Austrian Research UK & Ireland

Before 1866 few people would ever have doubted that Austria was part of Germany. Had they been able to understand the question, that is. Even after 1866 there would have been little doubt in the minds of most germanophone Austrians that they remained directly concerned in German affairs: this mentality led to their welcome for Anschluss, as a goal and even as a fait accompli. Arguably the adventof the Dualist system and then the collapse of the Monarchy challenged their blurred Austrian identity more than their unquestioned German one. Heinrich von Srbik, the most prominent Austrian historian of the earlier twentieth century, promoted the notion of what he called a ‘gesamtdeutsch’ past; and something of that vision was shared by many intellectuals in the First Republic. It was, however, coolly received by German colleagues – as witness an interesting correspondence between Srbik and Gerhard Ritter, guardian of the Prussian tradition, on the point.[1]

After 1945 the subject was lost to sight. Both sides seemed happy to bury it – after all, Ritter was himself perhaps the most influential German historian of the post-war years; and new interpretations of research fields came to be developed. One of Ritter’s younger colleagues, Karl Dietrich Erdmann, caused a passing flurry in the 1980s when he argued for the importance of the ‘traces of Austria in German history’. [2] But his main target was the Austrians themselves and their continuing attempts to dissociate themselves, in the days of the Waldheim-Affäre, from what had happened in the Third Reich. A wider dissociation in the once seamless web of an imperial past in central Europe has by now been largely accomplished.

In practice, of course, no one today would deny the place of Prague or Vienna in late medieval Reichsgeschichte. Nor would a writer on (say) the Thirty Years War in Germany fail to accord the Austrian lands, and especially Bohemia, an integral role. The last phase of the Holy Roman Empire is widely understood as a duality, or balance, between Habsburg and Hohenzollern. But even some significant recent writing on the Old Reich tends to open up a gap between the Habsburg lands and Germany ‘proper’, in respect of such things as religious toleration. [3]After 1815 Austria commonly appears as a semi-foreign protagonist in accounts of the German Confederation. By 1848 we find a regular presumption that the großdeutsch solution was never really on the cards. And the 1860s are still often programmed by historians according to a Prussian agenda, even though the demise of Prussia sixty years ago now might have given cause for a reassessment.

This state of affairs, however, is surely more serious for Austrian than for German historical scholarship. Even if historians of Germany make only passing reference to Austria, they at least have the thriving distinct discipline of Ostmitteleuropaforschung, which folds major aspects of the Austrian past into a discrete category of area studies. By contrast, there often seems to be no Austrian view of ‘German’ history at all. Naturally it is legitimate to reconstruct the antecedents of Austria within her present-day frontiers; just as Slovaks or Slovenes write national histories for peoples who possessed no kind of state, or even administrative separateness, until very lately. It is also legitimate to chronicle and analyse the story of that greater Austria which embraced at various times many of the neighbouring territories, Czech, Polish, Hungarian, Rumanian, South Slav, or Italian. Yet a crucial element, indeed the most crucial, in the Austrian historical experience is seriously lacking; and Germany needs to be readmitted into our understanding of it.