Lost Fatherland

This book presents a portrait of a particular milieu—the overlapping political and intellectual circles from the late Habsburg Empire and interwar Europe—in order to examine broader issues of European history in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. It brings together twenty-one individuals who started in politics in the Habsburg Empire and continued their lives in different states across Europe. Marked by the trauma of the First World War, the vanishing of their home countries, and the transition to post-1918 Europe, they produced a remarkable array of political programs and staffed and sustained the various polities that emerged after the imperial downfall. Covering the Austrian part of what after 1867 became the federative empire of Austro-Hungary, this study analyzes the transfer of institutional models and practices across 1918, from the empire to interwar Europe and beyond. This monograph demonstrates how a cluster of ideas rooted in the nineteenth-century Habsburg Empire—conservatism, liberalism, nationalism, Christian socialism, Austro-Marxism, federalism, and internationalism—shaped European politics and society in the twentieth century. It proposes an alternative narrative of European history, one that highlights the connections between the fin de siècle and the post–Second World War eras. That is, the Habsburg epoch in European history may be said to have come to an end, not in 1918, but between 1938 and 1945.