As the hundredth anniversary of November 1918 approaches, this article suggests some ways in which historians might rethink dominant narratives about the character of the Habsburg monarchy in its final years, the reasons for its collapse, and its complex legacies to the postwar world. Currently, most accounts that narrate the fall of the empire are still shaped to some extent by outcomes whose character was defined at the time by the nationalist architects of the states that replaced the monarchy. Even accounting for a sensible revisionism of their versions of events over the past century, their general reasoning, their ideological claims, and their worldviews frame the predominant explanations for why the monarchy fell when it did. Concomitantly, they continue to influence our understanding of the character of the regimes that replaced the monarchy after its fall.

The Enlightenment seems out of kilter. Until fairly recently, its trajectories were beguilingly simple and straightforward. Devised by Western metropolitan masterminds, the Enlightenment was piously appropriated by their latter-day apprentices in Central and Eastern Europe. This process of benign percolation made modern science, political liberty, and religious toleration trickle down to East-Central Europe. The self-orientalizing of nineteenth-century Central European intellectuals reinforced this impression, making concepts that were ostensibly authentic and pristine at their “Western” sources seem garbled and skewed once appropriated in their region.

Histories of dynastic empires frequently add up to studies of power, its attributes, and its expressions. Much attention is paid to how skillfully sovereign families turned to their advantage control of far-flung territorial holdings, their political and legal institutions, and fiscal resources, credit included. Military superiority, diplomatic ingenuity, variants of cultural hegemony, and cultivation of good public relations are usually part of the story as well, along with opportunism and sheer ruthlessness. All these considerations had roles in the story of the rise of the sixteenth-century Habsburg House of Austria to global eminence. By 1550, the totality of their patrimony would stretch from east central Europe to Spain, the Netherlands, the Americas, and the maritime fringes of Asia.

What a beautiful day, Emil Franke may well have been thinking to himself as he hurried through the streets of Prague on a cool November morning in 1937. If only that day he had not been confronted by an unpleasant member of parliament's interpellations! The representatives of the Sudeten German Party were going to be asking about the wages of German minority teachers and Karel Domín, the rector of Charles University, was planning to ask about Straka Academy. Franke knew the situation in the academy very well—by the beginning of the 1920s, his Ministry of Supply had already occupied some of its rooms, and Domín shed some light on this situation. In his interpellation Domin described the state of the foundation as the most painful chapter in the existence of foundations in Czechoslovakia. He finished his speech by asking a question: “Are you, as Minister of Education, willing to arrange for both the foundation and academy to be returned and kept for our students as the founder of this foundation intended?” As Franke very well knew, at that moment in time the academy had barely any students. It was basically useless, it served no purpose.

On 2 January 1915, during the first winter of the First World War, the celebrated composer Carl Goldmark died in Vienna at the ripe old age of eighty-four. The Viennese press gave the story of his passing the kind of coverage that one would expect for a figure who was described as the “rector of Austrian music,” even its “epicenter.” The notice in the Neue Freie Presse was particularly striking in its imagery: “We, musical Vienna and the entire musical world, stand shaken around the funeral bier of the great composer and Austrian Carl Goldmark.” As the report goes on, the writer makes a clear reference to the growing war effort: “Many of our best and brightest must now die on the battlefield for the fatherland. Goldmark lived for his fatherland, and by creating art touched by the breadth of eternity, he honored the fatherland in his own way and greatly increased the cultural heritage of humanity.” Meanwhile, in the other great capital of the Dual Monarchy, the composer's death was covered very differently. To read the obituaries that appeared in Budapest is to be told that Hungary, not Austria, was Goldmark's fatherland. Here, in effect, both halves of the monarchy were fighting over the same man's legacy—the one, primarily on the basis of his Hungarian birth and childhood; the other, on the basis of his long residency in Austria and the central role he played in the musical culture of late Habsburg Vienna.

From April 1919 to April 1920, twenty-four-year-old Joseph Roth worked full time as a reporter on the newly founded Viennese daily Der Neue Tag [The new day]. It was his first regular job and, although he was later to become one of the best-paid journalists of the Weimar Republic, it was also the only one he would ever hold on a fixed contract. In spring 1919, Roth had recently returned from eastern Galicia, the place of his origins, where he had also been stationed during the war, first in the infantry, then as an army press officer. His position as a Heimkehrer in Vienna after the war was precarious for a number of reasons. Paid work was scarce in the impoverished city, and Roth had not finished—indeed, would never finish—his degree. More important, although he had already been resident in Vienna as a student before the outbreak of hostilities, the “Ostjude” Roth, like so many others, had no valid papers and no right to remain in the former imperial capital. Political parties across the spectrum were agitating for the largely Jewish refugees from the former eastern provinces of the fallen Habsburg empire to be sent “home”—even by force, if necessary. Roth's position at Der Neue Tag was therefore not only an important apprenticeship for his high-profile career in journalism—which in turn laid the foundations for his oeuvre as a novelist—but also constituted a vital existential anchor. Given their historical and biographical context, it seems surprising that the texts he produced for the new newspaper—two or three a week throughout this pivotal period in Vienna's transition from self-assured imperial capital to beleaguered Social Democratic outpost—have received comparatively little attention in Roth scholarship. This is in part a result of the acknowledged bias in research on German-language culture and literature during this era toward the Weimar Republic, in particular Berlin, and away from First Republic Austria: similar texts produced slightly later by Roth in and on the German capital are often studied and seem to have eclipsed the earlier Viennese texts. This article seeks to redress the balance within Roth scholarship while also suggesting what Roth's work for Der Neue Tag can contribute to our sociohistorical understanding of the period, despite or perhaps because of the literary techniques it uses.

Few institutions have possessed as enduring importance in Europe's history as the Holy Roman Empire. Dating its foundation to Charlemagne's coronation in 800, it survived for a millennium, being dissolved only in 1806 in the face of the overwhelming threat from Napoleonic imperialism. Its geographical extent was equally remarkable: at its peak, imperial territory stretched eastward from the North Sea as far as Poland, and southward from the shores of the Baltic deep into the Italian Peninsula. Around 1800, shortly before its nemesis, the Empire was Europe's second largest polity, with a territorial area of around 687,000 square kilometers. It was eclipsed only by Russia, which during the later-seventeenth and eighteenth century had expanded spectacularly. Its population too was impressive: with around twenty-nine million inhabitants, its only rivals were France and Russia. Claiming descent from ancient Rome, the Empire long embodied the idea of a unified Christendom, while its defensive role against Ottoman expansion from the late fifteenth century onward sustained its religious mission even after the Protestant Reformation. Yet it is often squeezed out of accounts of Europe's past, an exclusion which is particularly evident for the early modern centuries.