Across the Leitha. Rudolf von Eitelberger, the Austrian Museum of Art and Industry and the Liberal View of Culture in the Habsburg Empire

Citation for published version (Harvard): Rampley, M 2019, Across the Leitha: Rudolf Eitelberger, the Austrian Museum for Art and Industry and the liberal view of culture in the Habsburg Empire. in E Kernbauer, K Pokorny-Nagel, R Rosenberg, J Rüdiger, P Werkner & T Jenni (eds), Rudolf Eitelberger von Edelberg: Netzwerker der Kunstwelt. 1st edition edn, Bohlau Verlag, Vienna, pp. 363-392. https://doi.org/10.7767/9783205209256.363


Introduction
In the archives of the Museum of Eastern Slovakia in Košice there is a letter from Rudolf von Eitelberger to the Hungarian art historian Imre Henszlmann (1813-1888).1 It is not dated, but the content makes it possible to establish roughly when it was written. It reads as follows : Museum of Art and Industry ; and I am asking for your advice and support, especially with regard to Hungary. My priorities are : 1] that the Museum should come into contact with those men who have made an outstanding contribution to art and art industry in Hungary ; 2] to exhibit in Vienna those branches of Hungary's art industry in which either individual men excel, or where it will be useful for Hungarians to exhibit their objects in Vienna. […] Hoping that your support will not fail me, and that I shall succeed in bringing you into constant contact with the institute." Translations, if not stated otherwise, are by the author.
The Imperial Royal Austrian Museum of Art and Industry was established in March 1863, at the suggestion of Eitelberger, and formally opened in Vienna on 31 March 1864, with Eitelberger as its first director. It is therefore safe to assume the letter was written some time in 1863.3 Although it is short, it casts light on how Eitelberger envisaged the museum in the wider context of the Habsburg Empire and especially with regard to Hungary. His contributions to debates about Viennese topics -the architecture of the Ringstraße, for example, the design of the future Kunsthistorisches Museum, or the success and failings of the Opera House -are well known. Yet what were his hopes and aspirations in relation to the Empire as a whole ? How did he envisage the work of his own museum in the context of the Habsburg state, and what did he imagine his own place to be in it ? Eitelberger wrote extensively about the burgeoning network of design museums in the Austrian half of the Habsburg Monarchy, for example, but he was considerably less forthcoming about Hungary.4 His letter thus offers insight into a seldom explored aspect of his work. The identity of its recipient, Imre Henszlmann, and the familiarity of the mode of address, point moreover towards a social and professional network that spanned both sides of the river Leitha. This article examines these questions but its aim is to offer more than merely a supplement to existing knowledge about Eitelberger and the museum he founded. For it examines him as a leading representative of Austrian Liberal thought in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. His views can be seen as symptomatic of the set of ideological commitments and values he shared with the network of like-minded intellectuals, including Henszlmann. As such, the article examines Eitelberger's views in respect of the cultural politics of the Habsburg Empire and the liberal response to its cultural and ethnic diversity. In what ways did a liberal political outlook shape his approach to the Museum of Art and Industry as well as to the changing cultural politics of Austria-Hungary ? What do his attitudes tell us about the strengths and failings of liberal ideology when it came to the field of art and culture in the later Habsburg Empire ? In addition, what do they tell us about the Museum as a site where values and ideals were articulated and negotiated ?
In order to begin to answer such questions it is valuable to return to the correspondence with Henszlmann, since the letter was written on the basis of a twenty-year friend- ship, and it may serve to sketch out the context in which Eitelberger became acquainted with Henszlmann. As such, it helps identify the formative influences that shaped his attitudes.

Eitelberger, Henszlmann and the Böhm Circle
Košice is now in eastern Slovakia, but during the nineteenth century it was the city of Kassa in Upper Hungary. The largest city in the region, it also has an illustrious historical heritage ; a royal free town of the Hungarian kingdom from the fourteenth century onwards, it is also the location of Slovakia's largest Gothic church, the Cathedral of St. Elisabeth, which dates back to the late 1300s ( fig. 1). It was undoubtedly on account of its rich historical heritage that the city was chosen as the site of a regional museum, which was founded in 1872, initially as the as a formative influence on Eitelberger, which Julius Schlosser first highlighted in his account of the Vienna School of art history.10 Recent research has begun to establish a clearer picture of Böhm's career as an artist as well as his broader art historical significance. For the present discussion, his most important activity lay in the afternoon salons he organized, and which were attended by young scholars, art dealers and collectors who constituted the so-called Böhm Kreis -the Böhm circle. Eitelberger later testified to the decisive impact of these meetings on his artistic interests. He had a particular concern with medieval art and architecture, for example ; some of his most extensive art historical works were on medieval architectural heritage, and this was undoubtedly due in part to Böhm. For the latter was a contemporary and close friend of the painter Friedrich Overbeck (1789-1869) and other artists of the Nazarene circle, and his art historical interest in the Middle Ages reflected a shared desire to reform contemporary artistic practice by reviving the intertwining of art and religious faith of medieval Catholicism.11 At the core of the salon was discussion of art, more specifically, discussion of individual works of art in Böhm's extensive personal art collection. In contrast to the more connoisseurial interests of many private collectors, Böhm regarded his collection as having a didactic role : the gatherings were a form of pedagogy, and this informed his decisions on collecting. Rather than purchasing works on the basis of their individual appeal and quality alone, he built up a collection that was representative of the history of European art.12 In an extensive obituary on Böhm written in 1865, Eitelberger described the basic approach of the meetings : an inductive history of art, starting out with close observation of the technical, formal and symbolic features of an individual artwork and then 10  drawing out broader issues that it presented.13 In a much earlier account, dating from the period when he was still associated with the Böhm circle, Eitelberger spelled out the logic of the collection : to ensure universality ("Allseitigkeit") and comprehensiveness ("Vollständigkeit").14 Yet the significance of the circle for the present article lay not in its role in defining the methodological tenets of Viennese historiography, but rather in its membership. Key individuals of the Hungarian art world of the mid-nineteenth century were thus associated with Böhm, and the Böhm circle also served as a point of origin for art history not only in Vienna but also in Hungary. Henszlmann also championed medieval art and architecture : in his study of the "German style" churches of Košice he advocated a Gothic revivalist restoration of the cathedral which, while symptomatic of a broader development -one might think of his contemporary Eugène Viollet-le-Duc -may also be due to Böhm.16 He persisted with this preference ; in 1862, he would argue that the planned new home for the Hungarian Academy of Sciences should be built in a Neogothic style.17 It is thanks to Henszlmann, too, that a fairly detailed picture can be built up of Böhm's teaching style and intellectual concern, for in his obituary of the artist Henszlmann described in some detail the procedures of the meetings of the circle.18 Böhm left no writings outlining his ideas, but thanks to correspondence from Henszlmann we know that they certainly existed and that they played some part in his own intellectual development.19 Later, Henszlmann would testify to the importance of Böhm for the growth of the scientific study of art in Austria-Hungary, raising it to a level that exceeded even that of Germany.20 1851, and later sold it to the Liverpool-based collector Joseph Mayer, whose private collection became the basis of the World Museum in Liverpool, where the codex is still to be found. with any similar German ventures, but -in the period when they were edited by two of Böhm's excellent students, Heider and Eitelberger -they also surpassed similar publications in the other German lands ; and why ? because they mostly built on Böhm's teachings ; they started out from his principles and set the practical, individual study of objects as the primary task and the clear drawing up of chronological development as the surprising result, and as soon as archaeology and art criticism rejected lofty and obscure arguments based on the ›beautiful‹ and the ›ideal‹, and started to love and explain artistic character by using Böhm's principles as a starting point, it could, firstly, explore history, and, secondly, improve taste, so that in Vienna nowadays it is not just the scholarly study of history that has risen to a much higher level than previously, but the newly established museum of art and industry, headed by Eitelberger, also has a huge influence on the improvement of industrial products." I. Henszlmann, Böhm Dániel József, in : idem, Válogatott képzőművészeti írások (cit. n. 17), pp. 224 f.
Henszlmann, Pulszky and Böhm had more in common, however, than merely a shared enthusiasm for art. Henszlmann maintained close personal links to the sculptor after he returned to Budapest and, whilst in exile in Britain, was also friends with his son Wolfgang Boehm (1823-1890) who pursued a successful career as a painter in London. Indeed, the Böhm circle was based, in part, on other prior personal connections. Pulszky's family already knew Böhm before the circle was convened in Vienna ; in the mid-1830s Gábor Fejérváry had moved into the Pulszky family home, decorating it with a set of copies of the Parthenon marbles executed by Böhm himself.21 In his reminiscences Pulszky referred to Henszlmann as one of his closest childhood friends, while the extensive correspondence between the two shows that they remained in close contact throughout the 1850s and 1860s.22 Like Henszlmann, Pulszky also threw himself into the 1848 revolution and supported Hungarian independence ; he served as a member of the National Defence Committee (Országos Honvédelmi Bizottmány), for which he was sentenced to death in absentia by the Habsburg authorities, resulting in a period of exile in London. Indeed, his political commitments were even more marked than those of Henszlmann or Eitelberger, for he continued to work closely with the revolutionary leader Lajos Kossuth (1802-1894) after the defeat of 1849, accompanying him on international tours and playing a prominent role in the promotion of the Hungarian nationalist cause abroad.23 The Böhm circle meetings thus functioned as a kind of social, intellectual and ideological nexus that brought together intellectuals from both halves of the Empire (as they would be after 1867). The implications of this have hardly been considered, and the lack of critical attention to this nexus is all the more striking, given that Böhm himself had grown up in Upper Hungary (now : eastern Slovakia). Specifically, he grew up in the German speech island of Wallendorf (in Hungarian : Szepesolaszi/in Slovak : Spišské Vlachy), only 60 or so kilometres northwest of Košice. The appeal of Böhm to the circle of Hungarian intellectuals and art lovers can thus be ascribed to prior personal acquaintance as well as to their shared common background, for they all came from the same part of Upper Hungary. Pulszky grew up in Eperjes (now Prešov) which is only 36 kilometres north of Košice, and the triangle encompassing Prešov, Spišské Vlachy and Košice -commonly referred to as Zips (in Hungarian : Szepes, in Slovak : Spiš)was a German speech island, amidst a broader population of Slovaks and Hungarians.
Like Böhm, Henszlmann was also of German-speaking origin. Pulszky was from a family of Polish aristocrats, but his father's first language was German, and German was the language spoken at home, even though his mother was Hungarian.24 Indeed, when 15 he had to be sent to study at the provincial town of Miskolc in order to improve his Hungarian language skills.25 Eitelberger can be mentioned in this context, too, for having grown up and studied in Olmütz (now : Olomouc) in Moravia, he was also the product of a German speech island, although in this case it was in a mixed German-and Czech-speaking environment.
The changing demography of late nineteenth-century Austria-Hungary has, for understandable reasons, attracted considerable commentary, since it has most often been identified as the principal cause of the instability and eventual collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy. Yet even in the first half of the 1800s there were discernible shifts ; in particular, the German-speaking population in Hungary began to lose its distinct identity and adopt Hungarian as their primary language. During the War of Independence Buda was still a predominantly German-speaking town, but on the other side of the Danube, Pest, which owed much of its development to traders and artisans from Germany, had become a Hungarian town, and had come to overshadow in size and significance its counterpart across the river.26 This fluid cultural landscape arguably had a formative influence on all those members of the Böhm circle who came from beyond Vienna, in contrast to others such as Eduard von Sacken, Albert von Camesina and Gustav Heider, who were based in Vienna or its vicinity. Indeed, one might go further, and argue that their similar backgrounds were linked to, even responsible for, common attitudes towards the question of national identity. In the later nineteenth century, as Habsburg political and social life became increasingly fractured, the experience of linguistic and cultural difference became increasingly associated with various nationalist political movements. Yet in the 1840s, it could equally result in identification with the hegemonic German and Hungarian cultures, and this is precisely what can be observed in the cases of Eitelberger, Henszlmann and Pulszky.
Evidence of such identification can be seen in the early activity of Henszlmann. In the 1840s he edited and published a short-lived journal Vierteljahrsschrift aus und für Ungarn. Its objective was to promote the Hungarian demand for cultural and social autonomy ; the fact that it was printed in German makes clear that it had a double audience : German speakers in Hungary and political officials in Vienna. On the one hand it reads like a deliberate provocation, for it purposely agitated for the superior status of Hungarians over other groups in the Kingdom of Hungary, and this view was not unique to Henszlmann. The first volume contains correspondence between Pulszky and Count Leo Thun in which Pulszky claimed that : Das slavische Volk […] wo ich wohne, und in der Umgegend, steht auf der untersten Stufe der Civilisation, der Adel ist ungarisch, die Bürger setzen ihren Stolz darein, selbst wenn sie geborne Slaven sind, Deutsche zu scheinen.27 The exchange between the two prompted the appearance of an anonymous polemical pamphlet Vertheidigung der Deutschen und Slaven in Ungarn, which levelled numerous accusations against Henszlmann for the factual inaccuracies of his claims as well as his general political outlook.28 Yet despite the apparent chauvinism of his comments, they were not expressions of the nationalism so often associated with nineteenth century Hungary, but rather of a liberal view that saw Hungarian national culture as having a broader civilizational mission (comparable to what Austrian Liberals held to be true of German culture). As Henszlmann himself noted : As problematic as his dismissive attitude towards the Slovaks of Upper Hungary may be, it can be tempered, perhaps, by the fact that for Henszlmann it was always possible to become Hungarian. Being Hungarian was not a matter of biology or of destiny, but of choice, a key liberal tenet. Indeed, as an assimilated German-speaker, Henszlmann was himself testimony to this idea. As such, this paralleled the view of Austrian Liberals, including Eitelberger, for whom German was the common supra-national language of culture and science. The significance of this ideological position, especially in relation to Eitelberger, will be explored in the next section, but a preliminary summary can be made of the importance of the Böhm circle. For it not only provided a methodological template for Eitelberger's burgeoning interest in the history of art. It also provided a crucial formative social environment. Eitelberger was of a generation that grew up with liberal visions of culture and politics that were shared on either side of the River Leitha. It was based on the idea of an imagined community that transcended local identities and differences, including those of class. As Eitelberger would later state : "[D]ie Kunst ist nur eine […]. Es gibt nicht eine Kunst für die Armen und eine Kunst für die Reichen […]."30 He shared this view with his counterparts Henszlmann and Pulszky, and their later common involvement in museums was also intricately bound up with this broader ideological vision, for museums would serve as tools of mass communication. Not merely the museums in Vienna and Budapest, but also those in regional centres across the crownlands of Austria-Hungary, including Kassa/Košice.
Eitelberger's friendship with the "Hungarians" Böhm, Henszlmann and Pulszky may also inform interpretation of a little discussed text from the 1850s : his report on the medieval architecture of Hungary.31 It was the outcome of two topographical tours undertaken in 1854 and 1855 at the behest of the Central-Commission zur Erforschung und

Erhaltung der Baudenkmale (Central Commission for Research and Preservation of Built Monuments).
Such topographical studies were one of the central functions of the Central Commission, namely, to survey the hitherto little known areas of the Monarchy in pursuit of adopted a Hungarian identity." I. Henszlmann a proper understanding of the scope of its artistic and architectural heritage. It is also possible that under neo-absolutism, such documentation was encouraged since, as with mapping in general, it was part of the apparatus of political control on the part of the central imperial authorities. Undertaken only five years after the War of Independence, this was in certain respects a politically charged action, for post-revolutionary Hungary was still regarded with a degree of suspicion by members of the imperial administration, and this was accompanied with a vision of it as economically, socially and cultural backward. In his Memoires of 1897 Jacob Falke, for example, recalled travelling through Hungary in 1854, visiting the "unentwickelte Kulturstadt" (culturally undeveloped city) of Pest and experiencing the bucolic charms of the countryside where old habits and customs were still preserved.32 Eitelberger was himself not immune to such patronizing attitudes. His report noted : "Der Reisende muss […] weite von Cultur noch wenig berührte Strecken durchwandern, bevor er an ein interessantes Denkmal gelangt […]."33 Yet despite such lapses, and regardless of the ultimate political objectives of his tour, his immediate purpose was to combat the absence of Hungary on the art historical map. He complained, for example, about the absence of reference to Hungary in any of the recently published standard works of art and architectural history, singling out, by way of contrast, Henszlmann's study of Košice cathedral as a noble exception.34 His first step, therefore, was to counter prevailing myths about Hungary. These included the idea that nothing of any art historical value had survived the invasions of the Mongols in the thirteenth century and then the gradual imposition of Ottoman rule after the Battle of Mohács in 1526. Or that whatever existed from the pre-Habsburg era was essentially Byzantine. In contrast, Eitelberger argued, Hungary possessed a rich legacy of historic architecture, and its early medieval monuments were clearly in the mainstream of the western architectural tradition. For, he noted : "Sie haben eine entschiedene Verwandtschaft mit den Werken in den benachbarten deutschen Kronländern des österreichischen Kaiserstaates. This was a familiar rhetorical ploy ; to advance larger political claims in the guise of arguments over cultural affiliation, and Eitelberger would later do the same with Dalmatia. Yet it is not improbable to assume that in the case of Hungary this move was informed by his personal acquaintance with Henszlmann and others, who were members of the same social and civilizational order that transcended the ethnic and linguistic differences of the Empire. Eitelberger's report was thus not a championing of Hungary, even if his 1848 articles for the Wiener Zeitung expressed sympathy for the aspirations of the differing ethnic groups of the Habsburg state. Indeed, he was later critical of Hungarian rule in Dalmatia. Its policy of Magyarisation was counter-productive, he argued, for it led to resentment among local Croats and Serbs and encouraged them to turn to Russia as their would-be protector.36 Eitelberger was thus concerned with the integrity of Austria-Hungary, and the aim of the Report was to promote that sense of unity by enhancing knowledge of the Empire's lands. A similar tactic would be employed 30 years later by Crown Prince Rudolph when he sponsored the multi-volume Österreich-Ungarn in Wort und Bild or Kronprinzenwerk as it was known as, on the basis of the idea that increased mutual understanding of the various peoples of the Empire would create a sense of shared identity and community.37  These are laudable sentiments, perhaps, and they represented the typical beliefs of mid-century Liberalism : a belief in global free trade and an antipathy to protectionism, coupled with a faith in the civilising force of Bildung. Such views were reflected in the Museum of Art and Industry, with its emphasis on collecting the best art and design from across the world, as a means of improving Austria's economic competitiveness. His assertion was an indication, too, of the extent to which Liberals had achieved an accommodation with Habsburg dynasty for, although with differing motivations, liberal intellectuals and industrialists were committed to a unified state and had a shared opposition to nationalism.40 Hence, while his lecture praised what Austrian art and design had achieved under Franz Joseph, Eitelberger also distanced himself from any suggestion that this was a nationalistic claim, for, he noted : Jeder gebildete Mensch will geistig auf eigenen Füssen stehen, jede gebildete Nation betrachtet die geistige und national-ökonomische Selbstständigkeit als eine Grundbedingung ihrer 39 Ibid, p. 177. "The times are past when cultivated peoples and individual persons could believe they could shut themselves off from their neighbours and neighbouring peoples. This is least of all possible in the area of art and art industry. Today the artist belongs to the world just as much as to his nation, and the industrialist must always have in view the global market and the demands of educated taste of the world. The call for measures of prohibition, for the exclusion of foreigners, is reminiscent of the times when, instead of helping ourselves, we called for the police and for the censor. In its place, Eitelberger espoused a notion of civil society that transcended national differences, one which enabled individual development as well as broader social and cultural progress. It was, he contended, the enlightened rule of the Emperor that had facilitated this. Thanks, in part, to his acquaintance with Henszlmann and others from Hungary Eitelberger came to see himself as part of a liberal intelligentsia that spanned the Empire. For Eitelberger, Henszlmann and Pulszky saw themselves as members of a civilizing culture that was open to all who sought it, and which could bind the disparate parts of the Empire together. National identity was far from being a matter of indifference to them ; their political and cultural activities indicated that they were all highly patriotic individuals. However, the key issue rested on how one defined national identity. As Pieter Judson has argued, for German-Austrian Liberals it was axiomatic that their identity as Austrians rested on their adherence to liberal values and on their membership of a (German) culture that was open to people of any background.42 They greeted the idea of a national identity based on ethnic or linguistic difference with bafflement and regarded it as having little or no political significance. In the mid-nineteenth century Hungarian Liberals espoused similar views and this informed their more general cultural and social attitudes.43 The National Museum in Budapest, for example, of which Ferenc Pulszky would later be long-term director, was "national" not because it celebrated the unique identity of Hungarian national culture, but because it displayed the contribution of Hungarians to world culture and learning.44 Despite Eitelberger's optimistic sentiments, from the late 1850s onwards the social and political order on which he based his vision experienced a series of existential crises. The loss of Lombardy in 1859 brought into question the prestige of the Austrian 41 "Every cultivated person wishes to stand on their own two feet, intellectually ; every cultivated nation regards intellectual and economic self-sufficiency as a basic condition of its existence. This life maxim has nothing to do with narrow minded particularism and nothing to do with egotistical passions. Empire as the major power of central Europe, while, even more gravely, defeat at the Battle of Königgrätz in 1866 cast into doubt the automatic self-identification of Austrians such as Eitelberger as "German". In economic terms the Austrian government had sought to create a central European customs union ("Zollverein") that would confirm its position as the major power between Russia and France, but instead, in 1862, Prussia had entered into a separate trade agreement with France which other German states then joined, thereby isolating the Habsburg state.45 Furthermore, the Ausgleich of 1867 put into question Eitelberger's belief in an imagined community encompassing the whole of the Empire, and the stock market collapse in 1873 brought about a crisis in the legitimacy of the liberal ideology of the free market. Eventually, in 1879, the Liberal government was replaced by the "Iron Ring", the Conservative coalition led by Count Edward Taaffe that stayed in power until the early 1890s. These might be regarded as extrinsic contingent events, except that they went to the heart of Eitelberger's engagement with cultural politics. If, in 1871, he could confidently declare that Austrian cosmopolitan unity ruled the day, he spent much of the rest of the decade criticising the exponents of various kinds of federalism and nationalism. As early as 1866, even before the Ausgleich institutionalised the separation of Hungary and Austria, Eitelberger was expressing anxiety over the fact that different groups in the Empire no longer seemed to hold to the idea of Austria as a common cultural, social and political space. In the arts, for example, he noted : There was undoubtedly exaggeration in this complaint. Subsequent histories of Austria-Hungary have argued that there was significant loyalty to the Empire across all the crownlands at least until 1914, and in many cases beyond then.47 Yet liberal ideology was clearly being challenged in numerous ways, and hence concern over the growing fragmentation of the Empire became a recurring feature of Eitelberger's writings from the 1870s onwards. Thus, he complained, cosmopolitanism was being replaced by its problematic other face : eclecticism, which involved diversity but one in which the diverse artistic currents co-existed without any relation between them, without any sense of the whole, without a "Gesammt-Kunstauffassung".48 Instead, there was individuality, atomisation and "romanticism". Vienna was no longer the automatic focus of interest ; artists no longer exhibited in the capital, and if one wished to see work by successful painters such as the Poles Jan Matejko (1838-1893) and Artur Grottger (1837-1867), one would have to look elsewhere, and the same held for Czech artists or even those from the Tyrol. Eitelberger found this development all the more perplexing in the visual arts. For whereas linguistic pluralism might be a recognisable cause of cultural difference -intellectual exchange is either not possible or extremely limited between parties lacking a common language -this could certainly not apply to art. Indeed, art could overcome linguistic divides : "[…] bisher war man der Ansicht, dass eben die Kunst dasjenige Element sei, welches die Völker vereinige. Denn eine Zeichnung, ein Gemälde, spricht zu Jedem gleich, ist Jedem gleichmässig verständlich und zugänglich."49 Perversely, this commonality was being lost : "Die Kunst ist keine gemeinsame Angelegenheit mehr der Völker Oesterreichs."50 For Eitelberger one reason for this lay in the absence of shared historical myths and narratives that could underlie a common Austrian identity ; this stood in contrast to the national cultures of the Czechs, Poles and even the Hungarians, where artists were becoming dedicated to the cultivation of historical memory.51 The only artist he singled out for mention was Matejko, whose large-scale heroic depictions of key moments in Polish history garnered praise across Europe, but one might mention others such as the Czech painter Václav Brožík  or Bertalan Székely (1835Székely ( -1910 in Budapest, who gained a similar international recognition, and embodied the phenomenon that was such a clear source of concern for Eitelberger.
Such sentiment, even the federalism of aristocratic conservatives, who merely sought to maintain their local autonomy against interference from central government, was based on a dangerous cocktail of eccentric nostalgia about a past that never was and, as well, on active destructive interventions into contemporary politics : As with other Liberals, it was, for Eitelberger, a matter not merely of critiquing a rival political programme, but rather of addressing an ideology that threatened the constitution of the state, into which so much had been invested as a means of achieving the ultimate social goals of Liberalism.
It might be queried why Eitelberger dwelt so much on this issue in art, rather than in practical politics, but the stakes were deadly serious : for it was in the sphere of ideology, of the imaginary, that political programmes were framed, and therefore his target was something potentially more serious than the mundane policies enacted and debated in political life. In his speech at the opening of the Museum of Art and Industry Eitelberger staged a plea for openness to the global market, arguing : "Der nationalökonomische Föderalismus ist viel gefährlicher als der politische. Er isolirt nicht blos den Markt der Industrie, sondern verengt den geistigen Horizont der Industriellen." Indeed, "Der Geschmack ist nicht Etwas, das sich unter einen politischen Glassturz stellen lässt ; er verträgt keine Isolirung."53 Yet of course this is exactly what was increasingly at the forefront of debate : the determination of national style.
Eitelberger's views were central to his activity not only as a scholar but also as museum director, and this brings us back to his letter to Henszlmann. As Diana Reynolds has argued, at its very foundation, the Museum of Art and Industry, and its school of design and applied art, was an imperial institution intended to encompass the creative activities of all peoples of the Empire ; while he lacked the resources to set up further museums beyond Vienna, he was highly supportive of local initiatives that established museums and schools of design and industry in, for example, Brünn (Brno), Prague, Reichenberg (Liberec) and Budapest.54 The museum Eitelberger founded stayed broadly loyal to this mission, long after his death. The pages of the Mittheilungen des k. k. Österreichischen Museums (and its successor from 1898, Kunst und Kunsthandwerk) are full of reviews and reports not only on major international museums and exhibitions, but also on often quite minor and provincial towns across the Austrian crownlands. Indeed, the museums of industry and applied arts were, he thought, a showcase for the universal artistic culture he understood to span national, ethnic and class differences. This also shaped their relation to their publics. When he founded the Museum of Art and Industry the primary audience consisted of industrial producers : artisans and designers, as well as the larger-scale industrialists who commissioned particular designs and were responsible for their large-scale production. For even though the aim was to improve taste, Eitelberger viewed this problem in terms of supply rather than demand. The idea that the purchasing public might become more discerning thanks to the museum exhibits was a secondary consideration. Yet though reform was directed at producers, the museums of design were not to be understood as being for their particular needs. As he noted in his review of design museums across the Empire : "Es handelt sich bei diesen Museen nicht darum, das particulare Interesse der Fabrikanten und das Einzelinteresse der Handwerker zu fördern -denn für solche particulare Interessen gründet man keine Museen […]."55 Again, this included the issue of cultural identity, for while many museums were set up in smaller provincial towns, their purpose should not be to promote only local or national culture, for the ultimate goal was to improve competitiveness on the world market : "Ebenso ist es grundfalsch, solche Museen auf nationaler Grundlage allein aufzubauen. Die Waare, die für den Weltverkehr berechnet wird, ist unempfindlich für nationale Schrullen."56 Most museums kept to this broad aim and maintained a collecting and acquisitions policy that was global in scope. Thus, from early on, the Museum of Art and Industry not only acquired textiles by the Viennese firm of Philip Haas, for example, but also purchased examples of contemporary Japanese, North African and Indian work.57 Similarly, while its glass collections had an understandable focus on work by manufacturers such as Lobmeyr or Salviati from Habsburg (or former Habsburg) territories, they included, in addition, Islamic glass, and an international network of agents ensured a supply of objects from across the globe.58 A similar pattern could be observed across the Empire. From Brünn (Brno) to Kolozsvár (Cluj Napoca), museums of design and industry, even those in regional cities and towns, amassed substantial collections of artefacts from Japan, China and the Islamic world, alongside those from Europe. 59 This was common practice across both halves of the Empire, and is important for how we view Austria-Hungary, since a distinction is commonly drawn between the cosmopolitanism of Austrian Cisleithania and the putatively nationalist orientation of Hungary. As this article argues, however, Austrian and Hungarian Liberals (and most members of the cultural elite would have regarded themselves as Liberal) had similar values when it came to the question of national and state identity. The administration in Budapest did, admittedly, seek to create a unitary Magyar identity for all its subjects, but this was a matter of some debate amongst Hungarian politicians. Thus, the prominent politician József Eötvös (1813-1871), minister of education and religion in the 1860s, who was instrumental in the emancipation of the Jews, argued tirelessly for the preservation of the cultural plurality of the Hungarian kingdom.60 Moreover, the policy of magyarization did not, at least until the 1880s, translate into a nationalistic cultural policy or museum practice. This was so even in the case of the Hungarian National Museum, where there were important voices against a narrowly nationalistic conception of its purpose. Collecting policies are a powerful index of such attitudes.
In 1818 Miklós Jankovich (1772-1846), a prominent aristocratic scholar and patron of the arts in the early nineteenth century, had argued that the newly founded Hungarian National Museum should focus on antiquities glorifying the achievements and history of Hungary.61 Thirty years later the Hungarian Academy of Sciences made a similar argument in its "Call in the Matter of Hungarian Monuments to All Hungarians Concerned about National Honour".62 The character of these appeals should not, however, be misinterpreted. Jankovich defined Hungarian nationality in territorial not ethnic terms, and he collected objects from across the German-speaking world. As a representative of the enlightened circles of reform-era Hungary, his conception of Hungarian identity was comparable to that of Liberals such as Henszlmann, Pulszky and, ultimately, Eitelberger. With regard to the National Museum, the conception of a national collection was not seen as in conflict with Enlightenment ideas of universal culture, for the National Museum was "national" in terms of being for the imagined community of the present Hungarian nation.63 The same held for the Museum of Applied Arts in Budapest. Although, in the 1890s, it came to be seen primarily as dedicated to the promotion of Hungarian design and applied art, with "Hungarian" defined in increasingly ethnic terms, its collecting in the 1870s and 1880s was eclectic, with a mixture of local, European and non-European artefacts that paralleled practice in museums elsewhere, including the Museum of Art and Industry in Vienna.64 On this point it is instructive to draw comparisons with Ferenc Pulszky. For all the dismissive character of his comments about the Slovaks in the early 1840s, in 1838 he published an article, On the Use of Art Collections, that echoed Jankovich's emphasis on national collecting, yet at the same time criticised as narrow-minded the idea that these were the only artefacts worth collecting.65 He built on this idea while in post-revolutionary exile in London in 1851, where he delivered a lecture in London On the progress and decay of art ; and on the arrangement of a national museum that sketched out his ideal vision of an institution that would, very much like the British Museum, be universal in its scope. 66 In a later article of 1875, On Museums, he revisited the lecture, singling out for critical treatment institutions that were instrumentalized purely to serve "national vanity".67 In 1872 Henszlmann expressed virtually exactly the same sentiment in the pages of the Pester Lloyd in which he argued that the National Museum should not restrict itself to merely "provincial" concerns but should aim to represent the history of art "in general".68

Eitelberger and the Blindness of Liberalism
In his note to Henszlmann, Eitelberger expressly sought co-operation with leading designers and art world representatives from Hungary. His hopes were not fulfilled, however. While he paid constant attention to the development of art and design in Hungary, the events of the following years, in particular, the Ausgleich and its consequences, meant that Hungarian designers and artists made increasingly little reference to Vienna. Indeed, once the Museum of Applied Arts was founded in Budapest in 1872, they had their own institutional framework, and so while museum correspondence testifies to the loan of objects between museums in Budapest, Vienna and Košice, such constant contact did not materialize in the way Eitelberger envisaged it.
When the Imperial Royal Austrian Museum of Art and Industry (k. k. Österreichisches Museum für Kunst und Industrie) was founded in 1864, the Habsburg state was still, formally, the Austrian Empire. The transformation of Austria into the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary in 1867 was not followed by a matching change of name for Eitelberger's museum. We might regard this as a matter of mere nomenclature, except that increasingly, the Museum became just what its title came to imply : a museum for the Austrian half of the Empire. Hungary did still occasionally feature in the pages of its journal. The important exhibition of goldsmithing in the Museum of Applied Arts in Budapest was the subject of an extensive review by Bruno Bucher, for example.69 But this was the exception ; compared to the level of interest in the crownlands of Galicia, Moravia, Bohemia and Gorizia, for example, the attention given to Hungarian art and design was minor.70 Slowly, external political realities began to intrude.
Eitelberger envisaged the Museum (and art more generally) as participating in an Austrian political and social order that transcended national differences. The same held true for Henszlmann and Pulszky in respect of Hungary. This outlook was rooted in a Liberal notion of national identity that first emerged in the first half of the century and it converged with the narrative of cosmopolitanism that was formulated to legitimate Habsburg rule. Yet in the final decades of the 1800s Liberalism in both halves of the Empire took on a decidedly more nationalistic tone. In part this was in response to the rise of nationalist movements ; in order to compete on the political stage, Liberals came to adopt, in modified form, some of the rhetoric of their opponents. In Hungary, for example, the image of a universal enlightened civilization was displaced by an ethnically defined notion of Magyar identity based on romantic conceptions of the nomadic origins of the Magyars in central Asia. In part, too, however, this shift was the working out of contradictions and tensions within that older liberal discourse.
Their root cause of such contradictions could be found in this understanding of German (and Hungarian) identity and its place in the Empire, and its contradictory attitudes are fully in evidence in Eitelberger's writings. He endorsed the Habsburg vision of an Austrian identity based on its cultural diversity. The Empire's great achievements were based, he argued, on the fact that it had been open to individuals from many places and had welcomed them as good Austrians. In the field of politics, he noted, Prince Eugene (from Savoy), Field Marshal Laudon (originally from Livonia), General Karl von Schönhals (born near Wetzlar in Hessen) had all made crucial contributions to Austrian life. A similar story could be told about the arts : figures such as Gottfried van Swieten, the Dutch composer and patron of composers such as Mozart and Haydn, Johann Peter Krafft and Heinrich Füger had all come from Germany : "Das geistige Leben Wiens darf nicht auf einen particularistischen oder nationalen Isolierschemel gestellt werden, wie es in Pest, Agram or Krakau geschieht."71 Yet apart from the fact that "Austria" in this account is indistinguishable from Vienna, it was also axiomatic for Eitelberger and other Liberals that Germans would still play the leading role. All the while Austria could claim to be the central power in Germany, the difficulties of disentangling German from Austrian identity could be passed over ; Austrians could be conceived of merely as one of the distinctive German "tribes". But after Austria was expelled from German affairs in 1866, the logic of the identification of "Austrian" with "German" began to unravel. German Austrians were now just a particularly privileged group within the Empire as a whole.
The weakness of Liberals such as Eitelberger was that they seemed unable to comprehend the extent to which the ground was shifting beneath their feet. An example of such limitations can be found in a lecture Eitelberger delivered at the Museum of Art and Industry on the significance of the Franco-Prussian War.72 Delivered in late October 1870, the war between Prussia and France was still unfolding ; the Prussian army had defeated and captured Napoleon III at the Battle of Sedan in September, but hostilities were not concluded until May of the following year. It might therefore be unfair to judge Eitelberger on his inability to understand the importance of the battle and its aftermath. Nevertheless, it is clear from the lecture not only that he failed to read the historical significance of events, but that he also seemed not even to have adapted to the changed state of affairs since the Battle of Königgrätz of four years earlier. Hence, his lecture strongly aligns Austria with Germany and sees Austrian identity as essentially German, and in addition, rather than seeing some common cause with France, embarks on an extraordinary vilification of French culture (labelling it as frivolous, concerned with superficial luxury, lacking real Geist).73 He starts, for example, with a celebration of German colonialism ; Germans have colonised the world, and even though they may not have created an overseas empire such as the British, they have played a leading role in the civilising mission of Europeans more generally. The stridency of this assertion may be explained as reflecting the topic of the lecture and its presumed audience. It certainly stands at odds with the positive tone of his pronouncements elsewhere on the creative outputs of the non-German groups in the Empire. His dismissive comments about St. Stephen seem to contradict his emphasis on the depth of the Hungarian cultural heritage outlined in his report from the 1850s. Indeed, Eitelberger's assertion about the fundamentally German character of Austria bears comparison with a famous provocation in Prague by the art historian Alfred Woltmann six years later, whose claim that the cultural heritage of Prague was entirely due to the efforts of German artists and architects had caused riots and demonstrations in the streets of the city. 79 Woltmann's assertion has often been treated as an example of growing German nationalism in the final quarter of the nineteenth century, but although it was meant as a provocation -the national paternity of artworks had become a contentious issue in the Bohemian capital -comparison with Eitelberger suggests his sentiments were commensurate with the wider liberal understanding of the place and value of German culture in Austria as a whole. Upholding a belief in German culture was pursued as an "ideology of public integration in central and eastern Europe, one that would eventually wipe away the backward and particularistic attitudes held by uneducated peasants and Slavs, joining them all in a great German liberal union". 80 Eitelberger was no exception to this more general belief.
Such attitudes were not unique to German Liberals. Hungarian Liberals had similar views with regard to their own language and culture. The idea of a cosmopolitan identity, seen as central to construction of Habsburg state identity was consequently not a celebration of diversity-in-difference, but rather one of a culture that could assimilate or even sublate all into a higher unity. As András Gerő has argued, the aim was to "homogenize the Hungarian people" for this "non-integrative" liberal concept of nationhood "could not tolerate the notion of a Hungarian people with a diverse culture".81 As with German-Austrian Liberals, the basic flaw of such cultural paternalism was a blindness to the other, an inability to understand that for others, German and Hungarian cultures were no less particular than their own.82 Conversely, German and Hungarian Liberals were unable to grasp the demands for separate cultural recognition on the part of other groups, and met them with a mixture of attitudes, ranging from disregard to bafflement.

Conclusion
Eitelberger played a dominant role in the artistic and cultural life of mid-nineteenth century Vienna. He was a powerful spokesman for Liberalism in the field of cultural politics, and was an advocate of global free trade and cultural exchange. He was clear about the benefits of open borders and about the contribution of foreigners to Austrian cultural life ; his programme of design reform was predicated on the idea that designers had as much to gain from engaging with multiple historic traditions, and he critiqued the growing tendency towards the invention of specifically national visual identities. The collections of the Museum reflected this belief, with a purposeful eclecticism that was repeated in the museums of industry elsewhere in the Empire.
As laudable as his sentiments may seem -particularly when compared with the conservative and nationalist voices that shaped political discourse in the Habsburg domain in its final decades -it would be a mistake to view this outlook as a nineteenth-century precursor to the multi-culturalism of more recent years. His comments were the product of an ideological programme that proved to be inadequate to the shifting socio-political circumstances of the later nineteenth century. Specifically, Eitelberger's Liberalism was predicated on a notion of cultural hierarchy that undermined his very aspirations. Both German-Austrian and Hungarian Liberals operated on the assumption of the normative role of their own cultures ; the exercise of cultural hegemony was legitimate in that both Hungarian and German culture were seen as means of accessing the universal culture and science of modern Europe. Eitelberger worked tirelessly on behalf of this vision. In some cases, he could look to successes ; his student the Croatian Izidor Kršnjavi (1845-1927), for example, who almost single-handedly created the artistic and cultural infrastructure of Habsburg Zagreb, remained strongly committed to the Habsburg Empire as a shared cultural space, even while he worked to promote and gain recognition for Croat art. In general, however, the image of the Empire for which Eitelberger campaigned struggled to gain adherents in many locations due to his inability to acknowledge that artists in Prague, Cracow and other regional centres might have legitimate reasons for not wishing to set Vienna as their automatic first point of reference. The irony is that while he could see the counter-productive nature of Hungarian rule in Dalmatia and other southern regions, he was unable to see how this danger might apply in the Austrian half of the Empire.
Austrian and Hungarian Liberals are seldom discussed together, but this article suggests that figures such as Eitelberger, Henszlmann and Pulszky had overlapping values and visions. The significance of the discussion goes beyond consideration of these individual cases, however, for their success and stature provide an instructive illustration of how middle class intellectuals managed to reach an accommodation with the Habsburg Monarchy. This was all the more striking given their enthusiasm for the politics of the 1848 revolution. Yet there was a marked convergence of interests between Liberals and the Habsburg regime. Eitelberger promoted the Habsburg Empire's economic and cultural status, but this was also because it alone could uphold the central social, economic and cultural order he craved. In response to the shifting demographic and socio-political situation of the late Habsburg Empire, Liberals became increasingly nationalist in tone ; there are examples of this in Eitelberger's own writings. His response to the Franco-Prussian War was to adopt a stridently pro-German tone. Yet this turn was ultimately a sign of a deep malaise ; like many others, including Henszlmann and Pulszky, Eitelberger's political concepts had developed little since the 1840s and thus failed to adapt to changing circumstances. His response was simply to reaffirm, in an increasingly emphatic manner, an ideological outlook that had been outstripped by events. As such, he is of significance as emblematic of the broader cultural politics of the Habsburg Empire and of the struggle of Liberals to come to terms with the passage to modernity.