dissolution, also calls for the rehabilitation of Austria-Hungary. His volume makes a valuable contribution to the ongoing discussions whether the monarchy produced solutions that would position the state to withstand the incendiary questions of its era. To contest the notion that the Habsburg administration did not adequately respond to the challenge of nationalisms, Moore reviews the pivotal decades between 1867 and 1914, examining the state-sponsored civic education in elementary and secondary schools of the Empire's Cisleithanian half. As Moore convincingly shows, the Austrian administration assembled a rigorously curated political narrative to disseminate Austria-Hungary's historic two-pronged mission as defender of Christian civilization from the East and guardian of West European order, as well as to advertise the monarchy as a family of nations. Moore's book presents us a public education system impressively supported, even from a contemporary perspective: well-trained teachers taught solid curricula grounded in educational psychology and served as resident intellectuals in their communities; schools were required to have large windows and gardens; the Ministry of Religion and Culture funded field trips and school hikes.

The Ministry controlled and coordinated representations of the Empire's past and present through the school curriculum as well as through official celebrations, museum commemorations, and monument design, assuring political and pedagogical alignment between classroom education and public events (the Kronprinzenwerk would have been a welcome addition to Moore's study). A crucial strategy in building patriotism was to encourage a gradual evolution: younger pupils were taught to love their regional/ethnic Heimat, developing a broader self-identification as Austrians in higher grades. By fostering what Moore terms a "layered identity," the monarchy sought to integrate potentially divisive regional loyalties into a supranational patriotism. Relying on sources not considered before in discussions of the Empire's political strategy, such as textbooks, school inspection reports, and educational journals, Moore shows that any extant assumptions of the ineffectuality of Austria's civic education should be put to rest: The administration met the challenge of nationalism through coordinated efforts to mold a cohesive supranational identity.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, civics assumed a vital role in school curricula in Europe and in the United States. In need of ideas that could bind together all citizens, history lessons taught about common myths and heroes. To accommodate liberal demands, textbooks explained how the state operates and taught the rights and obligations of citizens. Moore examines the design and implementation of civic education, the selection of state heroes to model patriotism for all Austrians, and the historical narratives presented in lessons and commemorations. The last chapter traces a conflict between the state and teachers, inevitable with the emergence of civil society: the Ministry regarded school personnel as bureaucrats bound to political neutrality; in contrast, teachers understood themselves as citizens with political rights, often turning into vocal leaders in their ethnic communities. The Ministry's prohibition on political activity, which extended to all organizations, not just nationalists, could play a role in hiring or transfer decisions as teacher scrutiny intensified during the dualist period.

Moore's scope has its limits: his research considers only Germanlanguage schools, and the exclusively German-language primary sources generally...