The paper concentrates on a specific chapter of the Austrian heraldry, i.e. heraldry of the Jewish noble families. The coats-of-arms were originally granted to the Jews sporadically. Jakub Bassevi (1578-1635) was the first unbaptized Jew to receive a coat-of-arms and a title in the early 17th century. The Jews had not become ennobled until the 18th century. Their coats-of-arms, however, rarely contained traditional Jewish symbols. In Austria, we can thus encounter only the Star of David, the Ten Commandments and the prayer shawl (tallit).
The problem of the study of Jewish elites is that it is often ahistoric, oscillating between indiscriminate admiration and total refusal, which merely reflects the extremes of a traditionally unbalanced attitude of the society towards the Jews as well as towards nobility in general. Jewish nobility is part of the the so‑called new nobility of the 18th to 20th centuries, although in legal terms it does not constitute any specific group within it. Like other families belonging to the new nobility, its members obtained their titles as a reward for their credit and contribution to the monarchy and public welfare and, but for a few rare exceptions, had no social or family ties to aristocratic or old‑nobility families, despite the fact that it was precisely the new nobility who, since no later than the middle of the 19th century played a crucial role not only in the economy of the country, but also in its politics, army as well as its culture. Unlike aristocracy, this new social group, usually called „second society“, was open to all newcomers who had acquired a certain social status. The reason for nobilitation did not play any role in being a member of this elite: while some individuals were ennobled thanks to their entrepreneurial success which allowed them to give out large sums to charity, others earned their title due to exemplary performance of administrative or military service, and still others were nobilitated as a reward for their success in art and science. Whereas members of the latter group were nobility only through their titles and lifestyles, and through their family ties remained connected to the bourgeoisie, rich entrepreneurs and top state officials were often able to transform their considerable wealth in political and social capital.
The Teschen region experienced complex and throughout its historical development variable ethnical structure. At the beginning of the 19th century, Silesians were still considered to be a single nation, which had been divided as a result of the Habsburgs’ defeat in the Silesian Wars. Language was not considered a criterion for national identity. At first the Czech and Polish communities worked together in the national political fight against Germans, but from 1880s onwards the Czech-Polish rivalry with strong manifestations of animosity prevailed. The tensions escalated during the censuses in 1880, 1890, 1900 and 1910 when respondents declared one or another language of daily use (Umgangssprache). Thousands of immigrants especially from Galicia but also from Bohemian and Moravian midland streamed into the industrial parts of Teschen region. The battle to “recruit” these migrants was a characteristic feature of the nationalist agitation in the censuses.
This article analyzes the regulation of prostitution and attempts to control venereal disease in the Bohemian Lands at the end of the “long” nineteenth century, a time when arguments over prostitution raged among abolitionists, feminists, members of the bourgeois women’s movement, neo-regulationists, and others who debated whether prostitution should be tolerated, legalized, or abolished. Between 1899 and 1910, trafficking in women and “venereal peril”, issues intimately associated with prostitution, were internationalized. Attitudes toward prostitution varied among Habsburg-police and bureaucrats, but there was broad support for confining prostitutes in closed bordellos. The discussion highlighted the contrast between the ineffectiveness of regulation in the large and increasingly anonymous metropolises in Habsburg Central Europe, like Prague and Vienna, where the vice squads were allegedly rife with corruption, and the efficacy of regulation in small-to-medium-sized towns and cities.
Last two decades of the 19th century were also a peak period of the Czech immigration to Vienna. The study analyzes reasons why most of tens of thousands immigrants from Czech speaking parts of Bohemian lands were not recorded during population censuses 1880–1910 with the Czech language of common communication. For this reason it first brings forth a situation of the Czech minority and a social climate it had to face in Vienna and then it defines a category of the “language of common communication” used in pre-Cisleithan censuses. Later on it describes a course of the census of the language of the common communication in Vienna. It also takes into account interest positions of the Cisleithan state (a support of a natural migrant assimilation out of the reason of social cohesion sustenance), German nationalistic activists (an assimilation of Slavic immigrants in the German territory “at any rate”, that is also a violent one) and also of Czech nationalistic activists (the fight against assimilation and a denial of a natural assimilation existence).
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In this study, the author uses Daase’s concept of extended security to analyse the main line of the Habsburg monarchy’s territorial stabilisation between 1815 and 1820 in the context of preserving the status quo and preventing the outbreak of new wars and revolutions in Europe. Using the example of the provinces of Moravia and Silesia, it then specifically looks at the issues of establishing a secret political police, detecting and monitoring dangerous persons and last but not least investigating public opinion before the Congress of Troppau in 1820.
This article assesses the historical consciousness of German travellers who visited Bohemia in the period between 1750 and 1850. Through an analysis of the German travel literature about Bohemia, the goal is to identify such geographical sites that were associated with important historical events and to examine the interpretation of historical events. The focus on the period of one hundred years between 1750 and 1850 allows for the analyses of the transformation of historical memories and the study of those memories in the context of emerging national identities. The article shows that travellers and authors of the travel literature set the historical remembrances within the interpretative framework of a national historical narrative.
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This article draws upon the remarkable diaries of Vojtěch Berger to offer an original perspective on left-wing politics and the transformative effects of war, occupation, and violence in early twentieth-century Central Europe. Berger, a trained carpenter from southern Bohemia, began writing a diary at the turn of the century when he was a member of the Czechoslovak Social Democratic Party in Vienna. He continued to write as he fought for the Habsburg monarchy during World War I; moved to Prague and joined the Communist Party; endured the Nazi occupation; and questioned the Communist Party, and his place in it, after liberation in 1945. Berger’s diary speaks to two constituencies that deserve more attention from historians: Czech-speaking veterans of World War I and rank-and-file members of the interwar Communist Party. The article argues that Berger’s politics, while informed by his experiences and framed by party ideologies and structures, obtained significance through relationships with like-minded “comrades”. Furthermore, the article examines how Berger used his diary to create political self-understanding, to fashion a political self. Each world war, the article concludes, threw this sense of self into disarray. Each world war also spurred Berger to reshape his political self, and with that to reconstitute his political beliefs, his public relationships, and his sense of belonging in the world.
A linchpin of government next to the army and the judiciary, the public (political) administration was of special signifi cance in the multinational Habsburg monarchy throughout the constitutional period. It stimulated changes and paved the way towards progress and modernisation of the Danubian monarchy, and yet since the beginning its activity was severely criticised and accused of numerous fl aws. In order to reform the administration and remedy its shortcomings, a number of projects were conceived by both the authorities and the parliamentary-governmental environment or academia. The administration’s greater involvement in solving problems of social and economic life was called for and the need to remove the conflictsof jurisdiction between its various branches and to sort out the relations between the organs of the state and local self-government was postulated. One of the most interesting projects of the administrative reform was prepared at the beginning of the twentieth century by the government of Ernst Kroeber. It consisted, inter alia, in strengthening the government power in the area. Although the proposed changes were not implemented, the reform of the administration was re-set on the agenda before the outbreak of World War I in 1911 with the establishment of a special Administrative Reform Commission, its work only partially successful. The outbreak of World War I necessitated the suspension of further work on the reform.
The article describes philanthropic activities of Marie Riegrová-Palacká and her merit as of a birth of the first, from the language point of view Czech kindergartens in Prague, based on a French model. The entry of Marie Riegrová-Palacká, but also of other women into a public sphere was accompanied just by charity activities, often conditioned by Christian ethics. The endeavour of Marie Riegrová-Palacká exceeds also by means of a correspondence with Marie Pape-Carpantier, the director of the French Institute for kindergarten teachers in Paris. This long time correspondence had been preceded by a visit at World Exhibition in Paris in 1867, where Riegrová- Palacká became thoroughly acquainted with a pedagogical section of this exhibition. The willingness of the French side had to face first of all standings of Prague city committee the members of which Riegrová-Palacká at the end managed to get round as for advantages of the French method for the new Czech kindergarten. As late as at this point Barbora Ledvinková and Marie Müllerová could start their way to prepare for a career of teachers in the new Czech kindergarten of St. Jacob without any obstacles.
For almost one hundred and fifty years the Habsburg Monarchy and the Ottoman Empire were struggling for control in Hungary. After the unsuccessful second Siege of Vienna in 1683 the situation seemed to be convenient for the reconquest of Turkish Hungary. The alliance of the Holy League against the Sultan was created in the spring of 1684 in which the Emperor, the Pope, Poland and Venice were involved. The Habsburgs focused their interests towards the Kingdom of Hungary from now on. Until 1688, in a series of campaigns the Christian forces reconquered most of Hungary and in addition the Habsburgs achieved the title of the hereditary kings of St. Stephen’s Crown.
This study focuses on nationalist agitators and municipal politicians in the North Bohemian city of Reichenberg (now Liberec) during the period of nationalist political struggles before WWI. It explores — on the example of the record of the language of daily use in 1891 census and other conflicts between German and Czech activists — the ways in which the discourse of the political elites became nationalized — though this hardly reflects the intensity with which people were committed to national issues in their everyday lives. The intensification of the conflicts in Reichenberg is not regarded as a sign of the weakness of civil society, but rather of its growing strength. In the days when the Czech-speaking community in Reichenberg occupied an entirely inferior status, there was no friction between it and the majority German community. The friction came about when the Czech-speaking middle classes gained in strength and influence, and began to engage in nationalist agitation — which was confrontational in nature. The hostile response from the city authorities was essentially a symptom of a struggle for the symbolic occupation of public space. The response adopted by the Reichenberg City Hall (which was similar to other “German” authorities in ethnically mixed towns and cities in the Bohemian lands) was very hard, which to some degree explains (though it does not excuse) the highly confrontational approach taken by the independent Czechoslovak state towards its German citizens in the immediate post-war years.
Inhabitants of the Habsburg Monarchy began to dominate in the number of immigrants heading to the United States of America after year 1883. The largest number of emigrants were heading through the North German ports, because the journey to the north of Germany was not difficult at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Thanks to emigration, two German ports, Hamburg and Bremen, recorded the prosperity growth. Both ports played a major role in emigration as an imaginary gateway for emigrants from the Monarchy, and both German shipping companies, Hamburg Amerikanische Paketfahrt Aktien-Gesellschaft (HAPAG) based in Hamburg and Norddeutscher Lloyd (NDL) of which shipping departed port Bremen, must be grateful for poor emigrants from the Habsburg Monarchy. German companies began to focus on the Monarchy market, especially after the German Government began regulating emigration from its own country, and then the two German shipping companies found a replacement in the Monarchy.
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The article commemorates the three hundredth anniversary of the birth of Maria Theresa, which falls on the 13th of May 2017. The author introduces Maria Theresa as a symbol of the times when Habsburg monarchy cautiously, yet determinedly took the path that lead to the modern state (to its more effective functioning with the use of professional staff and legal norms applicable to everyone), and to more just a society. In other words, to what we today call western society – with all its strengths and weaknesses.Maria Theresa started the revolutionary transformation of society, including the new perspective on the functioning of the state and of the role of law, with the help of her responsible attitude to her duties as a head of state and her ability to reflect the needs of society. The author deals with the motivations, content and consequences of the most important Theresian reforms. He mentions the reforms of state apparatus (new organisation and professionalization of advisory and administrative bodies, as well as judiciary), codification of the Czech-Austrian criminal and exchange law, as well as the efforts to codify civil law and to adopt financial, military, commercial, villeinage, church and school reforms.He appreciates that, although these reforms were less radical than those later introduced by Joseph II., they were often more permanent. The author also pays attention to how the Theresian reforms were assessed by her contemporaries as well as (legal) history textbooks of the end of 19th and the beginning of 20th century, of the times of the First Czechoslovak Republic and of the post- February Czechoslovakia and Czechoslovakia in the times of normalisation.
CS
Článek je připomenutím třístého výročí narození Marie Terezie, které připadá na 13. května tohoto roku. Autor panovnici představuje jako symbol doby, v níž habsburská monarchie opatrně, ale zároveň rázně nakročila na cestu vedoucí k modernímu státu, k jeho efektivnějšímu řízení prostřednictvím profesionálního aparátu a pro všechny platných právních předpisů a k sociálně spravedlivější společnosti, tedy k tomu, co dnes – se všemi klady i zápory – považujeme za západní civilizaci. Přicházející revoluční přeměnu společnosti, včetně nového pohledu na fungování státu a na roli práva, Marie Terezie odstartovala svým odpovědným přístupem k panovnickým povinnostem a schopností reflektovat potřeby společnosti. Autor přibližuje motivace, obsah a důsledky nejdůležitějších tereziánských reforem. Zmiňuje reformy státního aparátu (novou organizaci a profesionalizaci poradních orgánů, správních orgánů i soudnictví), kodifikaci jednotného česko-rakouského trestního a směnečného práva i pokus o kodifikaci práva občanského, finanční, vojenské, národohospodářské, poddanské, církevní i školské reformy. Oceňuje přitom, že reformy z tereziánského období nebyly tak razantní jako pozdější opatření Josefa II., často však byly daleko trvalejší. Stručně si také všímá, jak tereziánské reformy hodnotili současníci a učebnice dějepisu a právních dějin z konce 19. a začátku 20. století, z doby první Československé republiky a z poúnorového i normalizačního Československa.
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