Volume 30: Visual Histories of Austria
Volume 29: Myths in Austrian History
Volume 28: Democracy in Austria
Volume 27 - Austrian Environmental History
This volume on the environmental history of contemporary Austria offers an overview of the field, as well as several topical case studies. In addition to highlighting some innovative methodological approaches, the essays also show how important the environment has been to some of the most crucial aspects of the recent Austrian past.
Volume 26 - Migration in Austria
This interdisciplinary volume offers methodologically innovative approaches to Austria’s coping with issues of migration past and present. These essays show Austria’s long history as a migration country. Austrians themselves have been on the move for the past 150 years to find new homes and build better lives.
Volume 25: Austrian Studies Today
This volume celebrates the study of Austria in the twentieth century by historians, political scientists and social scientists produced in the previous twenty-four volumes of Contemporary Austrian Studies. One contributor from each of the previous volumes has been asked to update the state of scholarship in the field addressed in the respective volume.
Volume 24: Austrian Federalism in Comparative Perspective
With its ambiguous mix of weak federalist and strong centralist elements, the Austrian constitutional architecture has been subject to conflicting interpretations and claims from its very beginning. The written 1920 constitution has been paralleled by informal rules and forces making up for the imbalance of power between national and subnational authorities. Understanding these inherent weaknesses, virtually all political actors involved are well aware that reforming the allocation of rights and duties between the different levels in the federal state is urgently needed.
Volume 23: 1914 Austria-Hungary, the Origins, and the First Year of World War I
Volume 22: Austria's International Position after the End of the Cold War
The Iron Curtain came down in 1989 and Austria found its international position dramatically changed after the end of the Cold War. Austria joined the European Union in 1995 and aligned its foreign policy with the EU. Unlike its neighbors to the East, it did not join NATO but continued its policy of neutrality. Austria strengthened its trade and investments in Central and Eastern Europe. Austria experienced devastating wars in its neighborhood in the Balkans and Austrian diplomats served as mediators in the region.
Volume 21: Austrian Lives
Writing biographies for a long time had been a male hegemonic project. Ever since Plutarch and Sueton composed their vitae of the greats of classical antiquity, to the medieval obsession with the hagiographies of holy men (and a few women) and saints, Vasari’s lives of great Renaissance artists, down to the French encyclopedists, Dr. Johnson and Lytton Strachey, as well as Ranke and Droysen the genre of biographical writing has become increasingly more refined.
Volume 20: Global Austria
After the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, Austria transformed itself from an empire to a small Central European country. Formerly an important player in international affairs, the new republic was quickly sidelined by the European concert of powers. The enormous losses of territory and population in Austria’s post-Habsburg state of existence, however, did not result in a political, economic, cultural, and intellectual black hole.
Volume 19: From Empire to Republic: Post World War I Austria
The eighteen essays in this volume offer fresh perspective and innovative scholarship on the difficult transition from empire to republic for the small state of Austria, newly created by the Allied peacemakers in Paris in 1919. These essays also deal with complex challenges of nation building after a major war as well as the ambiguity inherent in the creation of new institutions in politics, economics, social life and culture.
Volume 18: The Schuessel Era in Austria
Volume 17: New Perspectives on Austria and WWII
For more than a generation after World War II, official government doctrine and many Austrians insisted they had been victims of Nazi aggression in 1938 and, therefore, bore no responsibility for German war crimes. During the past twenty years this myth has been revised to include a more complex past, one with both Austrian perpetrators and victims.
Volume 16: The Changing Austrian Voter
Volume 15: Sexuality in Austria
Volume 14: Austrian Foreign Policy in Historical Context
This volume covers foreign policy in the 20th century and offers an up-to-date status report of the study of Austria’s foreign policy trajectories and diplomatic options both in the historical and political sciences. Eva Nowotny, the current Austrian Ambassador to the U.S., introduces the volume with an analysis of the art and practice of Austrian diplomacy in historical perspective. Ambassador Wolfgang Petritsch analyses recent Balkans diplomacy from his personal perspective as an EU-emissary in the Bosnian and Kosovo crises.
Volume 13: Religion in Austria
Like most European countries, Austria does not have a strict separation between state and church. Since the counter-reformation, it has been considered a country strongly influenced by Catholicism. Austrian attitudes towards religion derive from the Habsburg experience, when emperors and the Catholic Church acted in complete unison. This new volume in the Contemporary Austrian Studies series reevaluates this age-old tradition.
Volume 12: The Americanization/ Westernization of Austria
Political, economic, social, and cultural modernization dramatically transformed twentieth-century Austria. Innovative new methods of production and management, such as the assembly line, changed Austrian business after World War I. At the same time, jazz, Hollywood movies, television programming, and mass commodities were as popular in Austria as elsewhere in Western Europe.
Even political campaigns followed American trends. All this occurred despite the fact that in West Germany, American nostrums and models had been rejected, modified, or “translated” into milder versions. Ultimately, Austria was “Western Europeanized” when it joined the European Union in 1995.
How Western are the Austrian? This volume analyzes trends toward Americanization and Westernization in Austria throughout the twentieth century.