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Empress Maria Theresa |
From Engelsberg Ideas:
On 14 November 1918, Czechoslovakia’s first prime minister addressed his new-found country’s parliament. For too long, Karel Kramář announced, Czechs and Slovaks had ‘felt the barbarism of cultural oppression’ under their previous rulers. For too long they had suffered under the ‘heavy bonds of Austrian and Hungarian violence’. To a rapturous standing ovation, he declared that: ‘All ties that bound us to the Habsburg-Lorraine dynasty, are severed.’
Four years earlier, the head of that Habsburg dynasty had declared war on Serbia, setting off a chain reaction that drew Europe into a brutal, grinding war, from which few countries would emerge unscathed – least of all the defeated powers. Dejected and delegitimised, the Habsburgs watched their subjects declare their national independence one by one; the house’s rule over a sprawling Central European realm consigned to the history books.
For many decades, the legacy of Austria-Hungary was defined by people like Kramář, nationalists for whom the ‘black legend’ of Habsburg oppression served as a useful tool to legitimise the nation-states that succeeded it. The Habsburgs were not only deposed, but officially recognised as a malign historical influence, as a centuries-old obstacle to national freedom and self-determination.
Oddly enough, considering their later activities, Kramář and countless other politicians like him had, until the Great War, been loyal Habsburg subjects. Some were even loyal ‘Austrians’ in a supra-national state. Whether they were nationalists, conservatives, socialists, liberals, or Christian democrats, very few politicians envisioned – let alone advocated for – the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian state.
It was this state that ultimately shaped the political experiences and outlooks of the countless millions who came of age in it, particularly the 21 politicians who act as the subjects of Iryna Vushko’s ‘collective portrait’ in her new book Lost Fatherland. Despite the loss of their political homeland, most forged ahead as active participants in the process of shaping the continent’s future in the interwar years.
Vushko does an impressive job of picking apart the various political and intellectual strands that shaped late Austro-Hungarian politics, anchoring her story in real individuals and their political journeys. Many decades of innovative scholarship on the monarchy, which has largely languished far from public view in academic volumes and papers, shines through in a breezy, though not always particularly groundbreaking, narrative. And, it is worth noting, the book only addresses the ‘Austrian’ lands of the dual monarchy. (Read more.)
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