Volume XXXII of the Austrian History Yearbook is dedicated, fittingly, to John Rath, who founded this publication and, during its first quarter-century, was its publisher, editor, and copyreader—and did every-thing else except setting the type for its printing. As much as the Journal of Central European Affairs was the creation of S. Harrison Thomson, so was the Austrian History Yearbook the creation of John Rath. Although it was not intended to be a successor to the Journal of Central European Affairs, it was a happy coincidence that John inaugurated the Yearbook just as the Journal ceased publication, and scholars in the field were not bereft of a vehicle for presenting their work.

In All likelihood, Reuben John Rath will be best remembered by Austrian historians for his achievements as an “academic entrepreneur, ” if only because enterprises like the Austrian History Yearbook have provided a common institutional bond that unites all of us in the field. Nonetheless, there are many scholars who will recognize him most for more solitary scholarly endeavors that he pursued with such persistence in European archives and with such painstaking care at the controls of a manual type-writer. Six decades of scholarship have produced three books and more than thirty articles in field-specific journals like the Journal of Central European Affairs, the Austrian History Yearbook, and Der Donauraum, as well as in the American Historical Review and the Journal of Modern History. Moreover, his work has made lasting contributions to three discrete fields of modern Austrian history. Hence the need to divide this historiographical retrospective into three segments on Napoleonic and Restoration Italy (by Alexander Grab), the Revolutions of 1848 (by Pieter M. Judson), and Engelbert Dollfuβ(by James Miller).

On January 13, 1843, the executive committee of the Hungarian Industrial Association (Országos Iparegyesület) held its weekly meeting in Pest. The Industrial Association, a voluntary association dedicated to the spread of useful knowledge and the promotion of industry, had been founded fourteen months earlier. More than twenty men were present at the meeting, most of them untitled nobles, yet four counts, two master artisans (both button makers), and a Jewish merchant were present as well. Records suggest that this was a busy meeting, in which the executive committee passed a dozen resolutions on topics ranging from the printing of the association's bylaws to its plans to establish a library and launch a newspaper. Among other matters, the committee acknowledged receipt of a fifty-florin contribution from the Pest Jewish community and welcomed as a branch association a society dedicated to promoting industry and agriculture among Hungarian Jews.

During the decades prior to World War I, the Habsburg monarchy experienced an upsurge in national conflict. Nationalism emerged both as a form of identity politics, through which individuals became increasingly aware of their own national identity as well as that of others among whom they lived, and as a political ideology, calling for increased political, social, cultural, and economic rights for each national group. Thus, the rise in national feeling in the Habsburg monarchy led to the hardening of the boundaries separating national groups. As Jan Křen, Gary B. Cohen, and other have noted, Czechs and Germans not only became staunch political opponents, they also ceased to associate with each other privately or in social contexts by the late nineteenth century.

In October 1915, in the middle of World War I, the chief of staff of the Royal and Imperial Army, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, consulted the authorities on a private matter. While “the fatherland was fighting a bloody battle for its very existence, and the army and people were turning to their generals full of alarm,” the general was contemplating marriage. However, Austrian marriage laws stood in the way of his plans. Virginia (Gina) Agujari, Conrad's “chosen one,” had since 1896 been in a Catholic marriage with the industrialist Hans von Reininghaus.

Although the literature on nation building is truly vast, scholars have paid relatively little attention to the formation of regional identities. This is in large part because those who specialize in regionalism have argued that state and region form an essentially contradictory relationship. This article analyzes one example of how a hitherto indistinct geographical entity was fashioned into a federal province and how its political elite complied with a constant need to popularize and entrench the concept of the region. The new regional identity was thus designed to counteract two challenges to its very existence as a federal province: one from the former mother state, Hungary, and the other from Austria, where consideration was given to dividing the newly created entity between two neighboring federal provinces. The outcome of this attempt was the creation of a regional identity, albeit one mostly defined in negative terms.

The demise of Parliament in March 1933 was the most significant single act in the march to semifascism in Austria, which began with the formation of the Heimwehr in the early days of the First Republic and was well under way when significant changes were made in the government on September 21,1933, and a concentration camp was established at Wöllersdorf a few days later. Traditional democratic means were employed to abolish Parliament. Dollfuβ, the Heimwehr, and the Christian Social Party only did what parties in power in democracies do when under attack. They used all the means at their disposal to protect their government from being overthrown. The Social Democrats and Greater Germans, likewise, employed only democratic means in their effort to overthrow the Dollfuβ regime and to preserve a democratically elected Parliament. Dollfuβ and the leaders of all but the National Socialist Party in Austria were well aware of the great danger to Austria that stemmed from the intensification of National Socialist efforts to overthrow a democratic form of government in Austria after Hitler came to power in Germany and knew that the German National Socialists were providing financial support to the Austrian Greater German Party to support them in their efforts to take control of Austria.

On what was the first visit of an Austrian president to Israel, Thomas Klestil spoke before the Knesset in November 1994 of “repression,” of a lack of “admission to the whole truth,” stating, “We know that we have too often spoken of the fact that Austria was the first state to lose its freedom and independence to National Socialism—but we have spoken far too rarely of the fact that some of the worst henchmen of the NS dictatorship were in fact Austrians.” With this, Klestil was reacting to the fundamental questioning of the victim theory in the Waldheim debate as had Chancellor Franz Vranitzky in his often cited declaration to the Austrian Parliament on July 8,1991, to the effect that Austria “must admit to the good and bad … sides” of its history: “We must [admit] … to our share of the responsibility for the suffering that Austria did not cause as a state but that was brought upon other people and other peoples by the citizens of this country” and “apologize to the survivors and the descendants of the dead”.