European History
It has been two decades since Yugoslavia fell apart. The brutal conflicts that followed its dissolution are over, but the legacy of the tragedy continues to unsettle the region. Reconciliation is a long and difficult process that necessitates a willingness to work together openly and objectively in confronting the past. Over the past ten years the Scholars’ Initiative has assembled an international consortium of historians, social scientists, and jurists to examine the salient controversies that still divide the peoples of former Yugoslavia. The findings of its eleven research teams represent a direct assault on the proprietary narratives and interpretations that nationalist politicians and media have impressed on mass culture in each of the successor states. Given gaps in the historical record and the existence of sometimes contradictory evidence, this volume does not pretend to resolve all of the outstanding issues. Nevertheless, this second edition incorporates new evidence and major developments that have taken place in the region since the first edition went to press. At the heart of this project has always been the insistence of the authors that they would continue to reconsider their analyses and conclusions based on credible new evidence. Thus, in this second edition, the work of the Scholars' Initiative continues. The broadly conceived synthesis will assist scholars, public officials, and the people they represent both in acknowledging inconvenient facts and in discrediting widely held myths that inform popular attitudes and the electoral success of nationalist politicians who profit from them. Rather than rely on special pleading and appeals to patriotism that have no place in scholarship, the volume vests its credibility in the scientific credentials of its investigators, the transparent impartiality of its methodology, and an absolute commitment to soliciting and examining evidence presented by all sides.
This book examines the exercise of power in the stalinist music world as well as the ways composers and ordinary people responded to it. It is a comparative inquiry into this relationship between music and politics in the German Democratic Republic and Poland from the aftermath of the Second World War, through Stalin’s death in 1953, and concluding with the slow process of destalinization in the mid- to late-1950s. This study takes seriously the communist parties’ claims about and intentions for all kinds of music, both art and popular, and examines how composers, performers, and audiences cooperated with, resisted, and negotiated these suggestions and demands. The book argues that music, as a significant part of cultural production in these countries, played a key role in instituting and maintaining the communist regimes of East Central Europe. As part of the stalinist project to create and control the new socialist person, the ruling parties in East Germany and Poland sought to influence musical production to saturate the public space with politically effective ideas and symbols that furthered their attempt to, in the parlance of the day, engineer the human soul. Music helped the parties establish legitimacy; both extensive state support for musical life, as well as the messages in the music itself, encouraged musical elites and audiences to accept the parties’ dominant position and political mission. The parties invested considerable resources in the attempt to create an authorized musical language that would secure and maintain hegemony over the cultural and wider social world. The responses of composers and audiences ran the gamut from enthusiasm to suspicion, but indifference was not an option.
Berlin, Budapest, Prague, and Warsaw are cities indelibly marked by more than forty years of Soviet influence. Urban Cultures in (Post) Colonial Central Europe explores the ways in which these major urban centers have redefined their identities in the last two decades. The author suggests that they are both Central European and (post) colonial spaces and that the locations of their (post)coloniality can be found predominantly in communicative and media processes and their results in architecture, film, literature, and new media.
Agata Anna Lisiak analyzes Berlin, Budapest, Prague, and Warsaw as (post)colonial cities because their politics, cultures, societies, and economies have been shaped by two centers of power: the Soviet Union as the former colonizer, whose influence remains visible predominantly in architecture, infrastructure, social relations, and mentalities, and the Western culture and the Western and/or global capital as the current colonizer, whose impact extends over virtually all spheres of urban life. The cities discussed are not exclusively postcolonial or solely colonial: they are “in-between” the two predicaments and, hence, are best described as (post)colonial. The (post)colonial and “in-between peripheral” identities and locations of the Central European capitals complement each other, and their analysis provides a relevant perspective on the transformation processes that have been shaping the region after 1989.
When Austria annexed Galicia during the first partition of Poland in 1772, the province's capital, Lemberg, was a decaying Baroque town. By the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Lemberg had become a booming city with a modern urban and, at the same time, distinctly Habsburg flavor. In the process of the "long" nineteenth century, both Lemberg's appearance and the use of public space changed remarkably. The city center was transformed into a showcase of modernity and a site of conflicting symbolic representations, while other areas were left decrepit, overcrowded, and neglected. Habsburg Lemberg: Architecture, Public Space, and Politics in the Galician Capital, 1772–1914 reveals that behind a variety of national and positivist historical narratives of Lemberg and of its architecture, there always existed a city that was labeled cosmopolitan yet provincial; and a Vienna, but still of the East. Buildings, streets, parks, and monuments became part and parcel of a complex set of culturally driven politics.
The Austrian writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929) was one of the great modernists in the German language, but his importance as a major intellectual of the early twentieth century has not received adequate attention in the English-speaking world. One distinguished literary scholar of his generation called Hofmannsthal a “spiritual-moral authority” of a kind German culture had only rarely produced. This volume provides translations of essays that deal with the Austrian idea and with the distinctive position of German-speaking Austrians between German nationalism and peoples to the East, whether in the Habsburg Monarchy or beyond it, as well as essays that locate Hofmannsthal’s thinking about Austria in relation to the broader situation of German and European culture. “It is the true accomplishment of this translation that Hofmannsthal’s language, recreated in a clear and elegant English, regains its melody of an earlier time. If there ever was a captivating documentation of the European potential of Austria beyond the stereotypes of “Vienna at 1900,” it has been brought together in this volume of essays that responded to the tragic challenges of World War I in a constructive way.” Frank Trommler, University of Pennsylvania
The brief reign of Joseph I occupies an important place in Austrian history, coinciding as it does with the monarchy's great victories and conquests during the War of the Spanish Succession. Under Joseph's leadership, Austria established its long hegemony over Italy and suppressed the great Rgk6czi rebellion, drawing up a compromise with the Hungarian nation, which was to serve as a landmark in Austro-Hungarian relations until the end of the monarchy. Despite the significance of Joseph's contribution to the history of his dynasty, he has never had a modern biographer until now. Extensively researched both in published and archival sources, In Quest and Crisis is the first biography of this colorful emperor to appear in any language since the eighteenth century.
Pietas Austriaca is a path-breaking study of the relationship between religious beliefs and practices and Habsburg political culture from the end of the medieval period to the early twentieth century. In this seminal work, Anna Coreth examines the ways that Catholic beliefs in the power of the Eucharist, the cross, the Virgin Mary, and saints were crucial for the Habsburg ruling dynasties in Austria and Spain.Coreth analyzes how leading Habsburg rulers in the early modern period used Catholic sacraments, rituals, and symbols to create a sense of identity and political purpose for their far-flung possessions in Europe. She also demonstrates how this Catholic culture drew on earlier models of pious Catholic rulers, especially on the memory of Rudolph. In addition, Pietas Austriaca discusses the importance of this particular brand of Catholic piety in the confrontation with Protestantism in the Counterreformation period and in the encounter with the Muslim Turkish empire. Coreth extends her study to discuss the myriad ways that this religious culture continued to influence Austrian society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Pietas Austriaca is a tour de force that combines expertly social, cultural, gender and intellectual analysis of the political and religious landscape of one of Europe's most important empires and leading dynastic houses.
Under the patronage of two south German nobles, Johann Lorenz Schmidt published an annotated translation of the Bible's opening books in 1735. The story of the controversy the work aroused and of its eventual suppression sheds light on many aspects of the eighteenth century, as well as the nature of censorship in our time.
This multidisciplinary approach explores the historical antecedents and the dynamic process of Yugoslavia's violent dissolution. The volume, a compilation by distinguished scholars, examines issues broadening the understanding of the Yugoslav case, and also sheds light on how to deal with future episodes of state fragility and failure. Moreover, fifteen years after the Yugoslav crisis, the volume fills in the "blank spots" in the historical record.
In the late spring of 1718 near the village of Požarevac (German Passarowitz) in northern Serbia, freshly conquered by Habsburg forces, three delegations representing the Holy Roman Emperor, Ottoman Sultan, and the Republic of Venice gathered to end the conflict that had begun three and a half years earlier. The fighting had spread throughout southeastern Europe, from Hungary to the southernmost tip of the Peloponnese. The peace redrew the map of the Balkans, extending the reach of Habsburg power, all but expelling Venice from the Greek mainland, and laying the foundations for Ottoman revitalization during the Tulip period. In this volume, twenty specialists analyze the military background to and political context of the peace congress and treaty. They assess the immediate significance of the Peace of Passarowitz and its longer term influence on the society, demography, culture, and economy of central Europe.
The Memory Factory introduces an English-speaking public to the significant women artists of Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century, each chosen for her aesthetic innovations and participation in public exhibitions. These women played important public roles as exhibiting artists, both individually and in collectives, but this history has been silenced over time. Their stories show that the city of Vienna was contradictory and cosmopolitan: despite men-only policies in its main art institutions, it offered a myriad of unexpected ways for women artists to forge successful public careers. Women artists came from the provinces, Russia, and Germany to participate in its vibrant art scene. However, and especially because so many of the artists were Jewish, their contributions were actively obscured beginning in the late 1930s. Many had to flee Austria, losing their studios and lifework in the process. Some were killed in concentration camps.
Along with the stories of individual women artists, the author reconstructs the history of separate women artists’ associations and their exhibitions. Chapters covering the careers of Tina Blau, Elena Luksch-Makowsky, Bronica Koller, Helene Funke, and Teresa Ries (among others) point to a more integrated and cosmopolitan art world than previously thought; one where women became part of the avant-garde, accepted and even highlighted in major exhibitions at the Secession and with the Klimt group.
“This is an excellent addition to the literature on fin-de-sicle Vienna, well-researched and well-argued. It highlights little-known artists and situates them in a novel interpretation of women’s roles in the art world. The author challenges dominant tropes of feminist historiography and thus sheds new light on twentieth-century art history and historiography.” —Michael Gubser, James Madison University