History is made up of continuities and discontinuities. To do it justice it is necessary to take both of these ordering principles into account. Exile and banishment have always existed—mass expulsions and mass deportations have been recorded since Nebuchadnezzar's rule in the sixth century B.C. But, because of their power of expression and criticism, writers, intellectuals, and artists have been favorite targets for tyrants' wrath, and for those same reasons writers and intellectuals are the prime witnesses of the exile experience. Ovid's elegiac lament, Dante's bitter pride, Heine's poisoned homesickness, and Unamuno's scornful hatred are famous manifestations of the exile's state of mind.

In 1996, Austria will celebrate its millennium. As in many other cases, the chronological justifications for the anniversary are open to question. Austria has never been “founded,” and certainly not one thousand years ago; its independence is the result of a process that took centuries and cannot be symbolized by a date like July 4 in the United States. Austria's national holiday, October 26, marks the date in 1955 when the Austrian parliament voted permanent neutrality and the last of the Allied occupation troops left the country. Nobody, it is true, would doubt that Austria's history stretches back considerably before 1955, 1945 (the foundation of the Second Republic), 1918 (the birth of the First), or even 1804 (when the Habsburg emperor Francis I declared himself emperor of Austria after the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire). Nothing comparable happened in 996. In a charter dated November 1, 996, Emperor Otto III granted some land at Neuhofen, in the west of the modern province of Lower Austria, to the bishop of Freising. Even the exact date of the charter—whose original has survived—has not always been accepted, for the seal it carries was Henry II's, whose reign began in 1002. Recently, some scholars have even tried to prove, although not very successfully, that it was a forgery.

The supposedly authoritativeÖsterreichisches Staatswörterbuch (1905 edition) states unequivocally that the only joint-stock bank that existed before 1850 was a land bank founded in 1841 by the Galician estates. März, who has written the definitive work on the Credit-Anstalt, also found no place in his otherwise excellent study for the Schwarzenberg Bank, asserting that the Credit-Anstalt was founded simply on the model of the Crédit Mobilier of contemporary France. The only publication that concerned itself with the Schwarzenberg Bank, formally known as the Wiener oktroyirte Commerzial-, Leih- und Wechselbank (Chartered Commercial, Loan, and Exchange Bank of Vienna) in some detail was written in 1918, with the observation that it strongly resembled the Crédit Mobilier type of bank. This work was obviously ignored both in Austria and elsewhere where the history of banking and banks has been discussed.

One of the ironies of the Revolution of 1848 in Austria is that one of the most attacked institutions, the Roman Catholic Church, was able to draw the most benefit from the revolutionary upheaval. By the time Cardinal-Archbishop Eduard Milde returned to his palace in the Wollzeile from his safe mountain retreat, the dreaded Katzenmusik (mock serenading) had died down and it was clear that real social reform, not to speak of social revolution, was dead as well. Along the way, however, Catholic agitators, including Catholic priests, had learned how to use the revolution to further their own purposes.

During the government of Count Eduard Taaffe a series of social laws were enacted in Austria that set maximum hours in factories and mines, placed restrictions on the employment of women and young people, and introduced accident and sickness insurance. With this legislation, Austria obtained a unique position: no other country had both extensive protective labor legislation, including the ”normal workday,” and obligatory sickness and accident insurance for industrial workers on its law books in the early 1890s. Despite this progressive record, social policymaking in the Taaffe era has drawn surprisingly little attention. My article begins to fill this gap. The first section briefly examines the historiography of social legislation to demonstrate that the interpretations of the early development of Austrian social politics in the 1880s have been unduly determined by the ”Bismarckian paradigm.” The second section discusses the models that Austrian legislators in the 1880s used for their social policies. They were influenced not only by German social insurance but also by the Swiss Factory Act of 1877. Austrian politicians thus followed two quite distinct strategies in tackling the ”labor question”: they promoted both protective legislation, which infringed upon the employer's authority to organize production at his own discretion, and social insurance, which involved state interference with the lives of workers outside the workshop or factory. The third section examines the motives of Austrian politicians behind this twofold labor policy by looking into the background and procedures of legislation. The final section offers a tentative assessment of social politics during the Taaffe era.

The idea that the South Slavs constituted a single ethnic whole has long received considerable support in Croat intellectual circles. Ljudevit Gaj's Illyrian movement of the 1830s and 1840s, which represented the initial stage of the Croat national awakening, recognized this idea and attempted to construct a common culture for all South Slavs under the neutral Illyrian name. Given the increased pressure of Magyarization in the first half of the nineteenth century, the linguistic and regional particularisms of the Croats resulting from the breakup of Croat lands in the medieval and early modern periods, and the presence of a considerable Serb minority in the Croat lands, the Illyrian idea became a necessity. It enabled the “awakeners” to overcome the particularisms that complicated the creation of a national consciousness among the Croats and deeply implanted in this consciousness the commonality of the South Slavs. Illyrianism eventually became a political force that found expression in the revolutions of 1848–49, but it was largely rejected by the Slovene intelligentsia and the Serbs of the Serbian principality and the Vojvodina. It remained a force and retained its significance only in the Croat lands.

InDecember 1896 the Industrial Action Committee, a small group of Viennese industrialists, sent a memorandum to all Chambers of Commerce in the Cisleithanian halfof the Habsburg monarchy. Arguing that two decades of internecine ethnic and party strife had allowed agrarians, small artisans, and workers to eat away at the material well-being of the “productive classes” (Stände), the committee asked Austrian industrialists of every ethnic and political persuasion to advocate a proindustry platform at all party nominating conventions. Appended to the appeal, which was printed in German, Czech, Polish, and Italian, was a proposal to found a Bund österreichischer Industrieller (League of Austrian Industrialists, henceforth BöI), an organization that would unite industrialists “without regard to nationality, confession, or party affiliation” in concerted economic-political (wirtschafts-politisch) activity.

On the surface, there would appear to be little cause to explore the connections between Jews and the bureaucracy of the Austro-Hungarian foreign office in the last decade before the outbreak of World War I. During the tenures of foreign ministers Count Alois Aehrenthal (1906–12) and Count Leopold Berchtold (1912–15), no Jew belonged to the diplomatic corps, and only one functionary from the central office in Vienna is known to have entered the service professing Judaism. The situation within the Ballhausplatz certainly did not reflect that found in the other mainstay of the unified Dual Monarchy, the Habsburg armed forces, which contained an extraordinarily high percentage of Jewish officers, particularly in the reserves. Our knowledge of the experience of Jews in Central Europe's other major foreign office, the Wilhelmstraβe in Berlin, merely reinforces the view that few formal ties existed between Jews and diplomacy.

Before a single Austro-Hungarian soldier boarded the train for transport to his deployment area at the outbreak of World War I, the military plans put into motion, or rather not put into motion, by Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, the chief of the Habsburg General Staff (1906–11 and 1912–17), had sealed the fate of the initial campaigns on the Russian and Balkan fronts.

Although the fortress at Terezín attained a dubious international distinction during World War II as the Nazi concentration camp. Theresienstadt, it already possessed a gloomy history as a place of imprisonment, having held Austrian political offenders since the first half of the nineteenth century. Gavrilo Princip had been confined there along with his fellow conspirators after assassinating Archduke Francis Ferdinand at Sarajevo; the young man ultimately died in the garrison hospital. During World War I, Terezín became the largest prisoner-of-war camp in Bohemia, housing its mostly Russian prisoners in makeshift subcamps scattered outside the fortress. In 1919 the new Czechoslovak state employed some of these same facilities to intern various “suspicious elements” from Slovakia. Unfortunately the zeal with which the authorities took people into custody produced a flood of internees for which Terezín was ill prepared, and conditions in the debilitated Austrian camp soon threatened to provoke a public scandal. The circumstances of this rather unpleasant episode provide a revealing—though ambiguous—glimpse of the sterner side of the Czechoslovak First Republic, and by extension, post-Habsburg Central Europe.

By the spring of 1927 democratic institutions seemed to have secured a relatively firm footing in Austria. That appearance was deceptive. The same year saw the beginning of the deterioration of Austrian democracy.

The achievement of a secure democratic political environment by 1927 appeared grounded in reality. Within eight years after the Austrian Social Democrats had quashed the threat of a Communist-inspired Soviet republic in Austria, the bourgeois-dominated democratic government had succeeded in building up a reliable police force, gendarmerie, and army adequate to protect it against any internal threats. Rent as it was by the endless power struggles of its leaders, the Heimwehr was still only a relatively weak force on the political horizon. The National Socialist Party, split into quarreling factions, amounted to little more than a noisy opposition group. With the marked improvement in the Austrian economy by the mid-1920s, Austrian anti-Semitism had noticeably declined by the end of 1926. Perhaps most important of all, the foreign financial assistance assured by the Geneva Protocol of 1922 and the subsequent economic stabilization measures under-taken by the government did much to put the country's financial house in good order.