I should like to begin by recalling my own occasional points of contact with Robert Kann. When his first book, the great two-volume work on the nationality problem in the Habsburg Empire, was published, I was a student about to embark on research on eighteenth-century Austria, and took little notice of any large works not on my research period. Later, teaching nineteenth-century European history, I came to appreciate its wide range and deep insights. By the time his highly original Study in Austrian Intellectual History was published in 1960, my career as a historian had prospered sufficiently for me to be offered this book for review by a leading British historical periodical. I commented very positively on his analysis of Abraham a Sancta Clara. Turning to the chapters on Joseph von Sonnenfels, however, I took the opportunity of presenting some results of my own research on Sonnenfels, which had only just been published and which I thought called some of his judgments into question. Unlike many Central European academics of his generation, Robert Kann did not resent criticism by a younger colleague; hence I have memories of some pleasant and stimulating meetings with him in Vienna during the time he held an honorary professorship there.

Two Brothers Were born in Budapest before the turn of the century and grew up in that city speaking Hungarian. After they had left Hungary for good, they became assimilated in Austria and Germany. Later, one of them Attila Hörbiger, went on to become one of Nazi Germany's top movie stars, as did his wife Paula Wessely. During the Austrian Second Republic, the two brothers achieved cult figure status in the theater. Fifteen years ago, as Paul Hörbiger lay close to death, he expressed the wish to speak with Attila once again, after so many years, in Hungarian, the language of their childhood. In the final hour of Paul's life, that is what te brothers did.1 Regardless of the extent to which this story is, in fact, true, it can nevertheless serve as the leitmotiv for a discussion of ethnic and cultural identity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, providing an indication of the way many Austrians dealt with their ethnic origins or cultural background.

When Engelbert Dollfuss became chancellor of Austria in May 1932, no one dreamed that he would become a fascist dicator.1 Even his bitter opponents in 1933 and 1934 admitted that he was genuine democrat when he became chancellor. He had friendly relations with the leaders of the Social Democratic Party. In May 1932, the Social Democratic Party leader Otto Bauer felt that when the time was ripe Dollfuß intended to form a coalition with his party.

Friedrich Rainer (1903-50?) personified the semiautonomous chieftain who served the Third Reich so well. Born in Carinthia, he worked his way into major party positions in Austria and then, after the Anschluss, moved into crucial posts in the Ostmark. After leading the party in Salzburg, he highlighted his Nazi career by serving as Gauleiter of his native province. Simultaneously he governed the occupied regions in northern Slovenia (Carniola) and later added a role as Hitler's deputy on the Adriatic coast (Istria, Trieste, and environs). He was extremely ambitious, well connected in party circles, a capable administrator, a pronounced Pan-German, and a Hitler loyalist to the end. He also revealed himself as a keen observer of his surroundings, an active propagandist, and an able politician. In short, as a leader of consequence in the Third Reich, he did not differ much from other key Nazi lieutenants.

When the last Allied soldier left Austria in the fall of 1955, Austrians could look back on ten years of profound change. Austria had been reborn in the spring of 1945 with the provisional government's declaration of independence, but from the beginning, Austria was faced with a material crisis and a crisis of identity. In those lean years following the war Austrians drank Blümchenkaffee, coffee so weak that one could see through it to the floral designs on the bottom of coffee cups. By 1955, the physical rebuilding of Austria, greatly assisted by Marshall Plan aid, was largely complete and the shortages of food and fuel were mostly a memory.1 Simultaneously, Austrian political leaders and educators had laid the groundwork for a new Austrian identity based on a mixture of tradition, Austrian uniqueness vis-à-vis Germany, democratic values, and the myth of “Austria-as-victim.” The time of Blümchenkaffee was coming to an end. Austrian coffee was now richly brewed, and more and more Austrians could afford to drink Wiener Melange—strong coffee mixed with steamed milk and often served with sugar and a small glass of water on the side.

For a Long time, scholars of witch-hunting presented Enlightenment political reforms as a kind of ”cure” for the “craze” of witchcraft, but despite these efforts, relatively little attention was truly paid to the end of witch-hunting. Without were formulated, historians attributed changes in state policy to an emerging skepticism and rationalism within the judicial and political elites of Europe.1 At times, scholars focus upon specific, local trials in which a loss of confidence emerged among those hearing witchcraft cases, but somewhat more frequently, they examine specific regions in which, they claim, scientific values and attitudes fostered skepticism among the elites formulating policies on the crime of witchcraft.2 Although there is an undeniable validity to both approaches, their conclusions are not without controversy. Several scholars have pointed out that judicial skepticism toward the crime of witchcraft emerged even before widespread intellectual change, and they have noted that the centralization of judicial administrations led to a decrease in the number and intensity of trials well in advance of enlightened thinking.

The nature and scope of Reform Catholicism has been debated intermittently since the movement's emergence in the eighteenth century. The debate has peaked at those moments in which the movement's legacy became most relevant to the contemporary religious and political scene, and the period of the past few decades has been one of those moments.2 Reform Catholicism in the Holy Roman Empire has long been misunderstood because the politicization of the 1760s and 1770s and the radicalization of the 1780s and 1790s have cast the earlier stages into obscurity or disrepute.

The Austrian History Yearbook has published many articles illuminating the religious and intellectual history of Central Europe, but few if any have been as helpful as David Sorkin's “Reform Catholicism and Religious Enlightenment.” Not the least of his many services has been the provision of a critical bibliography that will be the essential starting point for anyone entering this fascinating but problematic world for the first time. Not only does he appear to have read everything of importance and much that is peripheral, he has also given us a balanced and judicious appraisal of the secondary literature. As the author of the standard work on Jewry in the period,1 he also brings to an old problem a new perspective and new expertise. Few scholars have sufficient range to allow them to write with authority in the same paragraph about Anglican latitudinarianism, North German Protestantism, the Haskalah, and Reform Catholicism, identifying what they had in common and what distinguished them from each other.

The Articles By David Sorkin and Edmund Kern have a common starting point. Both address aspects of the reform movement that unfolded in the Habsburg lands under Maria Theresa. They underline an argument made by much recent work on the subject that the movement in question, though committed to substantial changes in the social and cultural fabric, was fundamentally Catholic in its inspiration and only loosely and partially aligned with either the great intellectual challenge of the Enlightenment or the fuller and later program of reconstruction that has come to be known in the Austrian context as Josephinism. Both writers acknowledge the powerful contributory stimulus from abroad to the new climate of ideas generated in the monarchy by the travails of the mid-eighteenth century, but submit that those ideas besically arose out of a domestic evolution, especially within ecclesiastical circles.