Katherine Arens – författare

Since coming to public notice through major museum catalogues and the work of Carl Schorske around 1980, fin de siècle Vienna has been cast as the final bloom of a dying culture. Yet this assessment is itself a historical construct, deriving from the politics of the twentieth century. This volume argues that «Habsburg nostalgia» is anything but backward looking: instead, images from this glittering Habsburg past become evidence of a culture’s sophisticated sense of how and why history is made, in both official and popular spheres. Including the first translation of an original account of Crown Prince Rudolf’s suicide at Mayerling in 1889, Belle Necropolis argues for Austria’s continued reuse of its own history to point the way toward the future rather than simply memorializing a past that only exists as living memories of shared stories, not as a truth in itself. Case studies included here range from imperial stereotypes before 1900 through their adaptations in the film 1. April 2000 and today’s musicals, and from the politics of representing Austria since Rebecca West up through Schorske’s master narrative of the Ringstrasse. Through these studies, Habsburg culture emerges as a culture of commemoration that uses its own past to overcome the limits of a small country seeking a role on the contemporary world stage.

Vienna’s Dreams of Europe puts forward a convincing counter-narrative to the prevailing story of Austria’s place in Europe since the Enlightenment. For a millennium, Austrian writers have used images of Europe and its hegemonic culture as their political and cultural reference points. Yet in discussions of Europe’s nation-states, Austria appears only as an afterthought, no matter that its precursor states—the Holy Roman Empire, the Austrian Empire, and Austria Hungary—represented a globalized European cultural space outside the dominant paradigm of nationalist colonialism. Austrian writers today confront reunited Europe in full acknowledgment of Austro-Hungary’s multicultural heritage, which mixes various nationalities, ethnicities, and cultural forms, including ancestors from the Balkans and beyond.Challenging standard accounts of 18th- through 20th-century European imperial identity construction, Vienna’s Dreams of Europe introduces a group of Austrian public intellectuals and authors who have since the 18th century construed their own public as European. Working in different terms than today’s theorist-critics of the hegemonic West, Katherine Arens posits a political identity resisting two hundred years of European nationalism.

A long-overdue reassessment of post-1918 Salzburg as a distinct Austrian cultural hub that experimented in moving beyond war and empire into a modern, self-consciously inclusive, and international center for European culture.For over 300 years, Salzburg had its own legacy as a city-state at an international crossroads, less stratified than Europe's colonial capitals and seeking a political identity based in civic participation with its own economy and politics. After World War I, Salzburg became a refuge. Its urban and bucolic spaces staged encounters that had been brutally cut apart by the war; its deep-seated traditions of citizenship, art, and education guided its path.In Interwar Salzburg, contributors from around the globe recover an evolving but now lost vanguard of European culture, fostering not only new identities in visual and performing arts, film, music, and literature, but also a festival culture aimed at cultivating an inclusive public (not an international elite) and a civic culture sharing public institutions, sports, tourism, and a diverse spectrum of cultural identities serving a new European ideal.