Most World War I belligerents, including Austria-Hungary and Germany, experienced severe copper shortages because of insufficient domestic ore deposits and the extensive use of the copper alloys, brass and bronze, in the munitions industry. Both Germany and the Dual Monarchy, their foreign sources of copper limited because of the British blockade, were forced to use substitute metals and to curtail the use of copper even in the armaments industry. In 1913 Austria-Hungary's domestic production amounted to only 4,052 tons of pure copper. Austrian industrial demands were met only with the importation of 36,500 tons of the metal. Consequently, when the Allied blockade cut off most of her copper imports at the same time that military needs sharply increased demand, Austria-Hungary faced a dilemma. Moreover, before Austria-Hungary was able to develop substitutes for copper, brass, and bronze, domestic supplies had been seriously reduced.

The question of whether the Poles were an integrating or a disintegrating factor within the Habsburg monarchy has yet to be fully studied by Polish historians. Up to now they have concerned themselves mainly with the part played by the Austrian empire in the history of the Polish nation after the eighteenth century partitions and have overlooked the role of the Poles in the Austrian empire. They have concentrated their attention on the fate of the territories of the historic Polish state which fell under Habsburg rule and have studied the social, cultural, and political transformations which affected Galicia during the century and a half of Austrian domination. Polish historians have even studied the contributions made by former Habsburg subjects to the reconstruction of the Polish state after the dissolution of the monarchy, but they have rarely discussed the part which the Poles took in the political life of the multinational empire.

In discussing the Austrian State Treaty it is necessary to start with an explanation of terminology. Why “State Treaty?” Generally speaking, any treaty concluded between independent states or nations is a “Staatsvertrag,” as the German term goes. Then why is the Austrian treaty of 1955 known as the “State Treaty?” The origins of the term are to be found in Austrian legal terminology after World War I. In 1919 the Austrian government championed the legal thesis, developed by the distinguished legal theorist Hans Kelsen, that the Austrian Republic had not been in a state of war with the Allied and Associated Powers since it had not been in existence while the war was being fought; consequently, the Austrian Republic refused to be the legal successor of the defunct Austro-Hungarian empire.

Austria emerged in 1955 from a ten-year occupation administered by the four major powers of the successful anti-Third Reich coalition of World War II—France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States—as a united, independent state. The 15 May 1955 State Treaty signed by these countries and Austria spared Austria the fate of Cold War division suffered by Austria's neighbor to the north (in the ultimate East-West breakdown of Germany's parallel postwar quadripartite occupation). Paving the way for Austria's good fortune was a political quid pro quo agreed between Austrian leaders and their Soviet counterparts in Moscow the previous April. In the 15 April 1955 Moscow Memorandum, Austria consented to becoming a permanently neutral state modeled on Switzerland. This neutrality precluded a possible Austrian membership in NATO in exchange for a long-delayed Soviet assent to an end of Austria's occupation regime with a concomitant abandonment of the Soviet occupation zone and the withdrawal of all occupation troops. After the completion of this withdrawal, a fully sovereign Austria made good on its pledge with the passage on 26 October 1955 of a constitutional law declaring Austria to be “permanently neutral” and foreswearing all military alliances.

Forty years ago R. J. W. Evans, in his now classic study of The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, observed that, in the absence of a coherent early modern central government, the Habsburg enterprise rested crucially upon the baroque court and Habsburg patronage of the arts. Evans especially noted that “two great synthetic achievements, alike commissioned by court, magnates, and Church, alike immortally associated with the age of baroque in the Habsburg lands: the dramatic extravagance of opera; and its physical counterpart, the monumental architecture of the years around 1700.” Evans argued further that baroque art, including opera, contributed to the ideological legitimacy of the court, and therefore the state. This became particularly important during the reign of Emperor Leopold I, who was himself a composer of some distinction and who sponsored one of the supremely monumental operatic productions of the seventeenth century, Antonio Cesti's Il pomo d'oro, on Paris and the prize of the golden apple, staged with twenty-four sets over the course of two days, in honor of the birthday of Leopold's teenage empress, the Spanish Infanta Margarita, in 1668. As a child, she had appeared as the artistic focus of the Spanish court in the painting Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez.

The Austrian school reforms of the 1850s and 1860s, inspired by the mindset of the democratic and civic revolutions of 1848, turned a predominantly feudal and religious school system into a modern one and brought basic education to the masses. In the following decades, literacy increased, basic knowledge spread, and the overwhelming influence of the Catholic church in school matters diminished. Yet, as an “unintended consequence,” these reforms also had great implications for the process of building what turned out to be “the Slovene nation.” This article aims to illustrate that the formation of Slovene national identity—based on the use of the Slovene language as the main marker of Slovene ethnicity—was implemented to a large extent with the help of the Austrian school system and its efforts at centralization, systematization, and modernization. Measures like the creation of a school subject for the Slovene language, Slovene reading materials in school textbooks, and statistical categorization within school administrations played a crucial role in that process.

Veni, CreatorSpiritus! From the triumphant chorus of Gustav Mahler's Eighth Symphony to the muse-choir adorning Gustav Klimt's Beethoven Frieze, the Vienna Moderns celebrated the inspirational powers of the feminine. Muses, or the spiritual forces guiding acts of artistic and literary creation, have long been associated with the creative output of the Vienna Moderns, the groups and individuals responsible for the development of modernism in the arts and literature in Vienna from 1890 to 1910. These inspiring women—commonly personified as femmes fatales, femmes fragiles, and femmes savantes—played a crucial role in bringing the art, architecture, and writing of Viennese Modernism to fruition.

The idea of reform still supplies the guiding principle for most accounts of late medieval religion in Bohemia. Like a brightly colored thread, reform marks a trail leading forward from Jan Hus (d. 1415) to the leaders of the sixteenth-century Reformation, as well as backward to a series of precursors in the fourteenth century. This essay takes a different path through the religious culture of fourteenth-century Bohemia and of Prague, in particular. Rather than following the traditional historiography in identifying a handful of fourteenth-century Prague preachers as revolutionary forerunners of Jan Hus, this essay situates these and other figures within a more complicated and multivalent local religious culture, a culture that was carefully molded by Central Europe's most powerful authority. No one shaped Prague's local religion more dramatically than the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles IV (r. 1346–1378), as three examples offered here will illustrate. Like an architect, Charles IV designed much of Prague's vibrant local religion. Nevertheless, neither he nor anyone else completely controlled it.

Under The Influence of Enlightenment ideals of rational administration and cameralist notions of increasing the productivity and welfare of the populace, Joseph II and his ministers embarked on an aggressive program of reform for the Habsburg monarchy in the late eighteenth century. Their view as to what needed change was wide-ranging, but among their chief concerns was the desire to restructure the relationship between the Catholic church and Austrian society. As the largest and most powerful religious denomination in the Habsburg monarchy, the Catholic church possessed immense human and material resources, which could possibly be exploited to benefit the Austrian people and state. For Joseph II, the process whereby Catholicism could best be put to use in Austrian society necessarily involved seizing partial administrative control over the Catholic church. The Catholic church, he believed, did not distribute material and moral benefit to the Austrian people evenly, and changing this situation required the active intervention of the Austrian government.

As Richard L. Rudolph correctly observes at the beginning of his article, Austrian economic history has not been adequately examined in international, comparative studies of the problems of economic growth. Undoubtedly this is attributable both to the traditional orientation of Austrian historians toward national and regional studies and to the interest of so many historians in various aspects of the preindustrial age. Macroeconomic approaches have, therefore, been deemphasized, even though they have led to significant new conclusions in regard to the nature of preindustrial economy and society, partly because of the difficulty in applying this methodology to an analysis of the increasingly complex affairs of a modern industrial society.

On April 14, 1918, Charles I, the last ruler of the Austro-Hungarian empire, dismissed his foreign minister Count Ottokar Czernin. The immediate circumstances of Czernin's fall from power have been known for many years, and the recently opened documentary collections in the Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv in Vienna add little of substance to what is already known. Since neither the Czernin nor the Habsburg families have opened their private papers to the scrutiny of scholars, our information is still based on contemporary accounts of high government and court officials. From the evidence at hand we know little more than that Czernin had often treated Charles in a high-handed manner and that the foreign minister's refusal to assume full blame for the Sixtus Affair so angered the emperor that he accepted his minister's resignation. Thus, according to the consensus of his contemporaries, the reasons for Czernin's dismissal were emotional: the wounded pride and momentary anger of Emperor Charles. Certainly few would contend that these factors were unimportant; the emperor had often rendered similar imprudent judgments earlier in his brief reign. Still, one should be cautious about accepting this reason as the only one without searching for other more complex causes.