Interwar Austria and the Imperial Legacy: The Empire in the Province

Chair: Gabriel Trop, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Helmut Konrad, Rector and Professor Emeritus, University of Graz
The Empire in the Province: An Unknown Interwar Austrian Tale
Comments: Malachi Hacohen, Director, Council for European Studies, Duke University
“Empire, Socialism & Jews” represents an ongoing project aiming to reconceptualize the Austrian Empire’s place in Central European history and to write the Empire back into the Austrian national narrative. The project tracks the interaction between the Austrian imperial legacy, socialism, and European Jewry. This workshop, the fourth in a series, focuses on the interwar period (1918 - 1939). Participants will discuss the manifestations of the imperial legacy in Red Vienna, the Austrian provinces and borderlands, and the successor states to Austria-Hungary. They will focus on the traces of the Monarchy in Austrian Socialist discourse and Austrian national identity, and on imperial nostalgia in Central European literary life, especially among Jewish writers.