Chapters

In view of its internal fragility, the Ottoman Empire, once a feared conqueror, was now the target of imperialist ambitions by the European colonial powers.

In the nineteenth century, the Balkans were the setting for the growing emancipation endeavours of the various peoples in the region, where the seeds of the French Enlightenment and the nationalist ideology, as everywhere in Europe, fell on fertile ground.

The war economy demanded full commitment by everyone, and the civilian population, particularly women, were involved in the ‘total war’. They took over jobs that had been previously carried out by men, and their effort on the home front had a democratizing effect that changed social expectations with regard to the state.

The government in Vienna sought to prevent Russia from establishing itself as the protector of the orthodox Balkan Slavs. The Habsburg Balkan policy therefore aimed at strengthening the Austrian presence in the Balkan ‘powder keg’. It was thwarted in doing so by the rise of Serbia as a regional power.

The Congress of Berlin in 1878 was a textbook example of two-tier diplomacy characterized by the arrogance of the major powers with regard to the smaller nations and decisions being made over their heads that were to have fateful consequences.

The Congress of Berlin failed to bring about a lasting solution in the Balkans. Behind the façade of a laboriously maintained peace, the old conflicts continued to simmer. Austria-Hungary’s ambitions as a major power were also focused on the Balkans as a means of pasting over the problems at home with a demonstration of strength abroad.

The Austro-Hungarian film propaganda centred above all on the presentation of the imperial household and the military and economic strength. It was not just a question of outdoing the enemy but trying to match the over-representation of propaganda by allied Germany.

The undiminished desire for territorial expansion by the regional powers ensured that the Balkan crisis was an ever-present constant in Europe’s political affairs.

The Slovenes were one of the smaller ethnic groups in the Habsburg multinational empire. In 1910 only 1.4 million people claimed to speak the language habitually, just 2.6 per cent of the population of the Dual Monarchy.

In the study of the history of the nineteenth century, which concentrated above all on the history of states, the Slovenes, who did not have a state of their own, were regarded as being ‘without history’.

For the Slovenes as well, their language was the most important point of distinction from the ‘others’. In the era of nationalism, there status as one of the smaller ethnic groups in the region meant that the struggle for emancipation and linguistic equality were the main focal points.

Slovene national politics were characterized by a struggle on several fronts against German and Italian hegemony claims. After the outbreak of war in 1914, the continued existence of a Slovene nation was put into question. Yugoslavism became a political option, but the Slovene political camps were divided as to how the idea should be put into practice.

By the end of the war at the latest, the consequences of the years of fighting had become evident to everyone. The war invalids had to be integrated into post-war society. Films also began to show the war-wounded victims, but there was still no end to the hero worship. Almost no family had come out of the war unscathed, and they wanted at least to ensure that their lost relatives were seen as heroes. One-sided war films in the interwar years were very popular as a result, and anti-war films were not well received at all.

The variety within the Habsburg Monarchy gave outsiders the impression that Austria-Hungary was a modern Tower of Babel. The hotly discussed question of an official language of the state was complicated by the difference in the way the two halves of the Empire developed after the 1867 Compromise.

Bureaucracy one was one of the most important pillars of the Austrian authoritarian state. The language of red tape was therefore a hotly disputed political issue.

School policies were a sensitive topic in the multi-ethnic Habsburg Empire. A particularly hot issue was the question of the language of teaching. Following the Austrian-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, the two halves of the Empire pursued very different objectives.

In a multi-ethnic state like the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, the language and the spelling of place names in official usage was a hotly discussed issue, since they could be used to mark "national property". It sparked off a bitter struggle particularly in the multilingual regions.

The last complete statistical record of the Habsburg Monarchy was made in 1910. The huge quantities of data collected present a graphic image of the condition of the Dual Monarchy on the eve of the First World War and reflect the great variety as well as the enourmous differences and appalling inequalities between the regions.

As the Emperor's residence and the capital of the Austrian half of the Empire, Vienna was the cultural and economic centre of the Habsburg Monarchy and thus a major centre of attraction for migrants. In the 19th century, the city underwent huge growth.

Prague (Czech Praha), the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia, had always been a bilingual city in which Germans and Czechs lived alongside each other. The history of the city was dominated by the alternating importance of the languages. From the middle of the 19th century, the pendulum swung to the benefit of Czech.

Budapest was the second capital of the Dual Monarchy and grew rapidly to become a European metropolis. While Budapest took on a decidedly Magyar character, Pressburg/Bratislava remained a classical example of the multi-ethnicity of many central European cities.

In the old Habsburg Monarchy, school policies were an ideological landmine. The extent to which national emotions clouded the view is shown by examples where educational policy decisions led to nationalist escalation and shook the foundations of the Monarchy.

The Moravian Compromise was one of the few positive examples of an approach to a fair solution in the field of nationalities policies. Despite the deadlock in the language dispute between Czechs and Germans, a compromise acceptable to both sides and allowing a harmonious coexistence was found here.

In 1912, Islam was recognised officially as a religious community with equal rights within the Austrian half of the Empire. In the Christian world of European countries, the Habsburg Monarchy played a pioneering role in this field, and the law's basic features continue to apply today.