By reproducing the political and historiographical debates surrounding the legacy of the Habsburg Empire, this book follows the transformation of historico-political thinking during the two world wars. This transformation began in Germany, where völkish streams of the Conservative Revolution offered a radical new interpretation of history. These reading focused on the unchanging essence of the Volk and treated a certain idea of the Habsburg past as inorganic, "derailing" history and conflicting with the true calling of the German people.

By reproducing the political and historiographical debates surrounding the legacy of the Habsburg Empire, this book follows the transformation of historico-political thinking during the two world wars. This transformation began in Germany, where völkish streams of the Conservative Revolution offered a radical new interpretation of history. These reading focused on the unchanging essence of the Volk and treated a certain idea of the Habsburg past as inorganic, "derailing" history and conflicting with the true calling of the German people. The völkish movement and its historiography both inspired and challenged Austrian and Hungarian intellectuals, asking them to either adopt or resist this new philosophy and the politics it represented. Building a history out of the realignment of German thought and its affect on small states within Germany's cultural orbit, this volume richly recounts the clash between domestic tradition and imported "innovations."

When the Great War ended in 1918, the West was broken. Religious faith, patriotism, and the belief in human progress had all been called into question by the mass carnage experienced by both sides. Shell shocked and traumatized, the West faced a world it no longer recognized: the old order had collapsed, replaced by an age of machines. The world hurtled forward on gears and crankshafts, and terrifying new ideologies arose from the wreckage of past belief. In Fracture, critically acclaimed historian Philipp Blom argues that in the aftermath of World War I, citizens of the West directed their energies inwards, launching into hedonistic, aesthetic, and intellectual adventures of self-discovery. It was a period of both bitter disillusionment and visionary progress. From Surrealism to Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West; from Fritz Lang's Metropolis to theoretical physics, and from Art Deco to Jazz and the Charleston dance, artists, scientists, and philosophers grappled with the question of how to live and what to believe in a broken age. Morbid symptoms emerged simultaneously from the decay of World War I: progress and innovation were everywhere met with increasing racism and xenophobia. America closed its borders to European refugees and turned away from the desperate poverty caused by the Great Depression. On both sides of the Atlantic, disenchanted voters flocked to Communism and fascism, forming political parties based on violence and revenge that presaged the horror of a new World War. Vividly recreating this era of unparalleled ambition, artistry, and innovation, Blom captures the seismic shifts that defined the interwar period and continue to shape our world today.

An innovative study of the impact of the wartime alliance between Imperial Germany and Austria-Hungary on German national identity.

A pioneering regional approach to the study of international order in Central Europe following the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire, and the subsequent creation of the League of Nations.

The collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy at the end of World War I ushered in a period of radical change for East-Central European political structures and national identities. Yet this transformed landscape inevitably still bore the traces of its imperial past. Breaking with traditional histories that take 1918 as a strict line of demarcation, this collection focuses on the complexities that attended the transition from the Habsburg Empire to its successor states. In so doing, it produces new and more nuanced insights into the persistence and effectiveness of imperial institutions, as well as the sources of instability in the newly formed nation-states.

Hungarian Jews, the last major Jewish community in the Nazi sphere of influence by 1944, constituted the single largest group of victims of Auschwitz-Birkenau. In Hungarian Jews in the Age of Genocide Ferenc Laczó draws on hundreds of scholarly articles, historical monographs, witness accounts as well as published memoirs to offer a pioneering exploration of how this prolific Jewish community responded to its exceptional drama and unprecedented tragedy. Analysing identity options, political discourses, historical narratives and cultural agendas during the local age of persecution as well as the varied interpretations of persecution and annihilation in their immediate aftermath, the monograph places the devastating story of Hungarian Jews at the dark heart of the European Jewish experience in the 20th century.

Although state transformation – continuous struggle and bargaining between rulers and their subjects, producing an unpredictable variety of political structures – is often overlooked, the process is crucial in assessing the organizational development of early modern composite monarchies and deserves further investigation. In Austria, the monarchy’s emergence as a great power required it to overcome several successive crises that culminated in the decades around 1700. The Habsburgs succeeded more by adjusting relations between Crown and lordships than through institution building. This unusual interaction of state and non-state actors resulted in an Austria that markedly deviated from the centralizing nation-state exemplified by Britain or France. The nascent Habsburg fiscal-financial-military regime transformed regional and local authority, leading to armed conflict and causing disintegration of the administrative and social fabric. From the mid-seventeenth century onward, power – whether local or central, or social or political – would undergo enormous changes. Grounded in extensive research into Czech archives and spanning an era from the Thirty Years’ War to the coronation of Charles VI, Lordship and State Transformation delves into the complex transitions that characterized the first instance of a balance of power in Europe, with a focus on its underresearched great power, the Habsburg monarchy.

Explores European civilisation as a concept of twentieth-century political practice and the project of a transnational network of European elites. This title is available as Open Access.

In the spring of 1945, Fuhrer and Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler, President Edvard Benes, and Marshal Josip Broz Tito stood as examples of the complete rupture between the Germans and Austrians on the one hand, and the Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, and Bosniaks on the other. The total break that occurred in World War II with war crimes, crimes against humanity, and even genocides (particularly against the Jews and "Gypsies") had a long pre-history, beginning with violent nationalist clashes in the Habsburg Monarchy during the revolutions of 1848/49. Therefore, this monograph - based on a broad range of international primary and secondary sources - explores the development of the political, legal, economic, social, and cultural "communities of conflict" within Austria-Hungary, especially in the Bohemian and South Slavic countries, the making of the Paris Peace Treaties in 1919/20 by violating President Wilson's principle of self-determination, particularly in drawing new borders and creating new economic units, and the perpetuated ethnic-national conflicts between Czechs and Germans, Slovaks and Magyars, Slovenes and Germans, Croats and Serbs as well as Serbs and Germans in the successor states, deepening the differences between the nations of East-Central Europe. Although many kings, presidents, chancellors, ministers, governors, diplomats, business tycoons, generals, Nazi-Gauleiter, higher SS and police leaders, and Communist functionaries have appeared as historical actors in the 170 years of East-Central and Southeastern European history, Hitler, Benes, and Tito remain especially present in historical memory at the beginning of the twenty-first century.