The Afterlife of Austria-Hungary: The Image of the Habsburg Monarchy in Interwar Europe

Chapter One: Austria-Hungary in Historiography

24 AusTriA-hungAry in hisToriogrAPhy discourse in the 1920s and 1930s. This is to say that history writing develops as a dialogue with its own past as much it does as with the changing world. Before we begin the analysis of the interwar histories of AustriaHungary , it is necessary to realize two things. First, the main concern of these histories was the decline and fall of the monarchy. Shortly after 1918 no history of Austria-Hungary could avoid asking the question of the causes of this process. The monarchy had been one of the main European powers for the previous four hundred years, and even though its internal problems and weaknesses were well-known before 1914, scarcely anyone expected its total breakdown in such a short time. Historical writing at that time was still dominated by political issues, and historians could hardly imagine a more intriguing topic than the rise and decline of empires. The history of Austria-Hungary provided them with a fresh, clear-cut example of such a process. They had to rush before others would provide the public with their interpretations and explanations of what had just happened. Only one thing seemed certain: the monarchy fell because of the dissatisfaction of its nationalities . Hence, the national question dominated interwar debates regarding Austria-Hungary. As noted in the introduction, I do not actually deal with historians of the successor states of the monarchy who considered its dissolution a fortunate episode in the histories of their respective countries. My motivation is not to deny the validity of such an approach. Obviously, for the authors whose main focus was the history of the nations “enslaved ” by the Habsburgs, it made perfect sense: the monarchy was indeed an obstacle on their respective nations’ road to independence and sovereignty, and thus it is more than natural that all they had to say about its dissolution was that it was good that it had finally happened. Therefore, I concentrate on authors for whom the history of the monarchy constituted an intellectual problem. Some of them considered it a problem because they sympathized with Austria-Hungary. They combined intellectual curiosity with emotional engagement by inquiring what had gone wrong in Austria-Hungary, and who was to blame for it. Some of them had actually been politically active before 1918, and they were personally interested in proving that they had been always right in their opinions and their choices. Obviously, their declared scholarly objectivity did not remain intact as a result of such an engagement. AusTriA-hungAry in hisToriogrAPhy 25 Some of them were liberals, who had advocated reforms that would have changed the dual monarchy into a multinational federation. Some of them had been members of a party, or an informal group around the archduke Franz Ferdinand when he had been the heir to the throne and raised many hopes for a new opening in Austro-Hungarian politics . The most famous project for a reorganization of the monarchy along the new lines created under the umbrella of the archduke was authored by a Romanian, Aurel Popovici, who named it “The United States of Great Austria.” Popovici postulated breaking up the AustroHungarian dualism and dividing the monarchy into a federation of cantons according to ethnic borders. The Social Democrats, the only pan-Austrian and the greatest opposition party in the monarchy, advocated a different solution. They assumed that animosities between nationalities could not be solved by drawing new frontiers, because the ethnographic map of the monarchy was a patchwork, and no such settlement would satisfy all—it would simply produce new malcontents and new oppressors. Thus, they proposed that members of the respective nations associate in communities resembling religious communities , organizing their own schools, clubs, and other institutions. Obviously, after 1918 their assumption that nations could give up their desire for their own territory and live peacefully under a supranational (but still linguistically German and politically Habsburg) administration seemed hopelessly naïve. On the other hand, they were right: the peace settlement of 1919 indeed produced new malcontents and oppressors in numbers no less than the pre-1918 order. Finally, there were conservatives, and some German nationalists, who claimed that if the main cause of the monarchy’s problems was the dissatisfied nationalities , it was not because these nationalities had been oppressed but because they had been granted too many liberties and treated with too much respect and tolerance. The Habsburgs’ gravest sin...