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6 books match the query '1918-1938'

cover of Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire

Edge of Irony

Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire

Marjorie Perloff

University of Chicago Press, 2016

Among the brilliant writers and thinkers who emerged from the multicultural and multilingual world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were Joseph Roth, Robert Musil, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. For them, the trauma of World War I included the sudden loss of the geographical entity into which they had been born: in 1918, the empire was dissolved overnight, leaving Austria a small, fragile republic that would last only twenty years before being annexed by Hitler’s Third Reich. In this major reconsideration of European modernism, Marjorie Perloff identifies and explores the aesthetic world that emerged from the rubble of Vienna and other former Habsburg territories—an “Austro-Modernism” that produced a major body of drama, fiction, poetry, and autobiography.

Perloff explores works ranging from Karl Kraus’s drama The Last Days of Mankind and Elias Canetti’s memoir The Tongue Set Free to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notebooks and Paul Celan’s lyric poetry. Throughout, she shows that Austro-Modernist literature is characterized less by the formal and technical inventions of a modernism familiar to us in the work of  Joyce and Pound, Dada and Futurism, than by a radical irony beneath a seemingly conventional surface, an acute sense of exile, and a sensibility more erotic and quixotic than that of its German contemporaries. Skeptical and disillusioned, Austro-Modernism prefers to ask questions rather than formulate answers.
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cover of Governing Divided Societies: Habsburg Austria’s Democratic Legacy and the Czechoslovak First Republic

Governing Divided Societies

Habsburg Austria’s Democratic Legacy and the Czechoslovak First Republic

Philip Howe

Central European University Press, 2026

The authors of this volume challenge conventional notions about Habsburg and Czechoslovak politics, arguing that they were more democratic than they often appear. They use the consociational model of democracy as a means of combining political science and history. The theory, associated with Arend Lijphart, asserts that consociationalism guarantees minorities a say in government and helps preserve democracy in societies that experience deep ideological, cultural, or ethnic divisions. Consociationalism enables the main segments to be isolated organizationally from each other, thus avoiding conflict but affording the leaders opportunities to make compromises for the good of the whole.
Consociationalism has proven its worth as a model for describing contemporary democracies and diagnosing their ills. By exploring the institutions and practices of the Habsburg Monarchy before 1918 and the Czechoslovak First Republic, Howe, Lorman, and Miller prove the value of the consociational theory in analyzing the past. They hold that a multitude of parties, frequent cabinet changes, and reliance on cabinets of experts do not necessarily signal flawed democracies. In fact, they are features of consociationalism. This volume challenges historians and social scientists to view the Austrian half of the Habsburg Monarchy before 1918 as evolving toward consociational democracy and the Czechoslovak First Republic as a fully consociational state.
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cover of Karl Renner: Austria

Karl Renner

Austria

Jamie Bulloch

Haus Publishing, 2009

The Socialist politician Karl Renner (1870-1950) was prime minister of the government that took power in Vienna after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He lead the delegation to Paris, which had to face the difficult issue of reparations and war guilt, for which the Allies held the successor states to the Empire responsible for. Fortunately, Renner was a likeable man and a realist, and the Austrian delegation became quite popular in Paris. The new Austrian state was in a perilous condition in 1919, on the brink of starvation and revolution, and facing territorial demands from both Italy, which had its eyes on the Tyrol, and the new Yugoslavia. Many in the German-speaking rump of the Empire sought union with Germany, Anschluss, but the Allied Powers vetoed it. Austria is often overlooked as one of the successor states to the Habsburg Empire, but it was no less important in the postwar settlement than Hungary, Czechoslovakia and the Balkan countries. Jamie Bulloch's account of Karl Renner's adroit handling of a difficult situation makes for fascinating reading.
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cover of Minorities and Law in Czechoslovakia

Minorities and Law in Czechoslovakia

Jan Kuklík and René Petráš

Karolinum Press, 2017

Across the whole of modern Czech history—from 1918, through World War II, and into the postwar years—ethnic and minority issues have been of the utmost prominence. Moreover, Czechoslovakia has in the past been held up as a model for solving problems related to ethnic and minority tensions through legal regulations—regulations that played a key role in delineating minority status. Primarily intended for an international, non-Czech audience, this book takes a long-term perspective on issues related to ethnic and language minorities in Czechoslovakia. Bridging legal and historical disciplines, Jan Kuklík and René Petráš show that as ethnic minority issues once again come to the forefront of policy debates in Europe and beyond, a detailed knowledge of earlier Czech difficulties and solutions may help us to understand and remedy contemporary problems.
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cover of Old Wine

Old Wine

Phyllis Bottome

Northwestern University Press, 1998

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cover of The Authoritarian State (CW4): An Essay on the Problem of the Austrian State

The Authoritarian State (CW4)

An Essay on the Problem of the Austrian State

Eric Voegelin, Edited & Intro by Gilbert Weiss, Translated by Ruth Hein, & Historical Commentary by Erika Weinzierl

University of Missouri Press, 1999

Published in Vienna in 1936, The Authoritarian State by Eric Voegelin has remained virtually unknown to the public until now. Sales of the German edition were halted following the Nazi invasion of Austria in 1938, and the entire printing was later destroyed by wartime bombing. In this volume, Voegelin offers a critical examination of the most prominent European theories of state and constitutional law of the period while providing a political and historical analysis of the Austrian situation. He discusses the dismissal of Parliament in 1933, the civil war, the murder of Federal Chancellor Dollfuss, the adoption of the "Authoritarian Constitution" of 1934, and the predicament of being sandwiched between Hitler and Mussolini.

A radical critique of Hans Kelsen's pure theory of law lies at the heart of this work, marking Voegelin's definitive departure from Neo-Kantian epistemology. For the first time, Voegelin elaborates on the important distinction between theoretical concepts and political symbols as a basis for explaining the nontheoretical and speculative character of ideologies, both left and right. He shows that total and authoritarian are symbols of ideological self-interpretation that have no theoretical value, a distinction basic to his later work in The New Science of Politics.

Available for the first time in English, The Authoritarian State is a valuable addition to the Voegelin canon and to the field of intellectual history in general.

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