Empire and identity : biographies of the Austrian state problem in the late Habsburg empire

Empire and Identity takes a novel approach to the critical last decades of the Habsburg Empire. The study uses biography to examine questions of identity and self-understanding in six lives and careers from the Austrian intellectual and political elite. The focus in the six biographies is on the problem of the Austrian state in an age of nationalist strife and constitutional conflict, on the different perceptions of this problem, and on the solutions proposed through the political engagements of these individuals. The book is organized around three dual political biographies: author and dramatist Hugo von Hofmannsthal is compared and contrasted to the parallel development of Leopold von Andrian; Karl Renner's political theories are examined in their temporal context and juxtaposed to the historical scholarship and political career of Josef Redlich; and the historical works of Heinrich Friedjung and the bureaucratic carer of Ernest von Koerber are analyzed as parallel and partly complementing preoccupations with the crisis of the Austrian state around 1900. Each of the dual biographies focuses on a distinct problem in the development of the Imperial Austrian state in the early twentieth century. The biographical approach also throws new light on the six examined individuals, whose scholarly, artistic and bureaucratic careers are placed in a political context. Straddling several spheres normally treated separately, Lindström's work integrates analyses of historical scholarship, political theory and literature in a broad political framework dealing with questions of the identity and viability of the crisis-ridden Habsburg Empire. (from the back cover of the book