Reviewing popular historical accounts from an academic perspective is a thankless task. This has less to do with the question of whether every detail of such a narrative, which is aimed at a broad audience, is correct. Rather, it essentially forces university historians to confront the question of their own role and influence: what history, which may ultimately have much more influence than sophisticated, differentiated perspectives from within research debates, is being told outside the initially self-referential system of academia. This question is by no means new and has accompanied the establishment of history as an academic discipline and its relationship to a broader understanding of historical writing since the nineteenth century. Thus, Nietzsche’s dictum quoted above is not only part of this ongoing process of criticism and self-definition of history as a science. Significantly, it was the popular writer Emil Ludwig who brought this quote to bear in his debate with university historians from Germany and Austria in the late 1920s.Footnote ² Historical novels were the enemy of these experts, who subjected them to a collective attack on the grounds of political bias and “feuilletonism.” The fact that this concerted attack took place solely within the framework of the leading scientific journal and not in the wider public sphere, which they claimed to be protecting from trashy literature, gave the entire critique rather an unintentionally ironic twist.Footnote ³

One hundred years later, the self-reflective debate within university history departments has changed significantly, and public history has established itself as a separate field.Footnote ⁴ This brings us in a way to the situation that Hayden White once anecdotally described as the third stage of development toward a more community-oriented historiography and historical science: “Finally, the professionalization of history created a wedge between those historians concerned to create a scientific account of the past and those who continued to favor the older, traditional mode of storytelling (or narrative), considered to be a mode of explaining history particularly suited to the needs and interests of the ‘ordinary, educated’ citizen […].”Footnote ⁵ However, in both cases, the question of the influence of historical research and its impact on society at large remains.

The complexity of the societal and historical debate about what constitutes “Austrian history” dates back to the nineteenth century and has not become any simpler after the new republic was established in the postwar period.Footnote ⁶ Against this backdrop, the Austrian public broadcaster’s (ORF) historical documentary series Österreich – die ganze Geschichte takes a rather bold approach. According to the emphatic announcement in the first episode, the aim is to tell the “whole history” literally as a “story”—and indeed as a “story” that not only allows us to “understand today from back then,” as it initially states. No, shortly afterwards, the series’ ambition is articulated in far more statesmanlike terms: it wants to show “what we can learn from our country’s past in order to understand the present and master the future.”

Its explicitly didactic orientation is already evident in its overall presentation structure. In addition to a studio presentation that provides context and is garnished with graphics, visual effects, and sound effects, there are recurring outdoor reports that are intended to make the connection to the present clear, even to the most reluctant viewers. These reports visit locations where historical events took place or modern institutions connected to them (such as a wine cellar or the parliament). Here, the presenter’s commentary usually repeats information that has already been provided before, presumably to ensure that viewers take it away as a learning point for the present.

The opening trailer of each episode makes the claim to show the big picture tangible in a concise visual form—ranging from the seal of Otakar Přemysl II to Sisi and St. Stephen’s Cathedral, everyday objects of Ottoman and non-Ottoman origin to edelweiss, wine, and song (Johann Strauss II’s The Blue Danube), concentration camps and Hitler to the final destination of Vienna’s Pallas Athene fountain as pars pro toto of parliament and thus democracy. From the perspective of an early modern historian, this broad chronological range within which national history is to be told must be particularly intriguing. After all, is it not this late-invented epoch that usually provides the general public with particular points of identification in a national historical narrative? Filling the entire first season of the documentary series (10 episodes, nonetheless) with the Middle Ages and early modern period is, in this respect, a sign of remarkable daring. This is particularly true in light of the series’ explicitly presentist ambitions, which are also familiar, at least in parts of public history in the sense of “identity building as a central agenda.”Footnote ⁷

What are the building blocks of this narrative of identity for the pre-modern era? First of all, the obvious desire to deviate from the conventional narrative familiar from many older historical documentaries is remarkable. Monarchs are only occasionally brought into focus. The structure of the first season is rather characterized by an interesting combination of diachronic progression of the narrative and systematic thematic areas. In the second episode, for example, the classic narrative thread is the conflict between Rudolf of Habsburg and Otakar Přemysl, but it is also linked to the question of the starvation of the city of Vienna and, in this context, to questions of food and urban history. At the opposite chronological end of this season, Maria Theresa becomes a minor figure in the presentation of the Enlightenment, while Joseph II and his reforms are a secondary detail between the Freemasons and the Jacobins. Accordingly, for the time around 1600, the court of Rudolf II appears as a vague context for addressing the issue of witch hunts. Even though the popular topics of witch hunts and the plague are naturally included, the range of subjects stretches further, from the climate and economic history to the role of women, humanism, and the persecution of Jews, military confrontations, and cultural contacts with the Ottomans.

This narrative emphasis ultimately creates an ambivalent impression. There is certainly a broad overlap here with research trends of recent decades. The choice of topics for the series in the academic sphere is often linked to a methodological focus on cultural and microhistory, which offers clearly fruitful points of contact for a popular presentation of history. In this sense, the documentary shows the effort to break down “big” history into microhistorical examples. However, this is not done in an inductive use of microhistory for the grand narrative, but rather in a deductive manner. From a (cinematic) narrative point of view, this approach is all too understandable. Here, examples of patrician burghers (second episode, The Reign of Hunger), simple farmers (fifth episode, Hostages of the Cold), ideal-typical fictional spies (ninth episode, The Golden Apple), the royal servant Helene Kottaner (fourth episode, The Master Thief), or figures such as Joseph von Sonnenfels or Franz Hebenstreit (10th episode, At the Scaffold of Freedom) are used to create new heroes. This manifests an obvious desire to break with overly traditional and conservative narrative patterns centered on monarchs and dynasties.

As welcome as this may be, the largely consistent exclusion of monarchs, dynasties, and the nobility leads to a fundamental problem of interpretation: The indisputable, though from today’s perspective certainly not necessarily sympathetic, fact that European premodern history was ultimately shaped for many centuries by at least functionally stable dynastic structures and monarchies cannot be explained in this way. However, the didactic impetus of the series largely presents these groups of actors and structures as potentially anonymous, oppressive, and intolerant powers, with their victims or a few more or less successful resisters becoming the new heroes of the narrative. The consequence of this strategy is the compelling fact that an amorphous population, as subjects, appears to be passively exposed to the oppressive forces of a sinister triad of monarchs, nobility, and the church. This is aesthetically framed by the seemingly persistent gloom of medieval and early modern life. Thus, the scenes must be necessarily treated with a special premodern filter that drowns life in gray skies and the landscape in darker colors. As a result, the only salvation to be expected comes from enlightenment and revolutionary emancipation. This, in turn, feeds into such an outdated traditional view of history that efforts to realign it from a microhistorical perspective are ultimately thwarted. The message behind this is, of course, true and honorable: today’s democracy is a hard-won exception in history that must be defended.

The reason why monarchical structures were able to hold out for so long, and the fact that even monarchs could not operate without legitimacy and cooperation, is lost sight of—with the exception of a few moments where university historians, as talking heads, are allowed to paint a more nuanced picture. From this perspective, there can be no question of representation by estates, let alone the integration of rural communities into the provincial assembly, as was the case in Tyrol, for example.Footnote ⁸ A more complex picture of the premodern era, showing the activity and participation of subjects, albeit limited, could equally have served an educational purpose. The portrayal of subjects suffering and oppressed by hegemonic authorities may well serve to cast a brighter light on modernity, but as a narrative strategy, it also harbors an unintended danger: Why should the viewer not conclude that “those at the top” are and have always been like that? This seems particularly relevant if deep down inside the whole series is rather not about history, but about the viewer’s identification with everyday heroes who, in turn, teach them about the value of today’s Austrian society. Honi soit qui mal y pense , Nietzsche’s rhetorical theater seems to be lurking—except that here it is not Romans dressed as Englishmen who are on stage, but the travesty is reversed.

If such general political education can be illustrated using examples from a specific setting, it is a thoroughly appealing undertaking. However, the treatment of early modern history in this specific case poses a particular challenge. One need not resort to the polemical verve of Oliver Rathkolb, who observed about the popular perception of history in the postwar Republic: “The useful elements of identification from the Habsburg era were completely detached and transformed into the Second Republic, without taking into account their historical conditions in a large living and cultural space.”Footnote ⁹ Academia has devoted a great deal of effort and intellectual energy to discussing the complex question of what “Austrian” history can actually be, especially before the twentieth century, and how it can be incorporated into a diachronic narrative extending to the present day.Footnote ¹⁰ This classic problem is particularly evident in the territorial-geographical dimension of what one might call Austria. In this context, Arno Strohmeyer, for example, has advocated a multi-perspective spatial history that identifies differently constituted spaces and analyzes overlaps and clusters. Linking the narrative of Austrian history to the current state territory is certainly one of these possibilities, even if it should by no means lead to the idea of an eternal and solipsistic national territorial space.Footnote ¹¹

In this respect, the documentary series fits seamlessly into an extremely long and fractious academic and nonacademic debate. Nevertheless, it would have been desirable to include more clearly the spatial constellations (political, confessional, economic, etc.) that deviated from the current shape of the Republic and had a significant impact on medieval and early modern history. This happens at a few individual points in the series (mainly through briefly displayed maps or scattered remarks from the voice-over)—but ultimately so sporadically that a naive viewer might wonder, for example, why Rudolf II’s imperial court was located in Prague at all. Thus, the broad spatial references that were also of decisive importance for the history of the Austrian hereditary lands in the early modern period are largely ignored. Here, I would like to point out just the two most blatant cases: Apart from a few mentions of the late medieval Kingdom of Hungary (especially in episode 4), it is later as virtually nonexistent as the Bohemian Lands, apart from the figure Otakar Přemysl; nor does it cite other spatial references, and at least the European dimension of the Habsburg Empire. So, it seems unintentionally comical when the voice-over announces without further explanation that the Counter-Reformation had been particularly strong since 1620 (episode 7, The Witch Trial). But this statement must remain unexplained, as there is literally no connection between Austria and Bohemia in the series. The question of the character of the Habsburg Lands as an Empire (with the hereditary lands as its decisive core component), which has been much discussed in recent historiography of the early modern period, cannot therefore even be asked. This is a missed opportunity, because the very question of the nature and development of an empire is likely to be of some relevance to viewers in understanding current events.

To put the previous remarks into context once again: this is not about criticizing popular historical accounts per se and on principle. That would be as simplistic as it would be narrow-minded and meaningless. The result of such a position can already be observed among the university historians of 1929. From their comfortable academic perspective, it was easy to conclude: “In short, our science is experiencing an invasion of dilettantes who tout their lemonade as fine vintage wine.”Footnote ¹² The overall undertaking of such a series is very welcome. In this context, it was more important to me to point out what I consider to be questionable conceptual decisions within the presentist-didactic logic of the documentary. However, a completely different and more fundamental question can only be raised briefly at this point: Who is the intended audience? Can public broadcasting’s desire to educate people about democracy in the form of a television history documentary also reach the younger generations who will decide on the development of society in the medium and long term? There may be some doubts about this. At the very least, it would be extremely urgent and welcome to translate the content of the documentary into social media-compatible formats and distribute it accordingly. However, this poses entirely different challenges for narrative strategies and the communication of historical content.