This book by the Swedish historian Fredrik Lindström makes an important contribution to a growing body of scholarship which is reassessing elite and popular thinking about the Habsburg state during the last decades before 1918. The recurring political crises in various provincial diets, in the Austrian and Hungarian parliaments, and in the ministerial councils deeply impressed observers at the time, both at home and abroad. Since the end of World War I, those political crises have also captured the attention of scholars interested in explaining the collapse of the monarchy. In the successor states of the monarchy and beyond, historians...

Josef Redlich, one of the main personalities of this book, spent a large part of his life trying to understand what he variably called “the Austrian problem,” or “the Austrian problem of the state and empire.” When writing the letter from which the above quotation is taken, a few months after the outbreak of World War I, Redlich still felt confident that he would also participate in the political work of finding and realizing a solution to this problem. In 1906, he had taken the step from the academic study of it (he was a noted expert in constitutional and...

One day in mid-May 1919, the historian and journalist Heinrich Friedjung was probably browsing through the showrooms of the Dorotheum auction house in central Vienna. After leaving the Franz Josef room on the first floor, where the auction of furniture and household goods of the late former imperial Austrian minister president, Ernest von Koerber, was in progress, Friedjung would have gone up to the second floor. When he stepped into the Rössler room, nothing could have kept him from examining the books on display there. Friedjung had at this time been cultivating a many-layered interest in Ernest von Koerber for...

On one of the first days of November 1918, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and his family, in panic, as it seems, left the house in Rodaun, outside of Vienna, in which they had lived since the early years of the 1900s. The perceived threat from escaped Russian prisoners of war during these confused last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was exaggerated, as Hugo’s daughter Christiane noted in her diary on the day after the hurried family evacuation. Hofmannsthal’s reaction seems more in tune with the expected arrival of a hostile army than with the petty plundering of a few escaped prisoners...

In Josef Redlich’s voluminous writing on the Austrian imperial state and its history, his personal identification with the destiny of this state constitutes a strong undercurrent. This is nowhere more evident than in the foreword to those never-finished memoirs that Redlich began writing in his new home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the fall of 1928, shortly after having concluded the last of a series of historical works on Imperial Austria, a preoccupation of his that stretched back to the last years before World War I. In this foreword, Redlich recounts how he strongly felt that something was lacking in these...

In October 1918, Josef Redlich made this sharp observation about how the Josephist state continued functioning fully right through the “dissolution” process; viewed thus, “transition” would probably be a better term to describe this process. However, the view implicit in the observation of a parallel existence of the two Austrias—the old Josephist Zwangsstaat and the new multinational Volksstaat—had been part of Redlich’s perception of things for some time. Indeed, I would argue that this division constitutes an important key to understanding the development of late Imperial Austria and its dissolution. By shifting the perspective from the nationality problem...