Ritter points out that "the terms and metaphors which control present-day discourse about nineteenth-century [Austrian] liberalism are, to a great extent, taken over directly from the figurative language of pathology invented in some cases ... by insecure or disillusioned turn-of-the-century liberals themselves." Journalist historians who wrote from this point of view include Heinrich Friedjung, Heinrich Poliak, Ferdinand von Krones, and Richard Charmatz. Charmatz's Deutsch-Osterreichische PoUtik: Studien iiber den Liberalismus und iiber die Auswdrtige Politik Osterreichs (Leipzig, 1907) is one of the best of the early surveys. In the 1950s, Georg Franz published an exhaustive work on liberalism in the 1860s, Liberalismus. Die deutschliberale Bewegung in der habsburgischen Monarchie (Munich, 1955). Although sympa thetic in tone, the book combines the tragic self-diagnosis of turn-of-the-century liberal authors with a more nationalist and occasionally anti-Semitic viewpoint. Karl Eder's Der Liberalismus in
As the hundredth anniversary of November 1918 approaches, this article suggests some ways in which historians might rethink dominant narratives about the character of the Habsburg monarchy in its final years, the reasons for its collapse, and its complex legacies to the postwar world. Currently, most accounts that narrate the fall of the empire are still shaped to some extent by outcomes whose character was defined at the time by the nationalist architects of the states that replaced the monarchy. Even accounting for a sensible revisionism of their versions of events over the past century, their general reasoning, their ideological claims, and their worldviews frame the predominant explanations for why the monarchy fell when it did. Concomitantly, they continue to influence our understanding of the character of the regimes that replaced the monarchy after its fall.
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