This article examines Austrian perceptions of the people and landscape of Bosnia-Herzegovina from 1878 to 1908. It traces Austrians’ fantasies about and encounters with Bosnian Muslims, whom they often categorized as “Turks.” Following the Congress of Berlin, Austrians claimed to be doing the civilizing work of “Europe” in Bosnia. The article investigates the meanings of border and borderlands between the Habsburg Empire and Ottoman Bosnia, focusing in particular on crossings of the Sava River. Drawing on the writings of soldiers, administrators, journalists and travel writers, the essay considers a number of mental maps, imagined geographies of what Habsburg authors thought they knew about the land and people they occupied. It contributes to a growing scholarship on the Habsburg-Ottoman borderlands.

Amid the preparations for the abortive Russo-Ottoman peace talks at Fokschan in April 1772, Anton Wenzel Kaunitz instructed the Austrian Internuntius in Istanbul, Franz Maria Thugut, to elect a colleague to accompany him to the congress. Kaunitz, eager to maintain Austria's unique relationship with both belligerent parties, suggested two young orientalists, Bernhard von Jenisch and the Hungarian noble Karl Reviczky as suitable companions. In character with many thirty-somethings in the Habsburg bureaucracy in the 1770s, Thugut, Jenisch, and Reviczky were fluent in Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish and possessed an exceptional knowledge of Ottoman affairs. As members of the Austrian embassy to the Ottoman Porte, they had each spent long sojourns in Istanbul. The recruitment and education of such men had been one of Kaunitz's priorities since the 1750s. Thugut knew both candidates well, especially Jenisch, an old chum since their student days at the Oriental Academy in Vienna. Despite Reviczky's recent successes as a translator of an Ottoman treatise on government and some ghazals by the Persian poet Hafez, Thugut did not share Kaunitz's esteem for the young noble, explaining that Reviczky “is as ingenious as he is faint-hearted; he turns pale at the mere mention of plague and would take objection to travel over the channel with sharp winds.”

This article explores the consequences of the Austro-Hungarian Empire's end through the tumultuous biography of a philanthropic entrepreneur and quasi-consul community leader known today for assisting thousands of Jewish refugees during World War II. Focusing on Paul Komor (1886–1973) and the migrant community of Shanghai Hungarians, the article contends that postimperial diasporas preserved a piece of empire in their commitment to Jewish emancipation, imperialist nationalism, multiple loyalties, and political nostalgia. It also argues that diasporic networks and charitable actions communicated political and national loyalties while creating and defining the boundaries of the community. Presenting original research involving sources in multiple languages from China, Hungary, the U.S., the U.K., and the Netherlands, the article traces the fortunes of a Jewish Hungarian family in colonial Shanghai, shows the limits of its son's charity-rooted advancement in community leadership, sheds light on the seemingly contradictory political ideas of a postimperial expatriate to explain his complicated relationship with his kinstate, and analyzes the institutionalization of communal charity and the competing prerequisite definitions of postimperial national belonging.

The Habsburg monarchy seems doubly confounding. Its historians call it an empire, but it actually never called itself that. For a fraction of its existence (1804–67), the monarchy counted as a Kaisertum, a word meant to burnish the fading glory of a lost imperial title (of the Holy Roman Empire). But its rulers never evinced the self-confident imperial aggressiveness or the desire to exploit distant territories that characterized British or Russian counterparts, and students of global empires often do not think the Habsburgs fit the category. But after calling the double monarchy an empire, Central European specialists lose the critical edge historians apply to other empires, and celebrate the Habsburgs for holding back nationalism, the force that made the twentieth century so deadly. The monarchy was not only an empire but a virtuous empire. This Kann Memorial Lecture examines a range of theoretical and practical reasons for calling the Habsburg state an empire—as its subjects often did. But if we do, we should recognize that like other empires it abhorred democracy. Perhaps more than a dam holding back the twentieth century and all its evils, the Habsburg Empire was more a conduit.

This essay assesses the role of regionalism in interwar Austrian painting with a focus on the Tyrolean painter and architect Alfons Walde (1891–1958). At a time when painting was seen to be in crisis, eclipsed by the deaths of prominent Viennese artists such as Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, regionalism offered an alternative engagement with modern art. As the representative of a wider regionalist movement, Walde paved the way for a clearly identifiable image of rural Austria without foregoing the modernization process that took place in the Alps at the time. Filtering essential elements of local culture and synthesizing them with both a modern formal language and “modern” topics, most significantly ski tourism, he created a regionalism that reverberated beyond the narrow confines of his home province and caught particular momentum during the rise of the Austrian Ständestaat in the 1930s. Moving in between regional and national significance, Walde's work underlines the essential position of the region in Austria after 1918 and conveys that an engaged regionalism that responded to the rapid cultural and political changes taking place became a significant aspect of interwar Austrian painting.

The destruction of the Habsburg monarchy forced the Austrian Germans to make a wholly unforeseen and, with few exceptions, a heretofore unthinkable decision about their destiny. The rump Austria of 1919 was too weak to command the allegiance of all its citizens. Many Austrians, despairing of mastering the economic and political problems in Vienna, searched for an easier solution: the realization of the forbidden but still anticipated unification with their conationals in the German Republic. For it seemed in retrospect that only their Habsburg loyalties had separated them from the main channel of the Germanic stream. Often Austrian civic virtues seemed to them to have been bought at some rummage sale of political ideas—the symbols of imperial order, the loyalties of political Catholicism, a collection of Francis Joseph's virtues—hardly the raw material from which to build patriotism in postwar Austria.

Viewed from the perspective of thousands of years, political history reveals a pattern of continuous alternation between decay and re-formation. Thus, after the fall of the Roman empire, the first political entity that emerged in the West was the Carolingian empire, which, through the coronation of the emperor in 800, assumed the form of a revived western Roman empire. Although it soon became limited to the part of the old empire inhabited by the “German nation,” it continued to exist, at least in outward form, under the name of the Holy Roman Empire until 1806. As early as 1804, though, Francis II had adopted the title of emperor of Austria for his position as ruler of the “hereditary Austrian lands.”

Even before the war in Europe ended formally on 8 May 1945, there could be no serious misconceptions—either among defeated and liberated peoples or among the victorious Allied powers—as to how complex the challenges of reconstructing physical infrastructure and social networks would be.1 This was particularly true in urban areas within what had been Germany's 1938 borders, where the impact of air raids had reduced many areas to rubble and had damaged the rail and road connections that supplied foodstuffs and other necessities. In Berlin and other cities, images of people clearing debris from lunar landscapes dominated the popular imagination in the late 1940s and over the following decades. Indeed, when images of immediate postwar reconstruction have been invoked, it would appear as if there existed a heroic, unbroken connection between the initiative of these largely female volunteers (Trümmerfrauen) and the economic miracle associated overwhelmingly with largely male labor in West Germany a decade later. If a remarkable preparedness to come to terms with the exigencies of the present manifested itself during the initial postwar months, historians have subsequently offered insights into how problematic a consistent and thorough confrontation with the Nazi past proved to be during the later 1940s and beyond.

I am often asked, by students, colleagues, and friends, why and how I came to devote my professional life to the study of Central and Southeastern European history and current events and, in the process, how I came to spend thirty years living in the area. I have two stock answers, both of them true.

IN DECEMBER 1883, Habsburg political and military leaders met in crisis session to discuss the situation in Serbia. Serious rioting threatened to. topple the friendly government of Prince Milan Obrenović, which two and a half years earlier had concluded a secret agreement in Vienna that made the country a dependency of the Habsburg Monarchy. The Serbian war ministry had rushed troops from the large Belgrade garrison to the troubled areas and had placed the two battalions that remained in the capital on a war footing in an attempt to ensure continued calm. Alarmed by these drastic measures, an Austro-Hungarian crown council, although not obligated to do so under existing treaties with Belgrade, authorized the commitment of Habsburg military forces should unrest escalate to revolution in Serbia.

For hungarian society, as for most of East-Central Europe, the socalled Jewish question has been, and continues to be, an obsessive, seemingly insoluble dilemma that cries out for definition, discussion, commentary, and analysis. The notion persists, in both professional and general opinion, that if only a true historical understanding of the question were possible, a solution would also be within reach. The assumption is almost axiomatic that the Jewish question, with its attendant passions, prejudices, and contradictions, must be the expression of some prior set of causes that holds the key to its deciphering.

An Enthusiastic Group of Romanians gathered in Sibiu at the 1905 annualassembly of Astra, the largest Romanian cultural association in Transylvania, to celebrate their nation and their future. Moved by the gathering and the festivities, the editor of the association's paper, Transilvania, expressed a hope he and thousands of his compatriots shared: “Never before has this people been in a more favorable position as a superiorethnic element, as an important factor of civilization, and as a gifted nation with vitality, character, and great talents that guarantee it a bright future and a distinguished place among the peoples of eastern Europe.”1 Like many prominent Romanians of his time, the editor firmlybelieved that his nation would enjoy equal status with other European national groups in the near future. Equal standing had been a central goal of theRomanian intellectuals and clergy who founded the Transylvanian Associationfor Romanian Literature and the Culture of the Romanian People, or Astra, in 1861. Since the eighteenth century, Romanian elites in Transylvania had worked to obtain recognition for their national community so that they couldparticipate fully in the political life of the region. Two centuries later Astra members still hoped they were on the verge of forming a Romanian nation that could achieve the right to control its own destiny.