When the late Robert A. Kann entered the historical profession in the 1940's the study of the Habsburg monarchy was in its infancy in the United States. Today, a robust and mature discipline, its leading American practitioners rank equally with those from other countries, and a voluminous literature has deepened our knowledge of that vanished realm. Professor Kann's achievements through teaching, research, and writing over a span of four decades have contributed substantially to this tranformation in a complex scholarly discipline. This essay will recount some of his achievements insofar as they were realized during his years in the United States. It will also recall some personal qualities of a remarkable man whose death on August 30, 1981, at the age of seventy-five, grieved all who knew him and his works.

From 1950—when Robert Kann first revisited Vienna twelve years after having been driven away from Austria—to the time of his death in Vienna on August 30, 1981, Kann was a man of two countries. For three decades his work spanned America and Austria; he taught, lectured and published on two continents. Kann's influence on historical scholarship both in America and Austria (and beyond) is evidenced by the fact that more of Kann's books were publised both in English and in German translations than those of any other scholar in the field. Let us recall these titles: The Multinational Empire (1950), The Habsburg Empire (1957), A Study in Austrian Intellectual History (1960), The Problem of Restoration (1968), and A History of the Habsburg Empire, 1526–1918 (1974). All of them subsequently appeared in German translation in Austria; thus their impact was doubled.

The Habsburg monarchy was never a major sea power, and for most of its four centuries of existence it had no substantial navy at all. Especially before the nineteenth century the history of Habsburg naval armaments, therefore, is of little interest to the military specialist and more significant as a footnote to the domestic political history of the monarchy. At no time was this more the case than during the reign of Maria Theresa (1740–1780). From a military point of view the naval projects of this period could furnish, at best, the plot of an opera buffa, but from an administrative and economic point of view they highlight some of the most fundamental problems of enlightened absolutism in Austria.

Even though Szabo maintatins that the history of Habsburg naval armaments is of little interest to the miliatry specialist, his article offers several interesting parallels to the history of the Austrian navy in later years. The close connection between Austrian maritime affairs and those of the Habsburg-ruled Italian state of Tuscany under Pietro Leopoldo in the 1770's, was replaced by the dominance in Austrian maritime matters of Venice, whose port and fleet the Habsburgs inherited, first in 1797, and then again in 1814, agter the fall of Napoleon's kingdom of Italy.

The reinvigoration of German nationalism in 1859 aroused public interest in the problem of giveing concrete political organization to a growing German national consciousness which developed in the wake of the Austro-Sardinian War. A sense of anxiety led statesmen and publicists of every shade of opinion and from every German state carefully to weigh their particularist interests and political goals against their perceptions of German national interests. Diplomatic and military failures during the war had cast a shadow over the images of Austria and the Confederation. In the face of kleindeutsch demands for immediate political unification under the leadership of Prussia, the advocates of groβdeutsch reform and the promoters of the Mitteleuropa concept defended the existing Confederation and Austria's role in German civic life. The question of Germany's future fractured political barriers. Liberals joined both the kleindeutsch and the grofideutsch camps; some condemned the Confederation, while others defended it. And while some liberals rejected Austria's place in Germany, others made it central.

The above study deals with a small segment of the life and political thought of Albert Schäffle. In it Gentry expresses views that might have been more valid had he taken into account the whole spectrum of Schaäffle's ever-changing world of ideas, for Schäffle's life took a truly varicolored course.

The third quarter of the nineteenth century witnessed momentous changes in the style of European diplomacy and statecraft. The generation of Klemens von Metternich, Alexander I, and Viscount Castlereagh gave way to that of Louis Napoleon, Viscount Palmerston, Camillo Benso di Cavour, and Otto von Bismarck. The previous conservative consensus among the great powers that had feared war and revolution and valued harmony, peace, and stability succumbed to other ideas and attitudes that accentuated the diversity and the rivalry of the European family of states. The precepts of Concert diplomacy that had formerly regulated relations between the powers were no longer obeyed or respected. Between 1854 and 1871 Europe experienced five wars involving great powers; from 1815 to 1854 there had been only two. Obviously the old european system that had discouraged direct challenges and confrontations was crumbling.

In his article Elrod concentrates on an issue which was indeed vital to the Habsburg empire: the central idea of the pentarchy's international policy. At the Congress of Vienna, held after the end of the Napoleonic wars, the policy of the victorious powers was primarily oriented toward maintaining a balance of power and accepted the concept that the Great Powers were jointly responsible for keeping the peace. By the middle of the century at the latest there was an obvious change in motivation, for, under the ever increasing impetus of new ideas and new people, changes now came to be measured primarily on the basis of self-interest and only secondarily on the basis of their effect on international stability.

During the first decades after it came into existence the Austrian Social Democratic Party dedicated itself to preserving the multinational Austro-Hungarian empire as a state in which it could pursue socialist goals. The party leaders primarily concerned themselves with practical problems of party and trade-union organization, with devising a nationality program to resolve domestic tensions, and with winning the battle for universal suffrage. Before 1908 domestic issues clearly took precedence over international affairs.

Although Austria was reduced to a small republic of seven million inhabitants after World War l, the historical significance of the country remained, for two reasons, disproportionately large in interbellum Europe. First, the ghost of the Austro-Hungarian empire exerted a considerable influence on the fateful course of Central Europe; and, second, Austria is worthy of the historian's attention because of the role she played as the first victim of Hitler. The echoes of the demise of Austria-Hungary would reverberate in Central Europe through Austria; perhaps the history of Europe, even the history of the world, would have taken another course if Austria had chosen to resist absorption into Greater Germany in 1938.

“A great idea,” observed Robert Musil in his The Man without Qualities, is typically found in “a kind of molten state, as a result of which the ego enters into infinite expanses and the expanse of the universe enters into the ego, whereby it ceases to be possible to recognize what belongs to oneself and what to the infinite.” No wonder that “at every attempt to get hold of it in cold words it evaporates into nothingness.”

In few Austrians were preoccupations with post-empire culture and politics stronger than in Hans Eibl, Richard von Kralik's most enthusiastic disciple. Like may young Austrians who had wintnessed the crumbling of the Habsburg empire, Eibl longed for vanished glories, for an all-encompassing Germanic community, and for a leader who combined regenerative religious qualities with political greatness. Though Eibl himself tried to fill these needs with a synthesis of religion and politics, he fell victim to his own endeavors. Given his personality and professional specialization, as well as him mentors, plus the instability of the First Republic, it perhaps could not have been otherwise.

I consider the papers on Richard von Kralik and Hans Eibl as pilot studies of a post-empire problem that should receive a good deal more attention than it has up to now. After all, since the Second World War most of Europe is post-imperial: Great Britain, Holland, Belgium, France, Italy, Austria, the Germanies have all shed their empires. The transformation of a Great Britain into a Little England entails difficult psychological, economic, social, and political adjustments. This is also true with other European powers that have been denuded of their former colonies.

At first glance, Richard Kralik, historian of many interests, cultural philosopher, and poet, would seem to have almost nothing in common with the philosopher Hans Eibl. It is not at all understandable how these two learned men, to whom every-day politics was alien, were of any considerable influence on the forming of political-ideological opinion of students. Kralik and Eibl belonged to that group of intellectuals of Catholic and nationalist leaning who supplied, with their speeches and writings, the intellectual armament of an apparently harmonious combination of Catholicism, German nationalism, and National Socialism.

In discussing the Austrian State Treaty it is necessary to start with an explanation of terminology. Why “State Treaty?” Generally speaking, any treaty concluded between independent states or nations is a “Staatsvertrag,” as the German term goes. Then why is the Austrian treaty of 1955 known as the “State Treaty?” The origins of the term are to be found in Austrian legal terminology after World War I. In 1919 the Austrian government championed the legal thesis, developed by the distinguished legal theorist Hans Kelsen, that the Austrian Republic had not been in a state of war with the Allied and Associated Powers since it had not been in existence while the war was being fought; consequently, the Austrian Republic refused to be the legal successor of the defunct Austro-Hungarian empire.