Date: Tue, 28 May 1996 07:09:13 -0500
To: Multiple recipients of list H-STAFF Subject: Niessen International Report

Ed note: here is another valuable chapter in the International Report series, with thanks to Jim Niessen. SWTucker

HABSBURG members are an odd group. I've observed on many lists that the greatest driving force in online discussions is their pertinence to current affairs and, even more important, to an existing political or social entity -- whereas the Habsburg Monarchy lost this pertinence in 1918. The multinational state that existed for centuries up to that time was a cultural, at times even political and military powerhouse; but history has purportedly refuted its viability. Instead, history ordained that social reality in this part of the world is defined by ethnic identity. Study of the defunct community may consist of rather depressing postmortems, a disreputable nostalgia for what is irrevocably gone, or a selective attentiveness to the emergence of particular modern nation states. Nobody is interested in the prehistory of what does not exist.

Still, the fact that several hundred individuals have been willing to complete our membership questionnaire, make it available to others, and participate in our transactions suggests to me that there is something there after all. The subject matter is the history of the Habsburg Monarchy and its successor states from 1500 to the present, with an effective cutoff date several decades before the present. The basic contours of the membership are not very different from many other lists: predominantly teaching historians in the U.S., with perhaps one-fifth of the members residing outside the U.S.

So the enterprise is basically American, as are the present three Co-Editors. A query about the "State of the Profession" generated contributions only by Americans concerned about their prospects of teaching East Central European history: a field that came into its own during the Cold War and has established a track record of multilingual, comparative research in the history of the Monarchy, Balkans, nationalism, and ethnicity. The end of the Cold War has made the region more accessible, but raised questions about the legitimacy of the scholarly field. Cuts in American grant moneys, as we know, have affected most fields. As Franco Andreucci noted in this column two weeks ago with regard to Italian Studies, our group is based on an American academic category. Our "subjects" prefer national categories. A contributor to the unmoderated HUNGARY list referred to us as "the mythical Habsburg list, where experts on the Empire of Megalomania congregate."

HABSBURG's weekly book reviews, too, bear the stamp of an American project. American historians require students to buy a variety of books for their courses, send them to the library in droves for many more, expect extensive bibliographic knowledge of their grad students, and expect to see hundreds of reviews a year in their major journals. American scholarly publishers willingly bombard the journals with review copies, or send them when requested, out of their sizable promotional budgets. Some day this might happen for H-Net, too. Securing review copies from the region itself is even more difficult. In order to make possible our first review of a Hungarian book by a member in Hungary, our board member in Budapest personally walked the book over to the department of the reviewer, a Russian historian at a Central European University. Both the reviewer and North American members contributed to an illuminating discussion after the recent posting of her review. Ideas from editors on how to secure more foreign review copies would be welcome.

An argument about origins is where historians are in their element. Austria is celebrating a millennium, because a document dated 996 mentioned "Ostarrichi" (what later became Oesterreich, or Austria) for the first time with reference to what is today Austrian territory. Reading our affiliate Center for Austrian Studies' flyer about the celebration, a member asked: what about 976, when the Emperor granted the territory to the first Austrian duke, which we celebrated twenty years ago? Two Austrians on opposing sides of the ocean cited recent research on 996 and recalled that in 1946 the 950th anniversary served the useful purpose of highlighting Austrians' separateness from the Germans.

Perhaps the mix of teaching historians and others in our group is broader than usual. New members wander in from a variety of disciplines, or from an avowedly interdisciplinary perspective, because of a broad interest in the study of the region. Students of medicine, music, and art appreciate and complement the historical approach. Where would we, and the publishing industry, be without Fin de Siecle Vienna? Members' sizable interest in ethnic identity and nationalism also accounts for the variety of disciplines represented.

Our most international thread concerned the Hungarian greeting, "servus". A member forwarded the query from an American soldier who had logged onto a newsgroup while in Hungary. Several members recognized the origin of the term in the Latin for "obedient servant", and its existence in Austrian German, Czech, Romanian, as well as Hungarian and other languages of the Monarchy. Respondents in Hungary, Australia, and elsewhere illuminated the term's etymology in written and spoken forms and its relation to dialect and to the Italian "ciao". Our questioner forwarded all this to the soldier, who received it after logging in from his new base in Tuzla, site of an Austro-Hungarian operation against the Serbs in 1877 as the Monarchy was taking possession of Bosnia.

The three threads touched upon here -- on jobs, an historical commemoration, and a form of address -- illuminated for the Co-Editors some of the ways the group defines itself through its common interests. We don't know if the continued effort to recruit more members in the target region will meet with more success. There is an explosion of business-oriented Internet activity -- of course, from an incomparably lower base than in the U.S. Austrian, Hungarian, and other scholars' discomfort with computers dies hard, however. Historians we contact show interest, but meet unexplained obstacles on the way to establishing an email account. The budget busting of post-communist governments in the east has also hit universities particularly hard, thereby slowing the perceptible trickle of scholars into the Internet sphere. An article in the leading Hungarian business weekly this spring branded academic Internetters as economically unproductive "freeloaders".

There is an eagerness in "the East" to connect with the NATO countries, while denying one is "east". Thus the dislike for American academic labels like East European, or even of the study of East Central Europe. The director of the Hungarian Academy's Institute of History wrote in the preface to a recent anthology on Hungary's relations with its neighbors: "It is imperative that we rid ourselves of the national bias in the historiography of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries." But he failed to secure non-Hungarians for his volume. Too rarely do historians of the different historical traditions engage each other's works. How does one break out of this perceived narrowness except by engagement with other perspectives, including those of one's neighbors? Through a discourse spawned by electrons, we may better understand earlier discourses that fed mythologies of enmity and incompatibility.

Jim Niessen, HABSBURG Co-Editor/Book Review Editor <lijpn@pegasus.acs.ttu.edu>
Librarian for History and Foreign Languages Adjunct Asst Professor of History Texas Tech University - Lubbock, Texas

79409-0002