Scholarly Books
Austrian and Habsburg Studies
Since 1996, the Center has published a series of cutting edge monographs and volumes of selected papers from its international, multidisciplinary conferences in the series Austrian and Habsburg Studies. Below is a list of recent volumes in the series. All volumes are available as ebooks. Visit Berghahn Books for a complete listing.
Imagining Bosnian Muslims in Central Europe: Representations, Transfers & Exchanges
Austrian and Hasburg Studies, vol. 32
Edited by František Šístek
As a Slavic-speaking religious and ethnic “Other” living just a stone’s throw from the symbolic heart of the continent, the Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina have long occupied a liminal space in the European imagination. To a significant degree, the wider representations and perceptions of this population can be traced to the reports of Central European—and especially Habsburg—diplomats, scholars, journalists, tourists, and other observers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This volume assembles contributions from historians, anthropologists, political scientists, and literary scholars to examine the political, social, and discursive dimensions of Bosnian Muslims’ encounters with the West since the nineteenth century.
More than Mere Spectacle: Coronations and Inaugurations in the Hasburg Monarchy during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Austrian and Hasburg Studies, vol. 31
Edited by Klass Van Gelder, Afterword by Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly
Across the medieval and early modern eras, new rulers were celebrated with increasingly elaborate coronations and inaugurations that symbolically conferred legitimacy and political power upon them. Many historians have considered rituals like these as irrelevant to understanding modern governance—an idea that this volume challenges through illuminating case studies focused on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Habsburg lands. Taking the formal elasticity of these events as the key to their lasting relevance, the contributors explore important questions around their political, legal, social, and cultural significance and their curious persistence as a historical phenomenon over time.
Estates & Constitutions: The Parliament in Eighteenth-Century Hungary
Austrian & Hasburg Studies, vol. 30
István M. Szijártó, Translated from the Hungarian by David Robert Evans
Across eighteenth-century Europe, political power resided overwhelmingly with absolute monarchs, with notable exceptions including the much-studied British Parliament as well as the frequently overlooked Hungarian Diet, which placed serious constraints on royal power and broadened opportunities for political participation. Estates and Constitution provides a rich account of Hungarian politics during this period, restoring the Diet to its rightful place as one of the era’s major innovations in government. István M. Szijártó traces the religious, economic, and partisan forces that shaped the Diet, putting its historical significance in international perspective.
New York, Berghahn Books, 2020, 362 pp., ISBN: 978-1-78920-879-5, $155.
Antisemitism in Galicia: Agitation, Politics, and Violence against Jews in the Late Habsburg Monarchy
Austrian and Habsburg Studies, vol. 29
Tim Buchen, Translated from the German by Charlotte Hughes-Kreutzmüller
In the last third of the nineteenth century, the discourse on the “Jewish question” in the Habsburg crownlands of Galicia changed fundamentally, as clerical and populist politicians emerged to denounce the Jewish assimilation and citizenship. This pioneering study investigates the interaction of agitation, violence, and politics against Jews on the periphery of the Danube monarchy. In its comprehensive analysis of the functions and limitations of propaganda, rumors, and mass media, it shows just how significant antisemitism was to the politics of coexistence among Christians and Jews on the eve of the Great War.
New York: Berghahn Books, 2020, 326 pp., ISBN: 978-1-78920-770-5, $140.
Revisiting Austria: Tourism, Space, and National Identity, 1945 to the Present
Austrian and Hasburg Studies, vol. 28
Gundolf Graml
Following the transformations and conflicts of the first half of the twentieth century, Austria’s emergence as an independent democracy heralded a new era of stability and prosperity for the nation. Among the new developments was mass tourism to the nation’s cities, spa towns, and wilderness areas, a phenomenon that would prove immensely influential on the development of a postwar identity. Revisiting Austria incorporates films, marketing materials, literature, and first-person accounts to explore the ways in which tourism has shaped both international and domestic perceptions of Austrian identity even as it has failed to confront the nation’s often violent and troubled history.
New York: Berghahn Books, 2020, 292 pp., ISBN: 978-1-78920-448-3, $149.
Empty Signs, Historical Imaginaries: The Entangled Nationalization of Names and Naming in a Late Hasburg Borderland
Austrian and Hasburg Studies, vol. 27
Ágoston Berecz
Set in a multiethnic region of the nineteenth-century Habsburg Empire, this thoroughly interdisciplinary study maps out how the competing Romanian, Hungarian and German nationalization projects dealt with proper names. With particular attention to their function as symbols of national histories, Berecz makes a case for names as ideal guides for understanding historical imaginaries and how they operate socially. In tracing the changing fortunes of nationalization movements and the ways in which their efforts were received by mass constituencies, he provides an innovative and compelling account of the historical utilization, manipulation, and contestation of names.
New York: Berghahn Books, 2020, 350 pp., ISBN: 978-1-78920-634-0, $149.
Men Under Fire: Motivation, Morale and Masculinity among Czech Soldiers in the Great War, 1914-1918
Austrian and Hasburg Studies, vol. 26
Jiří Hutečka, Translated from the Czech
In historical writing on World War I, Czech-speaking soldiers serving in the Austro-Hungarian military are typically studied as Czechs, rarely as soldiers, and never as men. As a result, the question of these soldiers’ imperial loyalties has dominated the historical literature to the exclusion of any debate on their identities and experiences. Men under Fire provides a groundbreaking analysis of this oft-overlooked cohort, drawing on a wealth of soldiers’ private writings to explore experiences of exhaustion, sex, loyalty, authority, and combat itself. It combines methods from history, gender studies, and military science to reveal the extent to which the Great War challenged these men’s senses of masculinity, and to which the resulting dynamics influenced their attitudes and loyalties.
New York: Berghahn Books, 2019, 300 pp., ISBN: 978-1-78920-541-1, $135.
Nationalism Revisited: Austrian Social Closure from Romanticism to the Digital Age
Austrian and Hasburg Studies, vol. 25
Christian Karner
Focused on the German-speaking parts of the former Habsburg Empire, and on present-day Austria in particular, this book offers a series of highly innovative analyses of the interplay of nationalism’s discursive and institutional facets. Here, Christian Karner develops a distinctive perspective on Austrian nationalism over the longue durée, tracing nationalistic ways of thinking and mobilizing from the late eighteenth century to the present. Through close analyses of key texts representing diverse settings and historical episodes, this book traces the connections, continuities and ruptures that have characterized the varieties of Austrian nationalism.
New York: Berghahn Books, 2019, 308 pp., ISBN: 978-1-78920-452-0, $135.
Entangled Entertainers: Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna
Austrian and Hasburg Studies, vol. 24
Klaus Hödl, Translated from the German by Corey Twitchell
Viennese popular culture at the turn of the twentieth century was the product of the city’s Jewish and non-Jewish residents alike. While these two communities interacted in a variety of ways to their mutual benefit, Jewish culture was also inevitably shaped by the city’s persistent bouts of antisemitism. This fascinating study explores how Jewish artists, performers, and impresarios reacted to prejudice, showing how they articulated identity through performative engagement rather than anchoring it in origin and descent. In this way, they attempted to transcend a racialized identity even as they indelibly inscribed their Jewish existence into the cultural history of the era.
New York: Berghahn Books, 2019, 194 pp., ISBN: 978-1-78920-030-0, $135.
Comical Modernity: Popular Humour and the Transformation of Urban Space in Late Nineteenth Century Vienna
Austrian and Hasburg Studies, vol. 23
Heidi Hakkarainen
Though long associated with a small group of coffeehouse elites around the turn of the twentieth century, Viennese “modernist” culture had roots that reached much further back and beyond the rarefied sphere of high culture. In Comical Modernity, Heidi Hakkarainen looks at Vienna in the second half of the nineteenth century, a period of dramatic urban renewal during which the city’s rapidly changing face was a mainstay of humorous magazines, books, and other publications aimed at middle-class audiences. As she shows, humor provided a widely accessible means of negotiating an era of radical change.
New York: Berghahn Books, 2019, 288 pp., ISBN: 978-1-78920-273-1, $97.50.
Embers of Empire: Continuity and Rupture in the Hasburg Successor States after 1918
Austrian and Hasburg Studies, vol. 22
Edited by Paul Miller and Claire Morelon, Afterword by Pieter Judson
The collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy at the end of World War I ushered in a period of radical change for East-Central European political structures and national identities. Yet this transformed landscape inevitably still bore the traces of its imperial past. Breaking with traditional histories that take 1918 as a strict line of demarcation, this collection focuses on the complexities that attended the transition from the Habsburg Empire to its successor states. In so doing, it produces new and more nuanced insights into the persistence and effectiveness of imperial institutions, as well as the sources of instability in the newly formed nation-states.
New York: Berghahn Books, 2018, 366 pp., ISBN: 978-1-78920-022-5, $130.
The Art of Resistance: Cultural Protest against the Austrian Far Right in the Early Twenty-First Century
Austrian and Habsburg Studies, vol. 21
Allyson Fiddler
Well before the far-right resurgence that has most recently transformed European politics, Austria’s 1999 parliamentary elections surprised the world with the unexpected success of the Freedom Party of Austria and its charismatic leader, Jörg Haider. The party’s perceived xenophobia, isolationism, and unabashed nationalism in turn inspired a massive protest movement that expressed opposition not only through street protests but also in novels, plays, films, and music. Through careful readings of this varied cultural output, The Art of Resistance traces the aesthetic styles and strategies deployed during this time, providing critical context for understanding modern Austrian history as well as the European protest movements of today.
New York: Berghahn Books, 2018, 224 pp. Cloth, ISBN: 978-1-78920-046-1, $120.
The Monumental Nation: Magyar Nationalism and Symbolic Politics in Fin-de-siècle Hungary
Austrian and Habsburg Studies, vol. 20
Bálint Varga
From the 1860s onward, Habsburg Hungary attempted a massive project of cultural assimilation to impose a unified national identity on its diverse populations. In one of the more quixotic episodes in this “Magyarization,” large monuments were erected near small towns commemorating the medieval conquest of the Carpathian Basin—supposedly, the moment when the Hungarian nation was born. This exactingly researched study recounts the troubled history of this plan, which—far from cultivating national pride—provoked resistance and even hostility among provincial Hungarians. Author Bálint Varga thus reframes the narrative of nineteenth-century nationalism, demonstrating the complex relationship between local and national memories.
New York: Berghahn Books, 2016, 300 pp. Cloth, ISBN: 978-1-78533-313-2, $130.
Tropics of Vienna: Colonial Utopias of the Habsburg Empire
Austrian and Habsburg Studies, vol. 19
Ulrich E. Bach
The Austrian Empire was not a colonial power in the sense that fellow actors like 19th-century England and France were. It nevertheless oversaw a multinational federation where the capital of Vienna was unmistakably linked with its eastern periphery in a quasi-colonial arrangement that inevitably shaped the cultural and intellectual life of the Habsburg Empire. This was particularly evident in the era’s colonial utopian writing, and Tropics of Vienna blends literary criticism, cultural theory, and historical analysis to illuminate this curious genre. By analyzing the works of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Theodor Herzl, Joseph Roth, and other representative Austrian writers, it reveals a shared longing for alternative social and spatial configurations beyond the concept of the “nation-state” prevalent at the time.
New York: Berghahn Books, 2016, 152 pp. Cloth, ISBN: 978-1-78533-132-9, $80.
Sacrifice and Rebirth: The Legacy of the Last Hasburg War
Austrian and Hasburg Studies, vol. 18
Edited by Mark Cornwall and John Paul Newman
When Austria-Hungary broke up at the end of the First World War, the sacrifice of one million men who had died fighting for the Habsburg monarchy now seemed to be in vain. This book is the first of its kind to analyze how the Great War was interpreted, commemorated, or forgotten across all the ex-Habsburg territories. Each of the book’s twelve chapters focuses on a separate region, studying how the transition to peacetime was managed either by the state, by war veterans, or by national minorities. This “splintered war memory,” where some posed as victors and some as losers, does much to explain the fractious character of interwar Eastern Europe.
New York: Berghahn Books, 2016, 306 pp. Cloth, ISBN: 978-1-78238-848-7, $120.
Understanding Multiculturalism: The Hasburg Central European Experience
Austrian and Hasburg Studies, vol. 17
Edited by Johannes Feichtinger and Gary B. Cohen
Multiculturalism has long been linked to calls for tolerance of cultural diversity, but today many observers are subjecting the concept to close scrutiny. After the political upheavals of 1968, the commitment to multiculturalism was perceived as a liberal manifesto, but in the post-9/11 era, it is under attack for its relativizing and essentializing implications. The essays in this collection offer a nuanced analysis of the multifaceted cultural experience of Central Europe under the late Habsburg monarchy and beyond. The authors examine how culturally coded social spaces can be described and understood historically without adopting categories formerly employed to justify the definition and separation of groups into nations, ethnicities, or homogeneous cultures.
New York: Berghahn Books, 2014, 256 pp., ISBN: 978-1-78238-264-5, $135.
The Viennese Café and Fin-de-Siècle Culture
Austrian and Hasburg Studies, vol. 16
Edited by Charlotte Ashby, Tag Gronberg, and Simon Shaw-Miller
The Viennese café was a key site of urban modernity around 1900. In the rapidly growing city it functioned simultaneously as home and workplace, affording opportunities for both leisure and intellectual exchange. This volume explores the nature and function of the coffeehouse in the social, cultural, and political world of fin-de-siècle Vienna. Just as the café served as a creative meeting place within the city, so this volume initiates conversations between different disciplines focusing on Vienna 1900. Contributions are drawn from the fields of social and cultural history, literary studies, Jewish studies and art, and architectural and design history. A fresh perspective is also provided by a selection of comparative articles exploring coffeehouse culture elsewhere in Eastern Europe.
New York: Berghahn Books, 2013, 244 pp., ISBN: 978-0-85745-764-6, $135.
Territorial Revisionism and the Allies of Germany in the Second World War: Goals, Expectations, Practices
Austrian and Habsburg Studies, vol. 15
Edited by Marina Cattaruzza, Stefan Dyroff, and Dieter Langewiesche
A few years after the Nazis came to power in Germany, an alliance of states and nationalistic movements formed revolving around the German axis. That alliance, the states involved, and the interplay between their territorial aims and those of Germany during the interwar period and World War II are at the core of this volume. This "territorial revisionism" came to include all manner of politics and military measures that attempted to change existing borders. Taking into account not just interethnic relations but also the motivations of states and nationalizing ethnocratic ruling elites, this volume reconceptualizes the history of East Central Europe during World War II. In so doing, it presents a clearer understanding of some of the central topics in the history of the War itself and offers an alternative to standard German accounts of the period 1933-1945 and East European nation-states' histories.
New York: Berghahn Books, 2013, 210 pp., ISBN: 978-0-85745-738-7, $120.
Journeys into Madness: Mapping Mental Illness in the Austro-Hungarian Empire
Austrian and Habsburg Studies, vol. 14
Edited by Gemma Blackshaw and Sabine Wieber
At the turn of the century, Sigmund Freud's investigation of the mind represented a particular journey into mental illness, but it was not the only exploration of this territory during the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Sanatoriums were the new tourism destinations, psychiatrists were collecting art works produced by patients, and writers were developing innovative literary techniques to convey a character's interior life. This collection of essays uses the framework of journeys in order to highlight the diverse artistic, cultural, and medical responses to a peculiarly Viennese anxiety about the madness of modern times.
New York: Berhahn Books, 2012, 213 pp., ISBN: 978-08745-458-4, $120.
Sexual Knowledge: Feeling, Fact, and Social Reform in Vienna, 1900-1934
Austrian and Habsburg Studies, vol. 13
Britta McEwen
Vienna's unique intellectual, political, and religious traditions had a powerful impact on the transformation of sexual knowledge in the early twentieth century. Whereas turn-of-the-century sexology, as practiced in Vienna as a medical science, sought to classify and heal individuals, during the interwar years, sexual knowledge was employed by a variety of actors to heal the social body: the truncated, diseased, and impoverished population of the newly created Republic of Austria. Based on rich source material, this book charts cultural changes that are hallmarks of the modern era, such as the rise of the companionate marriage, the role of expert advice in intimate matters, and the body as a source of pleasure and anxiety.
New York: Berghahn Books, 2012. 240 pp., ISBN: 978-0-85745-337-2, $120.
Other CAS Scholarly Books
Michael Cherlin, Halina Filipowicz, and Richard L. Rudolph, eds. The Great Tradition and Legacy: The Evolution of Dramatic Musical Theater in Austria and Central Europe (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012)
Vedran Dzihic and Thomas Schmidinger, eds. Looming Shadows: Migration and Integration at a Time of Upheaval. European and American Perspectives. (Washington, DC: 2011)
Gary B. Cohen, Ben W. Ansell, Robert Henry Cox, and Jane Gingrich, eds. Social Policy in the Smaller European Union States. Contemporary European History, Vol. 9. (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011)
David F. Good and Randall W. Kindley, eds. The Challenge of Globalization and Institution Building: Lessons from Small European States. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997)
Richard L. Rudolph, ed. The European Peasant Family and Society: Historical Studies. (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995).
William E. Wright, ed. Austria, 1938–1988: Anschluß and Fifty Years. (Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, 1995).
David F. Good, ed. Economic Transformations in Eastern Europe: Legacies from the Past and Prospects for the Future. (London: Routledge, 1994)
David F. Good, Margarete Grandner, and Mary Jo Maynes, eds. Frauen in Österreich. Beiträge zu ihrer Situation im 20. Jahrhundert. (Vienna: Böhlau, 1994)
Charles Ingrao, ed. State & Society in Early Modern Austria. (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1994)
Richard L. Rudolph and David F. Good, eds. Nationalism and Empire: The Habsburg Empire and the Soviet Union. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992)
Kinley Brauer and William E. Wright, eds. Austria in the Age of the French Revolution, 1789–1815. (Minneapolis: Center for Austrian Studies, 1990)
William E. Wright, ed. Austria Since 1945. (Minneapolis: Center for Austrian Studies, 1982)