Nationale Vielfalt und gemeinsames Erbe in Mitteleuropa by Erhard Busek; Gerald StourzhReview by: Martyn RadyThe Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 72, No. 3 (Jul., 1994), pp. 553-556Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4211602 .

Accessed: 14/06/2014 22:16

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School of Slavonic and EastEuropean Studies are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Slavonic andEast European Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 185.44.77.34 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 22:16:11 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

REVIEWS 553

principality of Wallachia, and Stoker's character, is the name. Nothing in Stoker's work bears a historical relationship to the deeds of Vlad or to the events of his reign. Vlad did not practise vampirism, nor is there any association of it with him in Romanian folk legend, as one of the contributions in this volume points out. Admittedly, the notoriety attached to Vlad Dra- cula's method of punishment for his enemies, namely impalement, and other acts of cruelty attributed to him, provided Stoker with an attractive pedigree for his hero. But there the relationship ends.

Vlad, despite his cruelty, has been elevated by Romanian historians to the rank of national hero for saving his country from Turkish domination. In the minds of Western readers the fictional Dracula and the historical Vlad are difficult to separate, but Romanians have no such problem. Indeed, the essays in this collection, mostly by native historians, show why. The emphasis here is very clearly on the deeds of Vlad the Impaler; his campaigns against the Turks, and his relations with Transylvania and Hungary. Other contributions to this volume explain how Vlad acquired such a negative image in the West, largely through the stories of Saxon merchants from Transylvania, and contrast this with his image in Romanian folklore. There is a useful appendix with English translations of extracts from Ottoman chronicles concerning Vlad, an extract from Chalkondylas, and a genealogy of Vlad's family. School of Slavonic and East European Studies DENNIS DELETANT

University ofLondon

Busek, Erhard and Stourzh, Gerald (eds). Nationale Vielfalt undgemeinsames Erbe in Mitteleuropa. Geschichte und Politik, Vienna, and Oldenbourg, Munich, I990. I46 pp. No price available (paperback).

ANTON GINDELY (i829-92) must surely rank among the greatest Central European historians of the nineteenth century. His published works include not only studies of the Counter-Reformation, Thirty Years' War and the reign of Rudolph II but also some important source editions which continue to be of value to historians: most notably the first five volumes of the Monumenta Historiae Bohemicae (Prague, I865-70) and Quellen zur Geschichte der bohmischen Bruder (Vienna, I859). It is thus fitting that the Osterreichische Forschungs- gemeinschaft should have named its prestigious prize for historians in his memory. The present volume contains the texts of ten lectures delivered between 1979 and I989 on the occasion of the prize's award.

Gindely was an Old Austrian. Of mixed Czech and Hungarian-German parentage, he never sympathized with the contemporary nationalist move- ments. As he complained, '. . . the differences between us are becoming ever starker. There is not a single gathering or institution which is not about to lose its mediating character. Should you wish to exercise, then you must choose between a German or Czech Turnverein; a German Casino is being set up beside a Czech one; now there is a German Historical Society and a Czech . . . The time will shortly come when, as you take your last breath, you will have to explain whether you want to take German or Czech air' (pp. 30-3 ). Gindely anticipated various political consequences to the present crisis, ranging from

This content downloaded from 185.44.77.34 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 22:16:11 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

554 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW

absolutism to confederacy. Nevertheless, the remedy to which he often returned was a personal one. If only the peoples of the Monarchy could acquire the same linguistic proficiency as he possessed, then, so he main- tained, the relationship between the nationalities would be less embittered. For this reason, he steadfastly recommended that the Bohemian inner service should be bilingual.

Gindely's solution was overwhelmingly naive. A bilingual civil service could, in the context of late nineteenth-century Bohemia, only have been a bureaucracy staffed in the main by Czechs: hence the violent German reaction to Badeni's I897 octroi which sought to impose precisely what Gindely had recommended. Moreover, Gindely supposed that nationality, since it was defined by language, might be relieved of its potency by the dilution of linguistic affiliation. He failed to comprehend the relationship, therefore, between nationality and power and he mistook the badge of nationhood for the substance of identity. Despite his fluency in Czech and German, Gindely could not survive the division of the University of Prague in I 882. Unlike the flowers in the University's Botanical Garden, which on account of their Latin names could be claimed by both Czech and German faculties, Gindely was unwanted by either side. He was thus forced to take early retirement.

It really is no good, therefore, for Brigitte Hamann (p. 27) to claim that historians of Gindeley's calibre were plentiful ('eine ganze Reihe') in the nineteenth century, and that Gindely's true merit lay in his 'supra- nationalism'. Rather, it is the other way round: as a historian he was first-class; as an ubernationale Denker he was irrelevant. Nevertheless, the myth of Old Austria, as represented by Gindely, remains sufficiently strong for it yet to exercise its attraction on the organizers of the Gindely prize. Among the requirements for prizewinners is, therefore, that they should in their historical writing demonstrate both a facility in more than one of the Monarchy's languages and, although this point is less explicitly made, an appreciation of 'the cultural and historical unity of multi-lingual Mitteleuropa' (p. I 4).

In keeping with the spirit behind the Gindely Prize, several of the contribu- tors to the present volume demonstrate their good mitteleuropaische credentials. Ferenc Glatz criticizes historiography which is predicated on state and nation, affirms that as a historian he is dedicated to the dissolution of etatisme and to the separation of nationality from the international state-system, and advocates the restoration of a confederal Central Europe. In a statement which recalls Tsar Alexander's Holy Alliance, Wiadyslaw Bartoszewski makes an appeal to love. Stanislaw Stomma dedicates his own lecture to the memory of Franz Josef.

To claim that Central Europe is distinguished by its unity is as empty a statement as Vidal de la Blanche's famous assertion that France is character- ized by its variety. As Werner Ogris argues here, the Habsburg rulers dedicated themselves in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the consoli- dation of the Behordeorganisation in the Monarchy's various lands and king- doms. Their interest in its unity seldom went beyond confessional allegiance and the centralized administration of the royal reservata. By strengthening the separate organizations of government in each of their lands, the Habsburg rulers reinforced the Staatsrechtlichkeit of the Monarchy's individual parts and

This content downloaded from 185.44.77.34 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 22:16:11 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

REVIEWS 555

thus provided the institutional and ideological underpinning to late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century nationalisms. Only under the impact of the Enlightenment did the Habsburg rulers seek to unify the laws and thereby weld together a single jurisdiction: die gesammte Unterthanen zu allgemeiner Wohlfahrt untern einem Gott, einem Landes.irsten und einerlei Gesetz vereinbart zu sein (p.ss, citing an anonymous pamphlet published in I753). By this time, however, the die had been cast. National rights articulated within the framework of the retained lands and kingdoms prevented the adoption of the Austrian Civil Code throughout the entirety of the Monarchy. The lifting of the Civil Code in Hungary in i86i foreshadowed the Monarchy's division six years later.

Article XIX of the Dezember-Verfassung of I867 included guarantees for the linguistic rights of minorities which werejudicially enforceable. As Gerald Stourzh argues in this volume, the Reichsgericht and Verwaltungsgerichtshof scrupulously upheld the complaints of minority groups. Nevertheless, by the turn of the century, the national communities in the Monarchy were less concerned to ensure that their members enjoyed rights which equalled those possessed by members of other national groups, than to establish their own collective autonomy. The organization of school boards on the principle of nationality and the establishment of national curias for voting were indicative of this development. As the rights of the group came to outweigh in importance those of its individual members, so the politics of the Monarchy assumed a dangerous centrifugal quality, leading eventually to dissolution.

The Dezember-Verfassung was a characteristically liberal document which sought to protect the linguistic and cultural rights of the individual within the context of a centralized state. As Jiri Koiralka indicates here, the alliance between liberalism and national rights may be demonstrated on a personal level through the early career of Frantisek Palacky (I 798-I876). Not only was Palacky in close contact with the court liberals, most notably Pillersdorf, during the Pre-March, but also his famous speech on the necessity of Austria, delivered on I I April I848, was cribbed almost verbatim from newspaper articles by Ernst von Schwarzer and Hans von Perthaler.

Koiralka argues that the inability of the Kremsier Reichstag to reconstruct the Monarchy on federal principles, together with the imposition of 'neo- absolutism', drove a wedge between liberalism and the concept of national equality. Nevertheless, it may be observed that the stress Palacky put upon collective national rights amounted itself to a repudiation of the liberal programme. Palacky was overwhelmingly concerned with the rights of the Volk and not with the rights of the individual. It may well be, as Koiralka argues here, that the sort of federal arrangement promoted by Palacky was a viable solution to the Monarchy's nationalities problem. It is equally likely, however, that federalism would simply have hastened the Monarchy's disintegration into competing national units.

In his study on the Jews in the Habsburg Monarchy, Wolfgang Haiusler suggests that the Jews, as the most 'Austrian' and cosmopolitan of the Monarchy's peoples, might have effected a new pan-monarchical cultural synthesis. Study of his text suggests, however, that this observation is really only an afterthought. The history of the Monarchy's Jews, as Hiiusler tells it,

This content downloaded from 185.44.77.34 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 22:16:11 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

556 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW

bears a strong resemblance to that of the Monarchy's other constituent nationalities. The Jewish community was strongly affected on the one hand, therefore, by assimilationist pressures and, on the other, by powerful national- ist impulses leading to Zionism. Moreover, just as nationalism may itself be considered the consequence of modernization, so contemporary antisemitism may likewise be thought to have its origins in the same phenomenon. As Hiiusler indicates, antisemitism was transformed during the nineteenth century from a prejudice conceived on religious grounds to a secular resentment which derived from Jewish commercial and professional advancement. Hausler's account of nineteenth-centuryJewry is a masterpiece of compression. Nevertheless, it does suggest that the history of the Monarchy's Jews cannot be considered sui generis but needs to be placed instead in the broader comparative context of nineteenth-century nationalism.

Notwithstanding both its Jewish population and its Baroque facades, the Habsburg Monarchy was never a cultural unity. In a lecture originally delivered in I984, the content of which is now familiar from his more recent publications, Peter Hanaik contrasts fin-de-siecle Budapest and Vienna. The culture of the Viennese Sezession was predicated on style and aesthetics. Its symbols were the Garden, where the arts might seek a refuge from mundane political affairs, and the Stage, where the relationship between appearance and reality might be teased out. In Budapest, by contrast, culture was defined by reference to the 'Workplace'. The arts were perceived as furthering the national cause and as both an adjunct and expression of politics. Whereas the slogan of Viennese intellectual life was 'Der Kunst ihre Freiheit', in Budapest it was 'Dem Land seine Freiheit'. As the first issue of A Hit put it, 'L'art pour l'art is the luxury of great and fortunate nations. Culture is power for the small nations of the Danube' (cited here, p. I I3). Although the priority of the aesthetic was promoted after I 9o8 by the Nyugat circle, Viennese culture had by this time moved on in the direction of absurdism. The synchronization of cultural movements thus proved elusive.

Culturally, administratively, legally and linguistically disunited, the Habsburg Monarchy was never likely to be able to accommodate modern nationalism. Nor, as Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities so cruelly illustrated, was the Monarchy capable of advancing a bonding vision suffici- ent to resist the cogency of the national principle. Historians who seek to extract a blueprint for a successful multi-national Mitteleuropa from the ruin of the Habsburg Monarchy may be engaged in a noble work of invention but they are not practising their vocation. In this respect, Gindely's own words stand as timely advice: 'The goal which the historian at this present time in Austria should strive towards, is the most dispassionate truth [die rucksichtsloseste Wahrheit]. They may not like this, but they must put up with it' (p. 30). School of Slavonic and East European Studies MARTYN RADY University ofLondon

This content downloaded from 185.44.77.34 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 22:16:11 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions