The complex of events linked to the second Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683 often has been characterized as a turning point in East Central, indeed even European history, an argument which probably can be disputed only on semantic or philosophical grounds. For example, the late Hugo Hantsch once stated in private conversation that he firmly believed that the abortive Ottoman assault upon Austria's capital fundamentally determined the future of the Habsburg empire. Assuming that this judgment is valid, the purpose here is to refine, extend—and correct a bit—certain conclusions drawn in two earlier books, one in English and the other in German, concerning the subject in question. These observations are occasioned by the avalanche of writings evoked by the tercentennial celebration of the sieges in Vienna and elsewhere and by personal discussions of the author with the Hungarian historians, László Benczédi and Géza Perjes. It is convenient to treat the topic under three headings: the antecedents of the Ottoman offensive, the significance of the events per se, including the delicate question of Polish participation, and the consequences of the allied victory and the subsequent campaigns in Hungary.

Austria's Eastern policy in the eighteenth century long neglected by most historians of the Monarchy, has at last been given due attention in the publications of Karl Roider. Working from a systematic analysis of the rich holdings of a number of Viennese archives, Roider has produced a coherent picture of Austrian-Ottoman relations in this period and, perhaps for the first time, a plausible account of the Austro-Turkish war of 1788–1790. A return to this subject in these pages is not intended to dispute Roider's facts: he has marshalled them carefully and accurately. It is rather to take notice of additional materials, dealing with the history of the largely silent objects of the conflict, the Balkan peoples, which may lead to a modification of his conclusions.

Much has been made in recent years about the vitality of parliamentary institutions in early modern Europe and of the existence of considerably more cooperation between monarchs and their estates than one had previously thought. While this trend constitutes a significant revision in the thinking of western European historians, it has long been accepted by those who have studied the Habsburg monarchy. Over the last few years specialists on the seventeenth-century monarchy such as R. J. W. Evans, Jean Bérenger, and John Spielman have reemphasized the existence of a consensual, symbiotic relationship between the dynasty and its corporate bodies, especially those of the Erblande.

“Alles flieβt”—All things flow! Thus did the German-Austrian historian Richard Charmatz invoke Heraclitus to convey the sense of flux which characterized Austrian intellectual life before World War I. The sense of chronic, pervasive instability in late nineteenth-century Austrian society was the result of problems released by the solvents of liberal ideology, military defeat (in 1859 and 1866) and industrialization. In Danubian Europe, the discontents of modernity were experienced most acutely by the Germans, socially and culturally the most advanced of the nationalities of the Habsburg Monarchy. After 1848, the traditionally secure position of educated Germandom was threatened by the emergence of rival nationalisms, the growth of popular social protest, and the disintegration of a preindustrial value system. A culture accustomed to denying the Lebensfähigkeit of its neighbors was suddenly challenged by the need to demonstrate its own worth and capacity to survive. The Austro-German community reacted in a variety of ways; the result was a complex and extraordinarily rich cultural matrix which conditioned, on the one hand, the origins of psychoanalysis, logical positivism, musical atonality, and the philosophy of Wittgenstein, and nourished, on the other, the ideologies of Austro-Marxism, Christian Socialism, Zionism, and National Socialism. At the turn of the century, the capital of the backward “China of Europe” witnessed the birth of many of the major forces of contemporary history; cultural fecundity was the reflex of fear of decline and possible extinction.

Growing scholarly and popular appreciation of achievements in the arts, letters and technology of early twentieth-century Europe reflects an increasing conviction that these achievements laid the groundwork for Western culture and sensibility in our century. Continuing interest in early twentieth-century European social and political problems also testifies to an appreciation that these problems very much resemble, and have in some instances conditioned, the development of comparable problems today.

Poland's medieval and Renaissance capital and a mainspring of humanist learning in east central Europe, Cracow, suffered from neglect and decay after the Baltic-oriented Vasa dynasty transferred the court to Warsaw at the end of the sixteenth century. The first partition of Poland established the new border with Austria along the Vistula River, at the very gates of Cracow. Deprived of its hinterland, the city lost both suppliers and markets, and its commerce dried up. Local nobles and patricians abandoned the city for the more glittering and bustling life at the court of Stanisław August in Warsaw. Russian troops seized Cracow toward the end of the Kościuszko Insurrection and then ceded it to Austria in Poland's third partition. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, its population had shrunk to barely ten thousand. Ensuing Germanization was halted only when Cracow was joined in 1809 to the short-lived Duchy of Warsaw.

The importance of turn-of-the-century Vienna for modern Western civilization is such that it is difficult for any educated person to be unaware of the political and cultural changes taking place in that city at that time. Against a background of social and political disintegration, the intellectual and cultural elite of Vienna—and particularly its younger members—revolted against the rationalistic, legalistic, and moralistic liberalism of nineteenth-century Europe. Parliamentary politics in Vienna yielded to mass politics, increasingly strident in tone and negative in its goal. At the same time rationalist views of human nature were giving way before the psychoanalytic theories of the Viennese Sigmund Freud. Aestheticism became a refuge from life for many of the city's young intellectuals. Its literary men turned inward to study the psychology of the individual or uphold the goal of art for art's sake. The home of Mozart, Beethoven, and the Strausses gave birth at the turn of the century to the first works of Schoenberg. Academic formalism in painting came under attack from the Viennese Secession. And the city of the monumental historical eclecticism of the Ringstrasse gave rise to architectural critics who sought a new architecture expressing modern, not by-gone, life. The very phrase “turn-of-the-century Vienna” conjures up the names of a disparate group of famous—or infamous—giants of modern culture and politics: Freud, Hofmannsthal, Kokoschka, Klimt, Schoenberg, Mahler, Lueger, even the young Hitler.

Austria at the turn of the century was a country in which change was more commonly tolerated than encouraged. Its late economic growth coming at the end of the 1880s signalled the transition from an agrarian to a more industrially based society. This type of change after a long period of semi-depression dating from the crash of 1873 was looked upon with favor and encouraged by the state, banks, and entrepreneurs. It obviously meant increased prosperity and fit in well with the progressivistic attitude of the times, but less obviously meant the growth of urban blight and social disruption.

In a 1975 article in the Austrian History Yearbook, “The Migration of Galician Jews to Vienna, 1857–1880,” Anson Rabinbach asserted that the rapid growth of the Jewish community of Vienna in the second half of the nineteenth century was caused by the massive immigration of Jews from Galicia. He argued that the largest wave of Galician Jewish migration to the Austrian capital occurred between 1857 and 1869. After 1880, he observed, Jewish migration from Galicia declined markedly. Only one of the three people who commented on this article, Scott M. Eddie, pointed out the absence of substantive proof and the existence of logical inconsistencies in Rabinbach's arguments. Moreover, Eddie raised the important question, never addressed by Rabinbach, of the significance of Bohemian and Moravian migration in the expansion of the Jewish population of Vienna in the decades before World War I. Eddie wondered: “Why didn't greater geographical proximity and cultural similarities cause them (Bohemian and Moravian Jews) to be the principal source of Jewish influx into Vienna.”

The private letters of statesmen, diplomats and generals, as historians know, often are more valuable than voluminous official documents because they reveal more of the personalities and attitudes of the writers and illuminate more of the surrounding sociopolitical context in which they acted. With that in mind, the purpose of publishing the appended letters is two-fold. First, they offer new sources of information on Austro-Hungarian internal politics in the period 1867–1918, particularly the convulsive Czech-German language conflict of 1897–1899. Second, they serve to introduce historians to the private correspondence of Baron (after 1909, Count) Alois Lexa von Aehrenthal, Austro-Hungarian foreign minister from 1906 until 1912.

By their nature, ruling groups tend to be conservative, preserving the status quo rather than working to alter it. But few leaders have responded to demands for change with the kind of stolid passivity that seems to have characterized the bureaucratic statesmen of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in the last years of its existence. Eduard Taaffe's day-to-day Fortwursteln is one of the more famous characterizations of their “desperate but not serious” attitude toward policy-making. The leaders may have agreed in private to the necessity of far-reaching reforms in the Monarchy's institutional structure, but, faced with the practical difficulties of carrying out those reforms, they were inclined to make few experiments and to take few risks. If one looks at the last statesmen of the Monarchy who both occupied central positions of authority and possessed the willpower to attempt to carry through radical change, besides the hapless Emperor Karl, only a handful of figures emerges: Alois Lexa von Aehrenthal, who effected the Bosnian annexation; the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the throne; and Ottokar Czernin, Karl's foreign minister from 1916 to 1918.

In Berlin on November 10 and 11, 1915, the German Chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg, raised with the visiting Austro-Hungarian foreign minister, Baron Burián, the subject of strengthening the diplomatic alliance between their governments during the current world conflict. In order to make this alliance “a permanent factor of international politics vis-á-vis our foes,” Bethmann-Hollweg suggested “an extension of the contractual obligations in political, economic and military respects.…” Speaking from a political standpoint, he noted that the treaty of 1879 between Germany and Austria-Hungary “was based on … the idea of the predominance of the Magyars in Hungary and the Germans in Austria.” Since then the Magyars had maintained their position, but the “influence of the Germans in the other half of the empire has been continuously reduced.” Therefore, the chancellor explained, “in connection with the extension and strengthening of the alliance, it is a matter of life or death for Germany that the German element regains its old deserved position and that a stop be put to any further Slavicization.” Bethmann-Hollweg went on to tell Burián about Germany's plans for a thirty year customs alliance based on preferential tariffs, which would be lower than those granted to other lands in most-favored-nation agreements. He expected that these internal duties would be reduced every ten years, and that other European states would join this commercial league. This meeting led to a series of official negotiations about a more comprehensive treaty of alliance, which were still in process when the Central Powers collapsed late in 1918.

Prevention of public violence is a primary task of an ordered state. If rioting occurs, it is usually a serious setback for the government in power, a sign of weakness or even forthcoming collapse, an injury to the citizens' commitment. During a riot, governmental leaders are often taxed to the ultimate because they may lose control of the society in the uncharted waters of the mob; their policy-decisions can sink while awaiting enforcement. The rioters who participate in collective public violence lose their restraint, their individuality that previously caused them to respect authority, and turn to irresponsible acts they would not normally commit. For these reasons established political leaders place a high priority on preventing violence. Should it break out, their automatic inclination is to contain it. Some revolutionaries, on the other hand, see creativity in violence, are even willing to stimulate it, hoping that it will sweep traditional institutions away.