Browsing by Subject "Austria"

This dissertation asks how Europe’s multinational states legitimized themselves in the face of new, nation-based theories of sovereignty around the turn of the twentieth century. It answers this question by analyzing the production, reception, and circulation of the concept of “empire” in and between Central and Eastern Europe, and between the European continent and European colonies. It argues that a binary distinction between “modern,” unitary, mononational states and backward, decentralized, multinational “empires” emerged in the middle of the nineteenth century among European nationalist jurists, who used these paired concepts to justify both ethnonational homogenization and overseas expansion. It also shows that Habsburg subjects in linguistically and religiously diverse regions of the Dual Monarchy, and especially Hapsburg Jews, successfully challenged this discursive construction of multinational states as abnormal, archaic, and “imperial.” The redefinition of Austria as an “empire,” that is, an association of nations with historic rights to territory, posed challenges that could only be overcome, scholars from the Monarchy realized, by replacing the dichotomy of nation and empire with a new set of legal, political, and sociological concepts. Social analysis of the state provided, they believed, the means by which to produce these new concepts. A century before the “imperial turn” of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, legal scholars from Habsburg Austria turned to the sociology of the state and articulated an influential, if now forgotten, critique of the increasingly hegemonic nationalist legal principles that both undergirded European imperial projects and threatened the continued existence of pluralistic multinational states.

Identifying the major figures and institutions involved in the elaboration of this critique, this dissertation reveals an alternative to Britain, France, and Germany’s national-imperial sociologies and a distinct tradition of international law. Members of this alternative school reconfigured “society” as a transnational category of analysis and the state as a space of competition and negotiation between interest groups. They also highlighted the processes of internal colonization that produced supposed nation-states and drew attention to the hazy boundary between the European metropole and colony. Some even questioned the distinction between “multiracial” Western European and “multinational” Eastern European states and the reality of the nation as a transhistorical entity. The Bukovinian-Jewish sociologist of law Eugen Ehrlich, for example, reframed international law as an already-existing global network of transborder normative communities and legal pluralism as a fundamental element of, rather than hindrance to, political modernization, while the Galician-Jewish sociologist Ludwig Gumplowicz advanced the thesis that the origin of states, including supposed nation-states, lay in foreign conquest and imperial expansion, rather than in the organic growth of pre-existing ethnic units. These jurists-turned-sociologists were enthusiastically received by scholars in other ethnolinguistically diverse and stratified regions of the European periphery, such as by Manuel González Prada in Peru and Benoy Kumar Sarkar in Bengal, who creatively adapted Habsburg critiques of the European nation-state to their own political needs.

By offering a transnational legal and intellectual history of “empire” and its contested transition from a discursive to an analytical category, this dissertation contributes to larger debates about the viability of Europe’s multinational monarchies, the roots of twentieth-century federalism and internationalism, and the relationship between the social sciences, nationalism, and imperialism. It bridges the divide between two transformational moments in twentieth-century global history: the partial, though, to many, deeply significant, nationalization of European empires before 1918 and the frustrated efforts of anticolonial leaders to construct multiracial, democratic European empires in the era after 1945. Methodologically, my research challenges historians to look beyond more familiar intra-imperial and inter-colonial networks of exchange, to reconsider our use of “empire” and “nation-state” as units of comparative historical analysis, and to break down the artificial distinction between “Europe” and non-Europe that was drawn by nationalist social scientists in the late nineteenth century. Most significantly, it compels us to see methodological nationalism as a geographically and temporally limited phenomenon whose rise to dominance in the twentieth century was resisted by both European and non-European actors.

As a multinational state with a population that spoke eleven different languages, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was considered an anachronism during the age of heightened nationalism leading up to the First World War. This situation has made the search for a single Austro-Hungarian identity so difficult that many historians have declared it impossible. Yet the Dual Monarchy possessed one potentially unifying cultural aspect that has long been critically neglected: the extensive repertoire of marches and patriotic music performed by the military bands of the Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian Army. This Militärmusik actively blended idioms representing the various nationalist musics from around the empire in an attempt to reflect and even celebrate its multinational makeup. Much in the same way that the Army took in recruits from all over the empire, its diverse Militärkapellmeister - many of whom were nationalists themselves - absorbed the local music of their garrison towns and incorporated it into their patriotic compositions. Though it flew in the face of the rampant ethnonationalism of the time, this Austro-Hungarian Militärmusik was an enormous popular success; Eduard Hanslick and Gustav Mahler were drawn to it, Joseph Roth and Stephan Zweig lionized it, and in 1914, hundreds of thousands of young men from every nation of the empire marched headlong to their ultimate deaths on the Eastern Front with the music of an Austro-Hungarian march in their ears. This dissertation explores how military instrumental music reflected a special kind of multinational Austro-Hungarian state identity between 1867 and 1914. In the first part of my dissertation, I examine the complex political backdrop of the era and discuss the role and demographic makeup of the k.u.k. Armee. I then go on to profile the military musicians themselves, describe the idiomatic instrumentation of the military ensembles, and analyze significant surviving works from this repertoire by Julius Fucik and Carl Michel Ziehrer. The results of this study show how Austro-Hungarian Militärmusik synthesized conceptions of nationalism and cosmopolitanism to create a unique musical identity that, to paraphrase Kaiser Franz Joseph, brought together the best elements of each nation for the benefit of all.

The period following the Second World War in Austria represents a unique historical situation. On the one hand, strongly conservative and restaurative trends in politics, publications, media, and social life dominated the country - at the same time, a radically new avant-garde movement emerged. What today is collectively referred to as the Wiener Gruppe was, in the 1950s, a circle of young writers, connected by friendship and collaboration with the filmmakers Kurt Kren and Peter Kubelka. These artists created experimental works that pre-empt the concept of performance art established at a theoretical level two decades later, and anticipate the re-conceptualization of the role of the reader theorized by Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault in the 1960s.

In this dissertation, I outline the socio-political situation in Austria during the years following World War Two in Chapter One and discuss the key concepts and works which are relevant for the understanding of experimental literature and film in Chapter Two and Three. I demonstrate that the radical experimentation of postwar experimental authors and filmmakers draws attention to the materiality, visuality, and performativity of their works and establishes experimental literature and film as individual art forms: writing-as-writing and film-as-film. In conclusion, I argue that their works represent an implicit critique of language, culture, and society in the context of the "grand narratives" or the "invisible structurations" supporting a post-World War Two Austrian society.

In this dissertation, I will outline the socio-political situation in Austria during the years following World War Two in Chapter One, and discuss the key concepts which are relevant for the understanding of experimental literature in Chapter Two and Three. I will demonstrate that the radical experimentation of postwar experimental authors and filmmakers draws attention to the materiality, visuality, and performativity and establishes experimental literature and film as individual art forms: writing-as-writing and film-as-film. In conclusion, I argue that their works represent an implicit critique of language, culture, and society in the context of the "grand narratives," the "invisible structurations" which support society.

Much of our understanding of Schoenberg and his music today is colored by early responses to his so-called free-atonal work from the first part of the twentieth century, especially in his birthplace, Vienna. This early, crucial reception history has been incredibly significant and subversive; the details of the personal and political motivations behind deeply negative or manically positive responses to Schoenberg's music have not been preserved with the same fidelity as the scandalous reactions themselves. We know that Schoenberg was feared, despised, lauded, and imitated early in his career, but much of the explanation as to why has been forgotten or overlooked. As a result our own reception of Schoenberg's music is built upon inherited fears, hopes, and insecurities that are now nearly a century old. In order to more fully approach these musical works and their composer it is necessary to attempt to separate his reputation from the sound of the music.

This dissertation, which studies Schoenberg's reception from 1908 through 1924 in the United States, Britain, and Austria and German through select works (Opp. 10, 15, 16, 17), contributes to the field by uncovering additional primary sources, including previously unknown performances and reviews. My work interacts with larger trends in musicology, including questioning the narrative of atonality, assessing the value of social and artistic movements (i.e. expressionism) as applied to music, and examining how the reception of a work is the combination of many factors - from the aural to the political - which intertwine to form our idea of a musical text. Ultimately, through a study based on close musical analysis employing elements of set-class theory, the methodology of Rezeptionsästhetik, and a focus on historical context, I present an interpretation in which Schoenberg's reception is strongly determined by early critical responses from Vienna, where conservative views of music's role in society combined with undercurrents of anti-Semitic thought to brand Schoenberg as mentally unstable and his music as socially detrimental.