Journal of Austrian Studies最新文献

Reviewed by:

• Vielfalt ordnen. Das föderale Europa der Habsburgermonarchie (Vormärz bis 1918) by Jana Osterkamp
• Andrei Corbea-Hoisie

Der von Jana Osterkamp gewählte Titel ihres Buches, das innerhalb von wenigen Jahren schon zwei Auflagen erreicht hat, kündigt bereits die Thesen an, die im letzten, unmissverständlich benannten kurzen Kapitel “Ausblick: das föderale Haus Europa” ausführlich formuliert und entwickelt werden. Die alte Weisheit Historia magistra vitae könnte als ideales Motto für ein Werk dienen, das in Bezug auf die derzeitigen Herausforderungen des noch längst nicht abgeschlossenen Prozesses der Einigung Europas vorschlägt, die exempla der Vergangenheit gar nicht für obsolet zu halten. Ganz im Gegenteil, wenn man bedenkt, so die Autorin, dass in dem langen 19. Jahrhundert vom Wiener Kongress bis zum Ausbruch des 1. Weltkriegs Föderationen, neben Imperien und aufkeimenden Nationalstaaten, die Formen europäischer Staatlichkeit geprägt haben. Unter jenen stelle die Habsburgermonarchie laut Jana Osterkamp vielleicht das eklatanteste Beispiel einer “gelebten Föderation” dar, denn im Laufe der wechselnden politischen Umstände seit der Vormärz-Epoche, die von dem wachsenden Bewusstsein begleitet wurden, das Überleben des vom Mittelalter geerbten staatlichen Gebildes hänge von seiner Reformierung ab, wurde diese zu einem durchaus “innovativen Ort des Nachdenkens über Föderalismus”. Ähnlich wie das heutige europäische Konstrukt, das eine “föderale Verfasstheit” aufweist, auch ohne über eine föderale Verfassung zu verfügen, erlebte das mitteleuropäische “Altösterreich” eine bewundernswerte organisatorisch-bürokratische Dynamik in dem vielfältig “kooperativen Zusammenwirken” der stufenweise aufgebauten Teile dieser “konföderativen Union, deren Ordnungsleistung oft übersehen” werde. Darum könnte das Nachdenken darüber, wie auch jenes über die zahlreichen Gründe des endgültigen Scheiterns des Modells, auch [End Page 130] die gegenwärtigen Debatten über die nächsten Schritte in der Gestaltung eines “einheitlichen” Europas produktiv befruchten. In der Folge einer über 400-seitigen historisch-juristischen Untersuchung aller Facetten jener komplexen Bauart eines Rechts, das das wirtschaftliche, soziale und politische System des Habsburgerreiches in seiner letzten Existenzphase antrieb und funktionsfähig machte, klingt Jana Osterkamps Schlussfolgerung, dass das “Haus Österreich”, wie es Ingeborg Bachmann zu nennen pflegte, als “Baukasten für Reformentwürfe” und damit als ein “wichtiges Erbe für Europa” gilt, keinesfalls plakativ!

Als Inhaberin

Reviewed by:

• The Celebrity Monarch: Empress Elisabeth and the Modern Female Portrait by Olivia Gruber Florek
• Hansjakob Werlen

In posthumous fame and adulation, no monarchical figure can compete with Empress Elisabeth of Austria. The enduring worldwide fascination with the beautiful Bavarian duchess that began with Ernst Marischka’s 1950s trilogy of Sissi films has only increased since, as various media forms (musical, concert, TV/streaming program, tabloid serial) craft new variations of the empress’s persona for an eager public. Extricating Elisabeth from the carapace of innumerable mythologizing, commercializing, and kitschifying representations is one of the many achievements of Olivia Gruber Florek’s thoroughly researched study, The Celebrity Monarch.

As the title indicates, the study demonstrates how Empress Elisabeth transformed the iconographic traditions of royal portraiture into representations of evolving celebrity culture and, through her interventions in and contributions to the creative process of her portraiture, established a visual style that exerted its influence on modern paintings of female portraits.

While Elisabeth’s reclusiveness and her controversial eschewal of representational duties are well known, The Celebrity Monarch shows a woman who, although constrained by imperial etiquette, deliberately subverted courtly norms of representation to fashion a novel image: the celebrity monarch. Gruber Florek, in her analysis of the famous Franz Xaver Winterhalter paintings, demonstrates Elisabeth’s creative contributions to the startling changes of monarchical representation and the role of the rapidly evolving medium of photography in this transformation. [End Page 127]

The book is first and foremost an art-historical study, but its findings extend to many other histories, among them of the late Habsburg empire, of psychiatry, of photography, and of emerging celebrity culture. Key works in these fields as well as references to important theorists provide scaffolding for the study’s central contentions. This expansive approach, well documented in the lengthy final bibliography, allows Gruber Florek to engage Winterhalter’s paintings of Elisabeth in a dialogue that not only considers their novel and subversive iconography but also interprets their visual features for messages relevant both to the personality of the empress and the sociopolitical, artistic, and historical developments of Habsburg Austria in the second part of the nineteenth century.

The title of Chapter 1, “Staging the State Portrait,” points to the dual n

Abstract:

The travel books of the Bohemian-German author Richard Katz (1888–1968) were once among the most popular publications in German literature but have since been forgotten. This essay intends to reread, from a postcolonial perspective, Katz’s work from the interwar period. It focuses on his book about the Dutch East Indies, today’s Indonesia, Heitere Tage mit braunen Menschen (1930), in order to explain how and why the early form of postcolonial and antiglobalist critique we find in Katz’s writings could coexist with other ideas that reiterated nineteenth-century colonialist and racist conceptions about the indigenous Other and people of mixed race. The latter is all the more intriguing considering that Katz himself, being Jewish, was soon to become the victim of a political ideology marked by ideas similar to some of the ones he defended when writing about Southeast Asia.

Abstract:

The fascination with gaining insight into the motivation of European participants for the private and secretive world of hunting safaris in Africa informs both the avant-garde short film Unsere Afrikareise (1966) by Peter Kubelka and the more recent documentary Safari (2016) by . Both films provoke audiences with an interpretive openness that nonetheless must be understood as unveiled critiques of hunting practices and neocolonial attitudes. By drawing out formal and thematic similarities and differences, this comparative film analysis of Kubelka and Seidl illuminates the function and centrality of hunting via three interconnected aspects of their films: human and nonhuman bodies of otherness as central to understanding how both filmmakers view and instrumentalize the proximity of hunting and neocolonialism; the tension between word (sound) and image, with a focus on how the whitewashing of the hunting industry and conservation practices is exposed and challenged by images; and the key role of controversial images of slayed animals, dissected carcasses, and almost completely voiceless Africans in both films, which prove paradoxically indispensable for both Kubelka and Seidl in producing works that leave viewers with more interpretive specificity than is sometimes acknowledged.

Reviewed by:

• Die Macht der Kunstkritik: Ludwig Hevesi und die Wiener Moderne by Ilona Sármány-Parsons
• Patrick Werkner

Ilona Sármány-Parsons is a Hungarian-born art historian who taught for many years at the Central European University in Prague and Budapest. She published extensively on the fine arts in Central Europe, especially on nineteenth-and twentieth-century art, including a book on Gustav Klimt, which has been translated into five languages. Now her opus magnum has appeared, originally published in Hungarian and then recently in a (very good) German translation. The work represents the fruits of a lifelong preoccupation with Ludwig Hevesi (1843–1910), who might be described as the “critical Pope” of Viennese Jugendstil. Die Macht der Kunstkritik: Ludwig Hevesi und die Wiener Moderne runs to almost five hundred pages and has more than three hundred illustrations. The book is much more than an eulogy to Hevesi, who has gone down in history as an insightful critic of the pioneering [End Page 116] exhibitions of Vienna’s Secession. Hevesi devised the motto inscribed over the portal of the Secession Building, with which every devotee of turn-of-the-century Vienna is familiar: “To the age its art. To art its freedom.”

Based on a detailed reading of Hevesi’s exhibition reviews and commentary on the contemporary art scene, Sármány-Parsons unfolds a panorama of cultural developments from 1867 to 1909. The European art criticism of the day is the background against which the author highlights the burgeoning art of the fin-de-siècle: first in Budapest, then moving the focus to the crucible of Viennese Modernism. The author adopts a cultural-historical perspective on events in the tradition of Carl Schorske, an approach that is highly appropriate to the feuilleton genre written for the educated public in which Hevesi so excelled. His exhibition critiques dazzle, providing the best introduction for anyone interested in the Wiener Moderne. Hevesi’s writings and interpretations about Klimt’s ceiling paintings for the Vienna University (destroyed during World War II) represent even today a most inspiring analysis of these central works of Symbolism, notwithstanding the avalanche of commentary that has subsequently been published.

The author, however, departs from the usual chorus of panegyrics. She gives plenty of space to the decidedly unfazed conservative art criticism in marked contrast to the more “heroic” narrative of the Wiener Moderne. That victory lap was reflected in the creation of new institutions such as the Wiener Secession and the Kunstgewerbeschule, both of whic