Robert Kann in his Day famously asked large questions about nationality, revitalizing and imbuing with new academic rigor an already classic debate on ethnic sins of omission and commission in Central Europe. Language was, of course, always recognized as somehow intrinsic to this discussion; and it has exercised a fascination, whether lasting or just casual, for many with interest in the region. The Habsburg lands are renowned as the locus classicus of a polity whose ethnicities were notably marked by language. Moreover, they encompassed a large number (eleven in all, though it is a trope too to exaggerate the total!) of widely divergent languages: German; two Romance tongues, Italian and Romanian; a range of Slavonic languages from all the three branches—western, eastern, and southern—of that family; and Hungarian, or Magyar, from the Finno-Ugric group.

The austrian habsburg court under Empress Maria Theresa has been characterized as combining an informal domesticity with a rigid ceremonial structure inherited from her predecessors. In this picture of life at the Habsburg court, the strict protocol and elaborate calendar of ceremonies only partially designated how the imperial family structured its time; protocol and ceremony coexisted, it would seem, with more casual and relaxed forms of familial interaction. Popular Austrian writing on Maria Theresa has stressed the image of the empress as mother, and the maternal quality of this portrait has colored some modern notions of how her palaces were occupied and used. Tourists visiting Schönbrunn palace, for example, are often told that many of its rooms were designed with familial contact in mind, and the resulting picture of the palace's use and habitation is curiously modern. The notion that an “imperial domesticity” governed actions at Maria Theresa's Schönbrunn has found its way into scholarly literature as well; one scholar has gone so far as to describe Schönbrunn's admixture of ceremonial and intimate spaces as vorbiedermeierlich, that is, prefiguring the family-oriented, bourgeois culture of nineteenth-century Vienna. The instigator of this myth may be Stefan Zweig, who in 1932 described Marie Antoinette's childhood at Schönbrunn as one filled with carefree play, personal freedom, and adventure, all of which prepared her inadequately for her future role as queen of France. The modern visitor to Schönbrunn might be forgiven for thinking that, despite the palace's sumptuous rooms and elegant decoration, it differs minimally from the modern single-family home.

One of the enduring issues in Central European history has been the question of Habsburg longevity, namely, explaining the Habsburg monarchy's ability to endure though confronted with powerful changes in social relations, economic organization, and national allegiances. Certainly, there have been many arguments about which factors are most salient in assessing the Habsburg monarchy's disintegration; some scholars favor an analysis of “inevitable” long-term decline, while others point to the stresses and strains of unsuccessful war. An emphasis on nationalism is common to most explanations and is legitimately attached to the monarchy's ultimate demise. In addition to being challenged by pressures associated with economic and political modernization, imperial longevity and its breakdown were linked to the degree to which the Habsburgs were successful in extending the control of Vienna (the center) over the provinces, both German and non-German (the periphery).

In the historiography of the Habsburg monarchy, the era of neoabsolutism, 1849–59, has generally been defined as either a period of reaction or one of missed opportunity when domestic policy was subordinated to the dynasty's great power interests. Historians commenting on this era have made important contributions, mostly in the area of foreign policy, state finance, economic developments, and constitutional theory, and have focused on what could or should have happened had the government chosen various reform agendas. None, however, have investigated the substantial developments then taking place in the alteration of state-society relations in the area of public opinion formation. Their interpretations have therefore missed and consequently masked the neoabsolutist state's pioneering efforts to create a wholly new relationship with the monarchy's disparate lands and peoples founded upon the rule of law under the Stadion Constitution, 4 March 1849, and then the Sylvester Patent, 31 December 1851.

What is a myth? This question cannot be easily answered; the notions and concepts used in various scientific disciplines are too divergent and, as with many other terms, they possess different meanings in different societies. For the purpose of this article, a definition by Philip Manger is useful. According to this author, a myth is “a form of poetic truth, the sifting out of an essence, a hypothetical, metahistorical core that contained an intrinsic meaning,” a meaning that joins the past to the present and thus establishes another, perhaps higher, form of reality. This holds true for all kinds of myths, but especially for the “political” myth that will be dealt with in this paper.

In comparison with most of his predecessors and successors as imperial Austrian minister president, Ernest von Koerber (1850–1919) has attracted a special sort of scholarly interest. In the rare instances when scholars have investigated Austrian governments during the era of the Dual Monarchy (1867–1918), these governments have been approached in the direct context of this system and era. Koerber's five-year-long government (1900–1904) has instead been studied in the considerably wider frame of reference of the modernization of Europe in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There are, in fact, qualities in Koerber's political program, often referred to as the “Koerber Plan,” that seem to merit such attention. When compared to most Austrian governments of the late Habsburg Empire, Koerber's minister presidency was extraordinarily active. In the eyes of both contemporaries and later observers, the large-scale investment program (mainly in railroads and canal construction) represented the essence of Koerber's modernization project. But he also carried out a widely noted liberalization of state control in society, elements of which included ending the policing of political meetings and practically canceling censorship of newspapers. His background as a civil servant also shaped his policies, especially his very active modernization and effectivization program for the state bureaucracy.

Many years ago, Arthur J. May wrote, “Only the Bucovina provided a patch of blue in the beclouded nationality sky of Austria.” Without going into the comparative aspect of this assertion, the object of this study is to ascertain to what extent May's statement correctly reflects the complex relationships of the ethnoculrural or national groups in Bukovina. How blue was the sky really?

Acquired by Austria in 1774–75, Bukovina prior to 1918 was a small Crownland in the northeastern corner of the Austrian Empire. It bordered on Hungary, Romania, the Russian Empire, and the Austrian province of Galicia. Its area was about 410,000 square kilometers, and its population in 1910 was just over 800,000. Some of the land was rolling and fairly fertile countryside, especially in the north and east, merging into the foothills that in turn gave way to the Carpathian Mountains in the south and west. Much of Bukovina was forested. The estates of the large landowners, sometimes with a palace or large manor house, stood in glaring contrast to the small landholdings of the peasantry and their cramped housing. The capital, Czernowitz (Chernivtsi), with a population in 1910 of around 87,000, was the only sizable city.

Any modern atlas or encyclopedia will inform us that Bratislava is the capital of the Slovak Republic, the center of Slovak political and cultural life. But before World War I—or even toward the end of it in 1918—it was far from clear that the city could or should be defined as “Slovak,” to say nothing of a “Slovak capital”; that it was to belong to the future state of Czechoslovakia; or that it was to be called Bratislava. This essay will describe the processes that led to these outcomes, and how a name shift became a crucial instrument in the “Slovakization” of the city. In focusing also on the ways local and central actors responded to these political and symbolic transformations, I hope to shed new light on the complexity of collective identifications and allegiances, and on the significance of renaming as a catalyst for processes of nationalization in Central Europe in the early decades of the twentieth century.

It is Difficult to find fault with Peter Bugge's study, which is based on a very solid knowledge of the most important literature and sources. For many centuries, the citizens of Bratislava (Pressburg/Pozsony) had lived their own lives, which were only minimally touched by ethnic or national conflicts. Their mentality was best reflected by an anecdote published in the Pressburger Zeitung in 1919, shortly before Czechoslovakia's first census:

Two “Pressburger” met in the street.

“What nationality will you declare on the census? Are you a German?” the first one asks.

“I am not a German,” answers the second.

“Will you declare yourself a Magyar?”

“No, I am not a Magyar.”

“Then you must be a Slovak.”

“No, I am not a Slovak.”

“And what nationality are you actually?”

“I am a Pressburgeaner.”

To Liberate Me from the detestable yoke of foreignness,… I implore you to change my surname,” Umberto Terchig begged Italian authorities in Venezia Giulia, Italy's new northeastern border territory incorporated in the wake of the Habsburg collapse. In Venezia Giulia, comprised of several of the provinces of the former Austrian Adriatic littoral, some 1,000 individuals in the population of approximately 350,000 requested surname changes over the period from the end of World War I in 1918 to the Fascist takeover in 1922. Most petitioners hailed from Trieste and the city's immediate surroundings. Their level of education and relative sophistication varied. Nonetheless, these individuals shared a particular “nationality consciousness” that led them to choose name change as a means to establish national belonging in Italy. Former Habsburg subjects, like Umberto Terchig, living throughout the successor states sought to rearticulate ethnic and national identities to reflect personal affinities and ambitions consistent with institutional arrangements and associations in emerging state frameworks.

This is a story of a missed opportunity. Italian national identity emerged in the modern era on a feeble institutional basis. However, the completion of the country's unity with World War I offered the Italian Liberal state and its administrative elites a great chance. Italy's leaders and officials made the most conspicuous attempt to assert their function as genuine public servants of the general interest—the most effective way to corroborate a sense of national community from the top—by mastering the fervent irredentism in the Venezia Giulia with a mixture of encouragement and moderation. And yet, after four years, this enlightened conduct had to yield to the fanatic and counterproductive nationalism of the far right. Maura Hametz provides a perceptive explanation of this missed opportunity by focusing on the interplay between national choices and local politics in Trieste. Even better, Hametz's essay narrates the story at the microlevel with frequent reference to the international context, thus using a rare combination of ethnocultural and diplomatic history approaches. Few studies of national identity dare encroach on traditional diplomatic history territory. But when dealing with the border disputes among Austria's successor states, it becomes crucial to fit the anthropological and sociological aspects of microhistory into the general history of Europe's balance of power.

What's in a name? For nationalist activists in Habsburg Central Europe in the early part of the twentieth century, names seem to have meant everything. As Peter Bugge and Maura Hametz convincingly demonstrate in their engaging essays on Bratislava and Trieste after World War I, the use of particular names gave nationalists the power to assert symbolic territorial claims against opponents. Well before 1914 in many regions of the monarchy, as apparently innocent a gesture as hanging a business sign in one language in a neighborhood inhabited by speakers of another language could inflame the passions of local nationalists enough to create political causes célèbres out of such displays. Similarly, the decision of a town council in a linguistically mixed region either to add or to prohibit street signs in a second language could easily provoke serious public protest. The activists who labored obsessively to nationalize both Central European peoples and the spaces they inhabited experienced decisions in favor of one or another set of names as incursions launched against the territory of a national enemy. Never mind that such “linguistic attacks” frequently originated as innocent business advertisement. Nationalists made sure that they would become understood as the legitimate (or illegitimate) reclamation (or seizure) of one nation's property from another.