Journal of Austrian Studies

In Approaching East-Central Europe over the Centuries, Marija Wakounig and Ferdinand Kühnel (both of the Institut für Osteuropäische Geschichte, Universität Wien) have brought together a volume that showcases present work and future of scholarship on Austria and Central Europe. This is an important little volume, partially for its content (which is interesting) but also for what it represents, which is the truly international scope and methodological range of Austrian and Central European Studies (ACES) in the twenty-first century. Comprised of progress reports and ten articles, this book is an attempt to convey where ACES now stands and where it could be headed when the students of the current generation become professional historians and scholars.

The first fifty pages of the volume are made up of reports for the academic year 2016/17 by the heads of eight of the nine ACES centers, which were all founded and partially funded over the last half-century by the Bundesministerium für Bildung, Wissenschaft und Forschung in Vienna. (The ninth center, opened in Berkeley, California, in 2017, was too new to be included in the book.) With locations in Europe (Vienna, Budapest, Leiden, Olomouc), Canada (Alberta), the United States (Minneapolis, New Orleans, Berkeley), and Israel (Jerusalem), these centers provide support for undergraduate teaching, graduate and faculty research, and community outreach. Looking through these reports, even if of limited interest to casual [End Page 159] readers, enables one to gain a fascinating and encouraging view into the diversity of scholarship and public engagement around ACES happening across the western world.

Alongside the public and academic programming arising from the various centers, it is—as Wakounig and Kühnel note in their brief introduction—the work of the centers' international cohort of graduate students that truly represents the promise and possibility of ACES heading into the middle of the twenty-first century. Therefore, the majority of the volume is devoted to ten articles, one each by leading graduate students from across the international network of centers. Spanning five hundred years of historical time, the articles are organized (mostly) chronologically, with some in English and others in German. Although for most readers these articles will be found as individual works via online databases, publishing them together offers the advantage of a brief overview of the range of research possibilities and methods in ACES.

Beginning in the Reformation Era, Jiří Černý (Olomouc) and Bryan Kozik (Minnesota) both examine responses to the religious upheaval in the broader Habsburg lands. Examining, respectively, the distribution of a pamphlet (Černý) and biography (Kozik), each article adds to our knowledge of the perception, reception, and response by locals to the enormous cultural shift that was the Reformation. Taking us into the palaces of the princes and nobles of that same era, Martin Küster (Leiden) examines the phenomenon of Wunderkammer, demonstrating the deeply interwoven ties between economics, social and political prestige, and art/natural history collecting in early modern Central Europe.

The next three articles take readers to the time of the world wars and their aftermath. Vicko Marelić (Vienna) turns to diplomatic history in the 1914–1920 period, revealing the deep involvement of Great Britain in the question of what was to become of the former Habsburg territories along the Adriatic, including British negotiations with the Italians and Slavs who claimed territory along the sea's eastern coastline. Beáta Márkus (Budapest) focuses on the final year of the Second World War and the deportation of ethnic German civilians to the Soviet Union following the Red Army invasion of 1944–45. Like Marelić's classic diplomatic history, with its personalities struggling against larger historical themes, Márkus writes what could almost be called classic deportation history, a disturbing but necessary account of the [End Page 160] displacement of peoples during wartime, in this case the tens of thousands of East...