Engelbert Dollfuss has not been enshrined in history as a popular political figure. The National Socialists vilified him as a Satanic evildoer who embodied everything they hated. Dollfuß's widow and two children found it imperative to flee to Switzerland immediately after the Anschluss and eventually went to Canada, where Mrs. Dollfuß and their daughter remained until 1956. Their son still lives there.

This essay addresses the political role of nationally defined scholarship in multiethnic milieus. The focus is on Transylvania, one of the marginal provinces of the Habsburg Empire without stable, state-funded institutions of higher learning and research. The time frame is the Hungarian Vormärz, known as the Reform Era, which extended from the 1830s until the revolution of 1848 and was a pivotal moment in the maturation of the national perspective in scholarship and politics, challenging the traditional order of the composite monarchy. The liberal and national impetus of the period was manifest in the foundation of numerous regional voluntary associations intended to serve the public good, and further education, scholarship, and “national improvement.”

The Serbs occupied a unique position among the nations living in the Habsburg empire in the eighteenth century. They were the only Orthodox Christians who had full religious equality, and collectively they enjoyed the advantages of a privileged and autonomous group. Beginning in the early part of the eighteenth century, when it gradually became apparent that the Serbs would be integrated into the monarchy as permanent residents rather than as temporary refugees and allies, the special status of the Serbs posed difficult problems for the Habsburg government. The Magyar authorities, the central government offices in Vienna, and the Serbs themselves became involved in recurrent struggles within the bureaucracy as each faction continually maneuvered to gain advantages for its position.

Beginningwith the conquests of theBalkans and Hungary in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and drawing to an end only with the Habsburg takeover of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1878, the Ottoman interlude in the Croat lands has long been a cause of great anxiety, great sorrow, great resentment, and great pride. For many writers and interpreters of Croat history, the response to the Turkish threat has figured as a source of profound meaning—indeed, even as a source of identity—and they have clearly intended that their audiences see things in this way as well. Even today the encounter with the Turks may still carry that great weight. In one recent study of the long Croat-Turk relationship, for instance, Ottoman-era specialist Ive Mažuran unequivocally calls the time of invasion and occupation “the most tragic period in Croatian history.” This, then, is still a past that signifies.

The question of how to categorize and study science in multicultural empires has in recent years increasingly occupied historians of science and of empires. Issues of intercultural mediation, brokerage, or cultural translation have been particularly influential in the study of science in colonial empires. However, the question for continental empires was about science as a reaction to pluricultural reality. Ernest Gellner, Deborah Coen, and Johannes Feichtinger, among others, have taken a similar approach to the Habsburg monarchy, which notwithstanding its legal status as a monarchy shared several characteristics of an empire. These reactions to empire also included nationalisms, which, as recent publications have shown, largely defined the shape of the late-nineteenth-century scientific landscape in Central Europe. In this article, I want to look at the imperial scientific landscape from yet another perspective, concentrating on itinerant scholars and the circulation of knowledge in the Habsburg Empire. In my view, this constitutes an imperial culture of its own that has not yet been thoroughly analyzed.

The demise of Parliament in March 1933 was the most significant single act in the march to semifascism in Austria, which began with the formation of the Heimwehr in the early days of the First Republic and was well under way when significant changes were made in the government on September 21,1933, and a concentration camp was established at Wöllersdorf a few days later. Traditional democratic means were employed to abolish Parliament. Dollfuβ, the Heimwehr, and the Christian Social Party only did what parties in power in democracies do when under attack. They used all the means at their disposal to protect their government from being overthrown. The Social Democrats and Greater Germans, likewise, employed only democratic means in their effort to overthrow the Dollfuβ regime and to preserve a democratically elected Parliament. Dollfuβ and the leaders of all but the National Socialist Party in Austria were well aware of the great danger to Austria that stemmed from the intensification of National Socialist efforts to overthrow a democratic form of government in Austria after Hitler came to power in Germany and knew that the German National Socialists were providing financial support to the Austrian Greater German Party to support them in their efforts to take control of Austria.

This article was first conceived as a commemorative address for the centenary of the extinction of the Habsburg monarchy, which occurred in November 1918. It seeks to take a correspondingly broad view, geographically and chronologically, of the factors that occasioned that collapse. It addresses three main themes, structured loosely around three classic historiographical analyses of the monarchy as a whole. The great irony of the last phase of Habsburg rule in Central Europe is that it was undermined by precisely those elements in the politics and society of the region that seemed, on the face of things, to derive most advantage from it. The article concentrates on the long-term dysfunctionality caused by the evolution of the Hungarian and German problems, and by the progressive enfeeblement of dynastic institutions. It also engages more briefly with a countervailing phenomenon, that some of those interests most conspicuously spurned by central government might have been the readiest to rescue it. On the argument presented here, World War I, which finally brought the monarchy low, was a catalyst rather than an independent determiner of that outcome.

From the late eighteenth century until the present, suicide has become a fundamental issue for professional Europeans' understanding of themselves and especially of the supposed health of their societies. From the second half of the eighteenth century onward, medical doctors, moral statisticians, sociologists, psychologists, and other professionally trained and university-educated experts produced increasing numbers of studies on suicide. Prior to 1750, suicide had been a popular theme for commentary from moralists, philosophers, and, above all, theologians and clerics. Of course, these groups of commentators have continued to write on the topic through the modern period, but the emergence of doctors, sociologists, and psychologists, among others, in the debates surrounding suicide has been a hallmark of the modern era. Claiming to offer complete or partial answers to the issue and causes of suicide, these professional groups increasingly asserted their own pivotal roles in analyzing the problems of European societies. Suicide was supposedly a modern problem that required expert commentary and intervention.

In Joseph Roth's novel Die Kapuzinergruft, a Polish count bemoans the fate of a chestnut seller. “He is only a chestnut roaster, but he is quite symbolic. Symbolic for the old Monarchy. This gentleman once sold his chestnuts everywhere, through half of Europe one might say. And everywhere where his roasted chestnuts were eaten was Austria, and the Emperor Franz Joseph reigned. Now there is no chestnut without a visa.”

It is fitting that a story about charitable donations and their provenance should begin with a gesture of gift giving. In 1849 a group of Habsburg subjects came together with the intention of raising money to purchase a gift for Josip Jelačić, general of the Habsburg army and Ban (Governor) of Civil Croatia. Jelačić was identified as one of the notional “saviors” of the Habsburg Empire, whose actions in the field had helped quell the revolutionary and military perils of the previous months. The proposed gift was a suitable symbol of imperial honor and military prowess: a ceremonial sabre designed especially for the Ban. Jelačić was apparently moved by the gesture but had a more practical idea: better to use the money raised for his gift to help those less fortunate (and less celebrated) than himself, it should be put toward a fund to support soldiers who had served in his units and militias and who had been injured in fighting—and also to the families of those that had been killed. To this end, a committee was already operating, based in Vienna, but collecting funds through the Ban's Council (Bansko Vijeće) in Zagreb. This would become a mobilization of Habsburg society whose impetus rested on precisely the same values of dynastic loyalty and respect for the Habsburg military as the ceremonial sabre, except that many more people would have a chance to show their devotion and support to the “heroes” of 1848–49.