Inventing Germanness: Class, Ethnicity, and Colonial Fantasy at the Margins of the Habsburg Monarchy

Abstract

This working paper draws on theories generated by analysts of racial categories in the Americas to examine a particular form of German nationalism popularized in the Austrian half of the Dual Monarchy during the 1880s. The paper assumes that 19th-century German-speaking Austrians did not share a transhistoric German identity, and that among those who identified themselves as Germans there was little agreement about what it was that made them German. Thus, rather than ascribe local conflict in Bohemia and Moravia to innate national differences, the paper points instead to the interaction of multiple and contingent social factors which together produced a distinctive German nationalism in late nineteenth century Austria.