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.”

Reading these articles in our AHY Forum brought back a flood of memories to my last days as a university undergraduate at Emory University when I first encountered Emperor Rudolf II and Renaissance Prague in a course taught by the late James Allen Vann. What captivates us about the past? What prompts naive undergraduates to take that fateful step and pursue a PhD in history? For me, it was simply Rudolf. I was not alone. The quizzical emperor ensconced in his castle high above the city has intrigued the imaginations of many. There is certainly irony in this, for Rudolf as an emperor was no success. He ended his reign an ineffective ruler browbeaten by his own brother to abdicate as king of Bohemia. But if he failed politically, there were lasting triumphs elsewhere. Rudolf's contemporary, the Flemish painter and theoretician Karel van Mander, famously pointed to Prague and the emperor as the “greatest art patron in the world.” And what emperor can boast that his most acclaimed “likeness” was a collage of fruits and vegetables, a portrait executed by a student of Leonardo da Vinci?

The histories of early modern religion and trade have both benefited from the global turn in recent years. This article brings the two fields together through the study of religious objects in Prague in the seventeenth century and shows ways in which religion and religious practice were entangled with new commercial and artistic ventures that crossed regional and international borders. Among the possessions of seventeenth-century Prague burghers were religious objects that had come from exotic lands, such as a “coconut” rosary and a ruby and diamond “pelican in her piety” jewel. These objects were made in multiple locations and traded to satisfy a new demand for items that could aid and display devotion as well as act as markers of wealth and confessional identity. Through this study of religious objects, Central Europe is revealed to be an important locale to the global history of the early modern period.

This article considers the function of twenty-two hand-colored prints of mathematical instruments in Tycho Brahe's Astronomiae instauratae mechanica (Instruments of the renewed astronomy; 1598), a hand-painted presentation treatise dedicated to Emperor Rudolf II and conferred on a network of individuals connected to the imperial court in Prague. Although the accompanying text communicates the instruments’ use and composition, the images demand close inspection because they articulate Brahe's observationally driven astronomy. They do so through structured, repeated, and consecutive representations; through expanded viewer access, achieved by adhering to multiple perspectives; through the juxtaposition of colors, which focuses attention on the heads of the instruments (the part that does the measuring); and through the use of gold paint, which emphasizes the head and brings to mind the very metallic nature of the instruments. Much like an astronomer taking multiple measurements of cosmological phenomena, these images allow viewers and readers, as they leaf through the pages of the treatise, to become virtual participants in Brahe's instauration of astronomy.

In 1577, a petty pawnbroker named Ester lost a clasp belonging to a Prague noblewoman, Lady Juliana the Fifth. Having been traded repeatedly between anonymous pawnbrokers, the clasp was eventually tracked down in the Polish city of Poznań, by which time Ester had already fled Prague and taken refuge in Cracow. In this essay, I use the subsequent criminal court case to explore this illuminating episode in the history of the city's Jewish Quarter. Taking place in the late Renaissance, during what has often been referred to as the Jewish “Golden Age,” I argue that this dramatic event provides access to the realities of an era often characterized as harmonious. I position pawnbroking as an industry that invited intimate and regular cross-confessional contact, and one that therefore offers up new opportunities to consider the nature of coexistence. By following the movement of both Ester and the pawned clasp from Prague to Poland, I also show how attention to pawnbroking can illuminate a constellation of transregional connections that stretched from Bohemia to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to its east, revealing the otherwise unrecorded ways in which Prague's Jews were connected to the Ashkenazi diaspora.

This article uses three well-known members of Rudolf II's imperial court—the astronomer Johannes Kepler, the composer Philippe de Monte, and the adventurer Kryštof Harant—to delineate some ways music helped Europeans understand identity and difference in the early modern period. For Kepler, the unfamiliar intervals of a Muslim prayer he heard during the visit of an Ottoman delegation offered empirical support for his larger arguments about the harmonious properties of Christian song and its resonances in a divinely ordered universe. For Harant, listening and singing were a means of sounding out commonalities and differences with the Christians and Muslims he encountered on his travels through the Holy Land. Monte sent his music across Europe to the English recusant William Byrd, initiating a compositional exchange that imagined beleaguered Bohemian and English Catholics as Israelites in exile, yearning for Jerusalem. Collectively, these three case studies suggest that musical thinking in Rudolfine Prague did not revolve around or descend from the court or sovereign; rather, Rudolf II's most erudite subjects listened, sang, and composed to understand themselves in relation to others.

The question that sparked this forum was to what extent we can see Prague as an important stage for Renaissance and Reformation exchange and as an internationally connected city. It is striking, though not unexpected, that all the authors have been drawn to some extent to sources and subjects in Rudolfine Prague. It must be stressed, however, that the emphasis of each of these studies is somewhat different to an older field of “Rudolfine studies.” The researchers here do not focus on the emperor's court but use it as context. It is tangential to their main focal points—on Jewish communities, religious change, and the exchange of scientific and musical knowledge—and these are first and foremost historians not of Prague but of social and cultural history, music, art, material culture, and religion. This indicates a marked shift from the historiography. For this generation of scholars, Prague is not only a city that is home to a fascinating and intriguing art historical moment but is also a city of early modern international connections. It provides a unique context for understanding communities, everyday experiences, religion, and culture in early modern Europe—a multilingual, multiconfessional, and multicultural mixing pot whose composition changed dramatically across the early modern period. Rudolf's court was certainly a catalyst for these crossings and encounters, but they did not fade away after his death in 1612, nor were they limited to the confines of the castle above the city.

The Ottoman conquest of Szigetvar and Gyula (1566) exposed the weakness of the Habsburg monarchy. Unable to mount a military response, Maximilian II depended on his diplomats to ward off the imposition of a conqueror's peace along the Hungarian border. But an official register, the Book of Halil Beg, put forward the sultan's claims to a wide swath of towns and villages, including many still held by Habsburg loyalists. Moreover, the Ottomans said, His Majesty had best accept a settlement on these terms; victorious Turkish captains wanted more and were restrained only by Selim II's orders. This essay describes the efforts of Maximilian's ambassadors to forestall additional losses in peacetime. After years of tough negotiation, they managed to obtain minor revision of the relevant treaty text. Although the Book of Halil Beg would indeed be the basis for any border settlement, as the Porte insisted, the Ottomans acknowledged that Vienna disputed certain of its provisions. This mere protest may have been enough to assure loyalist magnates in Hungary that the dynasty had not abandoned them, or their hereditary lands. Hence the paradox of Habsburg-Ottoman diplomacy. The 1576 treaty of peace, formally ending hostilities, was at the same time a charter for Kleinkrieg.

The Habsburg Mausoleum in St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague, designed and constructed in the second half of the sixteenth century by Alexander Colin from Mecheln in the Low Countries, is often noted in modern scholarship as an early manifestation of the influence in Bohemia of the Habsburg dynasty, which had ascended the Bohemian throne in 1527 and ruled without interruption until 1918. Bridging both art historical and social cultural scholarship, this article explores the location and spatial features of the mausoleum, as well as its reception by contemporaries. It argues that while the style and size of the mausoleum is modest, its central location changed the dynastic symbolism in the cathedral, placing the Habsburgs at its center. And while it is less visible than other Habsburg cultural projects of its day, it—more than any single cultural project of the early Habsburg dynasty—demonstrates and symbolizes Habsburg ambitions in and commitment to Bohemia and is an important element in both the transformation of Prague into a Habsburg residential city and in long-term Catholic renewal efforts.

This article investigates the uses of the term “Hungarian Empire” during the long nineteenth century. It argues that the term “empire” emerged in the Hungarian political discourse in the Vormärz era and it was used to denote the imagined integrity of Hungary proper, Transylvania, Croatia, Slavonia, and eventually Dalmatia on the grounds of the historic rights of the Holy Crown of Hungary in the form of a composite nation-state. This usage of the term became ubiquitous after the Austro-Hungarian Compromise. A second meaning pertaining to imperialist foreign policy entered the dictionary of Hungarian political discourse in the late nineteenth century. Fed by the recently created memory of the medieval Hungarian great power, several pressure groups in fin-de-siècle Hungary lobbied for a Hungarian (informal) empire in Southeastern Europe and beyond. While several lobby groups were firmly embedded in the framework of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, some of these visionaries imagined a Hungarian empire independent from the Habsburg structures. A short comparison with the Croatian and Czech political discourses illuminates that the first meaning of empire (composite nation-state) did not differ in substance from contemporary terminology in other Habsburg lands but the second meaning (imperialism) was indeed a unique phenomenon in the Habsburg monarchy.

Hungary has a long, rich history of wine production. Historians have emphasized wine's importance to the development of both the Hungarian economy and Hungarian nationalism. This article ties together these historiographical threads through a case study of a small village in one of Hungary's most famous wine regions. Tracing the village's history from the 1860s to World War I, the article makes three main claims. First, it demonstrates that from the start, this remote village belonged to wider networks of trade and exchange that stretched across the surrounding region, state, and continent. Second, it shows that even as Magyar elites celebrated the folk culture and peasant smallholders of this region, they also cheered the introduction of what they saw as scientific, rational agriculture. This leads to the last argument: wine achieved its place in the pantheon of Hungarian culture at a moment when the local communities that had grown up around its production and stirred the national imagination were undergoing dramatic and irreversible change.

The article analyzes reactions to the outbreak of World War I in the Habsburg Crownland of Salzburg. Based on a detailed examination of local sources, such as diaries, memoirs, church and gendarmerie chronicles, regional newspapers, and administrative records, the study sheds light on the complexity of responses and emotions elicited during the summer of 1914. Engaging with recent historiography on the question of “war enthusiasm” and the “August experience,” the ensuing analysis allows for profound insights into how the local population reacted to the news of the Sarajevo assassinations, Austria-Hungary's ultimatum to Serbia, and the subsequent declaration of war, mobilization, and the first weeks of the conflict. The article highlights the role of the press, governmental policies, and repression as key factors in creating an agitated atmosphere to which people responded in different ways, depending on age, class, gender, and the urban–rural divide. At times, frenzied patriotic mobilization occurred alongside not only a widespread acceptance of the obligation to do one's duty, but also—and equally—great uncertainty and anxiety. This highlights the complexities of public reactions in the summer of 1914, thereby challenging from a regional historical perspective the notion of an “enthusiastic” welcoming of the war.

This article analyzes a collection of narratives concerning the Russian occupation of Lviv (Lwów, Lemberg), the capital of the Austrian Crownland Galicia, between September 1914 and June 1915 in the initial phase of World War I. These narratives were produced and published in Polish and German between 1915, when Lviv was still occupied, and 1935, sixteen years after it had been included in a reborn Poland. One might assume that the relatively uneventful occupation constituted a negligible experience in the context of the dramatic developments of this period: the Great War and the subsequent Polish-Ukrainian and Polish-Soviet wars. And yet, memories of the Russian occupation were tenaciously perpetuated and cultivated. In this article I attempt to answer the multipronged question: Why did the occupation attract so much attention, and from whom, and what made its memories survive the subsequent dramatic conflicts and changes of political regimes relatively intact? Hence, my analysis regards the formation of collective memories at the intersection of individual experiences, group and national identities, and strategies of accommodating the unpredictably changing political realities.

In spite of the recent transnational turn, there continues to be a considerable gap between Fascist studies and the new approaches to the transitions, imperial collapses, and legacies of post–World War I Europe. This article posits itself at the crossroads between fascist studies, Habsburg studies, and scholarship on post-1918 violence. In this regard, the difficulties of the state transition, the subsequent social unrest, and the ascent of new forms of political radicalism in post-Habsburg Trieste are a case in point. Rather than focusing on the “national strife” between “Italians” and “Slavs,” this article will concentrate on the unstable local relations between state and civil society, which led to multiple cycles of conflict and crisis. One of the arguments it makes is that in post-1918 Trieste, where the different nationalist groups contended for a space characterized by multiple loyalties and allegiances, Fascists claimed to be the movement of the “true Italians,” identified with the Fascists and their sympathizers. Accordingly, while targeting the alleged enemies of the “Italian nation” (defined as “Bolsheviks,” “Austrophiles,” and “Slavs”), they aimed to polarize the Italian-speaking community along different political fault lines to reconfigure relations between the state and civil society.

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.

After the collapse of the Habsburg Empire and the sanctioning of new national borders in 1920, the successor states faced the controversial task of reconceptualizing the idea of national territory. Images of historically significant landscapes played a crucial role in this process. Employing the concept of mental maps, this article explores how such images shaped the connections between place, memory, and landscape in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Hungarian revisionist publications demonstrate how Hungarian nationalists visualized the organic integrity of “Greater Hungary,” while also implicitly adapting historical memory to the new geopolitical situation. As a counterpoint, images of the Váh region produced in interwar Czechoslovakia reveal how an opposing political agenda gave rise to a different imagery, while drawing on shared cultural traditions from the imperial past. Finally, the case study of Dévény/Devín/Theben shows how the idea of being positioned “between East and West” lived on in overlapping but politically opposed mental maps in the interwar period. By examining the cracks and continuities in the picturesque landscape tradition after 1918, the article offers new insight into the similarities and differences of nation-building processes from the perspective of visual culture.

The “Ibiza affair,” a succession of scandals triggered by undercover recordings of the FPÖ's former head, Heinz-Christian Strache, in compromising discussions with a purported Russian oligarch's niece has profoundly altered Austria's political landscape and public debates. This article offers a historically contextualized analysis of the multiple voices and competing truth claims articulated by diverse actors in the course of the scandal's fallout. Empirically, this discussion offers a systematic analysis of political and media discourses focused on “Ibiza” between May 2019 and June 2020. Conceptually, the argument builds on Michel Foucault's approach outlined in I, Pierre Rivière and its subsequent applications within nationalism studies. This analysis thus examines data through the questions as to who speaks about the event in question, how they do so, what is being claimed and disputed, and which political strategies and trajectories this enables. The competing, partly shifting positions revealed are the following: Strache's initial regret that soon turned to a self-ascribed “victim-cum-martyr” status; the FPÖ's distancing and eventual rupture from its long-standing Bundesparteiobmann; the Kronen Zeitung's attempted ideological repositioning; the ÖVP's need and opportunity to shift its positions vis-à-vis its political competitors; and critical voices calling for far-reaching structural changes. With the full facts behind the scandal still to be established, the (post-Foucauldian) approach applied here captures the contestations, (new) fault lines, and (shifting) political boundaries constitutive of a discursive field in a crisis context.

John Connelly, a member of the history faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, for the last quarter century, has produced what will surely stand as a landmark among grand syntheses on the modern history of Eastern Europe. The book title uses the geographical designation favored during the Cold War, but the subject is more precisely East Central Europe, a term that Connelly uses interchangeably with Eastern Europe to designate the lands lying between Germany and Austria in the west and the former components of the Soviet Union to the east.