Narrated Empires : Perceptions of Late Habsburg and Ottoman Multinationalism 9783030551988, 9783030551995

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MODERNITY, MEMORY AND IDENTITY IN SOUTH-EAST EUROPE

Narrated Empires Perceptions of Late Habsburg and Ottoman Multinationalism

Edited by Johanna Chovanec Olof Heilo

Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe Series Editor Catharina Raudvere Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies University of Copenhagen Copenhagen, Denmark

This series explores the relationship between the modern history and present of South-East Europe and the long imperial past of the region. This approach aspires to offer a more nuanced understanding of the concepts of modernity and change in this region, from the nineteenth century to the present day. Titles focus on changes in identity, self-representation and cultural expressions in light of the huge pressures triggered by the interaction between external influences and local and regional practices. The books cover three significant chronological units: the decline of empires and their immediate aftermath, authoritarian governance during the twentieth century, and recent uses of history in changing societies in South-­ East Europe today. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15829

Johanna Chovanec  •  Olof Heilo Editors

Narrated Empires Perceptions of Late Habsburg and Ottoman Multinationalism

Editors Johanna Chovanec Department of Comparative Literature University of Vienna Vienna, Austria

Olof Heilo The Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul Istanbul, Turkey

ISSN 2523-7985     ISSN 2523-7993 (electronic) Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe ISBN 978-3-030-55198-8    ISBN 978-3-030-55199-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55199-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Praise for Narrated Empires “This much-welcomed volume undertakes for the first time to provide a comparative perspective on late Habsburg and Ottoman imperial legacies. Exploring a variety of distinct forms of modern narratives, the book convincingly reclaims the multi-layered past and presence of the two empires and their multi-confessional and multi-cultural societies. An important and engaging book.” —Nadia Al-Bagdadi, Central European University, Budapest “The dissolution of the Ottoman and Habsburg empires have been told and compared numerous times. Why would we need another volume? The editors and contributors to this volume make a novel claim to examine imperial identities, forms of belonging, and the reorganization of rule through the narratives of empire, the ideologies embedded in narratives and the various ways in which they branched out to accommodate political transformations. The chapters in this volume bring to light the end of imperial rule and the beginning of national states in subtle and sophisticated analyses that uncover new meaning behind old trajectories. This volume will certainly be a prized addition to the work on these two empires.” —Karen Barkey, University of California, Berkeley, USA “Language matters. This is particularly true for multinational empires and, even more so, for this fine volume, in which multi-faceted perspectives on the late Habsburg and the late Ottoman empires are brought into a productive dialogue. The impressive range of topics is nicely integrated by the overarching theme of narrated empires and the well-informed introduction. This edited volume is full of thought provoking insights into langue, narratives, and empires.” —Peter Becker, University of Vienna, Austria “Distressed by the rise of national socialism in Germany, the French poet Paul Claudel looked at the multinational nature of the Austro-Hungarian empire as a possible remedy for the dangers of nationalism. There is no doubt that the Ottoman experience too would have offered him much food for thought. By looking comparatively at both the Ottoman and Habsburg empires, this volume makes an insightful contribution to the debates on (post-)imperial identities and cultures between centres and peripheries. Engaging with the literary heritage of the two empires, the book brings to the fore the intrinsic relation between literary and political narratives.” —Laurent Mignon, University of Oxford, UK

“How do empires narrate their changing political circumstances and ideologies in the crush of real time? When post-imperial peoples gaze back into the mists of those bygone empires, what do they see? This volume answers these questions through a set of deeply engaging, empirically rich, multidisciplinary, and theoretically suggestive chapters about two of history’s most diverse and consequential empires.” —Alan Mikhail, Yale University, USA “This is a wonderful collection of studies that illuminates the Habsburg and Ottoman cases in new ways by placing them in dialogue with each other, showing multiple ways that we can close the breach between the two historiographies. Despite all of their differences—of language, religion, and political structure—the histories of both empires benefit from being seen through the lens of the other. Specialists in both empires will have epiphanies about their own and the other empire in reading the contributions herein. This will surely be a generative work for a field still in its infancy.” —Christine Philliou, University of California, Berkeley, USA “The contributions to this important volume offer a wealth of new insights into ideologies and policies that the Habsburg and Ottoman empires developed as they faced the challenge of ethnolinguistic nationalisms during the long nineteenth century. The authors also reveal how local actors engaged with Habsburg dynastic patriotism and Ottomanism, and transformed them to fit their own agendas.” —Rok Stergar, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia “A lucid book that engages complex themes, this is a sophisticated analysis unpacking the social and political legacies of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. The book offers a compelling, in-depth comparative analysis of how both empires respectively tried to reconcile the challenges of nationalism. With a well-structured counterpoint of bottom-up and top-down interactions, Chovanec and Heilo have produced the ideal compendium for understanding the history of empires, weaving throughout crisp yet subtle intellectual considerations underlying the intersections of modernity, empire, and nationalism.” —M. Hakan Yavuz, University of Utah, USA

Contents

Part I Introduction   1 1 Narrating Empires: Between National and Multinational Visions of Belonging  3 Johanna Chovanec and Olof Heilo 2 Making Sense in a World That Is Falling Apart: Imperial Narratives of State, Diversity and Modernity 37 Olof Heilo Part II Ottomanism Revisited: An Imperial Narrative of Many Voices  55 3 Ottomanism and Varieties of Official Nationalism 57 Salim Çevik 4 Ottomanism in History and Historiography: Fortunes of a Concept 77 Alp Eren Topal

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5 Unruly Children of the Homeland: Ottomanism’s Non-Muslim Authors 99 Madeleine Elfenbein 6 Arab Perspectives on the Late Ottoman Empire121 Stephan Guth Part III Empires of Diversity and States of Change: Nations and Identities Between Centres and Frontiers 149 7 Zrinski-Myths: A Vehicle for Imperial and National Narratives151 Marijan Bobinac 8 Ottoman Reform, Non-Muslim Subjects, and Constitutive Legislation: The Reform Edict of 1856 and the Greek General Regulations of 1862169 Ayşe Ozil 9 Ottoman Albanians in an Era of Transition: An Engagement with a Fluid Modern World191 Isa Blumi 10 Unravelling Multinational Legacies: National Affiliations of Government Employees in Post-Habsburg Austria213 Therese Garstenauer Part IV Habsburg Press(ure): Reading Between the Lines of a Many-­Tongued Journalism 237 11 Pester Lloyd and the German-Speaking Upper Classes of Hungary: A Budapest Newspaper in the Context of Increasing Magyarisation239 Andrea Seidler

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12 A “Roman Affair”: A Croatian Priest College in the Habsburg Press Debate of 1901257 Tamara Scheer 13 Narratives of Modernisation in Periodicals: On the German-Language Agramer Tagblatt in 1918283 Milka Car Part V Echoes from an Inner Void: The Post-­Imperial Novel Between Melancholy and Memory 309 14 Theory of Empire, Mythology and the Power of the Narrative311 Christine Magerski 15 The Ottoman Myth in Turkish Literature331 Johanna Chovanec 16 The Hotel as a Non-Place of Habsburg Multinationalism. Hotel Savoy (1924) by Joseph Roth367 Jelena Spreicer Part VI Afterword 385 17 Remembering Empires: Between Civilisational Nationalism and Post-National Pluralism387 Nora Fisher-Onar Name Index399 Subject Index405

Notes on Contributors

Isa Blumi  is Docent/Associate Professor of Turkish and Middle Eastern Studies at Stockholm University and History and Political Science at the American University of Sharjah. He holds a PhD in History and Middle Eastern/Islamic Studies from New  York University and a Master of Political Science and Historical Studies from The New School for Social Research, New  York. Researching societies in the throes of social, economic, and political transformation, Dr. Blumi’s latest work covers the late Ottoman period and successor regimes, arguing that these events are part of the process that interlinks the Balkans, the Middle East, and the larger Islamic world. This focus has most recently been published as Destroying Yemen: What Chaos in Arabia tells us About the World (2018). Marijan  Bobinac is Professor of Modern German Literature at the German Department of the University of Zagreb. His research interests include German language literature from the nineteenth century up to present day, Croatian modern literature, popular theatre, Croatian-­ German/Austrian cultural transfer, Habsburg and post-imperial studies, and historical fiction. Recent book publications include Uvod u romantizam (Introduction into Romanticism), Zagreb 2012; Narrative im (post) imperialen Kontext. Literarische Identitätsbildung als Potential im regionalen Spannungsfeld zwischen Habsburg und Hoher Pforte in Zentral- und Südosteuropa (Matthias Schmidt), Tübingen 2015; Postimperiale Narrative im zentraleuropäischen Raum (Wolfgang Müller-Funk), Tübingen 2018; Sjećanje i suvremenost. Ogledi o novom njemačkom povijesxi

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nom romanu (Memory and Contemporaneity. Essays on the New German Historical Novel), Zagreb 2018. Milka Car  is an associated professor and lecturer at the Department for German Language and Literature at the Faculty of Humanistic and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, where she studied Comparative Literature and German Studies. Her master’s thesis dealt with the reception of German drama in Croatian theatre in Zagreb 1894–1939 (2003); her doctoral thesis focused on the German documentary novel in the last third of the twentieth century (2008). She reviews contemporary German literature for the 3rd programme of the Croatian Radio. She has made several study visits to Vienna, Berlin, and Munich, and has been a mentor at the seminar for literary translation in Zagreb for many years. Salim  Çevik  is a researcher at the Center for Applied Turkey Studies established at the Berlin based think tank SWP (Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik—German Institute for International and Security Affairs). Prior to joining to SWP, he held research or teaching positions at Lund University (Sweden), Ipek University (Turkey), Bilgi University (Turkey), and Columbia University (USA). He received his PhD degree in Political Science from Bilkent University (2015, Turkey). His main areas of research are religion in politics, democratization, nationalism, and nation building. Johanna  Chovanec is a doctoral fellow of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the German Academic Scholarship Foundation at the Department of Comparative Literature, University of Vienna. She previously worked as a researcher for the EU Horizon 2020 project “The future of EU-Turkey relations” at Sabancı University, Istanbul and pursued her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Comparative Literature at University of Vienna and Bilgi University Istanbul. Chovanec has been affiliated with the interdiscplinary project “(Post)imperial Narratives in the (Central) European Literatures of Modernity” (Croatian Science Foundation). Her research interests include melancholy in Austrian and Turkish literature, comparative empire studies, Occidentalism, and identity constructions in Europe and Turkey. Chovanec co-edited the volumes Türkeiforschung im deutschsprachigen Raum (2020) and (Post)imperiale Narrative in den Literaturen der Moderne (2018). Madeleine Elfenbein  received her PhD in 2017 from the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago

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with a dissertation on the Young Ottoman movement. She is a visiting scholar in the Department of History at Columbia University, where she is completing a book on Ottomanism and its place in nineteenth-century global politics. Previously, she held an Early Career Fellowship at Lichtenberg-Kolleg, the Göttingen Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, where she was a member of the research cluster on Human Rights, Constitutional Politics, and Religious Diversity. Her interests include the history of liberal and Islamic political thought in the Ottoman Empire and Europe and the rise of racial thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nora Fisher-Onar  is Assistant Professor of International Studies at the University of San Francisco. Her research interests include the theory and practice of international relations, political ideologies, comparative area studies (Turkey; Middle East; and Europe), history/memory, and gender. She received her doctorate from the University of Oxford and holds master’s and bachelor’s degrees in International Affairs from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and Georgetown universities, respectively. Fisher Onar is author of the forthcoming book Pluralists vs. Anti-Pluralists: Islam, Liberalism, and Populism in Turkey and Beyond, and editor of the volume, Istanbul: Living With Difference in a Global City (Rutgers UP, 2018). She has published extensively in academic journals including Conflict and Cooperation, Millennium, Women’s International Studies Forum, Middle East Studies, and Turkish Studies as well as addressed policy concerns in fora like the Washington Post, openDemocracy, and the Guardian. Therese  Garstenauer is a historian and social scientist, and senior research fellow (Elise Richter Programme, Austrian Science Fund) at the Department of Economic and Social History, University of Vienna. She is working on her habilitation project dealing with the conduct of life of Austrian Government employees from the late Habsburg Empire to the National-Socialist Regime. Among her other research interests are the history of work and livelihood, gender history, and the global division of labour in the social sciences and humanities. Her recent publications include the monograph, Russlandbezogene Gender Studies: Lokale, globale und transnationale Praxis (Göttingen 2018) as well as articles on emotions in administrative practice, and the proper conduct of the life of Austrian government employees.

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Stephan Guth  studied “Islamwissenschaft”, Modern German Literature and Philosophy at the universities of Bonn, Tübingen, and Cairo. He received his PhD in 1992 from Bonn University, then served as a Research fellow at the German Institute for Oriental Studies (Istanbul, Beirut), before moving to Switzerland, where he did his “Habilitation” (Berne, 2003). Guth has taught at the universities of Berlin, Berne, Munich, and (since 2007) Oslo. His main fields of research and publication span from modern Middle Eastern fiction (especially Arabic and Turkish) to Arabic etymology and conceptual history. Major publications include Brückenschläge (a comparative history of the modern Arabic and Turkish novel, 2003), Die Hauptsprachen der Islamischen Welt (an overview over the principal languages of the Islamic World, their linguistic features, history, and literatures, 2012), Etym Arab (a 1000-words pilot version of an Etymological Dictionary of Arabic, online, work in progress), and several studies (conceptual history, Nahḍah studies) on key concepts of Arab modernity, such as ʾadab, riwāyah, or wat ̣an. Olof Heilo  finished his graduate studies in Ancient Greek and Arabic at Lund University in 2005 and holds a PhD from the Institute of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Vienna in 2010. He taught the history of the Late Ottoman Empire at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies in Lund in 2012–2017; since 2016 he has been deputy director at the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul. His research interests include both Byzantine and Early Islamic history and Modern European and Middle Eastern History, and the uses of history in contemporary identity politics and discourses. Christine  Magerski is a full professor at the University of Zagreb, Croatia. Previously she held research and teaching appointments at the Monash University (Melbourne) and the Humboldt University (Berlin). Her books include Die Konstituierung des literarischen Feldes in Deutschland nach 1871 (Niemeyer, 2004, reprinted in 2010 by De Gruyter), Theorien der Avantgarde. Gehlen—Bürger—Bourdieu— Luhmann (Springer VS, 2011), Gelebte Ambivalenz. Die Boheme als Prototyp der Moderne (Springer VS, 2015), Imperiale Welten. Literatur und Politische Theorie am Beispiel Habsburg (Velbrück, 2018), Literatursoziologie. Grundlagen, Problemstellungen und Theorien (Springer VS, 2019) and edited volumes Moderne begreifen. Zur Paradoxie eines sozio-ästhetischen Deutungsmuster (Deutscher Universitätsverlag, 2007),

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Literaturwissenschaft im Wandel. Aspekte theoretischer und fachlicher Neuorganisation (Sringer VS, 2009) and Kulturrebellen. Studien zur anarchistischen Moderne (Springer VS, 2019). She has also authored numerous peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters. Ayşe Ozil  is Associate Professor of History and a member of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Sabancı University. She holds a BA in Political Science and International Relations and an MA in History, both from Boğaziçi University. She obtained her PhD from London University, Birkbeck College. A revised version of her thesis has been published as Orthodox Christians in the Late Ottoman Empire: A Study of Communal Relations in Anatolia (2013). She was a post-doctoral fellow at Princeton University and a visiting scholar at the University of Leiden. Previously, she taught at Boğaziçi and Bilgi Universities. Her teaching and research interests include the social history of the late Ottoman Empire and republican Turkey, Greek communities, urban history, questions of modernization and nationalism. Tamara Scheer  is a historian, teaching at the Institute for East European History, University of Vienna. Her scholarly works focus on the history of the Late Habsburg Monarchy and South Eastern Europe, in particular language diversity and national identities in the military, press, and the Catholic Church. She is working on a book manuscript entitled Language and Loyalty in the Habsburg Army, 1867–1918. Among recent publications are Ethnic Boxes: The Unintended Consequences of Habsburg Bureaucratic Classification, in: Nationalities Papers 2018 (co-authored with Rok Stergar), and The Ban Jelačić Trust for Disabled Soldiers and Their Families: Habsburg Dynastic Loyalty beyond National Boundaries 1849–1851, in: Austrian History Yearbook 2018 (co-authored with John Paul Newman). Andrea Seidler  is a professor at the Institute of European and Comparative Linguistics and Literature, University of Vienna, teaching in the Department of Hungarian Studies. Her research focuses on historical media history, primarily media of the age of Enlightenment in the Habsburg Monarchy, German-language literature in the Kingdom of Hungary, early travelogues and digital editions. She is researching the political media of Hungarian refugees in the period after the First World War and the bequest of the philosopher Georg Lukács. She is president of the International Association of Hungarian Studies and the Austrian

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Institute for Hungarian Studies, editor-in-chief of the interdisciplinary journal Hungarian Studies published in Budapest and co-editor of the series Interdependencies and Interferences. Studies on literatures and cultures in Central Europe (Edition Präsens, Vienna), together with Wolfgang Müller-Funk. Jelena Spreicer  studied at the University of Zagreb, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, where she obtained a BA in English and German (2009), an MA in American and German Studies (2011) and a PhD in German philology (The Narrativization of Trauma in the Contemporary German Novel, 2015). She is employed at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences as a postdoctoral researcher working on the project (Post-) Imperial Narratives in Central European Literatures of the Modern Period, funded by the Croatian Science Foundation (Hrvatska Zaklada za Znanost). Her main research areas are the representation of trauma in contemporary German literature and post-imperial and postcolonial studies. Alp Eren Topal  received his PhD in 2017 from Department of Political Science, Bilkent University, with his dissertation on changing conceptions of reform in Ottoman political writing from the seventeenth century to the late nineteenth. After receiving a post-doctoral scholarship from Gerda Henkel Stiftung, he is a Marie Curie fellow at University of Oslo, Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages. Topal’s research focuses on Ottoman and Turkish political thought in the long durée through conceptual history. Through a diachronic analysis of social and political concepts, he is interested in broader questions of secularization, transformation of Islam, modernization and authoritarian rule. Topal’s articles have appeared in Journal of Islamic Studies and Contributions to the History of Concepts as well as major Turkish journals.

List of Maps

Map 1.1 The Habsburg and Ottoman empires in 1848, superimposed over the states that replaced them. © The authors Map 1.2 The Habsburg Empire, its Crown lands and major cities after the 1867 ‘Ausgleich’ with Hungary, the bold line indicating the division between Hungary and ‘Cisleithania’. © The authors Map 1.3 Stages of Ottoman territorial decline in the Balkans, 1858–1913. Shading indicates areas that underwent periods of transitional rule over one or several stages. © The authors Map 1.4 British, French and Italian colonial expansion in the Ottoman Levant, 1882–1923. © The authors

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PART I

Introduction

CHAPTER 1

Narrating Empires: Between National and Multinational Visions of Belonging Johanna Chovanec and Olof Heilo

Introduction: Nationalism and Imperialism A century ago, the Habsburg and Ottoman empires disappeared from the political map of Europe. They left behind a number of nationalising states and the memory of a bygone pluralism of languages, ethnicities and religions from Central Europe to the Middle East. Although the two empires are sometimes depicted as adversaries due to their centuries-long power struggles in the Balkans and Eastern Mediterranean, their history shows a number of striking parallels. Their We would like to thank Nadia Al-Bagdadi, Stephan Guth and Iva Lučić for their invaluable comments, and Matthew Goldman, Sebastian Haug, Charles Lock and George Winter for their thorough reading of earlier drafts of this chapter. J. Chovanec (*) Department of Comparative Literature, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected] O. Heilo The Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul, Istanbul, Turkey e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Chovanec, O. Heilo (eds.), Narrated Empires, Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55199-5_1

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rise to significance began in the late thirteenth and culminated in the mid-­ fifteenth century, symbolised by the coronation of Friedrich III as Holy Roman Emperor in Rome in 1452 and the conquest of Constantinople under Mehmed II in the following year. At the peak of Habsburg and Ottoman power, the Ottoman sultan Süleyman I (r. 1520–66) and the Habsburg emperor Karl V (r. 1519–56) fought for the dominance of Southern and Eastern Europe. They claimed to defend Christianity and Islam, respectively, at a time when the rise of Protestantism in Northern Europe and of Shi‘i Islam in the Middle East questioned the alleged unity claimed by both faiths. Perhaps most strikingly, however, the two empires managed a challenging transition into the modern period. Modernity brought down many of their historical rivals, but the Habsburg and Ottoman empires re-invented themselves in an era of emerging nation-states as embodiments of multinational coexistence. Following a series of crises in the first half of the nineteenth century, Habsburgs and Ottomans undertook a number of legal, infrastructural and social reforms aimed at forming stable states, strengthening the central power and tying their provinces and peoples closer together. In both cases, this meant taking complex demographics into account, as the areas they controlled were marked by a high degree of pluralism in terms of languages, cultures, ethnicities and religions. ‘Dynastic patriotism’ (Cole and Unowsky 2007) and ‘Ottomanism’ (e.g. Kasaba 2006) are concepts used to describe the frameworks of belonging by which Habsburgs and Ottomans of the nineteenth century tried to foster imperial cohesion and loyalty among their subjects. In an age of modern communication, and against the backdrop of an expanding public discourse, this was an enterprise that could not be pursued solely from the side of the state authorities, but presumed the active participation of educated individuals who would show commitment to a common ideology through written media such as newspapers and books. The challenge of creating a sense of ‘imperial patriotism’ was exacerbated by the spread of nationalist ideas that rejected the imperial ideologies as artificial, patronising and doomed to fail: nationalist voices used the new technical means of communication to convey their own visions of an organic and historical predestination of peoples that needed to be liberated from the enforced imperial confines. From the outset it should be noted that the dichotomy between imperialism and nationalism in this period should not be exaggerated. In the late nineteenth century, the Habsburg and Ottoman empires were

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arguably ‘nationalising’ projects (Berger and Miller 2015) and some of the nationalist projects that emerged out of their shadows—from Italy and Germany to Greece and various Arab states—had imperialist ambitions. As the two dynasties faced a gradual loss of military power and territory, they shifted their political strategies, oscillating between more inclusive and more exclusive approaches towards their own inner diversity, and, in the case of the Ottomans, even ended up exterminating minorities they had claimed to embrace.1 The states that eventually replaced the two empires cannot always be described as ‘nation-states’ either, and in many cases— such as Yugoslavia (Deák 1997, 133), Lebanon (Jaulin 2014) and Iraq (Dodge 2003)—they tacitly or openly acknowledged their inherent diversity. These similarities notwithstanding, empires and nations have been imagined in diametrically opposed ways, particularly in the wake of the twentieth century. The double impetus for political reform and national purification that underlay many anti- and post-imperial political agendas is key for understanding why the modern history of Central and Eastern Europe and the Middle East is not only one of democratisation and social development but also one of civil strife and ethnic cleansing. Consequently, the narrative of the empire as a safe, ordered and harmonious body of many nations and peoples, as promoted in different ways by the Habsburg and Ottoman empires up to the time of their collapse, has sometimes come to serve as an alternative vision to the nationalist tendencies in Europe and the Middle East.

Narrating the World of Yesterday Habsburg and Ottoman legacies took on various and sometimes ambiguous meanings in the interwar period, especially in Austria and Turkey. Intellectual circles in Vienna reminisced about a stable and diverse Habsburg Monarchy against the backdrop of an increasingly anti-Semitic and fascist political climate across Central Europe. The imperial Ottoman past, by contrast, became the official Other of the Kemalist political project that emanated from the new capital of Ankara, and whose political

1  See most recently the monograph by Morris and Zeevi (2019) which has unleashed a furious debate about the nature of late Ottoman policies towards various Christian minorities, the Armenians in particular but also Assyrians and Pontic Greeks.

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myths and national imagery aimed at homogenising Turkish society, history and cultural identity. Austrian and Turkish literature captured the radical societal transformation of that period. While authors such as Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) melancholically evoked the peaceful, stable and pluralist Habsburgian World of Yesterday (1942), authors like Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar mourned the Peace of Mind (1948) that had been lost together with Ottoman lifeworlds, radically cut off from the national present. The questions of whether or how to synthesise the imperial and national realities and how to make the past visible in the present still reverberate today. The Habsburg (Magris 2000 [1963]) and Ottoman myths (Chovanec 2018) continue to resound not only in cultural memory but also in political discourse. Whereas these sometimes conflicting narratives could be interpreted as symptoms of an identity crisis of their successor states, the multinational dimension of the empires seems to have struck a chord with the postmodern world at large. The painful experiences of the twentieth century and the increasing stress on multicultural coexistence as an essential good of liberal democracy have led to a sneaking re-evaluation of imperial rule— sometimes coming close to outright nostalgia. The retrospective fascination for the last Ottoman belle époque (Öncü 2007), for instance, becomes visible in the literary oeuvre of Nobel Prize laureate Orhan Pamuk, ‘who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city [Istanbul] has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures’ (Swedish Academy 2006).2 Melancholic literary references to the cultural heritage of the peoples that once were characteristic of imperial state entities contrast with neo-imperial discourses present in current political trends across Europe.3 In the case of Turkey, different strands of Ottoman nostalgia can be juxtaposed with or seen as a wider trend of what is sometimes referred to as neo-Ottomanism (Fisher-Onar 2009, 2018; Mills 2011; Taglia 2016; Yavuz 2016, 2020). Turkish military interventions in Syria (Hoffmann 2019) and official claims to include the Greek and Bulgarian parts of Thrace in a wider Turkish ‘zone of influence’ (Heilo 2016) have taken 2  The reason mentioned in the quotation was the Swedish Academy’s official motivation for giving Pamuk the 2006 Nobel Prize. 3  On neo-imperial and neo-colonial discourses in current-day British politics see Bhambra (2017), Virdee and McGeever (2018), Tomlinson (2019); on Russian expansionism and imperial legacies see Teper (2016) and Torbakov (2017), the latter discussing Russian ‘neoeurasianism’ as a competing concept to neo-Ottomanism.

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place simultaneously with a wave of glorifying film and TV productions about the Ottoman Empire (Carney 2018). This kind of neo-Ottomanism stands in sharp contradiction to the policies of Ottomanism in the nineteenth century, as such mainstream visions of the Ottoman era rarely embrace the non-Turkish and non-Muslim populations that once made up an essential part of the empire. The Habsburg Monarchy can hardly be said to serve contemporary (Austrian) foreign policy interests though it does play an important—and complicated—role in Austrian identity and domestic politics (Karner 2005) where the Habsburg ‘commonwealth’ is sometimes depicted as a forerunner for the European Union, at least on the political centre-right.4 Partly in opposition to this, premodern Habsburg history also serves as a rallying point in far-right discourses, with the Ottoman sieges of Vienna in 1529 and 1683 being invoked and exploited not only in Austria but also in Poland and Hungary (Wodak and Forchtner 2014). These receptions of history resonate with what Brubaker (2017) has labelled ‘civilizationism’: an approach less interested in traditional concepts of nationhood and more preoccupied with grand-scale trajectories of history or identitarian meta-narratives of civilisation. The Balkan borderlands between the two former empires have become the scene for heated contests of competing memory and heritage politics, pitting ‘Ottoman’, ‘European’ and other perceived ‘civilisations’ against one another (Walton 2016; Luke 2018). Popularised versions of Habsburg and Ottoman history reach well beyond politics in Austria and Turkey. A ‘whitewashed’ Habsburg Empire5 has become a lasting tourist attraction in Austria. From the onset of the post-imperial era, it has been enacted through museums, art, architecture, musical and theatrical performances and films such as the Sissi trilogy 4  The most notable example is the last Habsburg heir apparent, Otto von Habsburg (1912–2011), who was an active member of the Pan-European movement, parliamentarian for the Christian Democrat bloc in the European parliament, a strong critic of the nationalist far right and the author of essays on how a multinational Europe should work closer together (Habsburg 2006). When he died in 2011, his funeral in Vienna was attended by representatives of all major religions and nationalities of the former Habsburg Monarchy as well as prominent Christian Democrats and Catholics from all over Europe. 5  What Jovanović (2019, 461) defines as ‘whitewashed Empire’ is a concept inspired by postcolonial theory that ‘questions the supposed absence of colonial logics and their historical conditions from the cultural space of Habsburg Mitteleuropa’. Instead, it ‘critically engages the material practice of renovating and maintaining architectural assemblages, through their symbolic and political economies’, thus approaching ‘imperial historicity at the intersection of its discursive and material construction’.

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(1955–57) (Jovanović 2019, 461). Similarly, the market-oriented use of the Ottoman Empire in Turkish TV shows and merchandise has proven to be attractive not only within Turkey but increasingly also to tourists from the Balkans and Middle East (El-Ariss 2015).

Habsburgs, Ottomans and the Imperial Turn The increasingly complex reception of imperial legacies in the political and cultural spheres corresponds to a growing interest of scholars in ‘empire’ as a concept,6 where Habsburgs and Ottomans are discussed alongside twentieth-century examples such as late colonial Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States. The years following the fall of the Iron Curtain and the collapse of the Soviet Union, in particular, marked the beginning of the ‘imperial turn’ in academic re-evaluations of the recent past of Europe (Bachmann-Medick 2016, 279).7 Critical comparisons of nineteenth- and twentieth-century empires and nation-states were the subject of the now classical study edited by Barkey and von Hagen (1997), followed, among others, by Roshwald (2001), Esherick et al. (2006) and Leonhard and von Hirschhausen (2011). The last decade has also seen studies on how empires legitimised themselves (Münkler and Hausteiner 2012), how they functioned as nationalising projects (Berger and Miller 2015) and how they are remembered (Nicolaïdis et al. 2015). Whereas the ‘imperial turn’ can be read within the wider field of postcolonial and global studies (Burton 2003), European discourses (see Clark 2012, xxv–xxvi) seem to have increased their engagement with the empires of Central and Eastern Europe (Judson and Rozenblit 2005; Bartov and Weitz 2013). The Habsburg Empire, in particular, has been the subject of a number of landmark studies (Cole and Unowsky 2007; Feichtinger and Cohen 2014; Deak 2015; Judson 2016; Osterkamp 2018; Prokopovych et  al. 2019; Bellabarba 2020) that focus on imperial skills in managing diversity and encouraging dynastic patriotism. A more critical take on this topic highlights inequalities between centres and peripheries (Komlosy 2003), how the Habsburgs contributed to the ethnic and regional divisions of their subjects (Stergar and Scheer 2018), and to what extent their policies in regions such as Bosnia ought to be defined in colonial terms  On ‘empire’ as a concept in Ottoman political thought see Wigen (2013).  See further Mikhail and Philliou (2012) for the Turkish context, Ghosh (2012) for the British one, and David-Fox et al. (2006) for the Russian one. 6 7

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(Ruthner 2018a, b; Ruthner and Scheer 2018). Lindström (2008) deals with Late Habsburg identity and state-building around the turn of the century; Adlgasser and Lindström (2019) further expand on the role of the civil service and bureaucracy. Leidinger (2017) discusses the mechanisms of collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy in 1918; Bischof et al. (2010) and Becker et  al. (2020) focus on the (re)construction of a national Austrian state and its administration in 1919–20. The resurging academic interest in the Ottoman Empire, in turn, has been accelerated by the rise of Islamic terrorism after 2001 and recurrent instabilities in the Balkans and the Middle East. As part of a broad range of publications on how these regions were managed under late Ottoman rule, Barkey (2008, 2013) focuses on diversity management, Emrence (2011) highlights regional differences and mechanisms of indirect rule, Herzog and Sharif (2016) take a closer look at the ‘first Ottoman experiments in democracy’, Anscombe (2014) problematises the role of religion, and Şiviloğlu (2018) discusses the emergence of public opinion. Philliou (2011), Davidson (2015) and Elfenbein (2017) concern themselves with vital aspects of the Tanzimat (see below), not least the role of Christian minorities, whereas Rubin (2011, 2018) and Aytekin (2012, 2013) focus on the reception and implementation of legal, fiscal and economic reform in the period. In different ways, Kayalı (1997), Zürcher (2010) and Cleveland (2015) locate the political and ideological dynamics of the late Empire in a field of tension between its Turkish and Arabic areas, while Khuri-Makdisi (2010) and Blumi (2016) examine its global linkages. Masters (2013) highlights the long-term continuity of the relations between Ottomans and their Arab provinces; Makdisi (2002) and Deringil (2003) discuss these entanglements as a colonial enterprise. Mikhail (2020) traces the global influence of Ottoman power and thus sheds a new light on what is perceived as European modernity; Reynolds (2011) and Brisku (2017) make comparisons between late Ottoman and Romanov endeavours at reform and integration. Philliou (2021) revisits the transition between the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the formation of the Republic of Turkey and discusses the political opposition of the time. In recent years, both Central European and Middle Eastern studies have experienced what is described as the ‘environmental turn’, a ‘major methodological shift’ in the field of empire research (Trumbull 2017, 173). Mikhail’s (2011) (first) environmental history analyses the control of natural resources in Ottoman Egypt and demonstrates the

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interconnectedness of imperial centres and peripheries through this lens.8 ̇ Inal and Köse (2019) have recently presented the first collective effort to take a look at the Ottoman Empire through the lens of environmental history. Similarly, Frank (2005), Gingrich (2011), Rus (2014), Daheur (2016) and Lučić and Müller (2021) highlight Habsburg use and exploitation of natural resources in their provinces and in competition with other empires in the modern period. Finally, a growing number of contributions in literary and cultural studies deal with the effects and after-effects of the demise of the Ottoman (Konuk 2011; Günay-Erkol 2012; Furlanetto 2017; Kučera 2017; Chovanec 2017, 2018, Forthcoming) and Habsburg empires (Schmidt et al. 2015; Moos 2016; Bobinac et al. 2018; Lajosi 2018) and their former Balkan borderlands (Raudvere 2018). Processes of modernisation, reform and societal transformation in the late Ottoman Turco- and Arabophone areas left traces in new literary genres such as the novel (Guth 2003; Mignon 2005; Al-Bagdadi 2010). The growing interconnectedness of the Habsburg crown lands in the nineteenth century facilitated the development of cultural production that tied centre and peripheries together. This provided a backdrop for both the so-called Wiener Moderne (Polt-Heinzl 2015) and an overall surge in literature that embedded local languages and provincial identities within the wider context of imperial belonging (Kriegleder et  al. 2019). From a conceptual perspective, the interactivity of literary and political narratives of empires and their afterlives is increasingly brought to the fore by literary scholars (Magerski 2018a, b). Highlighting the continuity and/or idiosyncratic link between empire and post-empire, such studies broaden the perspective on (post-) imperial narratives of power and modern notions of political unity and pluralism, social openness and closedness. These studies interact with contributions in the fields of political science and international relations, where especially the Nachleben of the Ottoman Empire in contemporary political discourses, in particular, has been the topic of a rapidly expanding field of study (Çolak 2006, 2008; Fisher-Onar 2009, 2018; Mills et  al. 2011; Taglia 2016; Yavuz 2016, 2020; Koureas et al. 2019; Haug 2020).

8  Monographs like the ones by Faroqhi (2010) or Mikhail (2014) explore the history of human-animal relations in the Ottoman Empire and can thus be contextualised at the interface between Ottoman and animal studies. Other studies centre on Ottoman epistemologies of plague (Varlık 2016) or the impact of the ‘Little Ice Age’ on Ottoman lands (White 2010).

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Approaching ‘Narrated Empires’ This volume expands on the Habsburg and Ottoman empires as multinational political orders and examines how they have been referred to and narrated. Focusing on the time period between 1848 and 1918 as well as the post-imperial period, primary sources for the analysis of the narrative construction of empires stem from both state agents—through legal texts or political statements, for instance—and imperial subjects—notably through newspaper articles or novels. In these media, and in the discourses they enabled, imperial and counter-imperial identities were continuously constructed in a variety of ways. Understanding the empires as ‘narrated’ allows us to expand on the intrinsic relation between empire, narratives and identities. The term ‘empire’ usually refers to a specific form of governing an expandable geographical region with flexible borders through vertical mechanisms of power and through the subjugation of peoples (Münkler 2014, 16–21). Empires, however, not only can be defined by means of legal, dynastic, historical or religious formations and foundations but should also be understood by means of the cultural ‘texts’ written in relation to and about them. Hence, (post-)imperial narratives can be defined as forms of narrations connected to existent, disintegrating or collapsed imperial state formations. They are being expressed, disseminated or displayed through, for instance, arts and literature, legal texts or political statements. What characterises imperial and post-imperial narratives is their confrontation with, respectively, a contemporary or past imperial order, be it in confirmation, rejection or subversion. They are intertwined with nationalism as an emerging form of a political narrative that developed partially in dissociation from the imperial order and its imperial narratives of multinationalism. Conversely, after the First World War, post-imperial narratives began to provide an often melancholic (see Chovanec’s and Spreicer’s contributions) or nostalgic (see Fisher-Onar’s afterword to this volume) counter-reality to the national status quo. At the vague intersection between the imperial and post-imperial condition lies the downfall of the empire as a political, social, legal, cultural and symbolic order (see Magerski 2015, 117). The anticipation, experience or memory of the radical transformation of a society from an imperial to a national order—as in the case of Austria and Turkey—is conditioned by and reflected in cultural production. The disintegration of the Ottoman and Habsburg empires as well as the experience of far-reaching reforms

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pre-dating or following their demise have left behind a complex mesh of challenges surrounding the loss of one order and the formation of another (Magerski and Chovanec Forthcoming). Moreover, since diversity was an essential and explicitly articulated part of the Habsburg and Ottoman forms of imperial order, what was lost in their downfall was not only a political unity but also an expression of (imperial) commonality across national boundaries in Central Europe and the Middle East. The origins of the (post-)imperial narrative of the multinational empires lie in the institutional, legal, political and cultural reforms that sustainably changed the imperial state order in the two empires in the nineteenth century, and which went hand in hand with the emergence of new identities. The vision of an autonomous subject and, in relation to that, ‘the constructability of one’s own identity’ (Kraus 2000, 23) is intrinsically connected to the modern period.9 The development of new political narratives in the nineteenth century was intertwined with collective identity formation processes shaped by an increasingly literate and vocal civil society. Against this background, both imperial and national narratives aimed at providing new frameworks of belonging, and collective identities in an increasingly market-oriented society within which modern subjects were supposed to find autonomy and fulfilment. Commitment to the multinational idea among both state agents and subjects was expressed in a multilayered way and allowed for local, national as well as other identities to coexist with the narrative of the overarching Empire. It is with this in mind that we suggest ‘Narrated Empires’ as a conceptual lens for approaching the many-voiced frameworks of belonging in the late Habsburg and Ottoman periods. Narrated Empires implies not only that imperial identities were continuously invented by means of narration across national, regional and linguistic boundaries during imperial times but also that the image of the empire as a multinational unit has been continuously re-invented and re-narrated, including when the empires as political realities were long gone. In addition to bringing together scholars associated with a historical research project, The Many Roads in Modernity (University of Copenhagen), 9  As discussed throughout a substantial body of literature, identities, whether personal or social, are fluid and changing (Hall 1992; Brubaker and Cooper 2000); and narratives are key for understanding how identities are developed and re-invented over time (Brockmeier and Carbaugh 2001; Fivush et al. 2011; Singer et al. 2012; McAdams and McLean 2013; Berenskoetter 2014). Accordingly, identity is not static but exists only as part of an ongoing, variable and evolving narration.

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and a literary research project, Postimperial Narratives in the Central European Literatures of the Modern Period (University of Zagreb), this interdisciplinary volume also includes approaches from political science as well as cultural, legal and media studies. Most contributions were originally presented at the conference Viribus Unitis: Myths and Narratives of Habsburg and Ottoman Multinationalism 1848–1918 at the University of Copenhagen in November 2018. It was the aim of both conference and volume to explore the mutual interdependencies of political and literary narratives of imperial diversity in their emergence, variability, contingency and after-effects. The impetus came from two rather different directions, combining Olof Heilo’s engagement with premodern entanglements of empire and religion in the Eastern Mediterranean and Johanna Chovanec’s focus on post-imperial narratives in modern Turkish literature. Along with Nora Fisher-Onar’s afterword, the two editors’ respective takes on the topic complement a total of 14 chapters that examine the manifold voices of political actors, journalists, scholars, intellectuals and writers in the formation and evolution of nationalist and multinational narratives.

Outline of the Volume: From Narrating to Remembering Empires Acting as a complement to this introduction, Olof Heilo’s chapter ‘Making Sense in a World That Is Falling Apart: Imperial Narratives of State, Diversity and Modernity’ contextualises the history of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires and the rising challenge of nationalism in a longer metahistory of empires and diversity. Whereas the origin of such narratives can be sought in premodern times, their reverberation has time and again been felt throughout (post)modernity. The chapter provides a general historical background for the developments leading up to the period covered in this volume. The second part of the volume, ‘Ottomanism Revisited: An Imperial Narrative of Many Voices,’ is devoted to a core concept within the Ottoman effort of creating an imperial consciousness. Beginning with the Gülhane Edict of 1839, the Ottomans embarked on an ambitious modernisation programme known as the Tanzimat (1839–76), whose primary aim was to tighten the economic, military and administrative grip of the state and make its subjects equal before the law irrespective of rank or

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background. More than just a top-down modernisation attempt the Tanzimat is often seen as part of an ideological project referred to as Ottomanism (see Yavuz 2016, 2020), which tried to bring together various religions, ethnicities, languages and regions of the Empire through a feeling of commitment to the Ottoman state. Salim Çevik’s chapter ‘Ottomanism and Varieties of Official Nationalism’ discusses Ottomanism as a form of ‘official nationalism’ trying to substitute the traditional imperial ideology of power in which various groups and communities had their given place in the imperial hierarchy, with an egalitarian one that regarded them all as one people, the ‘Ottoman nation’. In doing so, the Ottomans can be said to have oscillated between a more ‘Austrian’ approach, which openly admitted, articulated and even institutionalised a multitude of languages, religions and cultures, and a ‘Russian’ approach, which emphasised the dominance of certain languages, religions and cultures over others. Alp Eren Topal expounds on these undercurrents of Ottoman political ideology. As his contribution ‘Ottomanism in History and Historiography: Fortunes of a Concept’ demonstrates, the term ‘Ottomanism’ (Osmanlıcılık) as such does not appear in documents from the late Ottoman era when it allegedly was official policy. Instead, references to Ottomanism can be found in retrospective reflections on the different ideological trajectories of the late Ottoman era, where it is juxtaposed with ̇ two major ideologies that followed it: Islamism (I slamcılık), which became predominant under the conservative rule of Abdülhamid II (1876–1909) and Turkism (Türkçülük), which was related to the rise of the Young Turk opposition movement in the period leading up to the 1908–09 revolution. Topal shows how the earliest exponents of what could be called an Ottoman patriotism are in fact related to the generation of intellectuals known as the ‘Young Ottomans’ who often found themselves in opposition to the Tanzimat project. Whereas the Tanzimat era up to the time of Abdülhamid was marked by a strong desire to reach out to the non-Muslim subjects of the Empire by making them equal before the law and strengthening their identification with the state, this changed rapidly with the loss of large parts of the predominantly Christian parts of the Balkans in 1875–78 and the growing colonial influence of Britain and France in Africa in the years that followed. Nonetheless, as Madeleine Elfenbein shows in her chapter ‘Unruly Children of the Homeland: Ottomanism’s Non-Muslim Authors’, notable representatives of the Christian Ottoman intelligentsia stayed committed

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to the Empire, both as an idea and as a reality, despite the hardening political climate. Just like their Muslim counterparts among the Young Ottomans, these ‘unruly children of the homeland’ criticised the Ottoman government while defending the Empire. For some of them, British-­ controlled Cyprus and Egypt became places of refuge from which they expressed their disapproval of how the Ottoman Empire had failed to protect its core interests. In Egypt, these exiles crossed paths with an emerging Arab-speaking intelligentsia which lies at the heart of Stephan Guth’s chapter ‘Arab Perspectives on the Late Ottoman Empire’. Here, the semi-independent Ottoman khedives in Egypt (a British ‘veiled protectorate’ from 1882) created a hub for a new generation of educated Arabs, both Muslim and Christian, who have often been associated with the Arabic cultural and literary reform movement known as the nahda or ‘cultural upswing’. While the political aims of the nahda can be juxtaposed with the Turkishness promoted by the ‘Young Turk’ opponents to Abdülhamid II, Guth shows that Arabic literati—who were often opposed to Western colonialism but still benefited from the absence of censorship under the British administration—demonstrated a commitment to the overarching concept and narrative of the Empire well into the time of the First World War. The third part of the volume, ‘Empires of Diversity, States of Change: Nations and Identities Between Centres and Frontiers’, shifts focus from Ottoman ‘dynastic patriotism’ to how ethnic, religious and regional identities in the Habsburg and Ottoman empires were formed and articulated by and in opposition to imperial narratives. Lawmaking and propaganda aimed to ensure the loyalty of lands and subjects to the imperial centre, efforts that have often been read as attempts at suppressing nationalist sentiments within the multinational states. In fact, as shown by the four chapters in this part, minorities and provinces rarely understood their own identities in such clear-cut terms. Legal reforms and ideological mobilisation in post-imperial nation-states ultimately forced them to take a stance, but throughout the late imperial period they kept re-inventing their identities in various ways. A particularly insightful case is the Croatian lands. Under Habsburg rule, two historical frontier zones against the Ottomans—Croatia and Slavonia—were merged and conceded to Hungary in the 1867 Ausgleich that transformed the Habsburg Empire into a dual monarchy. Between Italian, German and Hungarian influences, forms of Croatian nationalism spanned from the ‘Illyrism’ once promoted by Napoleon in the Austrian

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coastal region of Dalmatia to the pan-Yugoslavism that would later form the basis for the post-imperial Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Marijan Bobinac’s chapter ‘Zrinski-Myths: A Vehicle for Imperial and National Narratives’ discusses how various efforts to promote new identities in nineteenth-century Croatian territories expressed themselves in novels and plays about two characters from the historical Zrinski family, one who had taken part in the battle of Szigetvár against the Ottomans in 1566, and another one who had been executed by the Habsburgs in 1671. Bobinac’s chapter shows how the Zrinski narrative has been used to both reject and show commitment to the Empire. Returning to the Ottoman Empire, Ayşe Ozil’s chapter ‘Ottoman Reform, Non-Muslim Subjects, and Constitutive Legislation: The Reform Edict of 1856 and the Greek General Regulations of 1862’ provides a different angle on the ambition to forge a coherent Ottoman state. Against the backdrop of legal reform, Ozil examines the Rum (Greek Orthodox) community in Constantinople in the wake of the Islahat Edict (1856), one of the milestones of the Tanzimat era. Issued in response to the Crimean War (1853–56), the edict prescribed a reorganisation of the Rum church administration, which at the time still exerted power over Greeks, Serbs, Bulgarians and other Orthodox Christians. The struggle to clarify its status and embed it within the Empire caused heated debates within the community and brought issues of belonging and loyalty to the fore. As the Ottomans gradually lost the Balkans to the formation of independent Christian states, Bosnia and Albania remained Muslim strongholds. The former was annexed by the Habsburgs in 1878; the latter became independent in the wake of the 1912–13 Balkan wars as the Dual Monarchy tried to curb the growing power of Italy in the Adriatic. Late Ottoman Albania saw various expressions of political awakening and self-­ articulation. On the basis of the remarkable careers of three brothers from the Frashëri family in late nineteenth-century Albania, Isa Blumi’s chapter ‘Ottoman Albanians in an Era of Transition: An Engagement with a Fluid Modern World’ shows how Ottoman-Southern Albanian (Tosk) activists instrumentalised the Empire’s diverse cultural, political and socio-­ economic heritage to further their political and economic goals. Blumi shows how various and sometimes contradictory ideologies of empire, nation and community intermingled against the backdrop of an increasingly interconnected Mediterranean, where communities and individuals found themselves caught between not only Habsburg and Ottoman but also British and Italian interests.

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As nascent nation-states and administrations emerged out of the collapsed Habsburg Empire in 1918, the new rump state of Austria was originally conceived under the name Deutsch-Österreich (German-Austria), indicating its expected unification with Germany. As in other post-­ Habsburg states, an administrative apparatus that had previously drawn on subjects from the entire Empire irrespective of their origin or ethnicity now demanded commitment to the nation. As Therese Garstenauer shows in her chapter, ‘Unravelling Multinational Legacies: National Affiliations of Government Employees in Post-Habsburg Austria’, determining the national affiliation of state servants was a complicated issue. Manifestations of national belonging in unclear cases could range from Germanising name forms to written testimonies of the language in which the education had taken place. In the fourth  part of this volume, ‘Habsburg Press(ure): Reading Between the Lines of a Many-Tongued Journalism’, the Habsburg Empire takes centre stage. The years following the suppression of the 1848–49 revolution were marked by a neo-absolutist trend that gradually gave way to a more liberal spirit of government. Unable to prevent the parallel unifications of Italy (1860–70) and Germany (1866–71) the Monarchy had to admit its dependency on Hungary by transforming itself into a Dual Monarchy in 1867. Since the Kingdom of Hungary itself was a highly multi-ethnic entity whose traditional Magyar elites ruled over Croats, Romanians and Slovaks, the concession actually reaffirmed the Empire in its role as the ultimate framework for articulating belonging and enabling reform. Still, the central power kept a guarding eye on exactly how this was done, closely observing the main channels of public communication to ensure that expressions did not stray too far away from the official narratives. As newspapers became more numerous, not only in the main cities but also in the provinces and in the many languages of the Empire, local censorship and discourses developed a complex relationship, forming a press landscape that was many-tongued—and not merely in a linguistic sense. The three chapters in this part are all devoted to such aspects of national and imperial expressions under Habsburg rule. Andrea Seidler’s chapter ‘Pester Lloyd and the German-Speaking Upper Classes of Hungary: A Budapest Newspaper in the Context of Increasing Magyarisation’ focuses on Budapest, the second capital of the Empire after 1867. Here, the daily business paper Pester Lloyd turned into a vociferous advocate of the Hungarian cause within the Empire, despite the fact that it was written and printed in German. The newspaper

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promoted Hungary’s reconciliation with the Habsburgs and preferred peaceful, consolidated cooperation of both parts of the Monarchy but the newspaper’s desire to promote Hungarian culture, literature and language stood in sharp contrast to its reluctance to acknowledge similar aspirations of other nationalities within the Dual Monarchy. The Habsburg commitment to Catholic Christianity did not protect the Empire from national strives that also began to affect the church. This is what Tamara Scheer focuses on in her chapter ‘A “Roman Affair”: A Croatian Priest College in the Habsburg Press Debate of 1901’. In 1901, a dispute broke out in Rome over the status of a priest college that had, until that point, gone under the more inclusive geographical term ‘Illyrian’ but which Pope Leo XIII (r. 1878–1903) now declared to be ‘Croatian’. A general confusion as to whose interests had been violated by who left newspapers throughout the Empire at a loss as to what would actually be the proper way of reporting the incident. The multilayered identity of the Croatian lands in the Dual Monarchy is the focus of Milka Car’s chapter ‘Narratives of Modernisation in Periodicals: On the German-Language Agramer Tagblatt in 1918’. The Zagreb-based periodical Agramer Tagblatt could trace its roots back to the late eighteenth century and for many decades in the late Habsburg era it was a prominent forum for Croatian intellectuals who wrote in German. The dramatic year of 1918 forced the paper to simultaneously take a stance and stay silent as sympathies around it drifted from loyalty to the Habsburg to the new Yugoslav state. At the beginning of the year, it still spoke out in favour of the so-called Trialism that envisioned a triple monarchy with a third Slavic component but soon drifted towards sympathising with the declarations of South Slav unity. The shock of the First World War (1914–18) and the collapse of political orders in its aftermath entailed a social and individual reorientation and necessitated political as well as psychological means of recuperation all over Europe and the world at large. In Austria and Turkey, the loss of empire and the void it left behind created the impetus for a rich literary production that has continued until today. The literary examples from the Turkish context exemplify the complex bifurcation along political lines, where the nostalgia for a multinational and pluralistic society may clash but also go hand in hand with a nostalgia for order and tradition. In Austrian interwar literature, the memory of the Habsburg Empire provided a literary place of refuge—especially for Jewish authors—in a world increasingly shaped by fascism and nationalism. The fifth part of the

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volume, ‘Echoes from an Inner Void: The Post-Imperial Novel Between Melancholy and Memory’, turns to imperial afterlife in literary works, further exploring the continuous intertwining of literary and political narratives of empire. In her chapter ‘Theory of Empire, Mythology and the Power of the Narrative’, Christine Magerski analyses the strong correlation between literary narratives and political orders. Building on Herfried Münkler’s theory of empires as providers of myths and meanings, she highlights the epistemological power of post-imperial novels that replace the bygone imperial order with the order of the narrative itself. With reference to Robert Musil’s (1880–1942) monumental The Man Without Qualities, set in Vienna just before the outbreak of the First World War, Magerski shows how the novel not only deals with a fictitious attempt at defining the purpose of the Dual Monarchy at the verge of its collapse but can also be seen as a struggle in itself to use narration as a way of establishing a new order. Johanna Chovanec’s chapter ‘The Ottoman Myth in Turkish Literature’ discusses the genesis of an ‘Ottoman Myth’ in literary texts, focusing on a broad variety of retrospective narratives that are tied together by (post-) imperial melancholy. As a defining feature of the Ottoman Myth, this melancholy results from the experience of losing a political, cultural and symbolic order that, in hindsight, is literarily imagined as Ottoman lifeworlds. ‘Empire’, or what is evoked as such, functions as a prism through which authors outline what is perceived as the ills of today, such as modernity, westernisation or nationalism. Through the analysis of various literary texts including novels by Ahmet Midhat, Halide Edib Adıvar, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Orhan Pamuk and Sema Kaygusuz, this chapter explores how the Ottoman Myth has evolved throughout the history of late Ottoman and (post)modern Turkish literature. Jelena Spreicer concludes this part of the book with a chapter on one of the most iconic of all post-imperial authors, Joseph Roth (1894–1939). In ‘The Hotel as a Non-Place of Habsburg Multinationalism. Hotel Savoy (1924) by Joseph Roth’, Spreicer focuses on one of Roth’s less well-known works, Hotel Savoy (1924). The novel is set in a provincial city hotel in the wake of the First World War, where people from all parts of the Habsburg Monarchy and beyond find themselves crammed together for an indefinite time. Cut off from the world, the hotel and its inhabitants illustrate melancholy as a state of mind that lacks any spatial link to the external world and characterises individuals who—like Roth himself—never really found themselves at home after the fall of the Empire.

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The book closes with an afterword by Nora Fisher-Onar. In ‘Remembering Empires: Between Civilisational Nationalism and Post-­ national Pluralism’, Fisher-Onar explores the uses and abuses of imperial nostalgia, connecting the overall topic of the volume with two major current-­day political discourses. She defines ‘Civilizationalist nationalism’ as a form of cultural nationalism which cites an imagined imperial golden age of religious and racial purity. This mode of remembering empire informs right-wing nationalist and violent extremist platforms in both the West and the Islamicate world. ‘Post-national pluralism’, on the other hand, invokes imperial cosmopolitanism as an inspiration for managing diversity today. Offering a synthetic overview of this volume’s contributions as a correction to these reductionist modes of remembrance, the chapter concludes with a plea to embrace our full complexity, past and present alike.

Appendix Recurring Concepts Cisleithania Illyrian

Josephinism

Magyarisation Millet

The non-Hungarian part of the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary after 1867 A concept referring to the historical name for Dalmatia. After Napoleon made the ‘Illyrian provinces’ into a short-lived state, the term was taken up by early Croat nationalists Late eighteenth-century enlightened reform movement in the Habsburg Empire, named after emperor Joseph II, aimed at, among other things, strengthening state outreach The efforts to spread Hungarian culture, language and identity to the parts of the Habsburg Empire that were under Hungary (Turkish: ‘Nation’): a term used in the late Ottoman Empire with reference to the ethnoreligious groups of the empire

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Nahda

(Arabic: ‘upswing’): movement promoting an intellectual and cultural revival in the late nineteenth century Arab world Neo-Ottomanism A concept used in contemporary discourses to denote current-day Turkish cultural and imperialist ambitions in the old Ottoman lands Ottomanism An ideological concept denoting the attempt in the Late Ottoman Empire to foster an Ottoman patriotism that transgressed ethnic, religious, linguistic and social boundaries Rum ‘Roman’: the Ottoman name for the Orthodox Christian millet, indicating its origins in the pre-­ Ottoman Byzantine oikoumene Tanzimat (Ottoman: ‘The New Order’, ‘Re-organization’ or ‘Reform’): the Ottoman reform period between 1839 and 1876 Yugoslavism ‘South-Slavism’: a nationalist concept envisioning the unification of all speakers of south Slav languages (Slovenian, Croatian, Serbian)

Timeline 1839: The Gülhane Edict marks the beginning of the Tanzimat era in the Ottoman Empire. 1848–49: Unrest all over Europe and the end of the Vormärz era in Austria. The liberal and nationalist movements within the Habsburg Empire are suppressed with the use of the military. The 18-year-old Franz Joseph is declared emperor. 1853–56: The Crimean War. Britain and France defend the Ottoman Empire against Russia while Habsburg Austria remains neutral. The Islahat Edict clarifies the status of non-Muslims in the Ottoman Empire (1856). 1859–67: The Austrian defeats at Solferino and Königgrätz pave the way for the unifications of Italy and Germany. The Austrian Empire transforms into the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary (1867). 1875–78: ‘The Eastern Crisis’ with uprisings in Bosnia and Bulgaria. The First Ottoman Constitution is proclaimed. Russia declares war on the Ottoman Empire; Abdülhamid II suspends the constitution. The Ottoman Empire loses Bosnia to the Habsburgs; a first Bulgarian state is created.

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There is an influx of Muslim refugees from the Balkans to the remaining Ottoman territories. 1879–82: Britain takes control over Egypt, which grows into an important hub for exiled Ottoman intellectuals and an already growing Arabophone intelligentsia. 1894–97: Hamidian massacres in the Ottoman Empire target Armenians and other Christians in Eastern Anatolia. In Vienna, Karl Lueger wins the highest elected office in the Habsburg Empire using a rhetoric with strong anti-Semitic undercurrents. 1908–09: The Young Turks stage a revolution in the Ottoman Empire; Abdülhamid II is deposed. Austria formally annexes Bosnia, and Bulgaria declares full independence. 1912–13: The First and Second Balkan wars. The Ottoman Empire in Europe reduced to a rump territory from Edirne to Constantinople. Through the intervention of Austria-Hungary, an Albanian state is created. 1914–18: The First World War. The Ottoman Empire resists at Gallipoli but gradually loses the Near East; the Armenians of East Anatolia are largely annihilated. The Habsburg Empire prevails with German help on the front against Russia but is defeated by Italy. Franz Joseph dies (1916). The Empire begins to dissolve. 1919–23: A German-Austria (Deutschösterreich) is created out of the remaining (German-speaking) part of the Habsburg Empire. Various partition plans for the Ottoman Empire; Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) prevails against Greek occupation and lays the foundation of the Republic of Turkey.

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Map 1.1  The Habsburg and Ottoman empires in 1848, superimposed over the states that replaced them. © The authors

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Map 1.2  The Habsburg Empire, its Crown lands and major cities after the 1867 ‘Ausgleich’ with Hungary, the bold line indicating the division between Hungary and ‘Cisleithania’. © The authors

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Map 1.3  Stages of Ottoman territorial decline in the Balkans, 1858–1913. Shading indicates areas that underwent periods of transitional rule over one or several stages. © The authors

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Map 1.4  British, French and Italian colonial expansion in the Ottoman Levant, 1882–1923. © The authors

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CHAPTER 2

Making Sense in a World That Is Falling Apart: Imperial Narratives of State, Diversity and Modernity Olof Heilo

In the last days of June 2014, the leader of the ‘Islamic State of Syria and Iraq’ Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared himself to be a Caliph, marking the beginning of a campaign of ostentatious brutality that put the term ‘Caliphate’ in the spotlight of international media. One of the slogans that his followers began to spread, “this Caliphate will have no borders, only fronts” (Casciani 2014) was mostly seen as a dig at the nation-state boundaries that had been drawn up by Britain and France after the fall of the Ottoman Empire but it could also be seen as a radical articulation of what I am indebted to various friends, colleagues and students throughout the years who have increased my interest and deepened my focus on this topic, and especially to my co-editor Johanna Chovanec who provided me with the opportunity to put my thoughts to paper in this way. I also want to thank Matthew Goldman and Iva Lučić for their valuable feedback. O. Heilo (*) The Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul, Istanbul, Turkey e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Chovanec, O. Heilo (eds.), Narrated Empires, Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55199-5_2

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has been a major characteristic of many empires throughout history. As opposed to nation-states, empires have open, elastic, even indefinite boundaries (Colomer 2017; Münkler 2007, 16). They cannot be pinned down: what they control can always be expanded, what they have lost can always be recovered. As the same example also shows, they also have a curious ability to survive conceptually even in cases where they have factually ended. The word Caliphate, which has been used to denote a number of Muslim empires and state constructions throughout history, first gained prominence in the Umayyad era (661–750) in order to express what was seen as God-given rule over many lands and peoples (Crone and Hinds 1986, 11–23; Fowden 2004, 115–141; Donner 2012, xiii–xiv) but effectively ceased to refer to any all-encompassing Islamic power in the mid-eighth century, and had lost most of its actual power at the latest by the mid-ninth century. The Ottomans laid claims to it after their conquest of the Middle East in 1517 and primarily used it for propaganda purposes before and during the First World War, after which it was abolished by Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) in 1924. Still, as shown not only by the ‘Islamic State’, the vision of a common authority of all Muslims irrespective of nation, language, culture and origin remains politically powerful. In a different and yet similar case, the Holy Roman Empire relied on the commitment to the idea or simply the memory of a unifying power in Europe rather than its practical implementation. Voltaire (1878) famously denied that it was Holy, Roman or an Empire. Yet by the time the Habsburgs dissolved it in 1806, it represented the symbolic continuity of a thousand years of European and Catholic Christian history and as such would remain a main point of reference both to the new Austrian Empire, to the later German Empire as well as to such different post-imperial entities as the Third Reich and the European Union (Herbers and Neuhaus 2010, 301–304).1 Similar arguments could be made for the Persian and Byzantine empires (Newman 2009; Kaldellis 2019). As the following section intends to show, modern Habsburg and Ottoman narratives of multinationalism must be read against the long history of an imperial concept whose impact lies beyond legislative, administrative, economic and military power. If an empire is expected to follow a 1  See also Schäuble (2006) for a lecture in which the then German Christian Democratic Minister of Interior Wolfgang Schäuble developed the idea of an affinity between the Holy Roman Empire and the European Union.

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more abstract principle than to merely protect and support its subjects, to preserve and expand its territories, or to collect and distribute material wealth, it has to be built by means other than education, irrigation, common roads and public order. The empire as a cosmos, embodied order or world of meaning might be communicated by means of images, symbols and performances, which all form part of what we call cultural production, further discussed by Christine Magerski in this book.2 Through art, literature and religion, narratives of empire have entered collective memory and imagination far beyond the spatial territories and time periods in which they have exerted power. The accumulation of empires over time has even created a narrative of its own, the translatio imperii, in which they form a succession of God-given power (Goez 1958), a concept of which both Habsburgs and Ottomans made frequent use.3 At the further side of such visions of the empire as eternal and inescapable, narratives of the decline, fall and ruin of empires have provided some of the most powerful visions of worlds ending, not least in the modern and secular era4—expressions of melancholy and loss in post-imperial Turkish and Austrian literature are discussed in this volume by Johanna Chovanec and Jelena Spreicer. The slightly apocalyptic character of such conceptualizations is further underlined by the ways in which many empires in action have depicted themselves. There are narratives that use war, conquest and dominance as elements to make the empire appear strong, invincible and frightening— conspicuous examples span from the Neo-Assyrian Empire to the Islamic State itself, which were not only factually brutal but supported an entire visual and narrative culture about their brutality (Euben 2017; Elavi 2018, 95–106). On the other extreme end, one can find narratives of peace, tolerance and inclusion that make the empire appear as a place of safety, a protector of the weak, a universalist entity that allows all kinds of peoples, cultures and faiths to thrive together, an attempt that can be traced back to the Achaemenid Persians (Abtahi 2006; Finkel 2013). In one of the most famous examples, the Roman poet Virgil (70 BC–19 AD)—with his  See also Münkler (2007).  See also Latowski (2013, 59–91). 4  Apart from Edward Gibbon’s tour de force The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1774–1789), this would be a recurring subject of nineteenth-century historicist paintings, some of which took more interest in the concept of decadence (cf. Thomas Couture, Les Romains dans leur décadence, 1848) and others which excelled more in visions of destruction (cf. John Martin and Thomas Cole). I am very grateful to Tonje H. Sørensen for her valuable input on these matters. 2 3

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imperial patron Augustus (r. 27 BC–14 AD) in mind—described the logic and mission of the Roman Empire: Let others excel in moulding the breathing bronze, Haul features of life out of the marble, Plead better in courts and trace with compass the heavenly orbits, outlining the rise of the star constellations. To govern the peoples, Roman, that is your fate! Those arts will be yours: to maintain peace and order, To show mercy to the defeated, but wage war on the obstinate. (Vergil 1900, 6:841–853)5

Here, the violent and peaceful narratives meet and together convey the myth of the empire as a God-given, all-encompassing cosmos. But this unity of opposites often undergoes a split in the popular reception, which makes use of both extremes to depict the empires as either universally good or universally evil. Judaism, Christianity and Islam, which entertain their own claims to an all-encompassing truth, have particularly complicated relationships to empires, which they have all both supported and rejected; apocalypticism in Jewish, Christian and Islamic tradition remains intimately intertwined with narratives of empire (Heilo 2016).6 Historical evidence may speak against or in favour of their factuality,7 but what interests us here is primarily the power of narratives to challenge as well as convey imperial claims. In order to maintain the impression of unity under such circumstances, the imperial authority is forced to either annihilate all expressions of difference or find new ways of integrating them. In the next section, we will take a closer look at how Habsburgs and Ottomans and their imperial predecessors in the pre-modern era dealt with such issues of internal diversity. 5  My translation (with special thanks to Anders Piltz); the Latin original reads “Excudent alii spirantia mollius aera / credo equidem, vivos ducent de marmore voltus / orabunt causas melius, caelique meatus / describent radio, et surgentia sidera dicent / tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento / hae tibi erunt artes; pacisque imponere morem / parcere subiectis, et debellare superbos”. 6  The Bible provides influential “shadow narratives” of the Neo-Assyrian and NeoBabylonian (Kings, Chronicles, Psalms), Persian (Daniel, Ezra, Nehemja, Esther), Macedonian and Seleucid (Daniel, Maccabeans) and Roman (Gospels, Apocalypse of John) empires. See Kosmin (2018) for a recent study of how and why many of them seem to go back to the Seleucid era in particular. 7  On the Achaemenids, see Dusinberre (2013); on the Romans, see Hingley (2005).

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Pre-modern Empires and Diversity: The World That Became Habsburg and Ottoman What we have outlined so far is an imperial narrative that is strongly monistic, and which as a result tends to polarize historical reception. Ancient, Christian and Islamic empires all have been used as projection screens for, respectively, rosy descriptions of multicultural coexistence and black visions of horrifying repression.8 In general, however, defining pre-modern empires in such terms is problematic.9 Fragmented by technical, geographical and social obstacles of communication, most of them were inherently diverse and as long as the objective of the men in power was not to foster equal citizens but to maintain an authoritarian principle that legitimized their own rule, this problem was not so much ignored or suppressed as non-existent. The term ‘multiculturalism’ would give a rather euphemistic description of a coexistence built on the segregation of classes, genders and communities, but it would be similarly anachronistic to imagine a cosmos marred by a perpetual tension between religions, languages and social strata among people whose horizons were—for most of the time—limited. The imperial power itself was dependent on various intermediaries: court structures, military chains of command, local elites, casts of priests, scribes and schools. Vertically as well as horizontally, the narrative of unity concealed diverse reality that sometimes remained unarticulated. This does not mean that imperial power, or power in any form, was ever uncontested. Cases of Jews who refused to give up their habits in face of Seleucid pressure, Christians who were martyred for their refusal to sacrifice to the Roman emperor, non-Muslims who were subjected to humiliating clothing regulations by Caliphates, all show, in different ways, how symbols, narratives and performances provided means by which imperial concepts and notions of unity and diversity could be contested and manifested. At the same time, it should be noted how such cases mostly carry evidence of the communicative power of the religious structures which transmitted them. In the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East, religion turned into a major tool of regulating diversity from Late Antiquity 8  Two recent and very illustrative examples are Moss (2013) and Morera (2016); the latter one even sets out by criticising the political correctness of narrating Islamic empires in current scholarship. 9  On a current debate that flared up on Twitter over diversity in the Roman Empire, see Basset (2017).

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onward, and rather than ideological and individual nodes of attraction, religions here represented assigned folds that imperial and religious hierarchies often helped each other to fixate and sustain (Fowden 1993, 12–60, 80–108, 138–168; Sizgorich 2009, 231–271; Heilo 2016, 107–108). All of this is essential for understanding the logic of diversity in the Ottoman Empire, which inherited both the earlier core areas of the Byzantine Empire and the Umayyad Caliphate and sets of established customs and practices for dealing with their demographic. It is often said that the ethnoreligious plurality of the Ottoman Empire was kept together by the so-called millet system, which is supposed to have regulated the relationships of Muslims, Jews, Orthodox (Rum) and other Christians to one another, but (as further discussed by Alp Eren Topal in this volume) that term only entered its political language in the nineteenth century (Masters 2004, 61–62). Following an established practice of many Islamic empires, the Ottomans admitted a pluralism of laws that drew legitimacy from the notion of revealed religions, but the purpose was not to encourage equality: non-Islamic law was overruled by Islamic law (which in the Ottoman case was further complemented by the Imperial law). Rather than appealing to identities of religious adherents in general, systemic pluralism of religions ensured that key institutions and elites remained committed to the overarching idea of the empire as a historical and geographical whole. In Habsburg Europe, and Europe at large, the question of religious pluralism was at the latest raised by the Reformation in the first half of the sixteenth century from a level of local and temporary conditions to a principle for the whole empire to consider. Officially, the cuius regio, eius religio compromise gave Catholic and Protestant elites of the empire the right to decide the religion of their subjects as long as communities and movements that rejected it, like Calvinists and Anabaptists, were suppressed (Forster 2010, 137–141). Whereas the Habsburgs themselves became infamous for stomping out religious dissent in their Western and Spanish domains, they showed more caution along the Eastern fringes of what would become Austria. Here, along the fronts of a divided Hungary, the Ottomans used their own systemic pluralism by welcoming non-Catholics fleeing Habsburg persecution and anti-Habsburg sentiment among noblemen. For instance, the 1664–1671 Croat-Hungarian conspiracy of Zrinski-Frankopan (whose later reception is discussed by Marijan Bobinac in this volume) formed an important backdrop for the second Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683.

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In the last decades of the eighteenth century, Hungary all the way down to Belgrade fell to the Habsburgs, which entailed concessions to its elites: Hungary was granted a degree of autonomy and its aristocrats were promised freedom of religion, thus bringing Lutherans and Calvinists within the imperial fold (Calic 2016, 153–158). Less consideration was initially paid to the Orthodox population, who found a different node of attraction in the rising power of Russia. As time went by, however, Karlowitz (Semski Karlovci) north of Belgrade grew into a centre for the Orthodox church in Habsburg lands and even became a point of reference for the Serbs on the Ottoman side of the border (Ćircović 2004, 150–177). In the growing competition for Orthodox loyalties, the Ottomans supported the Phanariotes, an influential class of Greeks around the patriarch in Constantinople, who simultaneously regarded themselves as heirs of the Eastern Roman (Turkish Rum) transnational church and toyed with an emerging sense of Hellenic self-awareness (Philliou 2011, 12–24). Communities with networks on either side of the border became pawns in an imperial game: in Vienna, where several Jewish communities had met violent ends, a Sephardic community was allowed to settle following peace agreements with the Ottomans in 1718 and 1739 (Kaul 1989, 1990). Over the course of the eighteenth century, Vienna grew into a hub of both Armenian and Greek cultures (Gschwandtner and Gastgeber 2004; Katsiardi-Hering and Stassinopoulou 2011). In consideration of the diversity policies that they inherited and tailored to their own needs, the early Modern Habsburg-Ottoman power struggle in the Balkans went far beyond simplistic narratives of confrontation (the Habsburgs liberating Europe from Muslims, or the Ottomans failing their historical commitment to spread Islam) or coexistence (the Habsburgs inheriting a picturesque melting-pot of cultures and religions from the tolerant Ottomans). This would become even more obvious during the process of what we call Modernity.

The Advent of Modernity and the Collapse of the Vertical Paradigm The century that lasted from the Spanish War of Succession (1701–1714) to the Napoleonic wars (1803–1815) saw a series of large state constructions undergo severe crises or collapses: the Safavid Empire in Iran, the Mughal Empire in India, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in Eastern

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Europe, and at last the Holy Roman Empire itself. ‘World War Zero’ as some historians refer to the Seven Years’ War of 1757–1763, put both Britain and France on the path towards a moment where one would lose its North American colonies and the other one would face state bankruptcy and revolution. The century is also understood as a general nadir for the Ottomans, which not only lost a number of wars and territories against the Habsburgs and Russians in the Balkans and around the Black Sea but also found themselves engulfed in exhausting struggles to regain control from local tax-farmers and militias. On his deathbed, Sultan Mustafa III (r. 1757–1774) left behind a dejected poem in which he claimed that the world is in a constant state of falling apart and that God alone can provide consolation.10 Is it a mere coincidence that the sultan wrote on the threshold of the same modernity as the conservative pessimist Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) was preparing the first volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire? The problem is that the term ‘modernity’, just as the word empire, can mean many things, and not merely in Shmuel N. Eisenstadt’s sense of a multiplicity over spaces and cultures (Eisenstadt 2000).11 If we accept Marshall Berman’s (1982, 6) claim that modernity is characterized by a “struggle to make ourselves at home in a constantly changing world” or that of Bruno Latour (1993), that it marks a constantly growing bifurcation between the generation of observed facts and their social interpretations, which according to the latter can be traced back at least to the seventeenth century, then it certainly appears to contradict the ancient concept of the empire as a cosmic order and embodiment of meaning. But there is a binary logic in this as well: empires may use new knowledge and technology to their own advantage and the struggle to make oneself at home in a rapidly changing world may increase the longing for universal epistemologies or notions of historical meaning. Entanglements of science and technology, trade and infrastructure, institutions and communications created possibilities as much as they posed challenges to articulations of political order: individual empowerment and social mobility increased, but so did centralization and state penetration; means of subaltern emancipation and self-articulation multiplied, but so did options for mass propaganda and censorship. In general, early globalization worked in favour of empires: as Jürgen Osterhammel emphasizes, the form of government  ”Yıkılupdur bu cihan”; see Hanioğlu (2008, 6) for an English translation.  Cf. Schäbler (2016, 15).

10 11

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that definitely died in the eighteenth century was that of the city-state, with its local identity, definition and belonging, symbolically sealed by the fall of the Republic of Venice in 1797, which, among other things, left Dalmatia to the Habsburgs (Osterhammel 2009, 565–570). In terms of territorial expansion, Russia and China took control of Central Asia at a remarkable speed, and France and Britain secured their grip on the world’s seas at the expense of Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands. In other words, the world was not merely falling apart but also reconnecting in a way that was marked by a growing pace and directness. Global trade routes, printing presses, state bureaucracies, steam and steel technology, school systems, post and telegraphs and not least an interconnected bourgeoisie created an entire spin of interpretations, understandings and explanations of the world, with language rather than religion being essential to constructions of meaning. Reducing, bypassing, or making redundant intermediaries in chains of command and communication—the military and religious elites that in Europe were associated with the feudal system—meant that agency became located at what had hitherto been the ends of the power axis: the ruler and the people faced each other in a completely new way. Simon Schama (1989, 123–130) has exemplified this duality through the first hot air balloon flight of the Montgolfier brothers from the gardens of Versailles in 1783: while the event indicated a vertical world-order—a display of scientific and technological advancement hosted by an enlightened autocrat and in the form of a vertical take-off—it also dealt a conceptual blow to verticality. The event was a democratic spectacle, perceived from the horizontal level of the palace environs by everyone irrespective of social standing. The revolution took the new order of things to their logical conclusion by making off with the king and creating the narrative of the nation, rather than the ruler, as the main agent of change. The dynamics of this would be demonstrated in the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. French propaganda used the concept of the nation to urge populations living within the Holy Roman Empire to throw off the imperial yoke; by the end of Napoleon’s reign it had recoiled and become a main vehicle for rallying popular support against the imperial power of France itself. The Holy Roman Emperor Franz II, who became the Austrian emperor Franz I in 1804, reluctantly accepted the emergence of an Austrian patriotic counter-rhetoric with himself cast in the role as a father-figure, exemplified in Joseph Haydn’s Volkshymne (1797), written in defiance of the French Marseillaise (Judson 2016, 89–102). A different but no less interesting case study can be found in Egypt. Here, Napoleon

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conducted a short and rather unsuccessful expedition in 1798–1799 with the aim of subverting British influence in a part of the Ottoman Empire that merely paid lip service to Constantinople. In a pamphlet that was circulated in Cairo, Napoleon tried to appeal to the “Egyptian people”, evoking their great past, blaming the local Mamluk rulers for their present sad condition and depicting himself as harbinger of a better future (Fauché 1799, 156–157). The poorly translated text achieved neither the desired circulation nor effect upon a largely illiterate population, but it already contained the main ‘buzz words’ that would characterize the nationalist rhetoric throughout the nineteenth century: the nation, understood as an organic collective; tyranny and mismanagement, seen as an external and hence temporary force; the promise of a greater continuity from a promising past through a troubled present to a redeeming future. Once it gained wide currency, it would be a political narrative with an almost explosive force.

The Early Nineteenth Century: Emergence of Habsburg and Ottoman Political Soundscapes As noted above, modernity can entail many things. If a state structure is considered modern when it has increased the outreach of its power apparatus and centre and reduced the number of middlemen and cases of indirect rule, then the Habsburg and Ottoman empires had already embarked on a transition into modern empires by the beginning of the nineteenth century. The so-called Josephinism, named after emperor Joseph II (r. 1765–1790), is a schoolbook example of enlightened top-down reform, aiming to increase state efficiency, outreach and sustainability from the imperial centre into the most remote and poor provinces of the Habsburg Empire. It envisioned ambitious societal changes including the abolishment of serfdom, the curbing of church authority, the emancipation of Jews and the use of German as the state language. The last attempt met with strong resistance in Hungary, whose elites pursued a Magyarizing agenda of their own, showing how language was becoming a mark of identity and vehicle of outreach at the same time (Eder 2006; Haarman 2019). The conservative ‘system’ of chancellor Clemens von Metternich (1773–1859), which would shape the Austrian Empire that emerged out of the Napoleonic wars, continued the absolutist trend of the Josephinismus in defiance of both local, traditional elites and a growing liberal discourse

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that envisioned political agency as belonging to the people (Judson 2016, 105–107, 131–134; Fillafer and Wallnig 2016, 33–35). Both facets of opposition would show their discontent in the unrest that broke out in the Habsburg monarchy in 1848. At first sight, the Ottoman Empire in the same period offers a very different picture. Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt was just one sign of its utter impotence: the Serbian uprisings (1801–1817), the Wahhabi insurrections (1802–1818) and the Barbary wars (1801–1815) all showed, in different ways, how far away it was from a monopoly on violence. Attempts to establish a new army that would be more efficient, better equipped, and under the direct control of the central authorities met with violent resistance from the Janissaries in the capital, which almost brought an end to the dynasty in 1807–1808 (Aksan 1999; Beydili 2001, 63–73; Hanioğlu 2008, 42–54). In the wake of Napoleon’s invasion, a breakthrough was achieved in Egypt as Mehmet Ali Pasha (1769–1849) curtailed the power of the Mamluks and embarked on a series of ambitious reforms of not just a military but also economic, medical and social nature. In the decades that followed, Egypt would act as a support, a challenge and a model for reformers in Constantinople (discussed by Stephan Guth and Madeleine Elfenbein in this volume with reference to the last half of the nineteenth century). Sultan Mahmud II (r. 1808–1841) eventually managed to break with two of the most powerful subgroups in his own capital: the Phanariotes, who were suppressed following the outbreak of the 1821 Greek war of independence, and the Janissaries, who were annihilated in 1826. Just as in the Habsburg case, resistance to the empire often kept coming from remnants of traditional elites who found modernisation threatening to their status and intrusive upon their own communities (an issue that figures in Ayşe Ozil’s chapter in this book). As already mentioned, however, reducing the intermediaries compels the ruler to adopt a much more direct approach to the subjects. Enforcing modernity from the top without at least the pretence of ideological support from those who are supposed to be modernized may reveal the state to be weak rather than strong.12 Resorting to the colonial narrative of the native or local subaltern as essentially passive and in need of 12  This was very clearly understood by one of Mehmed Ali’s officials, the Armenian Joseph Hekekyan who remarked in his diary that the brutal attempts to force the Egyptian fellahin to work in the cotton factories merely showed the limits of the state: the workers burned down the factory or fled to the desert. For a translation, see Amin et al. (2006, 41).

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modernization is possible only for as long as the preferential right of interpretation remains one-sided. But modernity did not only work from the top: the emergence of an interconnected and self-articulate bourgeoisie was a slow process in both the Habsburg and Ottoman empires but as Peter Judson points out, the quiescence of the Metternich era concealed a world of growing local cultivation, public organization and participation of women (Judson 2016, 134–145). Different but also similar patterns appear in Dana Sajdi’s (2013) recent study of historiographical production in the mid-eighteenth- to early nineteenth-century Ottoman Levant, where she detects social mobility, changing habits and individual self-articulation.13 In the Balkan areas, new power networks, centres of gravity and collective identities had begun to challenge the agendas of both empires: whereas the Ottoman Serbs had initiated their campaigns against local Janissary militias on behalf of the Sultan, the presence of a new self-conscious class of Serbs educated on the Habsburg side of the border transformed the objective of their struggle into one of national independence, which they were partly granted by the sultan in 1833—observed with growing concern from Metternich’s Austria.14 By that time, the Greek War of Independence had already shown in which direction the wind was blowing. Its tangible result was a modest one (a small state on the Peloponnese, ruled by a German prince) but its ideological reverberations were immense. It challenged the conservative balance of powers that had been established at the Congress of Vienna and generated narratives with which an entire generation of liberal Europeans would identify. As Metternich well understood, on a conceptual level it challenged Habsburgs as much as Ottomans because it drew on the same myth of a historical nation, restored from oppression and mismanagement to the new Golden Age, that Napoleon had tried to preach in Egypt and which two emerging movements of national unification—the German and Italian—would mobilize against Austrian rule (Siemann 2016, 647–652). On a slightly different note, it put British and Russian imperial interests at odds in the Eastern Mediterranean, highlighting a geopolitical conflict that had already been brooding for some time and which would come to a head over the question of the survival of the Ottoman Empire, and if (or

13  See also el-Rouayheb (2015) for a deepening perspective on the vitality of Muslim thought in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire. 14  See also Šedivý (2013).

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how) its dissolution ought to be hastened or avoided (Hopkirk 1990, 116–119, 149–164). Enlightened absolutism had been based on a hierarchical concept not only of government but also of culture and knowledge: both agency and the right to narrate it were limited. But as Metternich’s agents were hunting down German and Italian nationalists all over Europe and while Britain assisted the Ottoman state in its efforts to stabilize and regain control in the Eastern Mediterranean, the voices of a new, self-aware and increasingly vocal societal middle in both empires were already mixing with that of the state.

Narratives of Multinationalism in the Late Habsburg and Ottoman Empires: Some Preliminary Reflections This volume is devoted to two empires that, at about the same time, found themselves caught up with the challenge of narrating themselves with and against a variety of voices. The emphasis here lies on the word voices; for the last period of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires cannot—as little as their earlier periods—be described in absolute terms of imperialist or nationalist action and reaction. There were empires with nationalizing agendas and nations with imperial ambitions, and most of all their separation was not as ‘natural’ and ‘inevitable’ as teleological viewpoints would later have it seem. The nineteenth-century nationalists who invented their own narratives of popular reawakening and historical predestination—in which the multinational empires were seen as temporary constructions and artificial hybrids—ignored the fact that a diversity of languages, religions, customs and other national traits was a reality even among the states that claimed to represent unified nations. In Central and Eastern Europe as well as the Middle East only large-scale ethnic cleansing and population exchanges could (and later would) separate peoples who had been intermingled on a local level for centuries if not millennia. It is also important to note that only a few nationalists at the time when this volume begins entertained serious plans for such a breakup. National self-determination was a goal that rhymed with liberal concepts of progress but for several movements with such ambitions, both the Habsburg and Ottoman empires still appeared as instances through—and not against—which their aims might be realized, a wider framework from

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which their struggle for modernization and progress would ultimately benefit (see Philliou 2011, 152–169, Judson 2016, 155–217). By the time the empires broke up in 1918–1923 this had changed. As the chapters in this book will show, the road there was a winding and unpredictable one and still at the verge of their collapse—and after it—the empires were supported by people who knew no other belonging of nation than the imperial one. It is rather with regard to their own inner policies that a clear difference appears in this period. Already from the last decades of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire began to move away from the inclusive narrative of its early reform period and under the leadership of the Young Turks (1909–1918) it would be associated with what has been called the first genocide of the twentieth century. The Habsburg Empire, by contrast, despite being the breeding ground for the main genocidal ideologist of the same century, would sometimes be remembered as a bastion against the very forces that brought him to power. In the end, this ambiguity evokes not only the fact that the empire as a concept of all-encompassing power can be both peaceful and violent, it also breaks down the perceived dichotomy between empires and nation-­ states; an idea that is further developed by Salim Çevik in the subsequent chapter. For the nationalists, the nations to be born—or as Robert Musil put it, “the unredeemed nations” (Musil 1978, 517–522)—were paradises in the making, myths of the future. It was an apocalyptic narrative no less strong than the one provided by the religious movements of the ancient world, and it exhausted empires that operated not only on legitimacy from the past but also from the factual position of a complex present where they sometimes found themselves unable to live up to the expectations they faced. In the post-imperial era the roles swapped, and the empire came to stand for a reality different than the reality in the hands of the nation-states. Especially notable is how the last autocrats of both the Habsburg, Ottoman and Romanov empires would attain a saintly status among Catholic Christians, Sunni Muslims and Orthodox Christians, for which they represent martyrs of a greater salvation story in a world that had thoroughly devoted itself to godlessness. As we return to our own time, it may seem idiosyncratic how historical empires that were in reality characterized by a high degree of inner diversity can be used as sources of inspiration for political movements and ideologies that are openly intolerant, xenophobic and genocidal. But it manifests, once again, the apocalyptic logic of imperial narratives: whether

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by violent or peaceful means, they all strive to maintain a universal meaning in a world that is in a constant state of falling apart.

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Eder, Ulrike. 2006. “Auf die mehrere Ausbreitung der teutschen Sprache soll fürgedacht werden”: Deutsch als Fremd- und Zweitsprache im Unterrichtssystem der Donaumonarchie zur Regierungszeit Maria Theresias und Josephs II. Innsbruck: Studienverlag. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. 2000. Die Vielfalt der Moderne. Weilerswist: Velbrück Verlag. Elavi, Josette. 2018. Sennacherib, King of Assyria. Atlanta: SBL Press. Euben, Roxanne L. 2017. Spectacles of Sovereignty in Digital Time: ISIS Executions, Visual Rhetoric and Sovereign Power. Perspectives of Politics 15 (4): 1007–1033. Fauché, P.F. 1799. Correspondance de l’Armée françoise en Égypte interceptée par l’escadre de Nelson. Edited by P.F. Fauche. London: P.F. Fauche. Fillafer, Franz L., and Thomas Wallnig, eds. 2016. Josephinismus zwischen den Regimen: Eduard Winter, Fritz Valjavec und die zentraleuropäischen Historiographien im 20. Jahrhundert. Wien: Böhlau. Finkel, Irving. 2013. In The Cyrus Cylinder: The King of Persia’s Proclamation from Ancient Babylon, ed. Irving Finkel. London: I. B. Tauris. Forster, Greg. 2010. The Contested Public Square: The Crisis of Christianity and Politics. Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press. Fowden, Garth. 1993. Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2004. Qusayr ‘Amra: Art and the Umayyad Elite in Late Antique Syria. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Goez, Werner. 1958. Translatio imperii: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Geschichtsdenkens und der politischen Theorien im Mittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit. Tübingen: J B C Mohr. Gschwandtner, Franz, and Christian Gastgeber. 2004. Die Ostkirchen in Wien: Ein Führer durch die orthodoxen und orientalischen Gemeinden. Vienna: Styria. Haarman, Daniela. 2019. Die Ungarische Spracherneuerung. Einleitung in ein zentraleuropäisches Thema. In The 18th Century as Period of Innovation, ed. Harald Heppner and Sabine Jesner, 35–49. Graz: unipub. Hanioğlu, Sükrü M. 2008. A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire. Princeton: Princeton UP. Heilo, Olof. 2016. Eastern Rome and the Rise of Islam: History and Prophecy. Abingdon: Routledge. Herbers, Klaus, and Helmut Neuhaus. 2010. Das Heilige Römische Reich: Ein Überblick. Stuttgart: Uni Taschenbücher. Hingley, Richard. 2005. Globalizing Roman Culture: Unity, Diversity and Empire. Abingdon: Routledge. Hopkirk, Peter. 1990. The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia. London: John Murray. Judson, Peter M. 2016. The Habsburg Empire: A New History. Cambridge: Belknap.

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Kaldellis, Anthony. 2019. Romanland: Ethnicity and Empire in Byzantium. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Katsiardi-Hering, Olga, and Maria Stassinopoulou. 2011. The Long 18th Century of Greek Commerce in the Habsburg Empire. In Social Change in the Habsburg Monarchy, ed. Harald Heppner, Peter Urbanitsch, and Renate Zedinger, 191–213. Bochum: Winkler Verlag. Kaul, Christina. 1989. Die spanischen Juden (Sefardim) in Wien. Eine kulturgeschichtlich-­historische Betrachtung. Salzburg: Dipl.-Arb. Univ. Salzburg. ———. 1990. Die Rechtsstellung der türkischen Juden in Wien aufgrund der österreichisch-­türkischen Staatsverträge. Salzburg: Dipl.-Arb. Univ. Salzburg. Kosmin, Paul J. 2018. Time and Its Adversaries in the Seleucid Empire. London: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno. (1989) 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Latowski, Anne A. 2013. Emperor of the World: Charlemagne and the Construction of Imperial Authority 800–1229. Ithaca and London: Cornell University. Masters, Bruce. 2004. Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World: The Roots of Sectarianism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Morera, Dario Fernandez. 2016. The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise: Muslims, Christians and Jews under Islamic Rule in Medieval Spain. New  York: Open Road Media. Moss, Candida. 2013. The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom. New York: Harper Collins. Münkler, Herfried. 2007. Imperien: Die Logik der Weltherrschaft: vom Alten Rom bis zu den Vereinigten Staaten. Hamburg: Rowohlt. Musil, Robert. 1978. Gesammelte Werke: Der Mann Ohne Eigenschaften. Hamburg: Rohwolt. Newman, Andrew J. 2009. Safavid Iran: The Rebirth of a Persian Empire. New York: I B Tauris. Osterhammel, Jürgen. 2009. Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts. München: C. H. Beck. Philliou, Christine. 2011. Biography of an Empire: Governing Ottomans in an Age of Revolutions. University of California Press. el-Rouayheb, Khaled. 2015. Islamic Intellectual History in the Seventeenth Century: Scholarly Currents in the Ottoman Empire and the Maghreb. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Sajdi, Dana. 2013. The Barber of Damascus: Noveau Literacy in the Eighteenth-­ Century Ottoman Levant. Stanford: Stanford UP. Schäbler, Birgit. 2016. Moderne Muslime: Ernest Renan und die Geschichte der ersten Islamdebatte 1883. Paderborn; München; Wien: Schöningh. Schama, Simon. 1989. Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution. New York: Random House.

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Schäuble, Wolfgang. 2006. ‘Das Irreguläre am Reich im Lichte der regulären Europäischen Union’, Rede von Bundesminister Dr. Wolfgang Schäuble im Rahmen einer Vortragsreihe anlässlich der Ausstellung über das ‘Heilige Römische Reich Deutscher Nation 962–1806’ im Deutschen Historischen Museum am 4. Dezember 2006 in Berlin. Accessed March 8, 2020. http://www.wolfgangschaeuble.de/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/061204reich.pdf. Šedivý, Miroslav. 2013. Metternich, the Great Powers and the Eastern Question. Pilsen: University of West Bohemia. Siemann, Wolfgang. 2016. Metternich: Stratege und Visionär. München: C H Beck. Sizgorich, Thomas. 2009. Violence and Belief in Late Antiquity: Militant Devotion in Christianity and Islam. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Vergil. 1900. Bucolics, Aeneid, and Georgics of Vergil. Edited by J. B. Greenough. Boston: Ginn & Co. Voltaire [François-Marie Arouet]. 1878. Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations LXX, Œuvres complètes de Voltaire. Paris: Garnier Fréres.

PART II

Ottomanism Revisited: An Imperial Narrative of Many Voices

CHAPTER 3

Ottomanism and Varieties of Official Nationalism Salim Çevik

Introduction There is a powerful tradition in the scholarship of nationalism that makes a distinct contrast between empires and nation-states, where they are considered not just as antithetical but in fact are regarded as “mortal enemies” (Kumar 2010, 119). This polarization is based on the notion that empires and nation-states have fundamentally opposite ideologies. While defining an empire is a thorny issue, it is possible to state that in its ruling mechanisms and structures and with its cosmopolitan multi-ethnic and multi-­ religious nature, empires are political systems that are hierarchical, indirect and non-uniform and open to diversity. These features stand in stark contrast to the nation-state’s egalitarianism, direct and uniform means of rule, their tendency to homogenize, and the “one nation one state” principle. While empires are almost by definition heterogeneous and plural, the ideology of the nation-state strives for homogenization and unity. This

S. Çevik (*) German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP), Center for Applied Turkey Studies (CATS), Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Chovanec, O. Heilo (eds.), Narrated Empires, Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55199-5_3

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difference leads Benedict Anderson to point out the “inner incompatibility between empire and nation” (Anderson 1991, 93). The contrast that Anderson draws attention to and which is underlined by so many scholars in the literature of nationalism is certainly important, but there are also grey areas where it becomes blurred. In fact, the history of nineteenth-­ century empires demonstrates one realm that blurs this black and white division between empire and nation-state. During the nineteenth century, and throughout their drive for increased centralization, the empires that we are focusing on here gained some of the features of nation-states such as higher levels of egalitarianism, uniformity and direct rule. Esherick et al. (2006, 12–16) suggest that, by facing the threatening success of European nation-states, “the ruling elites [of empires] responded [to strains of modernity] with economic and political reforms akin to those of the nation-state projects of Western Europe, thus throughout the nineteenth century they displayed a pronounced trend toward national and ethnic self-definitions”. Attempts at nation-building by empires themselves thus constitute an exception to the general rule of directly contrasting the two (Ther 2015, 573), and it is this exception that this chapter deals with. More specifically this chapter aims to analyse these attempts in the context of the Ottoman Empire. According to Masami Arai (1991, 1), “from the beginning of the nineteenth century, in particular the age of Tanzimat onwards, most of the Ottoman reformers seem to have intended, consciously or unconsciously, to construct a nation-state from the various subjects of their empire. The idea of an Ottoman nation, or Osmanli milleti and millet-i Osmaniye, was born accordingly”. This chapter aims to analyse this process: the emergence of an Ottoman official nationalism, the unique challenges it faced, and its distinctive features by comparing them with the Ottoman past and with other imperial histories of the nineteenth century.1 In order to better understand this process, one needs to understand how empires deal with 1  It is highly debatable whether and to what extent this was a conscious process of nationbuilding. The earlier and more conventional historiographies tend to consider the reforms of the nineteenth century as deliberate attempts of nation-building whereas more recent revisionist works such as Topal’s contribution in this volume point to the contingent and convoluted nature of the process. Indeed, as various works on the origins of different nationalisms point out, nation-building is not always a conscious project but often emerges as an unexpected result of reforms aiming to strengthen and centralize the state. This article doesn’t specifically deal with these debates as its main aim is to comparatively analyse the tensions between social diversity and political centralization and how this tension impacts the emerging national project.

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diversity and how the management of this diversity and plurality was challenged and shaped by later attempts of centralization and modern state formation. Therefore, Ottoman nationalism is also explained through the changing dynamics of diversity and plurality throughout the nineteenth century. By bringing in experiences of other empires of the period these dynamics can therefore be contextualized.

Nationalism and Empires (Official Nationalism and Its Rivals) The problems of nationality in empires in general and the Ottoman Empire in particular should be considered from two different angles: firstly from the state’s desire to promote its own version of nationalism and secondly from the rival forms of nationalism emanating from its peripheries and often resulting in secessionist movements. It needs to be emphasized that neither the Ottoman Empire nor other empires in their classical form were multi-national states. Defining an empire before the nineteenth century as multi-national is anachronistic. As the classical empire belongs to an age before nationalism, a more correct label would be “non-national” or “a-national”. The nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of nationalism in two different and often rival forms; one coming from the state and aiming to transform its subjects into co-nationals and the other coming from a very limited segment of people aiming to create a state for those particular people conceived as a nation. Thus, throughout the nineteenth century the subjects of empires started increasingly to imagine themselves as members of a particular nation, while at the same time imperial institutions promoted an alternative national identity that would cover the entire empire. This second form of nationalism, which aimed at transforming the dynastic realm into one concept of nationhood, is defined as “imperial nationalism” (Ther 2015) or “official nationalism” (Anderson 1991, 83–112; Seton-Watson 1977). In the context of modern state formation, official nationalism aims to fully mobilize the energies of society in the service of the modern state without undermining the dynastic and patrimonial principles that formed the basis of their political legitimacy (Roshwald 2001, 8). Thus, the formation of an official nationalism within empire should be understood in the context of modern state formation and the age of nationalism. All empires of the nineteenth century, and indeed the

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eighteenth century—as in the case of the Romanov and Habsburg empires—were going through a process of administrative centralization. This process transformed the traditional organization of imperial societies that were based on a conglomeration of territories. The elimination of intermediaries and the move to a more direct control of the state over its subjects brought a certain administrative homogenization that inevitably also brought a cultural homogenization. However, Anderson rightly warns us that policies of centralization should not be confused with the policies of promoting an official nationalism. At least until the mid-nineteenth century, none of these centralization processes were based on an intention of nationalization. One of the clearest examples of this can be seen in the way that the Habsburgs turned to the uniform use of German instead of Latin during the late eighteenth century. As Anderson quotes from Jazsi, “the Habsburgs were not consciously and consequentially Germanizing power … There were Habsburgs who didn’t even speak German. Their measures were dictated by the intent of unification and universalism of their empire” (Anderson 1991, 84). However, as nationalism found an audience among the minorities of these empires (Ruritanians) the empires themselves (Megalomanians)2 undertook a conscious project of nation-­ building. Official nationalism refers precisely to attempts of transforming all the subjects of an empire into an all-inclusive imperial national identity. The aim was to compete with the nation-building processes of Western Europe and combine nationalization with the retention of dynastic power. Thus, according to Anderson (1991, 86), it developed after and in reaction to the popular national movements proliferating in Europe since 1820s. While nationalism constituted a fundamental challenge to every empire, the problem was more pronounced in the Ottoman context “because of the weakness of central control, the severity of socioeconomic problems, and the structural reality of an empire dominated by Muslims but well-nigh encircled by Christian powers” (Hanioğlu 2008, 51). This challenge coupled with the pressing need of centralization in the wake of 2  Ruritania is a fictional country in the novels of Anthony Hope. Ernest Gellner uses it as a metaphor for a peasant-based society living in the multi-ethnic empire of Megalomania. Nationalism develops first among this peasant society in the context of industrialization and urbanization of the empire. Accordingly, large-scale labour migration of Ruritanians to cosmopolitan cities dominated by Megalomanians results in an awareness among the Ruritanians of their distinct culture and language. For the parable of Ruritanians and Megalomanians, see Gellner (1983, 58–62).

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European political, economic, and military supremacy compelled the state elite not only to reform the state but also in a sense to “reinvent” it (Hanioğlu 2008, 41). This process included administrative homogenization, the increase of direct control and the elimination of intermediary power holders inevitably resulting in the need of a more egalitarian social system. This increased integration of state and society and the undermining of traditional power balances3 resulted in the search for a new structure and a political culture that could correspond to it (Karpat 1972). The overall restructuring of the state and society relations necessitated a new social contract fundamentally different from the centuries-old social system of the empire. Thus, the Ottoman social fabric—classically divided on two axes: a horizontal axis dividing the society into two social classes of a ruling elite and reaya, and a vertical axis dividing the society into separate and hierarchical existences of monotheistic religions (often referred to as the millet system)—had to be reinvented in more egalitarian and uniform ways (cf. the contribution of Topal in this volume). In fact, classical social organization was already obsolete: on the one hand Christian supremacy in commerce and education challenged the established hierarchies (Issawi 1982); on the other hand due to difficulties of sustaining the diverse and heterogeneous nature of society at a time of administrative homogenization, separate coexistence started to disintegrate. When Mahmud II declared that “From now on I do not wish to recognize Muslims outside the mosque, Christians outside the church, or Jews outside the synagogue” (quoted in Hanioğlu 2008, 74), he was hinting at the need of a new social organization. This search for a new social contract materialized for the first time in the declaration of Tanzimat in 1839.4

3  The traditional empire was based on a balance and hierarchy between various individuals, groups, and communities at different levels. On one level it is a hierarchical but separate coexistence of different religious communities. On another level, there is a power balance between the centre and the intermediaries, either as religious community leaders or as local notables. On an entirely different level, which is not discussed in this article, the power at the centre relies on a balance between the military, ulama, and the palace, which was challenged by the rise of a propertied class and a professional bureaucracy. 4  The Tanzimat Decree of 1839 was in reality instrumental, chiefly in accelerating the centralization and bureaucratization of the Ottoman Empire. As such it merely expanded upon and crystallized ideas and policies developed and implemented in the past (Karpat 1972, 258). But it also corresponds to the new ideological foundation of the reformed state-society relations. The reformers of the state, who by now were aware that these reforms also meant a complete transformation of the state structure and thus necessitated a new social contract

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This new social contract is based on the prioritization of state and direct allegiance to the state instead of to intermediaries: religious or otherwise. Thus, it can be considered as the first significant attempt in the formulation of an Ottoman nationhood that would include all subjects of the empire. As such it can be understood as an extension of Peter Sugar’s (1977, 34–43) category of “professional Ottomans” and thus could include the rest of the society as well. In that sense Tanzimat is the first step in a series of attempts to remove both the horizontal and the vertical axes that divided society and to bury these categories under the banner of the newly forming Ottoman nation.5 Therefore, Hanioğlu (2008, 74) defines the edict as “a significant first step toward the transformation of hitherto Muslim, Christian, and Jewish subjects into Ottomans”. The formation of the Ottoman nation is well reflected in the change of legal categories. A new legal category of ecnebi (foreigner) was introduced that could refer to all foreign nationals regardless of religious affiliation. As Anderson (1991, 6) mentions, unlike the universalist aspirations of empire and world religious systems, a significant aspect of nations (both as legal and discursive categories) is their “limited” ness.6 Thus, defining the foreign is essential for the construction of national, and ecnebi defines the limits (and the “other”) of Ottoman nationality. This was complemented with the introduction of Ottoman as a legal term “to replace the old distinction between Muslims and dhimmis (people of the book living under Muslim rule).7 Finally, the important designation of dhimmi was replaced between the state and society, formulated the decree as the first attempt to provide an ideological base for the new state-society relations. 5  Contrary to the common assumption, the Tanzimat Edict does not clearly refer to equality, but it promises the universal and equal application of new laws. Thus, it reveals a desire for establishing a single legal system which was already hinted by Mahmud’s statement above (Hanioğlu 2008, 73–74). The equality of non-Muslims and Muslims implied in the Tanzimat Edict was the main theme of the Islahat Edict declared in 1856. The process towards the emergence of a single legal system also means that administrative homogenization is coupled with legal homogenization. 6  It is this universalism of empires that enables and pushes them to tolerate diversity. In contrast the limited nature of nations and nation-states provides the necessary condition for homogenization. 7  Dhimmis pay an additional tax in exchange for the legal protection they receive. While technically dhimmi status is the privilege of the “people of book” in practice the distinction between non-Muslims who were people of book and other non-Muslims was effectively abandoned in the early history of Islam. Initially, the Zoroastrian population of Iran was accepted as dhimmi, based upon the similarity of their belief system to the monotheist ideals of the “religions of the book”. But it is with the acceptance of Hindus as dhimmis—a reli-

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by “non-Muslim Ottoman”. The Ottoman Law of Nationality of 1869 formalized these concepts (Hanioğlu 2008, 74). Although the Midhat Constitution declared in 1876 was quickly abrogated, it further defined the term “Ottoman”. “The eighth article runs as follows: all the subjects of the Ottoman State are termed Ottoman without exception regardless of their religion. The idea of an Ottoman nation was thus firmly and officially established” (Arai 1991, 3).8 Throughout the century, efforts to create a modern state continued and evolved hand in hand with related attempts to create a new social contract and find a new social balance. Thus, administrative, economic, and military developments and a search for a corporate political identity suitable for the new realities on the ground continued in a dialectic relation to each other. Put in different words: as the modern Ottoman state was being formed, qualitatively different from the pre-modern imperial structure of loosely connected territories and conglomerations of peoples, the inevitable result of this process was the evolution of a modern political ideology: Ottomanism (Osmanlıcılık). “The development of a distinct Ottoman identity was actively supported and cultivated by the Ottoman state both as a part of these reforms and as a way of strengthening them” (Kasaba 2006, 200). Thus, the promotion of this national identity in the Ottoman Empire, like in other empires, has two dimensions: first a reaction towards peripheral nationalism and second a consequence of centralization and modern state formation. Based on Anderson’s argument above, it is possible to claim that the project of building an Ottoman nationality was partly a reaction to the nationalist uprisings of the Greeks (1821–1829) and Serbians (1804–1835). The Ottomans themselves were influenced by the language and vocabulary used by the rebels (see Erdem 2005), particularly in their attempt to deal with the Greek Revolution which continued for nine years. During their experience of the Greek Revolt, Ottoman administrators realized that nationalism was a potent force to fight against, usually by adoption of the same tools used by their opponents (Erdem

gious group that clearly defies any conception of monotheism—that the word dhimmi practically became the equivalent of non-Muslim. For the historical evolution of the concept see Malik (1963, 301). 8  Devlet-i Osmaniye tabiyetinde bulunan efradin cumlesine herkangi din ve meshepten olur ise olsun bila istisna Osmanli tabir olunur.

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2005, 81).9 Yet, official nationalism in general and Ottomanism in particular, was not only a reaction to secessionist nationalism but it was also deemed a necessary consequence of social and political reformation. However, these attempts at an evolution of an all-inclusive Ottoman identity created the hitherto non-existent problem of the relationship between this larger identity and subcategories of identities, as well as the relationships between these subcategories themselves.

Diversity in the Age of Nationalism: From Being an Asset to Being a Problem Like most pre-modern empires the Ottomans also believed that “difference added to the empire, [it] didn’t detract from it” (Barkey 2008, 110). This attitude stands in stark opposition to European state-making, which resulted in the formation of modern nation-states. In Western Europe, the emphasis was on homogeneity rather than diversity and this homogeneity was considered a prime source of strength.10 With the idea of Ottomanism we can start talking about a nation project. As the evolution towards nationalization was primarily a result of the transformation of the definitive aspects of an empire towards the definitive aspects of a nation-state, the process is equally reflected in the changing nature of state-society relations and more particularly in the state’s approach towards diversity. In this process of nationalization, the state was transforming itself from the previous imperial structure, which was based on a conglomeration of territories connected to the centre in varying levels and ruled through intermediaries, towards a more centralized system in which the centre eliminated intermediary levels of those that held authority. As such, the previous imperial model, which enabled various kinds of rules and 9  Erdem (2005, 82) also quotes Mustafa Reshid Pasha defining Ottoman Empire as Turkistan right after the Greek independence. Yet this singular example should not be overstated since multiple examples prove that Ottoman administrators particularly when confronted with a nationalist uprising avoided the usage of national vocabulary either due to the existence of a traditional mindset or because of practical considerations. See Davison (1977). 10  Nationalism presupposes homogeneity as a virtue over diversity. According to Charles Tilly (1975, 79) this argument focuses on two key propositions: (1) a homogenous population is more likely to remain loyal to a regime led by members of its own community; and (2) the centralized policies of extraction and control were more likely to yield a high return to the government where the population’s daily life was organized in relatively uniform ways. Thus, a single successful policy could easily be generalized to all parts of a state.

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regulations, evolved towards more uniform rules and regulations. As the loosely held territories and subjects were constrained under the direct control of the modern state, the imperial society that was based on a hierarchical and cosmopolitan nature started to evolve into more egalitarian and uniform social relations. However, as the state managed to penetrate deeper into society, maintaining the acceptance of diversity became more and more difficult (Lieven 2000; Laitin 2009). Establishment of direct state control over subjects leads to administrative homogenization, which is also coupled with a certain degree of legal homogenization. Maintenance of social and cultural plurality in the face of increasing state interference and administrative homogenization is a challenge that all modern states face (see Young 1968), and the Ottoman state was no exception to this. As the Ottoman Empire evolved towards nation-ness, the most explicit manifestation of this transformation can be best observed in regard to attitudes towards diversity. As Barkey (2008) and Rodrigue (1995) point out, diversity was not only tolerated but also praised in the classical period that represented an imperial society. The most characteristic example of this attitude is the invitation by the Ottomans in 1492 to Jews from Spain, with the hope that these Sephardic Jews would help to advance trade with the empire. It was believed that the existence of diverse communities did not detract from the empire but contributed to its human resources. Compare this with Cevdet Pasha’s, a leading Ottoman statesman and scholar of the Tanzimat era, complaint on the diversity of empire: The lands of exalted state [of the Ottomans] do not resemble the lands of any other state. In its every corner, you can find unique conditions. No province resembles another province; nor does any given part of a province resemble another part of the same province. Therefore, it is impossible for a method of administration that might be conceived by the state to be applied equally and uniformly everywhere. (Quoted in Kasaba 2006, 203)

However, this pluralism was not regarded as a source of weakness in the classical period. Indeed, the strength of the Ottoman Empire depended not on the consistency of its practices and the uniform allegiance of its subjects, but on the fluidity, flexibility, and ambiguity, which were hallmarks of many of its central practices (Kasaba 2006). The classical empire lacked any sense of a uniform identity, or a uniform system of rule, or even a uniform system of education. Introduction of all these homogenizing tendencies clashed with the previous social and political categories, and in

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the nineteenth century these clashes had the potential to fire up to nationalist secessionism. One such category is the so-called millet system—the confessional organization of Ottoman society through autonomous millet bodies. While it is still a matter of debate when the millet system actually emerged and the extent of its institutionalization, these autonomous confessional bodies were crucial for the exceptionally successful management of religious diversity (see Braude and Lewis 1982; Kenanoğlu 2004 and Barkey 2005). However, in their desire to build an Ottoman nation, the Tanzimat statesmen were locked in a paradox of millets. The creation of an all-­ encompassing Ottoman nationality could only be built if the millet barriers were broken down. Thus following the Islahat Edict of 1856, they urged a reform of the millet system that eventually undermined the power of the clergy as the leaders of different millets (see Ozil in this volume). “With the Islahat Edict millets had become more of a purely religious organizations rather than dealing with all the aspects of the relation between the individual and the state”11 (Poulton 1997, 52). In doing so, however, the Ottomans weakened their traditional allies. The patriarchs were allies of the Ottoman Empire but they were not and could not be the allies of Ottomanism. They were targets of this transformation just like any other intermediary power holders, such as provincial rulers or ayans (local notables). “Even giving fixed salaries to Christian clergy was proposed which would transform them to state officials rather than community representatives”12 (Poulton 1997, 52). This is similar to the bureaucratization of provincial administration through administrative homogenization and just like the transformation of Vali (Governor) from a provincial intermediary towards a state official reflects the way the state dealt with intermediaries. However, while elimination of administrative intermediaries and their replacement by a central bureaucracy was successful in part, the same process was unfeasible or even destructive when extended to religious intermediaries.

11  For a detailed analysis of the Islahat edict and its impact on the status of the non-Muslims of the empire, please see the chapter by Ayşe Ozil in this collection. 12  This didn’t work primarily because the clergy rejected the idea because the Metropolitans were suspicious of the Ottoman bureaucrats’ intention of confiscating church property, especially real estate, in exchange for salaries. I would like to thank Dimitris Stamatopoulos for this insight.

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Ottomanism as a Form of Official Nationalism As already mentioned, the creation of a common imperial identity to overcome the challenges posed by diversity is a common feature of all modernizing empires. The idea is to balance the centripetal force of nationalism by a centrifugal force created by the imperial core. While this attempt to create official nationalism is widely recognized, the varieties of official nationalisms throughout the nineteenth century are seldom noticed. In fact, just as in any nation-building processes, these attempts took different shapes and variations throughout the process and often competed with each other as much as they competed with the peripheral nationalisms. In order to clarify the topic, I would like to delineate two prototypical versions of these imperial nationalisms: the Habsburg model and the Romanov model. I will argue that what is normally understood as the Official Ottoman nationalism, Ottomanism, had fluctuated between these two different poles. The Habsburg model is based on the “recognition of the multi-national character of the Empire and attempting to find Ausgleiche13 with and between its nationalities” (Ther 2015, 579). In contrast the Romanov model aims to create a single core nationality out of the diverse populations by a conscious policy of Russification. This is not to imply that neither the Habsburgs nor the Romanovs followed clearly identifiable or unique models. The Habsburgs turned to more centralizing policies during the 1850s following the 1848 revolts, while the Romanov policies of centralization and assimilation which were formulated by Kont Uvarov in the 1830s as “Autocracy, Orthodoxy and Nationalism” took real pace only after the 1863 Polish uprisings and more certainly after the 1880s, under the reign of Tsar Alexander III. However, apart from certain fluctuations and only to a certain extent, both empires followed these two different paths. Thus, Romanovs and Habsburgs can be considered as ideal type models in the promotion of official nationalism. The Ottomans followed neither way consistently and vacillated between the Habsburg model of federal plurality and the Romanov model of centralization and assimilation. This vacillation is most evident in their approach to the millet system, which simultaneously followed the contradictory policies of undermining millet boundaries in order to promote a sense of unity across the multi-faith society and policies of promoting and 13  Literally meaning balance, Ausgleich refers to the Austro-Hungarian compromise of 1867 which transformed the Austrian Empire into the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary.

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safeguarding the privileges and group specific rights of non-Muslim communities. Understandably, the peripheral powers opted for a more plural form of Ottomanism à la Habsburg while the central bureaucracy and particularly the Turkish element within the army inclined towards a more centralized system. The Bulgarian demands that the Ottoman sultan should be declared the Bulgarian Tsar certainly imitates the Ausgleich model. To transform the Ottoman state to a dual monarchy of Turkish and Arab kingdoms, a similar proposal would be raised later on. The assimilationist strand within the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), which considered Turks as the millet-i hakime (sovereign nation) and argued for the Turkification of Muslim elements, was the most extreme form of Romanov-style Ottomanism. The contribution of Russian immigrants in this strand of Ottomanism is also worth mentioning. In certain ways the trajectory of Ottomanism can be read within this dilemma and vacillation between the federative-pluralist Habsburg model and the centralist assimilationist Romanov model.14

Ottomanism Contextualized: From Tanzimat to Abdülhamid and Afterwards Despite the inconsistency of Ottoman administration in its application of official nationalism à la Habsburg or Romanov, one broad generalization can be made: through the historical process, the Romanov model gained ascendancy over the Habsburg version. It is possible to claim that despite apparent inconsistency, the Habsburg model dominated the Tanzimat era (1839–1876), while with the absolutist reign of Abdülhamid II a shift towards a more Romanov version of Ottomanism emerged in which Islam became the central pillar of official nationalism. The struggle between the different strands of official nationalism also dominated the opposition politics. The ideological split of CUP in 1902 into two different groups led by Prince Sabahaddin and Ahmed Rıza can better be understood as a split between two alternative forms of official nationalism.15 Within this 14  Here I am not implying that Ottomans consciously or subconsciously tried to follow or imitate Habsburgs or Romanovs, but that the two alternative approaches to official nationalisms available to Ottomans are best represented by these two empires. While the Romanovs and the Habsburgs can be considered as ideal type models in the promotion of official nationalism, the Ottoman case however lacked any such consistency. 15  For the detailed analysis of the 1902 Paris Congress of Young Turks and events leading to the split, see Ramsaur (2004, 81–133).

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split among the Young Turks, it is no surprise that non-Muslim elements sided with the decentralizing version of Sabahaddin while the Muslim and Turkish elements opted for a more centralizing version of official nationalism. While the evolution of Ottomanism in the years after 1913 towards a more assimilationist-centralizing version continued well through the CUP administration, the scope of centralizing and homogenizing tendencies of Ottomanism à la Romanov reached such an extent that Ottomanism irrevocably transformed into Muslim nationalism (Zürcher 2000). In order to understand the options available for Ottomanism and how and why Ottoman statesmen pursued a particular brand of it in contrast to other options, a quick look over the Habsburg and Romanov versions and the transformation of the Ottoman realm might be helpful. The difference in terms of the formulation of official nationalism among different empires is more a result of different conditions and different composition of the empires than being merely ideological. In the Habsburg Empire, Germans constituted only 23% of the empire’s overall population. Moreover, the Habsburg Germans were a minority among the Germans of Europe as the majority of Germans were living in the newly formed and bordering German nation-state. Thus, the Habsburgs did not and probably could not follow any policy of Germanisation. In contrast, Russians constituted more than 40% of the Romanov Empire and formed an important majority throughout the core regions of the empire (Lieven 2000, 181). Furthermore, unlike the Habsburgs, they were not threatened by any other state that would claim a rivalry of allegiance for its Russian population. This Russian population constituted a solid base to formulate policies of nationalization and assimilation. In terms of demographic diversity, the Ottoman Empire during the Tanzimat era resembled the Habsburg Empire more than the Romanov Empire. Moreover, Tanzimat statesmen, as contemporaries of Metternich, found in him their role model and ideologue. Metternich was struggling to maintain centralization without undermining the imperial-plural nature of the state. Thus, the problems facing the Habsburgs were more similar to the Ottomans and despite the common assumption of French influence on the Ottoman statesmen, at least for the Tanzimat statesmen, it is possible to say that the Habsburgs in general and Metternich in particular were more influential as a model (Ortaylı 1999, 240). However, we still cannot say that the Tanzimat statesmen entirely or consistently followed the Habsburgs. The common problem facing all empires was the difficulty in sustaining their mosaic character at the same

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time as pushing for an administrative unification. In order to overcome this, the Habsburgs followed a more federalist attitude, which aimed to preserve and coexist with diverse identities and communities under the banner of an inclusive Habsburg identity, while the Romanovs opted for a disproportionate centralization that aimed at transforming the empire into a typical nation-state based on state-nation congruence. Tanzimat statesmen never considered federalism as a valid alternative. For them federalism was a pretext for separation, and they resisted all such demands (Davison, 1977). As the Ottoman state had been exceedingly decentralized in previous centuries, the common theme of all the nineteenth-­ century reformers was the emphasis they placed on centralization. Indeed, this obsession with centralization created certain absurdities such as the creation of an agency for beggars (dilenciler kethüdası) in Istanbul that would function as a central body for all the beggars of the empire (Ortaylı 1999, 148). Thus, it is possible to say that while the diverse nature of Ottoman society was more suitable for a federalist-plural version of Ottomanism (the Habsburg model), the evolution of state organization and state-society relations were leaning towards a more centralizing assimilationist version (the Romanov model). In order to understand the Ottoman fear of federalism or decentralization, one also needs to mention the different characteristics of nationalist movements in the Habsburg and Ottoman territories. As Miroslav Hroch (2013, 195–196) points out, national movements in the Habsburg Empire, with the exception of the case of the Magyars, were not secessionist.16 These movements started with linguistic and cultural goals and when they later developed a political programme, these usually took the form of autonomy, not full independence. In contrast, almost from the beginning, most of the nationalist movements in the Ottoman Balkans aimed at statehood. Moreover, as Barbara and Charles Jelavich (1977) demonstrate, the excessive decentralization and decline of power of the Ottoman centre was in fact one of the primary factors that pushed rebellions seeking statehood. The power vacuum that emerged as a result of a de facto decline of Ottoman governance pressed the rebels to take the matter into their own hands and contributed to their secessionism. In this context a strengthening of the Ottoman centre was essential and pushed the Ottoman state elites to lean towards a Romanov model. 16  For an example, the essay by Milka Car in this book demonstrates it was only in 1918 that Jugoslav nationalism became the driving force in Croatia.

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In their attempt to promote their own form of official nationalism, Ottomans were doubly disadvantaged in regard to their contemporaries. Both the Habsburg and Romanov centralization attempts started much earlier than those in the Ottoman Empire. They entered the nineteenth century, the age of nationalism, with stronger and more centralized political bodies. Moreover, at least in terms of religious diversity, these empires were more homogenous than the Ottomans. The Habsburg dynasty had aligned itself with the Catholic Church since the wars of reformation and the founding of the empire (Jazsi 1961, 155–162). The Catholic Church remained the major centripetal force for the empire during the age of nationalism (even if it was by no means unaffected by the latter as shown by Scheer in this volume). However, since the eighteenth century it is true that Romanov expansionism had led them to include a substantial number of Muslims in the empire. Yet it is imperative to recognize that the Romanov policy of centralization and assimilation did not extend beyond the Ural Mountains where the majority of the Muslim population lived. Thus the Tsarist Empire had a double policy with regard to its subjects. The empire tried to create a nation-state from its Christian subjects through policies of Russification. Yet the recently conquered Muslim lands were treated pretty much as colonial possessions and thus the Muslims were excluded from the newly emerging nation.17 As the Christian populations were so widespread and were the majority in the most important European possessions of the empire, the Ottomans could not follow either policy. Indeed, in the empire, nationalism was primarily a “Christian problem” until the end of nineteenth century. Under these circumstances, the Ottomans vacillated between creating a common identity for all of their subjects and preserving communal differences. However the main features of the empire that pushed Tanzimat statesmen 17  As the empires of Europe transformed the imperial core into a nation-state while keeping their overseas possessions as colonial possessions it is indeed possible to claim that this was more or less a universal model. However, Romanovs were the first land-based empire that followed this double policy. To a certain extent the Ottomans also developed such a policy in their attitude towards the distant and peripheral Muslim elements at a later stage. Deringil’s (2003) article provides insights on the Ottoman state elite’s attitude towards the tribal populations of Libya considering them as primitive societies that needed to be elevated to the level of civilization through the civilizing mission of the Ottoman Empire. Erol Ülker’s (2005) important study on contextualization of Turkification during the CUP regime also points to a similar “double policy” where certain elements within CUP made a distinction between the imperial core (Anatolia) that needed to be homogenized and nationalized while the peripheral regions (Arab and Kurdish lands) were to be centralized but not necessarily Turkified.

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towards a more plural version of official nationalism (demographics and the crucial importance of Christians in the Ottoman state) started to change throughout the century. Their inability to develop a definition of Ottomanism that would convince the non-Muslim subjects to remain in the empire and the changing demographics of the empire starting with the 1878 War, but culminating in the aftermath of the Balkan Wars 1912 and 1913, finally led the Ottomans to increasingly define Ottomanism within a Muslim context and the imperial nationalism of the Tanzimat period started to evolve towards a Muslim nationalism. As the empire evolved more towards a clearer national definition, it also lost its imperial character, which enabled it to rule over and benefit from diversity. Thus, we can safely say that starting with the reign of Abdülhamid II, or more precisely following the 1878 War, Ottomanism started to gain a more Islamic character and the Ottoman nation increasingly meant Muslim Ottomans. The idea which was initially created as a measure to include all members of the society and significantly the Christians who had secessionist ambitions had narrowed itself as the inclusion of Christians became both impossible18 and perhaps to a degree secondary in importance. Once all Christian majority lands in the Balkans were lost after the Balkan wars, the new demographic and political configuration of the empire pushed for a Romanov-style official nationalism instead of a Habsburg style. Thus, the ideal Ottoman subject of the Tanzimat era, who was deprived of a religious denomination started to be defined through religious representation, and the initially secular concept of Ottomanism increasingly started to represent Muslim Ottomans.19 The narrowing of the original Ottomanist idea through the exclusion of non-Muslims in fact continued until the collapse of the empire. Abdülhamid’s major rival, the Young Turk movement, which in the end 18  It is therefore not a coincidence that the Hamidian era constituted a downward spiral of inter-confessional hatred and violence especially in Eastern Anatolia as it also witnessed the first massacres of Armenians. Michael Reynolds’ (2011) comparative study of the decline of the Ottoman and Romanov empires provides a wider context to these struggles as it demonstrates the mutual policies of the Romanov and Ottoman empires in playing out minorities against each other. 19  It is important to mention here that this emphasis on the Muslim nationalism is fundamentally different from policies of pan-Islamism often associated to Abdülhamid II.  The latter, at least in the Ottoman case, developed essentially as a foreign policy tool, while the former is designed to create a bond among the domestic constituencies during the age of nationalism.

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succeeded in overthrowing him, also based its political orientation on a Muslim nationalist Ottomanism excluding the non-Muslims of the empire. In fact, during the early days of their revolution in 1908 and in the hype of constitutional order, Young Turks officially declared their loyalty to an all-inclusive concept of Ottomanism formulated as ittihad-ı anasır (unity of different ethnic and religious elements).20 Yet in a similar fashion to the failure of the original Ottomanist project and a shift to Ottoman Muslim nationalism, they also based their practical policies, and in time even their discourses, on Muslim nationalism. Once again, the Muslim nationalism of CUP was partly shaped by the overwhelmingly Christian nature of separatist nationalism.21 Particularly following the Balkan War, the exclusion of non-Muslims from the national identity gained pace and a wholesale exclusion of Christian identity from the national identity started.

Conclusion Nationalism is constituted through the constant negotiation of its boundaries by including some groups, meanings, and practices and excluding others (Göçek 2002, 1). Thus since the first introduction of the concept of an Ottoman nation in the Tanzimat period, the meaning and boundary of this nation continuously shifted. The initial desire for an Ottoman nation that would include all the members of the state remained a constant hope for the state elites. However, through the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, Ottoman nationalism moved from a Habsburg model of official nationalism and became more narrowed down to a Romanov model of homogenizing nationalism. Eventually the Ottoman state transformed from being a Muslim dominated pluralist 20  Unlike the 1877 elections, the 1908 elections “eliminated the quota system in the hope for forging an Ottoman unity unless shackled by primordial attachments”. It was hoped that enforced centralization would maintain unity (Kayalı 1995, 281). 21  To the extent it existed, nationalism among the Muslims was limited to a very small elite and didn’t constitute an important political force. Traces of nationalist activity among Muslims were limited to movements of cultural and linguistic revivalism just as the start of the Nahdah movement did among the Levanten Arabs. These movements didn’t pose a significant threat to the territorial integrity of the empire and as Bruce Masters point out (2013, 19) “the empire came to an end in the Arab lands in 1918 with a long, painful sigh of a military retreat and not in an explosion of nationalist sentiment”. The only significant exception of nationalist political activity among the Muslims is the formation of the Prizren League in 1878. However, it emerged in the specific conditions of the 1878 War and mostly as a reaction to the Ottoman inability to protect Albanian lands from other Balkan states.

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empire into a Muslim nation-state. Thus, as the classical reaya were transformed into citizens, non-Muslims who were traditionally considered as members of certain millets increasingly became minorities in a nationalizing state and were more and more considered as obstacles in the formation of a homogenous nation. This fundamental difference vis-à-vis the classical empire resulted in their exclusion from the newly created national community: this process culminated into a decade of the promotion of religious homogeneity in many ways until 1924. War, deportations, ethnic conflicts-cleansings, and population exchanges were all different means through which the religious homogenization was achieved. Paradoxically, the exclusion of non-Muslims was accelerated and finalized under the secularist regime of the CUP. In its climax, the scope and brutality of this exclusion is unprecedented as the capacities available to the CUP leaders after a century of modern state formation were unprecedented as well.

References Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities. London: Verso. Arai, Masami. 1991. An Imagined Nation. Orient 27: 1–11. Barkey, Karen. 2005. Islam and Toleration: Studying the Ottoman Imperial Model. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 19 (1–2): 5–19. ———. 2008. Empire of Difference. Cambridge and New  York: Cambridge University Press. Braude, Benjamin, and Bernard Lewis, eds. 1982. Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society. New  York: Holmes & Meier Publishers. Davison, Roderic. 1977. Nationalism as an Ottoman Problem and the Ottoman Response. In Nationalism in a Nonnational State: The Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, ed. William W.  Haddad and William Ochsenwald, 25–56. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Deringil, Selim. 2003. ‘They Live in a State of Nomadism and Savagery’: The Late Ottoman Empire and the Post-colonial Debate. Comparative Studies in Society and History 45 (2): 311–342. Erdem, Hakan. 2005. Do Not Think of the Greeks as Agricultural Labourers. In Citizenship and the Nation-State in Greece and Turkey, ed. Faruk Birtek and Thalia Dragonas, 67–84. London and New York: Routledge. Esherick, Joseph, Hasan Kayalı, and Eric Van Young, eds. 2006. Empire to Nation: Historical Perspectives on the Making of the Modern World. Rowman & Littlefield. Gellner, Ernest. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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Göçek, Fatma Müge. 2002. Social Constructions of Nationalism in Middle East. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Hanioğlu, Şükrü. 2008. A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hroch, Miroslav. 2013. National Movements in the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires. In The Oxford Handbook of the History of Nationalism, ed. John Breuilly, 175–198. Oxford University Press. Issawi, Charles. 1982. The Transformation of the Economic Position of the Millets in the Nineteenth Century. In Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society, ed. Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis, 261–286. New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers. Jazsi, Oscar. 1961. The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Jelavich, Barbara, and Charles Jelavich. 1977. The Establishment of the Balkan National States 1804–1920. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Karpat, Kemal. 1972. The Transformation of the Ottoman State, 1789–1908. International Journal of Middle East Studies 3 (03): 243–281. Kasaba, Reşat. 2006. Dreams of Empire, Dreams of Nations. In Empire to Nation: Historical Perspectives on the Making of the Modern World, ed. Joseph Esherick, Hasan Kayalı, and Eric Van Young. New  York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. Kayalı, Hasan. 1995. Elections and the Electoral Process in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1919. International Journal of Middle East Studies 27 (03): 265–286. Kenanoğlu, Macit. 2004. Osmanlı millet sistemi: mit ve gerçek [Millet System and the Ottomans: Myths and Realities]. Istanbul: Klasik. Kumar, Krishan. 2010. Nation-States as Empires, Empires as Nation-States: Two Principles, One Practice? Theory and Society 39 (2): 119–143. Laitin, David. 2009. Empires in Macro Sociology. International Studies Review 11 (3): 615–617. Lieven, Dominic. 2000. Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals. New Haven: Yale University Press. Malik, Hafeez. 1963. Moslem Nationalism in India and Pakistan. Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press. Masters, Bruce. 2013. The Arabs of the Ottoman Empire, 1516–1918: A Social and Cultural History. New York: Cambridge University Press. ̇ ̇ Ortaylı, Ilber. 1999. Imparatorluğ un En Uzun Yüzyılı [Longest Century of the ̇ Empire]. Istanbul: Iletiş im. Poulton, Hugh. 1997. Top Hat, Grey Wolf, and Crescent: Turkish Nationalism and the Turkish Republic. New York: New York University Press. ̇ Ramsaur, E. Ernest. 2004. Jöntürkler: 1908 Ihtilalinin Doğuşu [The Young Turks: ̇ Prelude to the Revolution of 1908]. Istanbul: Pınar Yayınları.

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Reynolds, Michael. 2011. Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires 1908–1918. Cambridge University Press. Rodrigue, Aron. 1995. Difference and Tolerance in the Ottoman Empire. (Interview by Nancy Reynolds). Stanford Humanities Review 5 (1): 81–90. Roshwald, Aviel. 2001. Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires: Central Europe, Russia, and the Middle East, 1914–1923. London and New  York: Routledge. Seton-Watson, Hugh. 1977. Nations and States: An Enquiry into the Origins of Nations and the Politics of Nationalism. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Sugar, Peter. 1977. Southeastern Europe under Ottoman Rule, 1354–1804. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Ther, Philipp. 2015. Imperial Nationalism as a Challenge for the Study of Nationalism. In Nationalizing Empires, ed. Stefan Berger and Alexei Miller, 573–591. Budapest: CEU Press. Tilly, Charles, ed. 1975. The Formation of National States in Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ülker, Erol. 2005. Contextualising ‘Turkification’: Nation-Building in the Late Ottoman Empire, 1908–18. Nations and Nationalism 11 (4): 613–636. Young, Crawford. 1968. The Politics of Cultural Pluralism. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Zürcher, Erik-Jan. 2000. Young Turks, Ottoman Muslims and Turkish Nationalists: Identity Politics (1908–1938). In Ottoman Past and Today’s Turkey, ed. Kemal Karpat. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers.

CHAPTER 4

Ottomanism in History and Historiography: Fortunes of a Concept Alp Eren Topal

Introduction Ottomanism (Osmanlıcılık) is a key concept that modern historians use to explain the nineteenth-century Ottoman policy towards the subjects of the Ottoman Empire in general and non-Muslim subjects in particular. Since the 1990s, however, together with a revived interest and focus on the fate of non-Muslim subjects and Muslim-Christian relations in the final tumultuous decade of the Empire, Ottomanism has been a rather ubiquitous concept used to briefly explain pre-Hamidian Ottoman policies. Ottomanism is used, in its most general sense, for the project and or ideology of the unification of the various social elements (religious, ethnic, I would like to thank Einar Wigen, Yener Bayar, Özgür Türesay, Laura Goffman, Johanna Chovanec and Olof Heilo for their invaluable comments, and Gerda Henkel Stiftung for their generous post-doctoral scholarship which made it possible for me to write this article. A. E. Topal (*) Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Chovanec, O. Heilo (eds.), Narrated Empires, Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55199-5_4

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denominational, etc.) that made up the Ottoman Empire under the idea of a universal Ottoman citizenship and identity based on legal and political equality. For the better part of the nineteenth century this project is assumed to have informed and motivated Ottoman policy making (see Somel 2001; Erdoğdu 2008). However, for the curious who would like to trace its genealogy, the further one goes back in history, Ottomanism appears as a concept that is shrouded in a thick fog of scholarly rumour with little or no evidence to support it. While post-1908 debates around Ottomanism, Turkism and Islamism, the three rival “ideologies,” are covered quite extensively in scholarship (see, for instance, Vezenkov 2009, 2013), one would be hard pressed to find a proper account of the actual term’s history or evolution through the nineteenth century. Those few that are available provide a sweeping narrative, which subsumes any and every policy regarding non-Muslims from the reign of Mahmud II (r. 1808–1839) to that of Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–1909), under the banner of Ottomanism without any textual evidence (see Somel 2001; Erdoğdu 2008). General accounts of nineteenth-century Ottoman history, on the other hand, make note of Ottomanism only in passing as a guiding principle of Ottoman government, with different accounts identifying different points of inception. It would be revealing to list what some of those sources say about Ottomanism in chronological order. Contributors to the earliest collection of scholarship on the Tanzimat published by the Ministry of Education are in agreement that the Tanzimat project promoted Ottomanness and was tolerant towards non-Muslims and aimed to create a common identity (Maarif Vekaleti 1940, 47, 445, 459). One contributor traces it back to the pre-Tanzimat policies of Mahmud II and his approach to religious diversity in the Empire (Maarif Vekaleti 1940, 630). Halil Inalcık’s doctoral dissertation Tanzimat ve Bulgar Meselesi similarly highlights Ottomanism as the most central concern of the Tanzimat government and marks the proclamation of the Tanzimat in 1839 as its inception, arguing that the Edict had professed the project of granting legal equality (1992 [1942], 4–5). Inalcık also insists that Ottomanism was not merely a policy forced on the Ottoman Empire by the Great Powers; it was embraced by Ottoman statesmen themselves. Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, in his survey of the nineteenth-century literature defines it as the official axis of Ottoman intellectual life after the 1856 Reform Edict (Tanpınar 2006 [1949], 147). Bernard Lewis discusses Ottomanism only in relation to the early twentieth-century ideological factionalism among the Young Turks

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and Unionists, mentioning in passing that Ottomanism was an “aspiration of the nineteenth century liberal reformers” (1968 [1961], 326–327). Niyazi Berkes, on the other hand, marks 1867–1868 as the inauguration of “pan-Ottomanist” policy as a reaction to the rekindling of the Eastern Question and points to the establishment of Galatasaray High School (Galatasaray Lisesi), the first “mixed” school in the Empire, as an evi̇ dence of that (Berkes 1998 [1964], 189). Ilber Ortaylı argues that the Tanzimat statesmen were Ottomanists, similar to the Kaiserreich Nationalismus [sic] of the Austrian Empire, reacting to the French Revolution rather than being inspired by it (1983, 89–90). Erik Jan Zürcher also discusses the issue only in relation to the early twentieth-­ century ideological debates (2017 [1993], 126–127). Şükrü Hanioğlu, however, repeatedly emphasizes that Tanzimat statesmen were committed to Ottomanism as “the official ideology” of the empire, and a rational and secular one at that (2008, 37, 76, 99, 104–106). I should emphasize that in all the above examples, scholars do not spare more than a few sentences, and even from this limited sample it is clear that Ottomanism is either explicitly argued or implicitly assumed in passing, to be a guiding principle or an ideology of Tanzimat government. Historians do not produce any evidence from official documents or literary production of the era, with the exception of a quote from Mahmud II, the Gülhane Rescript of 1839 and the Reform Edict of 1856 as will be explained further below. Beyond this ambiguity in the secondary literature, it must be pointed out that Osmanlıcılık is not a word that was ever used in nineteenth-­ century printed documents or other archival sources. As historians we use it, but the sources do not. Of course, the lack of the word does not necessarily mean the lack of the concept; we could be dealing with a Minervian concept,1 that is, a concept that existed in discourse for a while before someone coined a single term to define it, or, alternatively, the concept may have been in circulation under different names or labels. As I will demonstrate, Ottomanism is indeed a Minervian concept, which acquired a name only in the early twentieth century to define an aggregate of concepts that had been formerly used for more limited notions. For instance, Ottomanness (Osmanlılık) and Ottoman union (ittihâd-ı Osmanî) were both used occasionally after 1870, but these concepts did not carry the full 1   The credit for coining the term “Minervian concept” belongs to my colleague Einar Wigen.

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weight of “Ottomanism” as an official ideology of the Empire, and they were used almost exclusively by various oppositional movements such as Young Ottomans and Young Turks against the policies of the Ottoman government. Osmanlılık was used to define the sense of belonging one could feel in relation to the “Ottoman nation” whereas ittihâd-ı Osmanî was connected to the cause of the unification of the collapsing elements of the Empire itself. The lack of the word Osmanlıcılık in nineteenth-century documents naturally raises certain questions regarding the accuracy of the label and its general applicability. After all, we occasionally see historians taking similar concepts for granted in explaining various aspects of Ottoman history without much regard to their historicity. For instance, another concept that is quite relevant for any discussion of Ottomanism, the (in)famous “millet system” for managing Ottoman religious diversity prior to the Tanzimat, has been shown to be a product of modern scholarship in order to define various early modern Ottoman practices that may or may not (probably the latter) have been motivated by the same logic (see Braude 1982; Philliou 2011a). Benjamin Braude demonstrates that, prior to the Tanzimat, Ottoman official documents very rarely, and even then, in exceptional contexts, used the term millet in reference to the non-Muslim communities of the Empire. On the contrary, millet seems to have been a term reserved exclusively for the Muslim community and the millet system a product of Tanzimat policies whereby Ottoman government tried to manage the diversity through religious communities (cemaatler) (see also Stamatopoulos 2006). This, of course, raises another question regarding Ottomanism: if Tanzimat policies inadvertently or deliberately led to a crystallization of religious communities as administrative units, then how, if at all, can this be reconciled with Ottomanism as an overarching explanatory framework? The way Ottomanism is used in the literature as an explanatory category includes several problematic assumptions, even without taking into account the historicity of the concept. First, it does not recognize the contingent and contested nature of Ottoman reform in the nineteenth century and brings together various decisions and rulings so that they appear as part of the same ideological force (see Topal 2017; Brisku 2018). These various instances are clearly interpreted in a teleological fashion and superimposed on each other. One of the most obvious examples of such superimposition is the frequent attribution of the introduction of legal equality (müsâvât) to the Gülhane Rescript although the document does

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not use the word and does not promise anything beyond the universal exercise of justice to all subjects regardless of religion or denomination ̇ (see Inalcık 1992, for instance). On the other hand, those historians who note the absence of the word “equality” interpret it away with remarks on how equality was in the spirit of the document or how it was worded somewhat ambiguously (see Somel 2001; Zürcher 2017, 51). Such interpretations imply teleology and such narratives ignore the convoluted process of Ottoman reform. At times, any and every reform policy with regard to the non-Muslims leading up to and during the Tanzimat era is considered as a step on the way to Ottomanism. Recent scholarship has repeatedly challenged such teleological accounts, emphasizing instead the contingent, contested and convoluted nature of Ottoman reforms (see Abu-Manneh 2015; Brisku 2018; Koçunyan 2018; Philliou 2011b; Topal 2017). Another major problem is that the literature ignores the ideological, political and material rivalries within the Ottoman government and imagines a uniform government apparatus governed by a uniform idea, and consistent both in and across time. Granted, one could still talk about Ottomanism, not as an official ideology but as an emergent identity or notion (Ottomanness, Osmanlılık) as a consequence of, or reaction to Tanzimat policies regardless of the intentions and motivations of Ottoman decision makers. For instance, Johann Strauss observes the disappearance of derogatory expressions from the Ottoman official language and emergence of more politically correct expressions with regard to non-Muslims after the Reform Edict (2002). Or Özgür Türesay notes that until the 1880s, “Ottoman” was also the name of the gradually vernacularized official language of the Empire (lisan-ı Osmanî), until at that time it was gradually replaced by “Turkish” (lisan-ı Türkî) (2008, 510–515). However, current injudicious use of the concept fails to address such distinctions. Moreover, it does not account for the explicitly and demonstrably Ottomanist project of the Young Ottoman opposition to the Sublime Porte from the mid-1860s onward (see Rahme 1999). The Young Ottomans, a loose alliance of Ottoman intellectuals who campaigned for a representative government and led the constitutionalist cause from 1867 to 1876, also called for a common Ottoman identity and nationhood while they heavily criticized the policies of the Sublime Porte in managing Ottoman diversity. For Ottomanism to have analytical use and explanatory power, it would also have to account for such contention and divergence.

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My main point here is that we need to be conscious of the difference between our historiographical categories and the concepts used by historical actors in relation to their actions. As argued elsewhere, using conceptual history following either Reinhart Koselleck or Quentin Skinner allows us to historicize concepts, and be more attentive to the semantics of the historical actors and further refine our analytical categories (Topal 2017; Wigen 2018; Topal and Wigen 2019). As such, I will present a brief history of the concept of Ottomanism in late Ottoman texts and establish a tentative timeline for this elusive concept. After that, I will provide a sketch of the Ottomanist project of the Young Ottomans and their criticism of the policies of the Sublime Porte through their essays in the newspaper Hürriyet (1868–1870). My argument is that it would be more meaningful to trace and attribute Ottomanism to the Young Ottoman movement in the mid-1860s, since it was their ideas that drove constitutional movement under Midhat Paşa’s banner in the 1870s when the Ottoman state officially admitted its subjects to be Ottomans. However, for the better part of the Tanzimat, it is highly problematic to identify Ottomanism as an official ideology of the Sublime Porte. In addition to the lack of textual evidence, the main body of policy evidence proposed for Ottomanism, starting with the Gülhane Rescript of 1839 and including the Reform Edict of 1856 and 1869 Law of Subjecthood, Ottoman Tanzimat policies each appear to have been driven by different concerns embedded in the immediate problems of the Empire. Only later, historians have come to interpret them to have been motivated by a concern over creating a national identity. A pervasive leap in these arguments is the equation of Ottomanism with the concept of equality and reform regarding non-Muslims.

Genealogy The first reference to Ottomanism as Osmanlıcılık I could locate is in a short essay by Ziya Gökalp (d. 1924), the leading intellectual of Turkism, in 1913, in the journal Türk Yurdu, where he presents Ottomanism, Turkism and Islamism as competing projects (Gökalp 1913). Although several other mainstream periodicals and sources I have scanned from the post-1908 period have not produced any result, the matter-of-fact way Gökalp uses the term suggests the word already had some prior currency. Besides, he was actually drawing on the threefold classification proposed by Yusuf Akçura (d. 1935), another leading Turkist intellectual, for the

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first time in 1904, in the famous treatise Üç Tarz-ı Siyaset (Three Modes of Politics) published in Egypt (Akçura 1995). However, Akçura does not actually use the word Osmanlıcılık, although he clearly defines the concept when he writes about the project of “creating an Ottoman nation” (millet­i Osmâniye ihdâsı) as opposed to the other two modes: Turkism which he defines as the idea of “instituting a Turkish political nation based on race” (ırk üzerine müstenid bir Türk milliyyet-i siyasiyyesi) and Islamism “called Panislamisme by the French.”2 His elaborate definition of this project, which will only later came to be labelled Osmanlıcılık, is as follows: granting the same political rights and duties on the Muslim and non-Muslim population in the Ottoman realms and thus establishing perfect equality among them, to grant total freedom of thought and religion, to unite these peoples in spite of the ethnic and religious differences between them by building upon this equality and freedom, to create a new nationality, an Ottoman nation, united in a common fatherland through representation like the American nation in the USA, and as a consequence of all these difficult operations, to preserve the Ottoman State in its original state, that is, in its old borders. (Akçura 1995, 17–18)3

Akçura traces the idea to the early nineteenth century citing the (in) famous quote from Mahmud II, which has later become the cornerstone of any discussion of Ottomanism: “I would like to see the religious differences of my subjects only when they are in their mosques, churches and synagogues.”4 Akçura further claims that, inspired by the example of Europe, Mahmud II and his followers wanted to establish an Ottoman citizenship based on equality, and this policy reached its prime during the  All the translations are my own unless stated otherwise.  “Maksad-ı aslı Osmanlı memleketindeki müslim ve gayr-i müslim ahaliye aynı hukuk ve vezâif-i siyasiyye bahş ve tahmil eylemek, böylece aralarında müsavât-ı kâmile husûle getirmek, efkâr ve edyânca serbestî-i tam vermek, işbu müsâvât ve serbestîden istifade ederek, mezkûr ahaliyi aralarındaki din ve neseb ihtilafâtına rağmen yek-diğerine mecz ve temsil ile Amerika Hükümât-ı Müttehidesi’ndeki Amerikan milleti gibi vatan-ı müşterekle birleşmiş bir milliyet-i cedide, Osmanlı milleti meydana çıkarmak ve bütün bu müşkil ameliyyâtın neticesi olarak da, Devlet-i Aliyye-i Osmaniyye’yi şekl-i zâhirî-i asliyesiyle yani eski hudûdlarıyla muhafaza eylemekti.” 4  “Ben tebaamdaki edyân farkını, ancak câmi, havra ve kiliselerine girdikleri zaman görmek isterim…” It would be an interesting pursuit to trace this quote to its original source, although I have not seen it cited before Akçura. In any case, the scholarship seems to have reproduced Akçura’s account verbatim. 2 3

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reign of Âli and Fuad Paşa, two Ottoman bureaucrats who held a monopoly over the Ottoman government for more than a decade following the proclamation of the Reform Edict to 1870. Although he recognizes that Midhat Paşa, the leader of the first constitutional movement in 1870s, followed them in this policy, he considers Midhat’s efforts ephemeral and the programme of the Young Ottomans supporting him rather vague, which, in turn, he cites as the main reason why Ottomanism eventually failed, to be replaced by Islamism. That we find the earliest definitions of Ottomanism in the writings of Akçura and Gökalp, two official fathers of Turkish nationalism, is in itself quite meaningful. In their effort to promote Turkism as the only viable path, both figures contribute to a narrative of failed Ottomanism, a concept they named themselves. In other words, they declare it to be dead the moment they give it a name. Needless to say, their definition and criticism should be taken with a grain of salt. Earlier Young Turk publications do not use the word Osmanlıcılık. Not to be confused with the Young Ottomans (1867–1876) in whose steps they followed, Young Turks (1890–1908) were a small group of bureaucrats who opposed Hamidian absolutism and requested the restoration of the constitution. In the core Young Turk journal, Mechveret (1895–1898), published in Europe, we come across the occasional use of Osmanlılık (Ottomanness) in reference to a common Ottoman identity, as well as the concept “Ottoman nation” (millet-i Osmaniye) (see Mechveret in Coşkun 2006, 144, 330, 397, 413). However, in the Young Turk use of the term Ottomanness, the emphasis seems to be on the concept of union (ittihâd) in response to the imminent separation of non-Muslim elements, particularly the Armenians, whose revolutionary committees were a constant topic of debate at the time, due to the ongoing unrest following the massacres of Armenians in Eastern Anatolia from 1890s onwards. Although the Young Turks championed equality (müsâvât) and freedom (hürriyet), their Ottomanist project rested on the concept of ittihâd (union), which in turn would help decide the name of the Committee of Union and Progress. It also makes sense in this context that Ottomanism was a loose set of concepts and projects without a single name until very late in the nineteenth century, only to be labelled later as Osmanlıcılık by the Turkists, linked with arguments for its failure. Until the gradual emergence of a Turkist programme in the early 1900s, an Ottoman nation was practically

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the only option without any alternatives from which it would need to be distinguished. From the side of the state, we find the first official and public declaration of the project of creating an Ottoman nation based on equality in the inaugural speech of Abdülhamid II (read aloud by Said Paşa) for the first Ottoman Parliament in December 1876. After praising the new constitution and talking about its intended benefits, Abdülhamid’s speech reads: Besides its essential regulations, the aim of the Constitution is to spread the principles of union and fraternity among the peoples and constitute an army of brothers to protect first and foremost our law and the prosperity of our people. For, our great ancestors have brought together many peoples under their rule in this vast country through their conquests. It became incumbent upon us to bind these peoples of many different religions and races to a single law and a common feeling […] From now on, all our subjects are the children of one fatherland and they shall live under the auspices of one law and they will be called by the name of our glorious dynasty of six hundred years… that is Ottomans. (Us 1939, 9–10)5

The Sultan’s inaugural speech also invokes the “prerogative of freedom and equality” (hukuk-ı hürriyet ve müsâvât). Although there is little chance that Abdülhamid wrote the speech on his own (Midhat Paşa is a usual suspect), this does not subtract anything from the performative quality of the speech in proclaiming one Ottoman nation. Abdülhamid II suspended the constitution and the parliament after six months and set out on an absolutist path that would last three decades.6 Still, however short-lived the first constitutional experience may have 5  “Kanun-ı Esasî kavâid-i asliyesinden başkaca beyne’l-enâm husûl-i ittihâd ü uhuvvet esasını temhîd ve halkça bir ömr-i saadet ve evvel-be-evvel hukumuzun vikayesi için ordu-yı uhuvvet tesis eylemek maksadını dahi câmidir. Çünkü ecdâd-ı izâmımız muvaffak oldukları fütûhât ile bu devlet-i vesiatü’l-memâlikte birçok akvâmı taht-ı hükümetlerinde cem ettiler, fakat edyân ve ecnâsca bu derece muhtelif olan işbu akvâmı bir kanun-ı münferid ve bir hiss-i müştereke raptetmek emrinin icrası kalmış idi […] Bundan böyle kâffe-i tebaamız bir vatanın evladı olarak ve cümlesi bir kanunun cenâh-ı himâyeti tahtında yaşayarak altı yüz bu kadar seneden beri hanedan-ı saltanatımızın unvanı olan ve sahâif-i tevârihte bunca âsâr-ı şevket ü şanı mazbut bulunan nam ile yad olacaklardır.” 6  Modern historiography is generally in agreement with Akçura that Abdülhamid forsook Ottomanism and opted for a pan-Islamist policy instead. Although there is an abundant literature on pan-Islamism in contrast to Ottomanism, I believe the concept (pan)Islamism needs its own conceptual history which would require a much more concerted effort between the historians of Ottoman Empire, Arab Nahda and Islam in Southeast Asia.

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been, official admittance of the concept of an Ottoman nation under one rule and one law subject to equality and freedom can be traced to this moment. The concepts used bear the unmistakable stamp of Young Ottoman discourse, which had been at work for about a decade, both at home and abroad, sowing in the public sphere the idea of a representative constitutional regime. Such concepts had been publicized through a loose network of journalists and public intellectuals in newspapers such as ̇ ̇ Hürriyet, Muhbir, Ibret, Hadîka and Istikbâl and the concepts had begun to seep into official discourse by the mid-1870s. An interesting manifestation of such discourse and an evidence of the ̇ power of the concept at the time is found in Üss-i Inkılab (Principles of Revolution), published in 1877 soon after the promulgation of the Constitution, by Ahmet Mithat, the famous Ottoman journalist and man of letters. Abdülhamid II commissioned the work and it covers Ottoman reforms from the Crimean War to the Constitution in an attempt to justify them. Ahmet Mithat defines Ottomanness (Osmanlılık) first as “one’s primary political allegiance being to the Ottoman dynasty” and later as the “dictum of tying a people consisting of various races (ecnâs) to a nationality (milliyet) and a political fraternity (uhuvvet-i siyasiye)” (Ahmet Mithat 2013 [1877], 23–35). In an interesting twist however, Ahmet Mithat argues that this sense of Ottomanness had been there since the inception of Ottoman state and it was, in fact, the source of the greatness and longevity of the Empire itself. It seems that, only a few months after officially proclaiming universal citizenship under the banner of Ottoman dynasty, Abdülhamid was already investing in a narrative whereby Ottoman subjects had always embraced it as an identity.

The Question of Equality Still, the question remains: to what extent did the Ottoman government embrace such a concept of Ottoman nationhood, and did such a concept, in fact, inform Ottoman policy making before the 1870s? By tracing the Ottoman quest for equality and universal citizenship to Mahmud’s policies and the Gülhane Rescript, scholarship on Ottomanism reproduces Akçura’s account almost verbatim (see Somel 2001; Erdoğdu 2008). As I noted above, the canonical scholarship on the Ottoman nineteenth century is also either silent or highly vague about this question. The gist of the problem here seems to be the equation of reform regarding non-­ Muslims and particularly introduction of legal equality with Ottomanism.

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The principle of legal equality was introduced for the first time with the Reform Edict of 1856 in order to procure better results in the Paris Peace Conference which ended the Crimean War of 1853–1856. The Edict was later cited in the Paris Treaty, thus tying Ottoman domestic reform to an international treaty. Koçunyan (2018, 70–93) demonstrates in detail the negotiations between the European ambassadors and the Sublime Porte, as well as the Porte’s willingness to proclaim the Edict instead of being forced to adopt it through Paris Conference and thus saving face and a blow to its image as a sovereign state. Mustafa Reşid Paşa, who is generally hailed as the architect of Tanzimat, personally wrote a memorandum to the Sultan, criticizing the form and substance of the Edict for overriding six hundred years of Ottoman tradition (Reşid Paşa 1887, 53–73) by introducing equality of the ruling people (millet-i hâkime) and the ruled (millet-i mahkûme) in an abrupt fashion. While he recognizes the necessity of reform with regard to non-Muslims, he argues it should have been introduced gradually and without binding it to the international treaties. The opposition of Reşid Paşa to the Reform Edict may partly be traced to his grudge against Âli and Fuad Paşas who had recently sidelined him in the Sublime Porte using their ties with French diplomats, but this merely helps reinforce the contingent and contested nature of Ottoman reform between European pressure, domestic demands and factional rivalries. Moreover, although the Reform Edict of 1856 introduces equality as a key concept, legal equality is not tantamount to Ottomanism. As we may recall from American history, one can imagine being “separate but equal.” This is not to argue for an explicitly segregationist policy in the Ottoman Empire of course. Muslims and non-Muslims were both horizontally (such as, in urban space) and vertically (social and political hierarchies) segregated in the Ottoman Empire until the Reform Edict, and the Sublime Porte seems to have been invested in maintaining and regulating the horizontal segregation while reducing the vertical one. As also discussed by Ayşe Ozil in this volume, the negotiations preceding the Edict show that the Sublime Porte clearly wanted to preserve the communal structure of the Greeks, reinforcing the authority of the patriarchate over the community and its role as an intermediary between the Porte and the community, a motivation shared by the Patriarchate as well (Koçunyan 2018, 81–82). Similarly, while granting legal equality to all Ottoman subjects on paper, the Reform Edict does not profess any motivation for the unification of subjects under the banner of Ottoman identity and even introduces immediate exceptions to the rule of equality such as allowing

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non-Muslims to avoid conscription via an annual tax. This was highly ironic considering that the Edict had abolished the poll tax on non-­ Muslims (cizye) following the principle of equality; the annual tax to avoid conscription was essentially another cizye (Onaran 2018, 197). From the introduction of compulsory military service in the Empire in 1828 until the collapse of the Empire, conscription of non-Muslims was a constant question. In fact, it was one of those issues, which say the most about Ottoman government’s policies regarding non-Muslims. For instance, Cevdet Paşa’s account of a discussion when the Sublime Porte entertains the idea of conscripting non-Muslims during a campaign, in 1864, is highly revealing for the simple and immediate motivations behind Ottoman policies (Cevdet Paşa 1980, 113–115). When the matter is brought to debate in a council due to falling draft numbers, he himself objects to the proposal by pointing out the difficulty of having religious personnel for each different confessional group within the army and finding common motivators to rally the soldiers. He considers the option of replacing concepts such as gaza and jihad with vatan (fatherland) but then reminds the audience that, for an Ottoman commoner, vatan is simply his village and it would take decades to instil the concept of vatan as a greater community if that was desired. Another example of teleological interpretation is the oft-quoted phrase by Mahmud II cited above, for which no context is provided. His reign has been one of the least explored and most poorly understood eras of Ottoman historiography, “a lacuna between the two disjointed interpretive frameworks of Ottoman sovereignty—the classical/post-classical framework and the retrospective teleology of modernization” (Philliou 2011a, 144). The quote from Mahmud might as well be interpreted in the context of Ottoman centralization and subsequent crystallization of the millet system. Last but not the least, recent scholarship has even questioned the 1868 Ottoman Law of Subjecthood and argued that the motivation behind the legislation had nothing to do with Ottomanism, rather it was intended to deal with an administrative issue, that is, the problem of Greeks who held dual passports (Torunoğlu 2018). I should stress once again that Ottoman official documents seem to avoid any mention of Ottomanness as an overarching identity even in those texts that bring up the issue of equality prior to the Constitution of 1876. This is despite the fact that clear proposals for Ottomanism came from several European actors at different times. For instance, Thouvenel, the French ambassador to Istanbul, suggested in 1856 during the

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negotiations for the Reform Edict, a detailed programme for universal citizenship that went well beyond the more limited concerns of other European states for improving and securing the conditions of the non-­ Muslims through concessions (see Koçunyan 2018, 83–84). Equality seems to have been a go-to concept the Porte used to appease the Europeans while avoiding concessions to Ottoman subjects that might have led to a more representative and participatory regime. There is no doubt that state-society (or ruler-subject) relations were going through a serious restructuring during the reign of Mahmud and the Tanzimat; however, using Ottomanism as an umbrella concept that can somehow explain these fragmentary rulings and policies means stretching the concept to the point of analytical inefficacy. Although the Ottoman government was trying to restructure state-society relations in a way that would serve the needs of a centralized bureaucratic state and even introduced the principle of equality under diplomatic pressure and in accordance with the spirit of the times, it would be erroneous to assume that these involved the all-inclusive concept of citizenship Ottomanism implies. Nor did it involve the levelling of differences; on the contrary it reinforced some of the hierarchies that had been inherited from the traditional structures within a modern framework (Onaran 2018, 198). And as I intend to demonstrate, it was exactly this paradoxical situation (preaching equality while reproducing hierarchies of all kinds) that motivated the emergence of Ottomanism in the Young Ottoman discourse.

Divergence: The Young Ottomans Young Ottomans were a loose alliance of men of letters from different backgrounds, united in their advocacy of constitutional monarchy and the establishment of a national parliament, as well as greater freedoms and equality for all the subjects of the Empire (see Mardin 2000; Çiçek 2010; Elfenbein 2017). They openly called themselves Ottomans, claiming it as a national identity, which would have been unthinkable mere decades before, since it would have meant identifying oneself with the dynastic family. The triumvirate who led the Society, Namık Kemal (1840–1888), Ziya Paşa (or Abdülhamid Ziyaeddin, d. 1880) and Ali Suavi (1838–1878), all emerged as public figures in 1860s with their journalistic activities, were exiled by the Ottoman government and chose to seek refuge in Europe in 1867 under the auspices of Mustafa Fazıl Paşa (1829–1875), a disgruntled member of the Khedive family of the Egypt. Once in Europe

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they started publishing newspapers openly criticizing the policies of the Sublime Porte and calling for a constitutional and representative regime. An essay titled “Mesele-i Müsâvât” (The Question of Equality) and published in the issue 15 of Young Ottoman weekly Hürriyet on October 15, 1868, presents a highly revealing instance of the conflict between competing projects regarding Ottomanness between the Sublime Porte and the Young Ottomans (Kemal 1868b).7 Kemal starts the article by summarizing a letter by Duc De Valmy,8 published in La Patrie on September 18, 1868. De Valmy proposes the creation of a national identity under the name Ottoman, the establishment of representative institutions to hold the government accountable particularly regarding finance and spending, and finally a broad programme for updating and extending Islamic law to cover all subjects thus uniting the fragmented legal situation. Kemal agrees with all these proposals and commends De Valmy for his deep understanding of the problems of the Empire, which distinguishes him from most Europeans who simply think it is only the non-Muslims who face persecution in the Ottoman realms. In the same article, Kemal also tackles the narratives of the Sublime Porte regarding the issue of equality. For instance, he quotes a memorandum written by Fuad Paşa (1814–1868), the foreign secretary, and sent to the Ottoman missions around Europe: Prior to the proclamation of the Auspicious Tanzimat, subjects of this Great Dynasty were, in appearance, divided into two based on a null and void assumption: the ruling faction, that is the Muslims and the non-Muslim people who were in complete obedience to Muslims. By the rules of that age, the lack of equality between these two, though illegitimate [by Sharia], had nonetheless been an essential principle of politics. But this illegitimate practice has been abolished with the Imperial Rescript of Gülhane which proclaimed the principle of absolute equality among the imperial subjects without any reservations or exceptions for religion or ethnicity. And, since then, the whole labour of the Exalted State has been towards the actualization of this promise, that is the implementation of the principle of equality into the constitution, customs and interactions among the people. While it cannot be denied that there is still much to be done in this regard, the 7  Like the majority of articles in Hürriyet, this essay is unsigned and there is not a consensus regarding its authorship, with some accounts pointing to Ziya Paşa and some other pointing to Namık Kemal. I favour Kemal based on the rather accessible style of the piece. 8  François Christophe Edmond Kellerman (d. 1868), a French diplomat.

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­ rinciple of the matter has been decided and put into effect and it has been p progressing ever since.9

What is striking about this passage is that Fuad Paşa cites the Gülhane Rescript as the precursor of the Reform Edict and the moment when equality was proclaimed in the Empire. It is clear from this memorandum that the Sublime Porte had started investing in a particular teleological narrative for the emancipation of non-Muslims in the Ottoman Empire in the late 1860s. Fuad Paşa does not want to justify this attribution by claiming (as some historians do) that it was in the spirit of the Gülhane Rescript and it does not seem likely that Fuad Paşa, one of the leading actors behind the Reform Edict, somehow mistakenly attributed introduction of equality to the Gülhane Rescript. What we see is the emergence of an official narrative regarding equality in the Ottoman Empire, tailored towards foreign audiences, which makes sense considering the diplomatic pressure due to the ongoing Cretan Revolt (1866–1869) and the call for reform initiated by the domestic opposition, which included Mustafa Fazıl Paşa and the Young Ottomans. Considering that more than a century later scholars continue to reproduce similar narratives, public diplomacy of the Sublime Porte seems to have been successful. Kemal does not buy into the narrative however and exposes the letter as an example of the official discourse used by the Porte to address the concerns of foreigners. He also mocks Fuad Paşa’s claim that the Gülhane Rescript introduced absolute equality as an ignorant claim. He corrects Fuad Paşa by reiterating that the equality of the Gülhane Rescript was 9  “Tanzimat-ı Hayriye’nin ilanından mukaddem tebaa-i Saltanat-ı Seniyye suret-i zâhirede izalesi nâ-kabil bir zu‘m-ı bâtıl ile müteferrik iki sınıfa münkasım olup biri fırka-i hâkime ki ̇ Müslümanlar ve diğeri kamilen ehl-i Islam’ın mutî‘i olan ahali-i gayrimüslimedir. O zamanın hükmünce bunlar beyninde adem-i müsâvât maddesi gayr-i meşruiyetiyle beraber, kaide-i esasiye-i politika hükmüne girmiş olduğu hâlde kavmiyet ve diyanete bakılmaksızın bilcümle tebaa-i şahane beyninde bilâ-istisna ve bir suret-i mutlakada usul-i müsâvâtı ilan etmiş olan Gülhane Hatt-ı Hümayunu’yla işbu madde-i gayr-i meşrûa lağv olunmuştur. Iş̇ te o zamandan beri Devlet-i Aliyye’nin bilcümle mesaisi kavliyâtı fiiliyâta tahvile, yani kaide-i müsâvâtın nizamât-ı esasiyeye derciyle, âdât ve muamelât-ı nâsta cereyanı emr-i düşvârını istihsâle masruf olmuştur. Bu bâbda daha yapılacak pek çok şey olduğu gayr-i münker ise de esas-ı madde takarrür etmiş ve muamelâtta cereyana başlayarak günden güne ilerlemekte bulunmuştur.” This letter is cited by Namık Kemal from a collection of official correspondence published by the Sublime Porte, titled Muharrerât-ı Resmiye and commonly referred to as Kırmızı Kitap due to its red cover. The full text of the letter dated May 15, 1868, can be found in Muharrerât-ı Resmiye (Istanbul: Ceride-i Havadis Matbaası, 1868), 48–50.

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about personal rights (hukuk-ı şahsiye), that is, everyone receiving due justice in court, whereas the equality proclaimed in the Reform Edict was a response to the demands of the European powers. The Sublime Porte, Kemal notes bitterly, paved the way for European intervention on behalf of non-Muslims by tying the Edict to an international treaty. He also accuses the Sublime Porte of reducing political rights (hukuk-ı siyasiye) to the admission of non-Muslims to official positions, whereas it should have been about people having the right to oversee the policies of their government and holding it accountable. Hence Kemal concludes that whilst there are a number of “bootlicking” Christians among the bureaucrats, this means nothing for the actual practice of justice or equality since the bulk of the Christian population does not benefit from it and a foreign citizen has more leeway in court than an Ottoman subject be they Muslim or Christian. Following that, he proposes equality to be of two kinds: equality by law (müsâvât fi’l-hukuk) and equality in honour (müsâvât fi’ş-şeref ). For him, the Ottoman government is confusing these two, or rather it is trying to implement the former while trying to demonstrate to foreign audiences the latter, which is absurd because while the former is a necessity the latter is an impossibility since it would require equality in material wealth, status, profession and descent. He adds that particularly in Ottoman realms where various peoples of different denominations, customs and morals live together, the conception of such equality is even more problematic. The Young Ottoman case for the equality of Muslims and non-Muslims rested on a sense of resentment and a certain kind of anxiety over status. For instance, in another article published in Hürriyet, they present their case for equality as follows: While we were still in Istanbul, one of our prominent members happens to be in a gathering in the house of a minister. There happens to be a European in the group as well and he asks: “I hear about a new faction called the Young Ottomans, pray tell, what is their opinion?” The minister responds: “Yes, there is indeed such a faction. They are a group of learned men who advocate the cause of nationality and they complain that the Europeans oppress the Muslims and spoil the Christians. I am also one of their number.” Our member who is present counters as such: “Beg your pardon my lord, it is true that Europeans are protecting the Christians and equality reached the degree of a privilege for them. But the Young Ottoman case is not about bringing the Christians down to the level of oppression suffered

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by Muslims, it is about raising the whole population to the level of freedom they deserve.”10 (Namık Kemal 1868a)

This short passage inverts the problem of equality: for the Young Ottomans, it is the non-Muslims who enjoy the rights and freedoms and it is the Muslims who need to access the fruits of equality. Such an argument bears a form of resentment, a conservative reaction to a perceived loss in the status of Muslims. For Kemal this seems to be plain truth and constitutes much of the problem although he does not put the blame on non-Muslims: the main culprit is the Sublime Porte and its misplaced emphasis on equality. He argues that there is still much to do to improve the conditions of non-Muslims, although Muslims cannot benefit from the principle of equality at all. Kemal complains that a non-Muslim can eventually acquire justice through the involvement and protection of the patriarchs and foreign embassies and agents whereas a Muslim perishes in custody waiting for trial. Similarly, a Muslim has to pay a 10,000 kuruş lump sum to exempt his son from military duty whereas a Christian gets by paying 50 kuruş annually. “Is this equality?” asks Kemal (Namık Kemal 1868b). The problem of conscription and malfunction of legal system constitute the main axis of Young Ottoman opposition to the Sublime Porte. According to Kemal, the former was caused by the restriction of conscription for Muslims only.11 He complains about the abuses caused by the 10 ̇  “Biz Istanbul’da iken içimizden bir büyük zat vükelâdan birinin meclisinde bulunur. O esnada meclise bir Avrupalı gelir. Sevk-i kelam ile ‘Aman Yeni Osmanlılar namında bir fırka çıkmış, bunların efkârı nedir?’ yollu sorar. Vükelâdan olan zat ‘Evet öyle bir fırka var, birtakım ̇ erbâb-ı marifettir ki milliyet dâiyesiyle mecbul olduklarından Avrupalıların Islam’ı ezerek Hristiyanları şımartmasından dolayı şikayet ediyorlar, hatta ben bile onlardanım’ der. Yeni Osmanlılardan olan zat buna karşı ‘Efendim ihsan buyurun, vâkıa Avrupalılar Hristiyanları himaye ediyorlar, müsâvât bir dereceye kadar imtiyaz mertebesine vâsıl oldu. Fakat Yeni ̇ Osmanlılar Hristiyanları Islam’ın derece-i mazlumiyetine indirmek istemezler. Umum ahalinin hakları olan derece-i hürriyete îsâlini arzu ederler’ mealinde mukabele eder.” 11  Mass conscription was introduced in the Ottoman Empire after the abrogation of the Janissary corps in 1827. The conscription process was quite costly for the Muslim population, since non-Muslim were by and large excluded from conscription; the whole process amounted to an expropriation of the rural labour force which did serious damage to an already struggling rural economy (see Yıldız 2009; Şimşek 2015). Conscription took a heavy toll on Muslim population together with new taxation policies and famines, and the burden of wholesale reform and centralization was borne by the subjects, whose grievances and unrest were addressed by the Gülhane Rescript, which promised fairer taxation and reasonable conscription policies. Still, achievements of the Tanzimat fell far short of its promises

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deficiencies in the lot-system and the blow it dealt to Muslim population and their wealth in the previous decades and notes this gap as an injustice (haksızlık) caused by the rampant maladministration of the Ottoman government (Namık Kemal 1869b). In the same article, he attributes the unwillingness of the Sublime Porte in the conscription of non-Muslims to their reluctance to arm non-Muslims for fear of their impending revolt. He rebuts this line of reasoning by pointing out again that in the past few decades non-Muslims have grown materially and attained much status by being employed in official positions, as opposed to the pre-Tanzimat times when they were considered as the ruled people (milel-i mahkûme) and could not ride horses or paint their houses the same colour as Muslims and the like. As such, they would not have any reason to revolt now. Kemal also notes in another article that whatever revolts have taken place in the empire were not in the name of Christianity, Judaism, or any other religion; rather they have all been taking place in the name of ethnicity (kavmiyet). He adds that even the Greek revolt was not about Christianity and that Albanians and Kurds have revolted as well even though they were Muslims (Kemal 1868c). Young Ottomans also argue that all the revolts by non-Muslim subjects, and particularly the Cretan Revolt of 1866–1869, can be traced to the discontent and unrest caused by Ottoman maladministration, which are then instrumentalized by external powers, most notably Russia (see Çiçek 2010). Kemal notes that even the Armenians, who came to be the most loyal of Ottoman non-Muslims among the various ethnic elements, would soon start emigrating to Russia to escape hunger and poverty (Kemal 1869a). It should be noted, however, that while the Young Ottomans campaigned for equality, representation and the primacy of law, they also helped build a romantic concept of Ottoman Muslim identity based on the past grandeur of Islam and the Ottoman Empire, through their literary production, which turned episodes of Ottoman history into proto-­ national narratives (see Gürpınar 2013). Such romantic concepts served to and although there were occasional attempts to include non-Muslims in the draft, these were very limited and as noted above, even after the Reform Edict of 1856, which proclaimed Muslims and non-Muslims legally equal, non-Muslims were allowed to avoid conscription with an annual tax (iâne-i askeriye). Muslims too could avoid conscription after lots were drawn; however, the price (bedel-i askeriye) was significantly higher than that of non-Muslims. Finally, although Kemal seems to be unaware of the fact, a significant part of the Muslim population, namely Arabs and Kurds, were also systematically excluded from the draft in practice for a long time and they did not need to pay the annual tax either.

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elevate Ottomanness to an appealing category to which anyone could aspire, but, at the same time, it inevitably favoured Muslims by referring to a historical account, which rarely cited non-Muslim agency. Still, the Young Ottoman case for Ottomanism was appealing for the non-Muslim intelligentsia of the Empire and, as demonstrated by Madeleine Elfenbein and Stephan Guth in this volume, Ottomanism had its non-Muslim and Arab champions too.

Conclusion Ottoman reform with regard to non-Muslims was a highly complex debate where actors with highly divergent motivations and goals contested for legitimacy to different audiences. The Ottoman government started implementing several policies and regulations that would drastically change the way it related to its subjects from 1827 onwards, starting with the introduction of conscription to the proclamation of equality in 1856. The gradual bureaucratization of government and standardization efforts would also change the way the state imagined the Ottoman collective. However, it would definitely be a stretch to assume Ottomanism to be an official ideology or a guiding principle governing these policies. As recent scholarship has emphasized repeatedly, Ottoman reform, in general, was a highly contested and contingent process motivated and constrained by international pressure and domestic demands. The Sublime Porte acted in response to these demands and constraints, trying at the same time to preserve the political status quo and a modicum of sovereignty. As such, while it was implementing measures to introduce legal equality among the subjects, it was also trying to preserve relatively autonomous communal structures and deny the rising demands for representative institutions and participatory politics. Of these demands, the Young Ottoman project stands out with an all-inclusive concept of Ottoman citizenship through representative institutions. The Young Ottoman project drew on a wide range of sources and inspirations, including the European constitutional and nationalist movements as well as the example of Armenian, Greek and Jewish community constitutions of the Ottoman Empire. It is also clear that part of the motivation for the Young Ottoman project was their dissatisfaction with and resentment against the conditions created by the Ottoman government. Through their publications, campaigning and political alliances they were able to force the Ottoman palace to proclaim a constitution and a parliament that officially embraced Ottomanism.

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Although, this was a short-lived experiment it left its mark on the future debated and discussions that would take place in the early twentieth century.

References Abu-Manneh, Butrus. 2015. Two Concepts of State in the Tanzimat Period: the Hatt-ı Şerif of Gülhane and the Hatt-ı Hümayun. Turkish Historical Review 6 (2): 117–137. ̇ Ahmet Mithat, Efendi. 2013. Üss-i I nkılap. Edited by Idris Nebi Uysal. Istanbul: Dergah. Akçura, Yusuf. 1995. Üç Tarz-ı Siyaset. Edited by Recep Durmaz. Istanbul: Boğaziçi Yayınları. Berkes, Niyazi. 1998. The Development of Secularism in Turkey. London: Hurst & Company. Braude, Benjamin. 1982. Foundation Myths of the Millet System. In Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire Vol I, ed. Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis, 69–88. New York and London: Holmes & Meier Publishers. Brisku, Adrian. 2018. Political Reform in the Ottoman and Russian Empires: A Comparative Approach. London: Bloomsbury. Cevdet Paşa. 1980. Ma‘ruzât. Edited by Yusuf Halaçoğlu. Istanbul: Çağrı. Çiçek, Nazan. 2010. The Young Ottomans: Turkish Critics of the Eastern Question in the late Nineteenth Century. London: IB Tauris. Coşkun, Ahmet. 2006. 1895–1898 Yıllari Arasında Yayınlanan Meşveret Gazetesinin Transkribt ve Değerlendirmesi. MA Thesis, Erciyes University. Elfenbein, Madeleine. 2017. No Empire for Old Men: The Young Ottomans and the World, 1856–1878. PhD diss., University of Chicago. Erdoğdu, Teyfur. 2008. Osmanlılığın Evirmi Hakkında Bir Deneme: Bir Grup (Üst Düzey Yönetici) Kimliğinden Millet Yaratma Projesine. Doğu Batı 45: 19–46. Gökalp, Ziya. 1913. Millet ve Vatan. In Türk Yurdu Vol 3, ed. Murat Şefkatli, 301–303. Ankara: Tutibay Yayınları, 1999. Gürpınar, Doğan. 2013. Ottoman/Turkish Visions of the Nation, 1869–1950. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hanioğlu, Şükrü. 2008. A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire. Princeton NJ: Princeton UP. Inalcık, Halil. 1992. Tanzimat ve Bulgar Meselesi. Istanbul: Eren. Koçunyan, Aylin. 2018. Negotiating the Ottoman Constitution 1839–1876. Paris: Peeters. Lewis, Bernard. 1968. Emergence of Modern Turkey, 2nd Ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Mardin, Şerif. 2000. The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought: A Study in the Modernization of Turkish Political Ideas. New York: Syracuse University Press. Namık Kemal. 1868a. Untitled Article. Hürriyet, 11, September 7. ———. 1868b. Mesele-i Müsâvât. Hürriyet, 15, October 5. ̇ ———. 1868c. Avrupa Şarkın Asayişini Ister. Hürriyet, 24, December 7. ———. 1869a. Mehâlik-i Hariciye ve Dahiliye. Hürriyet, 39, March 22. ———. 1869b. Hizmet-i Askeriye. Hürriyet, 53, June 28. Onaran, Burak. 2018. Padişahı Devirmek: Osmanlı Islahat Çağında Düzen ve Muhalefet: Kuleli (1859), Meslek (1867). Istanbul: Iletişim. ̇ ̇ Ortaylı, Ilber. 1983. Imparatorluğ un En Uzun Yüzyılı. Istanbul: Hil Yayın. Philliou, Christine. 2011a. The Ottoman Empire’s Absent Nineteenth Century: Autonomous Subjects. In Untold Histories of the Middle East: Recovering Voices from the 19th and 20th Centuries, ed. Amy Singer, Christoph K. Neumann, and Selçuk Akşin Somel, 143–158. London and New York: Routledge. ———. 2011b. Biography of an Empire: Governing Ottomans in an Age of Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rahme, Joseph G. 1999. Namık Kemal’s Constitutional Ottomanism and Non-­ Muslims. Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 10 (1): 23–39. Reşid Paşa. 1887. Reşid Paşa Merhûmun Ba’zı Asâr-ı Siyasiyyesi, 1305. Istanbul: Kütüphane-i Ebuzziya. Şimşek, Veysel. 2015. The Grand Strategy of the Ottoman Empire 1826–1841. PhD diss., McMaster University. Somel, Selçuk A. 2001. Osmanlı Reform Çağında Osmanlıcılık Düşüncesi 1839–1913. In Modern Türkiye’de Siyasi Düşünce Vol I, ed. Tanıl Bora and Murat Gürtekingil, 88–115. Istanbul: Iletişim. Stamatopoulos, Dimitris. 2006. From Millets to Minorities in the 19th-Century Ottoman Empire: an Ambiguous Modernization. In Citizenship in Historical Perspective, ed. Steven G. Ellis, Guomundur Hálfadanarson, and Ann Katherine Isaacs, 253–273. Pisa: Edizioni Plus—Pisa University Press. Strauss, Johann. 2002. Ottomanisme et ottomanité: le témoignage linguistique. In Aspects of the Political Language in Turkey (19th–20th Centuries), ed. Hans-­ Lukas Kieser. Istanbul: Isis Press. Tanpınar, Ahmet Hamdi. 2006. XIX.  Asır Türk Edebiyatı Tarihi. Edited by Abdullah Uçman. Istanbul: YKY. Topal, Alp Eren. 2017. From Decline to Progress: Ottoman Concepts of Reform 1600–1876. PhD diss., Bilkent University. Topal, Alp Eren, and Einar Wigen. 2019. Ottoman Conceptual History: Challenges and Prospects. Contributions to the History of Concepts 14 (1): 93–114. Torunoğlu, Berke. 2018. Estranged Subjects of the State: Neo-Hellens and Neo-­ Russians in the Ottoman Empire, 1830–1876. PhD diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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Türesay, Özgür. 2008. Être intellectuel à la fin de l’Empire ottoman: Ebüzziya Tevfik (1849–1913) et son temps. PhD diss., INALCO. Us, Hakkı Tarık, ed. 1939. Meclis-i Mebusan Zabıt Ceridesi Vol I. Istanbul: Vakit. Vekaleti, Maarif. 1940. Tanzimat I–II: Yüzüncü Yıldönümü Münasebetile. Istanbul: Maarif Matbaası. Vezenkov, Alexander. 2009. Reconciliation of the Spirits and Fusion of the Interests: ‘Ottomanism’ as an Identity Politics. In We, the People: Politics of National Peculiarity in Southeastern Europe, ed. Diana Mishkova, 47–78. New York: CEU Press. ———. 2013. Formulating and Reformulating Ottomanism. In Entangled Histories of the Balkans Vol I: National Ideologies and Language Policies, ed. Roumen Daskalov and Tchavdar Marinov, 241–271. Leiden: Brill. Wigen, Einar. 2018. State of Translation. Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press. Yıldız, Gültekin. 2009. Neferin Adı Yok: Zorunlu Askerliğe Geçiş Sürecinde Osmanlı Devleti’nde Siyaset, Ordu ve Toplum (1825–1839). Istanbul: Kitabevi. Zürcher, Erik J. 2017. Turkey: A Modern History 4th Ed. London: IB Tauris.

CHAPTER 5

Unruly Children of the Homeland: Ottomanism’s Non-Muslim Authors Madeleine Elfenbein

Introduction: Whose Ottomanism Was It, Anyway? In the summer of 1876, amid the euphoria occasioned by the popular revolt that dethroned Sultan Abdülaziz (1830–1876), a battle raged in the pages of Istanbul’s leading newspapers over the future of the Ottoman state. At its heart, the debate was an interpretative one: who truly held the ̇ reins of domestic and global power? The writers of Istikbâl (The Future) rejoiced in the sultan’s overthrow, which they insisted he richly deserved for his corruption and incompetence. The inevitability of his demise was plain, they asserted, not only “to the children of the homeland but to inhabitants of the entire civilized world” (unknown author quoted in Özdiş 2005, 14). Inspired by the democratic and constitutionalist impulses ̇ coursing through the capital, Istikbâl published lengthy reflections on the right and duty to revolt against unjust governance. “If the nation belongs

M. Elfenbein (*) Department of History, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Chovanec, O. Heilo (eds.), Narrated Empires, Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55199-5_5

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to the sultan, the sultan also belongs to the nation,” it proclaimed (Teodor Kasap quoted in Özdiş 2005, 19).1 The newspaper Vakit (Time), meanwhile, offered a starkly different reading of the forces shaping Ottoman politics. The well-known dissident cleric Ali Suavi (1839–1878), still in exile in Paris, published dark missives in its pages that described a world far less civilized than his readers might suppose. Suavi viewed the world as governed not by a growing impulse towards democracy and justice but by a cynical group of elites. “There is no such thing as public opinion in England,” he opined (Suavi 1876a), and indeed nothing in Europe that could properly be called a government (Suavi 1876b, 2).2 If there was any single force that held this chaotic world together, it was European antipathy towards the Ottoman state. ̇ In the pages of Istikbâl and Vakit, two different strains of Ottomanism were on display: one bent on limiting the power of traditional elites, and another more concerned with preserving Ottoman sovereignty in the face of threats from abroad. The names publicly linked with these positions belonged to a handful of prominent Muslim intellectuals, but they reflected the views of many non-Muslim Ottomans, including those at the newspapers’ helms. The licence to publish Vakit belonged to an Armenian Catholic known simply as Efendi (1823–1900), while the man responsible ̇ for Istikbâl was a Greek Orthodox subject named Teodor Kasap (1835–1897).3 Filip and Kasap themselves were known to clash in public over questions of identity and loyalty (Strauss 2002, 36), but on the most pressing question of the day—the fate of the Ottoman Empire—they were broadly aligned. Both longed for a united and fully sovereign Ottoman state, which they insisted upon as the birthright of those now living under its rule. Their vision is perhaps best captured in the new motto embraced 1  “Yalnız ebnâ-yı vatan değil bütün alem-i medeniyyet sükkânı Sultan Abdülaziz Han hazretleri hakkında zuhur eden hal’ ancak kendisinin muktezayât-i ef’alidir itikadında idi.” ̇ ̇ Istikbâl 118 (3 June 1876), 4. “Millet padişahın ise padişah da milletindir.” Istikbâl 191 (11 September 1876), 1. 2  “Rusya bir Mesele-i Şarqiye yaratdı.” “Ali Suavi Efendi’nin Izmir’de bir zata yazmış olduğu bir mektubun elimize geçen suretidir,” Vakit No. 301 (28 August 1876), 3. ̇ “Ingiltere’de efkar-ı umumiye. … yoq. Avrupa’da hükûmet. … yoq.” “Paris’ten mektup,” Vakit 323 (19 September 1876), 2. 3  Filip, whose name appears sometimes with the toponym Diyarbakırlı, reflecting his birthplace in the southern Anatolian city of Diyarbakır, or with the patronym Şahinoğlu or Shahinian, is also named in some sources as Philippe Efendi, while Teodor Kasap’s name is sometimes rendered as Kasab or Kassab, in French sources as Théodore Cassape, and in Greek sources as Theódō ros Kasápı̄s.

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̇ by Istikbâl in the weeks following the deposition of Abdülaziz: “The children of the homeland are a single body that will not accept political division.”4 As Filip and Kasap would reveal through their actions, they were unwilling to accept it even at the hands of their own state. As Alp Eren Topal reminds us in this volume, Ottomanism (Osmanlıcılık) is a term that appeared only in the twilight years of the phenomenon it described, and its meaning has been stretched to encompass a wide range of political visions, from the radically inclusive to the hierarchical and chauvinist, and from the quietist to the revolutionary. Yet it has long been characterized as a top-down, state-led initiative conceived and promoted by Muslim elites and their international allies. This perception persists despite abundant scholarship on the popularity of Ottomanist ideas and practices of civic participation among wide swaths of the empire’s Christian and Jewish populations, and on the diversity of roles played by Greeks, Armenians, and Jews in late Ottoman political life (Kechriotis 2005; Philliou 2009; Bashkin 2010; Campos 2011; Hartmann 2010; Moumdjian 2012; Koçunyan 2014; Cohen 2014; Stamatopoulos 2015; Cora et  al. 2016). In describing the ideological transformations undergone by late Ottoman society, prevailing accounts (Mardin 1962; Hanioğlu 2008; Turnaoğlu 2017) depict an intellectual world populated almost exclusively by Muslims and their European interlocutors, and one still dominated by figures acting in their capacity as spokesmen for the state. This chapter aims to revise this perception by highlighting the central role of non-­ Muslim journalists in the growth and spread of Ottomanist ideas and their ambivalent relationship with the state. By tracing the career paths and contributions of several non-Muslim journalists from the 1860s through the 1910s, a period spanning the Tanzimat, Hamidian, and Young Turk eras, it argues for a revised understanding of Ottomanism as a project driven by those at the margins of Ottoman power alongside those at its centre. The quintessential expression of official Ottomanism is to be found in the defining edicts of the Tanzimat era: the 1839 Edict of Gülhane, which affirmed the state’s commitment to defending the life, honour, and property of all its subjects, and the so-called Reform Edict of 1856, which more explicitly affirmed the equal status of the empire’s Christian and 4 ̇  “Ebnâ-yı vatan ki cism-i vâhiddir siyâseten taksîm kabûl etmez,” Istikbâl adopted this motto beginning with its 18 June 1876 issue, a few weeks after the deposition of Sultan Abdülaziz.

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Muslim subjects. Elsewhere in this volume, Ayşe Ozil and Salim Çevik explore the circumstances that gave rise to these edicts, viewing them as a response to the discourses of rights and attendant separatist movements that arose within the empire’s non-Muslim communities in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The fact that these measures of formal inclusion by the Tanzimat state were adopted under diplomatic duress, and were met by an outcry from Ottoman Muslims, has long grounded a historical narrative that places Muslim resentment at the core of public opposition to the broader Tanzimat agenda. Yet the newspapers of this era provide ample evidence of a different kind of Ottomanism, one less concerned with protecting the state than with defending the collective rights of the people who lived under its rule. The authors of this dissident vision were not only the handful of disgruntled members of the Muslim bureaucratic elite who would later be canonized as leaders of the Young Ottoman movement, but members of a new class of professional journalists whose publications were essential to the creation of a popular Ottomanist consciousness. It was to this cadre that both Filip and Teodor Kasap belonged. Their examples reveal non-­Muslim authors as a driving force behind the novel sensibility of patriotic defiance that came to dominate politics and culture in the wake of the Crimean War. Hailing from religiously mixed communities in central Anatolia or elsewhere on the imperial periphery, these figures arrived in the Ottoman capital with an unshakeable sense of their own indigeneity. Multilingual but often lacking a command of written Turkish, they formed close working partnerships with like-minded Turkish Muslim journalists—Namık Kemal, Ali Suavi, Ahmed Midhat, and Ebüzziya Tevfik, among others— and together produced some of the most widely read and influential newspapers in the Ottoman capital. These newspapers would foster a robust Ottomanism that drew on the newly articulated premise of Ottoman-ness to argue for a radical expansion of political rights. And even as the mounting political and financial crisis of the Ottoman state helped lay a path towards genocide, these non-Muslim Ottomanists fought until the end for an Ottoman nation big enough to include themselves and their communities.

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At the Vanguard and in the Back Office: Christians in the Ottoman Press ̇ The fact that the publishers of Vakit and Istikbâl, two of the most widely read newspapers in the 1870s Istanbul, were both Christians would not come as a surprise to anyone familiar with Ottoman press culture. From its very inception, printing throughout the empire had been dominated by non-Muslims, a trend encouraged by state policies that tightly restricted printing in the Perso-Arabic script while turning a blind eye to works published in Hebrew, Greek, and Armenian. As Johann Strauss points out, the majority of the capital’s printing presses were run by Armenians and Greeks until the eve of the Armenian genocide, and possibly longer (Strauss 2005, 244). As a result, the press culture that arose in Istanbul and other coastal cities in the 1840s was confessionally and linguistically mixed from the start, giving rise to a Turkish journalistic vernacular that bore the strong imprint of non-Muslim voices. Even so, scholars have by and large paid little attention to the role of non-Muslims within the heart of the machinery that was churning out new political ideas. The hybridity of Ottoman press culture has been obscured by a twentieth-century historiography shaped by the imperatives of methodological nationalism. Muslim Turks have been elevated as the authentic bearers of Ottoman (and, later, Turkish) culture, while Greek Orthodox, Armenian, and Balkan figures have been posthumously recruited to serve as forerunners of distinct national literary traditions. Thus many historians credit the Muslim-run Tercüman-ı Ahvâl, which first appeared in 1860, as the empire’s first ‘private’ newspaper, or alternatively as “the first Turkish newspaper edited by a Turk” (Topuz 1960, 18). In fact, that distinction arguably belongs to Evangelinos Misailidis’s Anatoli, which began publishing in Izmir in 1843, using Greek characters to render Turkish prose (Benlisoy and Benlisoy 2010). The Anatoli became the flagship publication of the Karamanli press, and it was soon joined by an array of newspapers and magazines in Armeno-Turkish (Ueno 2016).5 Ottoman readers of all faiths were accustomed to consuming 5  The practice of publishing in Karamanli Turkish, or Turkish rendered in Greek letters, had begun among Greek Orthodox inhabitants of central Anatolia as early as the eighteenth century, and became widespread from the 1830s onward (Balta 1999). In the same vein, Armeno-Turkish was originally developed to serve Armenian communities in central Anatolia and elsewhere where Turkish was the primary spoken language. Murat Cankara presents evidence that Armeno-Turkish was widely used by non-Armenian Ottomans as well, and the

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printed matter in a language or script not their own—or at least not their first—and Karamanli and Armeno-Turkish publications found readers among news-hungry Muslims as well as Greeks and Armenians (Strauss 2003; Cankara 2015). These publications employed a simpler style of Turkish that may have contributed to their popularity among readers of all religious confessions. As more Muslim-run Turkish-language journals began to appear in the 1860s, they freely borrowed content as well as personnel, equipment, and distribution networks from newspapers run by Ottoman Christians. As we will see below, several of the most famous Young Ottoman journals of the 1860s and 1870s, from Muhbir and ̇ Hürriyet through Ibret, were produced with the help of Ottoman Christian journalists. Yet somehow, the very ubiquity of the Greek and Armenian presence in Ottoman letters has cloaked its significance within the country’s broader political life. Memoirs of the late Ottoman period make frequent reference to Greek and Armenian journalists, yet scholars from the second half of the twentieth century onward have more often relegated them to footnotes, depicting them as part of the furniture of late Ottoman literary culture rather than as among its living, breathing agents. Some of this invisibility stems from a deliberate choice made by Christian authors to disguise their own identities. In the fall of 1860, in the Ottoman province of Syria, some months after the outbreak of civil war between Muslims and Christians and the landing of French troops at Beirut, an anonymous broadside appeared on the streets of that coastal city calling for peace and unity.6 Over the next several months, ten more broadsides appeared under the same title, Nafir Suriyya (Clarion of Syria), all of them signed by someone who fashioned himself simply “a lover of the homeland” (muhibb al-watan). Some years later, the author would reveal himself as Butrus al-Bustani (1819–1883), a Maronite merits of the Armenian script as a vehicle for the Turkish language were debated by prominent Turkish Muslim journalists, including Ali Suavi, Namık Kemal, and Ahmed Midhat, the latter of whom commended it as “rather excellent” as compared to its Greek and Latin counterparts (2015, 6). 6  The civil war that erupted in Ottoman Syria began in Mount Lebanon with a tax revolt by Maronite Christian peasants against their Druze lords in 1858 (see also the article by Guth here). The revolt led to an escalating series of violent reprisals throughout the spring of 1860, and the spread of sectarian tensions throughout the province. In July, thousands of Christians were massacred in Damascus, the provincial capital, prompting France and other major European powers to organize an international military intervention on humanitarian grounds (Fawaz 1994).

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Christian translator and scholar of Arabic literature who had laid hands on the tools of his employer, the American Mission Press in Beirut, in order to produce these broadsides. As Hala Auji convincingly shows, he had also laid hands on the graphic markers of Ottoman state authority by embracing a design that appeared to be “interpolating the authoritative visual language and format of Ottoman edicts” in order to make his appeal (Auji 2019, 42). al-Bustani appears to have taken as his visual model the famous 1856 Reform Edict assuring the legal equality of the empire’s Christian and Muslim subjects, a document with which he would have been intimately familiar as the person charged with preparing its Arabic translation. At first glance, al-Bustani’s imitation of a state document in his own broadside would seem to support the idea of Ottoman Christians as standing with, and behind, the official Ottomanism of Tanzimat bureaucrats. Yet al-Bustani’s clarion rang out in a distinctly different register than that of the edict he had translated; it was not issued in the voice of the state but as a lateral appeal to his fellow Syrians. “Countrymen, you drink the same water, you breathe the same air,” he wrote. “The language you speak is the same, and so are the ground you tread, your welfare, and your customs. […] May your hearts embrace the teachings and principles of the faith you believe in” (al-Bustani et al. 2019, 67). While al-Bustani urges his readers to yield to the state’s attempts to repair the damage and bring justice to wrongdoers, he insists that only the feelings between countrymen— “patriotism, affection, concord, and unity”—can save it and secure its future. The name that al-Bustani himself gave to these broadsides was wataniyyat, or patriotic expressions: they invoked the old word watan, or homeland, in a distinctly modern register, signifying, in Jens Hanssen’s words, “an ennobling concept of attachment and a political field of rights and duties” (al-Bustani et al. 2019, 55). Certainly, the scope of these rights and duties included continued obeisance to the Ottoman state. al-Bustani’s embrace of state imagery makes it clear that his patriotic agenda was far from anti-Ottoman; it was, above all, pacifist and anti-sectarian, reflecting the same fundamental ambiguities of political identity that we encounter in the writings of the other Arab intellectuals profiled by Stephan Guth elsewhere in this volume. Yet to read this brand of patriotism as ambiguous is to read it through the filter of an alien nationalist imaginary that insists on political independence as the sine qua non of nationhood. Quite strikingly, the watan of al-Bustani’s imagining is the Ottoman province of Syria—not a Syria he seeks to liberate

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from Ottoman rule, but a homeland all the same, defined by the bonds that unite its inhabitants. In the pages of his anonymous broadside, al-­ Bustani argued that those bonds did not require a shared religious identity or a formal legal obligation to the state, but could be sustained through commonalities of language, culture, and geography. The idea of Ottoman subjects as bound more closely to each other than to the state took longer to catch on in the Ottoman capital, where the distinction between the state and those it governed was less obvious. Yet a few years after al-Bustani’s clarion call, the sentiment of patriotic resistance would begin to emerge through the cracks that were beginning to show in the façade of Ottoman state power. Its apotheosis would come with the dethroning of Sultan Abdülaziz in May of 1876 and the drafting of the first Ottoman constitution, but we can find its first glimmerings in the periodical press of a decade earlier. In Istanbul, as in Beirut, non-Muslims were among the first to publicly articulate this novel and radical combination of sentiments: a newfound sense of alienation from the Ottoman state coupled with a sense of fellowship with their compatriots. One of the first mouthpieces of these newfound sentiments in Istanbul was the Turkish journal Muhbir, founded in January 1867, a collaboration between the Armenian Catholic Filip and the Muslim Ali Suavi. Filip was some twenty years older, a seasoned journalist who had spent years working at the semi-official Ceride-i Havadis, while Suavi had only recently returned to his native city of Istanbul after being fired from a provincial bureaucratic post, yet had already gained a name for himself as a fiery preacher who inveighed against corruption. Filip reached out to him through an intermediary and managed to enlist him as the chief writer for his new outfit, despite Suavi’s initial reluctance (Suavi 1870). Their initial collaboration was brief—from early January through mid-March of 1867, when Muhbir’s licence to publish was suspended—but impactful, as Muhbir set a new tone for Turkish-language journalism by openly challenging the wisdom of Ottoman state policies and implicitly questioning the authority of its leading statesmen. With little hesitation, the journal waded into the touchiest subject in Ottoman affairs: the ongoing rebellion on the Ottoman-held island of Crete. The revolt had begun in April of 1866 with a protest by the island’s Christian majority against the imposition of new taxes, and had quickly escalated into a proxy war between the Ottoman state, on the one hand, and Greece and Russia, on the other. The conflict drew international attention, particularly after the devastating explosion of a gunpowder

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cache at the Arkadi monastery in November of 1866 in which hundreds of civilians were killed. In the weeks that followed, Muhbir doggedly followed developments in Crete and their echoes abroad. It noted that while the island’s Christian population was drawing large sums of aid from philhellenic societies and sympathetic governments overseas, the island’s Muslims were suffering neglect from both Christian humanitarians and their own supposedly Islamic state. In early March, the newspaper switched from reportage to activism when it published a special supplementary issue to raise money for these victims. Volunteers were recruited to help to sell the issues, a commission was created to allocate the funds they raised, and plans were laid for Filip himself to travel to Crete in order to distribute them. All of these proceedings were outlined in the pages of the newspaper in a detailed and transparent fashion, putting the government’s own relief measures to shame. Muhbir’s appeals for funds were addressed not exclusively to Muslims, but to readers at large, calling out to “folks” (ehâli), “patriots” (hamiyetliler), and “zealots” (gayretliler) to join in. By mirroring the humanitarian efforts of philhellenic networks in Western Europe and the United States, Muhbir was enlisting Ottomans to act directly on behalf of their fellow Ottomans, cutting the state out of the deal. Muhbir’s campaign caught the notice of the French ambassador, who wrote home that “the [Ottoman] Ministers are troubled by it, the more rightly so because the noises of uprising in the provinces have managed to overexcite the minds of Muslims.”7 In other words, Christians were inspiring Muslims to revolt against their state. Muhbir’s Christian and Muslim authors alike were strongly opposed to the Cretan rebels’ goal of autonomy, but they shared their frustration with the Ottoman government and the desire to take matters into their own hands. By usurping the government’s role of providing for Ottoman subjects, Muhbir enacted a rebellion of its own. Its challenge to the state’s authority was made explicit through the journal’s decision to publish the Turkish translation of a manifesto written by a recently exiled minister, Mustafa Fazıl Pasha, which proclaimed, “It matters not whether one is Muslim, Catholic, or Greek Orthodox to be able to put the public weal ahead of private interest. For that it is sufficient to be a man of progress or a good patriot, which is one 7  Nicholas Bourrée, French ambassador in Constantinople, to the Marquis de Moustier, Minister of Foreign Affairs, 12 March 1867, 133CP/370/38, Archives of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

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and the same thing” (Mustafa Fazıl Pasha quoted in Davison 1963, 201). On 9 March, Ottoman authorities announced the suspension of the newspaper and the exile of Ali Suavi to the remote town of Kastamonu. Although Efendi, as the licence-holder for Muhbir, was legally responsible for its contents, Suavi’s reputation meant that he was widely assumed to be the primary if not sole author of the entire journal (Doğan 1991, 191). Within a few weeks, Suavi would be recruited to join Mustafa Fazıl Pasha’s retinue of subversives in Europe, and would take the name of his newspaper with him, founding Le Muhkbir in London in August of 1867.8 Yet while Muhbir is known in the annals of the Young Ottoman movement chiefly for launching Ali Suavi’s incendiary career, its most subversive acts were those of its Armenian publisher. Suavi makes this plain in his memoir, which asserts that the decision to publish Mustafa Fazıl’s manifesto was Filip’s and not his, even as Suavi notes with irony that “from that date onward I began to be counted as a partisan of Fazıl Pasha.” It was Filip whose fierce letter in protest of his journal’s suspension appeared in the 10 March issue of Namık Kemal’s Tasvir-i Efkâr a few weeks before it, too, was suspended (Davison 1963, 208). And it was Filip, rather than Suavi, who seems to have been the animating spirit behind the newspaper’s campaign on behalf of the Muslim families of Crete. After his licence to publish was restored in April, Filip continued to lead the charge in Suavi’s absence, travelling to Crete to personally deliver the funds that Muhbir had raised and writing at length about his experiences there (Sungu 1945, 401).

Exile Without Re-entry: Alexan Sarafian Another trajectory for non-Muslim journalists in the Hamidian era was to spiral away from the centre towards the margins of the empire. A notable example of this phenomenon is that of Alexan Sarafian (dates of birth and 8  Also among the journalists recruited to Europe by Mustafa Fazıl Pasha in 1867 to publish the Young Ottoman dissident newspaper Le Mukhbir was a Greek Orthodox journalist by the name of Anesti, engaged to serve as their typesetter (Tevfik 1973, 148). The chronicler Ebüzziya Tevfik notes in passing that Anesti was both “very witty” and “possessed of a powerful critical intelligence,” and that he had previously published a satirical journal of his own, Zenbur, which was published “in the Turkish language, but with Greek letters.” (“Bu adam ̇ vaktiyle Istanbul’da «Zenbur» adında Türkçe diliyle, fakat Rum harfleriyle bir mizah dergisi yayımlamıştı. […] Anesti, çok nükteci bir adamdı. Aynı zamanda güçlü bir tenkid zekâsına da sahipti.”)

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death unknown), who began his career as a perceived ally of the state and ended it as one of its obscure enemies. Sarafian is perhaps best known as ̇ the Armenian publisher behind the Istanbul-based journal Ibret, which served as a vehicle for the writings of Namık Kemal and other prominent Young Ottomans between 1872 and 1873. The journal had begun its life a few years earlier with a different name and a different reputation: in December of 1869, it appeared under the title of Kevkeb-i Şarkî (“Eastern Star”), with articles written in “an extremely broken Turkish” that were full of praise for the leading bureaucrat Âli Pasha, arch-nemesis of the Young Ottomans (Yazıcı 2000, 368). The journal was even singled out in the dissident newspaper Hürriyet as an example of craven pandering (Tevfik 1973, 280–81). And yet, a few years later, when Namık Kemal and his colleagues found themselves back in Istanbul and unable to obtain a publishing licence of their own, they turned to Sarafian for help, effectively leasing his licence at a rate of fifteen lira per month in order to puḃ lish Ibret under their own names (Tevfik 1973, 413). Sarafian remained legally responsible for the newspaper’s contents, and he was among those rounded up and arrested following its forced closure in April of 1873 (Davison 1963, 299).9 While Sarafian appears to have been released soon afterward, another source records that he was banished to Tunis and then to Syria before making his way to Cyprus in 1878 (Vizetelly 1901, 16). Ironically, Cyprus was the same remote Ottoman island to which Namık Kemal had been ̇ banished following the closure of Ibret, and where he had languished for three years until being allowed to return to the mainland after Sultan Abdülaziz’s dethronement. In the summer of 1878, however, Cyprus changed hands, becoming a British territory under the terms of the Treaty of Berlin. A gold rush of sorts followed, as the island was swarmed by adventurers from throughout the Mediterranean as well as the British Isles. Sarafian was among them, and appears to have brought a set of 9 ̇  The forced closure of Ibret was part of the Ottoman government’s crackdown on Young Ottoman activities following the massive demonstrations that accompanied the premiere of Namık Kemal’s play Vatan. A patriotic drama set during the Crimean War, the play famously inspired its audiences at the first three performances to fill the streets afterward with shouts of “Long live Kemal!” and “Long live the nation!” The mobilization of patriotic sentiment in a spontaneous popular demonstration was threatening to Ottoman state authorities, who responded by promptly shutting down the theatre production and arresting its author and several of his collaborators. Many of them, including Kemal, were ultimately expelled from the capital.

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Turkish type with him, which allowed him to set up the island’s first Turkish newspaper, Ümid (Hope), in 1880 (Unbehaun 2004, 250). After only a short run, Ümid was shut down by British authorities at the insistence of the Ottoman sultan, Abdülhamid II, whom Sarafian had upset with an article criticizing his decision to allow Britain to acquire Cyprus in the first place (An 2009, 286). Sarafian soon left Cyprus in search of more fertile ground for his publishing ventures. In early 1882, he moved to Cairo, where British influence was also making itself felt. Although still nominally an Ottoman possession, Egypt was rapidly descending into an open conflict between the Europe-backed khedive of Egypt and his challenger, the Egyptian nationalist leader Colonel ‘Urabi. Sarafian lost little time in founding an Arabic newspaper, al-Zaman (Time), which also soon fell afoul of authorities. In the words of one colleague, “he had been playing fast and loose with both Khedive and [‘Urabi], feeling his way to a subsidy,” but without success (Vizetelly 1901, 115). Amid the outbreak of violent demonstrations against foreigners in June of 1882, a warrant was issued for Sarafian’s arrest, and he fled Cairo for Alexandria, where he endured the British bombardment of the city in July of 1882. Afterward, he was able to return to Cairo and resume publication of his newspaper under British rule. Sarafian’s al-Zaman established itself as “the first Arabic-language newspaper to support the British,” and became a mouthpiece for a number of prominent Arab Christian voices, including that of the Lebanese author Jurji Zaydan (Gasper 2009, 33). Yet Cairo under British rule was no freer of the sultan’s censors than Cyprus had been, and within a few years British authorities stepped in to shut down al-Zaman. In its complaint, the Ottoman state alleged that the newspaper had “transgressed all standards of propriety,” in part through a series of articles criticizing the Ottoman state’s failure to defend peasants from unscrupulous moneylenders (Gasper 2009, 79). Sarafian, whose own name meant “son of a moneylender,” would have been keenly aware of how Ottoman Armenians were understood to be implicated in the empire’s financial troubles. The widespread massacres of Armenians that took place between 1894 and 1897 were preceded by a decades-long economic depression and rising rates of ̇ indebtedness among peasants throughout the empire (Inalcık and Quataert 1994, 871). The last we hear of Sarafian, he had returned to Cyprus, where in 1889 he founded yet another Turkish newspaper: Dik el-Şark, “the Rooster of the East” (An 1997, 2). Stitched together, these glimpses into his

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peripatetic publishing career convey the impression of an individual who refused, despite the difficulties he faced, to become a meek refugee from Ottoman state power. Instead, he struggled for decades to continue pursuing publishing ventures marked by strong political convictions. Yet the nature of these convictions is obscured by the dramatically shifting circumstances he faced. Sarafian began his career as a champion of the conservative Tanzimat-era statesman Âli Pasha only to become a victim of the repression visited on the press initiated by Âli Pasha’s own successors. He criticized Abdülhamid II’s decision to let Cyprus fall under British control, yet within a few years, he appears to have become a champion of the British occupation of Egypt. What happened? Was he chastened by the violence of the ‘Urabi Revolt, or dismayed by the Ottoman state’s failures at social reform? The source we are forced to rely on for many of the details of Sarafian’s later career is the memoir of a British journalist who cycled through many of the same locales, and who appears to have befriended this “Armenian gentleman” under the assumption that he was propelled by a desire to “seek fortune under our rule” (Vizetelly 1901, 16). Sarafian appears in the Englishman’s account as a quintessentially Orientalized figure, a man without clearly discernible origins or loyalties who moves with suspicious ease between Mediterranean cities, fluent in multiple languages and cultures of courtesy and seeking to exploit them for personal gain. The threadbare reality behind his colourful depiction is that Sarafian was an Ottoman Armenian who was being pushed to the margins of the world he inhabited. Amid the crumbling political infrastructure of Ottoman society, he struggled to continue participating in its public life, only to find himself thwarted at every turn in a landscape where indigenous Christians were increasingly identified with foreign occupiers.

Ottoman Christians as “Palace Journalists”: Filip Efendi and Mihran Nakkashian Those Greek and Armenian journalists who continued to thrive under the three-decade-long reign of Abdülhamid II found themselves saddled with the reputation of “palace journalists.” Yet their trajectories were much like those of their Muslim counterparts, including Ahmet Mithat Efendi and Ebüzziya Tevfik, who continued to publish in Istanbul after witnessing the silencing of their friends and colleagues. As Ebru Boyar suggests, it was impossible to work as a journalist in the Hamidian era without being

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conscripted into the sultan’s vast public relations campaign (Boyar 2006). Filip Efendi, whose journal Muhbir had been shuttered in May of 1867, spent the rest of his long career attempting to evade the sultan’s censors. Over the decades, his attitude of defiance gradually shifted into one of accommodation. His journal Vakit, founded in 1875, endured continual assaults from state authorities for its coverage of international politics (Demirel 2007, 65). It, too, was finally shut down in February 1884, following an article that mocked certain prominent government ministers (Zheltiakov 1979, 117). The next newspaper that Filip founded, a daily called Tarik, was his final and longest-lived venture, remaining in print until 1899. To keep within the good graces of Abdülhamid’s censors, Filip brought in as head writer the journalist Hamid Vehbi, best known for his collection of biographical sketches of famous figures in Islam, and made it a point to speak of officials only in the most respectful tones. The impression it left on a Parisian journalist in 1890 was of a “very progressive, semi-­ official organ” (Mermet 1890, 866). Despite this impression, it was not until 1894 that Tarik began to receive a regular subsidy from the state, after a petition from Filip argued for adding it to the government’s rolls by noting that several other newspaper publishers already received such a subsidy, and that the struggling Tarik was at least as loyal as theirs (Demirel 2007, 82–83). Ebüzziya Tevfik was not unaware of the difficult choices faced by journalists in the Hamidian era: although he was exiled to Konya during the last decade of Abdülhamid II’s reign, his name also turned up on a list of publishers who acted as state informants (Boyar 2006, 427). Another name on the list was that of Mihran Nakkashian (1850–1944), an Armenian from central Anatolia who edited the prominent newspaper Sabah. Nakkashian had studied printing at a vocational school founded by Midhat Pasha, joined the staff of Sabah as a typesetter, and bought the newspaper from its Greek owner in 1882, remaining its owner and publisher until the end of the empire (Civelekoğlu 2014). Working closely with a carefully chosen team of Muslim and Christian writers, Nakkashian managed to stay on the right side of Abdülhamid II for most of the nearly three decades in which their reigns overlapped. Yet in the summer of 1896, amidst the state-sponsored massacres of Armenians that took place between 1894 and 1897, Sabah was shut down. To end the shutdown, Nakkashian wrote a series of petitions to the sultan in which the publisher noted that he had received death threats from fellow Armenians for the

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contents of his newspaper, a fact that he mobilized as proof of his continued loyalty to the state and its sultan (Demirel 2007, 79–80).

From Accessories to Enemies: Diran Kelekian at Ottomanism’s End Given the tightrope that Nakkashian was forced to walk as the prominent Armenian editor of a mainstream newspaper, it is striking that his choice for head writer of Sabah was a fellow Armenian, Diran Kelekian (1862–1915). A native of Kayseri like Nakkashian himself, Kelekian could speak and write in Turkish as well as Armenian, and was in many respects ideally suited to embody the voice of the conciliatory Ottomanism that Sabah represented.10 Kelekian’s career as a journalist began during his year abroad in Marseilles, in 1880, where, in addition to studying commerce at one of the grandes écoles, he acted as a correspondent for the long-running Armeno-Turkish newspaper Manzume-i Efkâr. When the year was up, Kelekian returned to Istanbul to become the editor-in-chief of that newspaper, before moving to the Turkish newspaper Saadet, and then to Filip’s Tarik. In 1894, the outbreak of the Armenian massacres drove him back to Europe, where he wrote a number of articles for British journals. He also appears to have undergone a major political shift: his sympathies had originally lain with the Armenian separatist Hunchakian Party, yet his encounters with Ahmet Rıza (1858–1930) and other members of the Paris branch of the Young Turks were decisive in persuading him to share their vision of a multi-ethnic liberal state (Kevorkian 2011, 30 and 816). Kelekian was now convinced that a shared future for Ottoman Muslims and Christians was both possible and necessary, and he became a prominent champion of this view in the international press. When, in 1898, a collective amnesty was extended to all Ottoman subjects living abroad, Kelekian seized the opportunity to return to Istanbul. Nakkashian promptly made him the chief writer for Sabah, while state officials embraced him as a diplomatic asset in their bid to repair relations with 10  Kelekian (whose name is sometimes rendered as Kelegian, Kelekyan, or Kelegyan) moved with his family from Kayseri to Istanbul at the age of six, where he attended the Nersesian, Mezburian, and Surenian schools before spending a year at the École Supérieure de Commerce in Marseille. These and other biographical details are drawn from Kelekian’s own biographical account, originally furnished for Teotoros “Teotig” Lapçinciyan’s annual publication, “Everyone’s Almanac,” and translated into modern Turkish by Umit Torosyan (Torosyan 2012).

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European powers in the wake of the massacres. He was accordingly dispatched back to Europe to represent the state on several occasions, including the first international peace convention, held at the Hague in 1899, and appears to have also been involved in some spying on Young Turk dissident activities abroad (Hanioğlu 1995, 118). Yet he remained a dissident at heart, and within a few years he had once again fled Istanbul— this time for Cairo, where he continued to work as a journalist while becoming embroiled in revolutionary plots.11 In particular, Kelekian was instrumental in efforts to broker unity between Turkish Muslim and Armenian dissidents overseas. His approach is reflected in a handful of letters and memoranda drafted for the benefit of other Young Turk leaders before their gathering in Paris in April of 1906. Here Kelekian articulates the dilemma of how to reconcile the Turkish Muslim majority’s desire for continued hegemony with their practical need for the support of their non-Muslim compatriots. The desire for hegemony itself was no surprise, he wrote, given that “even in France,” nationalists had sought to restrict the rights of Jews; likewise, he was not surprised to see that “the Turkish nation…wishes to base the freedom that it seeks for the country” on its own continued dominance (Kelekian quoted in Hanioğlu 2001, 135–36). Yet he politely insisted that the aspiration for unity without equality was untenable; the demand for “racial and social equality” (as opposed to mere “individual equality”) was too great. “Nobody can be deceived by a liberalism based on the principle of Turkification,” he wrote in a letter to his Muslim fellow dissident Dr Bahettin Şakir. “The non-Muslim subjects are ready to become Ottomans,” he added, but not “Christian Turks.” The solution lay in a politics of “maximal liberalism [including decentralized power] and unequivocal justice.” His memo to his fellow Ottoman dissidents ended by urging them “to regard the fatherland as common for all, to abandon the claims of superiority and hegemony, and to limit oneself to being a ‘partner’ instead of a ‘superior’” (Kelekian quoted in Hanioğlu 2001, 135–36).

11  Kelekian’s involvement with the Young Turk movement is detailed in M. Şükrü Hanioğlu’s Preparation for a Revolution: The Young Turks, 1902–1908, which describes how his ongoing connections to Armenian separatists made him a valuable asset for the Young Turks. In 1906, Kelekian and Dr Bahattin Şakir organized a failed plot to assassinate Abdülhamid II in which “bombs as small as cigarette boxes would be placed in the Yîldîz Palace or in the Hamidiye Mosque,” a scheme in which Kelekian tapped into his old Armenian revolutionary networks (Hanioğlu 2001, 168).

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After the successful Young Turk revolt of 1908, Kelekian returned yet again to Istanbul and became a living apotheosis of Ottomanist ideals. Alongside his duties as head writer at Sabah, he was charged with educating the new Ottoman bureaucratic elite as a professor of politics at the Imperial School of Administration (Mekteb-i Mülkiye). In September of 1912, on the eve of the Balkan War, he delivered a speech to a hundred thousand people gathered outside Sultanahmet Mosque in which he promised that the Ottomans would “show Europe what stuff they are made of” in defending their Balkan territories, or else “leave thirty million graves behind them” (Kelekian quoted in Kevorkian 2011, 135). In February of 1913, as the war intensified, Kelekian was among a handful of prominent Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Ottoman leaders who helped form the National Defense League (Müdâfaa-i Milliye Cemiyeti), a civilian organization formed in support of the army (Beşikçi 2012, 53). Then, on the night of Saturday, 24 April 1915, he was arrested and deported from the Ottoman capital alongside hundreds of other prominent Armenian intellectuals, becoming one of the genocide’s first victims. His old revolutionary comrade and conspirator, Dr. Bahattin Şakir, would later be convicted for his role in perpetrating the genocide (Dadrian and Akçam 2011, 113–14).

Conclusion: Towards a New Understanding of Ottomanism The half-century that separated al-Bustani’s 1860 clarion calls for peace in Mount Lebanon from Kelekian’s call to war in the Balkans saw the realization of the greatest hopes and worst fears of Ottomanists. In 1876, a widely reviled sultan was overthrown and a constitution was promulgated that recognized all the subjects of the empire as citizens of a liberal state. Yet in the decades that followed, the state would orchestrate a series of massacres culminating in a genocide that killed over a million of those citizens. Throughout this period, non-Muslim voices rang out loudly in the public conversation surrounding the present and future of the Ottoman state. Recognizing these voices and attending to what they had to say leads us to a richer account of what Ottomanism was, whom it spoke for, and what it aimed to achieve. Amid the rise of separatist movements, mounting sectarian violence, and deepening ideological rifts within and between religious communities, a substantial number of Ottoman

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Christians chose to stake their futures on the possibility of a more inclusive and democratic Ottoman state. While Ottoman diplomats were accustomed to emphasizing the sectarian fault lines that ran through the empire and the risk of catastrophe they posed, leaning on Europeans’ fears of Muslim fanaticism to ground their case for the continued indispensability of the Ottoman state, these Ottomanists rejected the bureaucrats’ vision of the empire as an eclectic assemblage of religiously disparate subjects gathered under the protective cloak of the state. Instead, the vision of Ottoman society they conjured was of a community of compatriots, united by a common loyalty to their vatan or homeland, their communal history, and each other.

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Campos, Michelle. 2011. Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Cankara, Murat. 2015. Rethinking Ottoman Cross-Cultural Encounters: Turks and the Armenian Alphabet. Middle Eastern Studies 51 (1): 1–16. Civelekoğlu, Levent. 2014. Suadiye Sahilinde ‘Sabah’tan Kalma Bir Garib Yali … ‘Sabah’la Parlayip, ‘Peyam-I Sabah’ Ile Sönen, Bir Gazeteci; Mihran Efendi Ve Yalisi … etc. https://lcivelekoglu.blogspot.com/2014/02/suadiye-­sahilinde-­ sabahtan-­kalma-­bir.html. Accessed June 19, 2019. Cohen, Julia Phillips. 2014. Becoming Ottomans: Sephardi Jews and Imperial Citizenship in the Modern Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cora, Yaşar Tolga, Dzovinar Derderian, and Ali Sipahi, eds. 2016. The Ottoman East in the Nineteenth Century: Societies, Identities and Politics. London: I.B. Tauris. Dadrian, Vahakn N., and Taner Akçam. 2011. Judgment at Istanbul: The Armenian Genocide Trials. New York: Berghahn Books. Davison, Roderic H. 1963. Reform in the Ottoman Empire, 1856–1876. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Demirel, Fatmagül. 2007. II. Abdülhamid Döneminde Sansür. Istanbul: Bağlam. ̇ Doğan, Ismail. 1991. Tanzimatın iki ucu: Münif Paşa ve Ali Suavi: sosyo-pedagojik ̇ bir karşılaştırma. Merter-Istanbul: Iż Yayıncılık. Fawaz, Leila Tarazi. 1994. An Occasion for War: Civil Conflict in Lebanon and Damascus in 1860. University of California Press. Gasper, Michael Ezekiel. 2009. The Power of Representation: Publics, Peasants, and Islam in Egypt. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hanioğlu, M. Şükrü. 1995. The Young Turks in Opposition. New  York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2001. Preparation for a Revolution: The Young Turks, 1902–1908. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2008. A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hartmann, Elke. 2010. The ‘Loyal Nation’ and Its Deputies. The Armenians in the First Ottoman Parliament. In The First Ottoman Experiment in Democracy, ed. Christoph Herzog and Malek Sharif, 187–222. Ergon: Würzburg. ̇ Inalcık, Halil, and Donald Quataert. 1994. An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, 1300–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kechriotis, Vangelis Constantinos. 2005. The Greeks of Izmir at the End of the Empire: A Non-Muslim Ottoman Community between Autonomy and Patriotism. PhD Rijksuniversiteit te Leiden. Kevorkian, Raymond. 2011. The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History. London: I.B. Tauris. Koçunyan, Aylin. 2014. The Transcultural Dimension of the Ottoman Constitution. In Well-Connected Domains: Towards an Entangled Ottoman

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History, ed. Pascal W.  Firges, Tobias P.  Graf, Christian Roth, and Gülay Tulasoğlu, 235–258. Leiden: Brill. Mardin, Şerif. 1962. The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought: A Study in the Modernization of Turkish Political Ideas. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mermet, Émile. 1890. Annuaire de La Presse Française. Paris. Moumdjian, Garabet K. 2012. Struggling for a Constitutional Regime: Armenian-­ Young Turk Relations in the Era of Abdulhamid II, 1895–1909. PhD. University of California, Los Angeles. ̇ Özdiş, Hamdi. 2005. Teodor Kasab ve Istikbâl Gazetesine Dair Notlar. Kebikeç: insan bilimleri için kaynak araştırmaları dergisi 20: 5–26. Philliou, Christine. 2009. Communities on the Verge: Unraveling the Phanariot Ascendancy in Ottoman Governance. Comparative Studies in Society and History 51 (01): 151–181. Stamatopoulos, Dimitris, ed. 2015. Balkan Nationalism(s) and the Ottoman Empire, Vol. I: National Movements and Representations. Istanbul: Isis Press. Strauss, Johann. 2002. Ottomanisme et ‘Ottomanité’: Le Témoignage Linguistique. In Aspects of the Political Language in Turkey: 19th–20th Centuries, ed. Hans-Lukas Kieser, 15–40. Istanbul: Isis Press. ———. 2003. Who Read What in the Ottoman Empire (19th–20th Centuries)? Middle Eastern Literatures 6 (1): 39–76. ———. 2005. ‘Kütüp ve Resail-i Mevkute’: Printing and Publishing in a Multi-­ Ethnic Society. In Late Ottoman Society: The Intellectual Legacy, ed. Elisabeth Özdalga, 227–256. New York: Routledge. Suavi, Ali. 1870. Yeni Osmanlılar Tarihi. Ulûm Gazetesi 15: 892–932. ———. 1876a. Ali Suavi Efendi’nin Izmir’de bir zata yazmış olduğu bir mektubun elimize geçen suretidir. Vakit 2 (301): 2–3. ———. 1876b. Paris’ten mektup. Vakit 2 (323): 1–2. ̇ Sungu, Ihsan. 1945. Muhbir Gazetesi. Aylık Ansiklopedi 1 (13): 401–404. Tevfik, Ebüzziya. 1973. Yeni Osmanlılar Tarihi. Istanbul: Hürriyet Yayınları. Topuz, Hıfzı. 1960. L’information internationale dans la presse turque. Paris: C. E. L. S. E. Torosyan, Umit. 2012. Diran Kelegyan’nın Teotig’In Yıllıklarındaki Özgeçmişi. Dycengizhan.blogspot.com. https://dycengizhan.blogspot.com/2012/03/ diran-kelegyannn-teotigin-yllklarndaki.html. Accessed August 19, 2019. Turnaoğlu, Banu. 2017. The Formation of Turkish Republicanism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ueno, Masayuki. 2016. One Script, Two Languages: Garabed Panosian and His Armeno-Turkish Newspapers in the Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Empire. Middle Eastern Studies 52 (4): 605–622. Unbehaun, Horst. 2004. The Middle Eastern Press as a Forum for Literature. Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang.

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Vizetelly, Edward Henry. 1901. From Cyprus to Zanzibar by the Egyptian Delta: The Adventures of a Journalist in the Isle of Love, the Home of Miracles, and the Land of Cloves. London: C. Arthur Pearson. ̇ ̇ Yazıcı, Nesimi. 2000. Ibret. TDV Islâm Ansiklopedisi 21: 368–370. https://islamansiklopedisi.org.tr/ibret%2D%2Dgazete. Accessed August 17, 2019. Zheltiakov, A.  D. 1979. Türkiyeʾnin sosyo-politik ve kültürel hayatında basın (1729–1908 Yılları). Ed. Orhan Koloğlu. Ankara: Basın Yayın Genel Müdürlüğü.

CHAPTER 6

Arab Perspectives on the Late Ottoman Empire Stephan Guth

Introduction In his little lexicon about The Arab World, Alexander Flores starts his entry about the role and importance of the Ottomans for this region stating that, until the end of WWI, the overwhelming majority of the Arab populations, including the elites, remained loyal subjects of the Ottoman Empire (Flores 2003, 202). Flores explains this as the result of a long history of relatively uncomplicated Ottoman-Arab relations,1 relations that had remained so uncomplicated because the Ottomans always employed non-Turkish Muslims (as well as non-Muslims) on all levels of administration and did not make, before the early twentieth century, any attempts to 1  The Levant had become Ottoman in 1516, Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula including Yemen in 1517, Iraq in 1539, Tripolitania and the Cyrenaica in 1557, Tunisia and Algeria in 1574 (Berger et al. 1987, 44).

S. Guth (*) Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Chovanec, O. Heilo (eds.), Narrated Empires, Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55199-5_6

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stress Turkishness as a leading ideology. In contrast to what later Arab nationalists often want to make their readers believe, Ottoman administration did, as a rule, not mean foreign oppression for the Arabs (Flores 2003, 202.).2 Flores’s general assessment is corroborated by that of several others.3 Yet it does not explain why the Ottoman state would issue several decrees that made everybody living under Ottoman rule into equal citizens of the state, irrespective of religious or ethnic affiliation.4 In 1869, the ideology—generally referred to as “Ottomanism”5—was even translated into the Ottoman Nationality Act which made all subjects of the Empire equal before the law, after the Imperial Edict (Ḫaṭṭ-ı Hümāyūn) of 1856 had already granted religious freedom and the equality of ethnic groups and religions in administration.6 Historians agree that these and similar measures that, in Salim Çevik’s words, attempted “to transform all the subjects of an empire into an all-inclusive imperial national identity” (S.C., in the present volume) were triggered mainly by the need to counter ever-­ growing European influence and involvement in the Empire and to contain the destabilising impact Western political ideology, especially nationalism and the ideas of the French Revolution, and Western cultural hegemony might have on the Empire’s inner stability.

2  For some specimens of twentieth-century Arab national ideology that lumped Mamluks, Ottomans, and British colonizers into one category of oppressors of the past, cf. Reinkowski 2016, passim. In his Philosophy of the Revolution (ca. 1960), the “great leader” Gamal Abdel Nasser even quoted, approvingly, his ancestors with their saying, yā rabb yā mutagallı̄, ʾihlik il-ʿuthmānlı̄ [read ʿus̱mallı̄, with n > l assimilation, for reasons of rhyme] “Oh Lord, who art manifest in Thy deeds, destroy the Ottoman(s)” (quoted in German by Reinkowski 2016, 237; Arabic original as in ʿAbd al-Nāsị r [c. 1960], 45; English translation following Badawi and Hinds 1986, s.r. √1gly). 3  Cf., for example, Philipp 2014, 115, where the author says that “[b]efore World War I we hear practically no Arab voice demanding Arab independence.” 4  Cf., for example, Shaw 1971, 135. 5  Although, if Alp E. Topal is right, the corresponding Turkish term, ʿOs̱mānlıcılıḳ, is not attested earlier than in 1913 (see Topal’s contribution to the present volume), one may well nevertheless speak, as historians usually do, of an “Ottomanist” ideology, an Ottomanism avant la lettre, meaning a “pan-Ottoman” ideology that sought to include all subjects of the Ottoman state as equal citizens with equal rights (e.g., religious freedom, primary education) and duties (esp. taxes and military service). Salim Çevik (in this volume, too) refers to this very same concept as “imperial nationalism.” 6  For an analysis of the legal implications of the Edict, see Ayşe Ozil’s contribution to this volume.

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Ottoman fears of this kind were indeed not unfounded. Revolts in the Balkans (Serbia 1804–06, 1815–17) and the Greek War of Independence (1821–29) had already led to territorial losses, Algeria had become a French colony in 1830, and England and France were active on a large scale in several parts of the Arab world. The successes of independence movements in Europe could, Ottomans were afraid, possibly inspire similar secessionist tendencies in other parts of the Empire, among which the Arab regions’ non-Muslim minorities were already being courted and promised support by European powers overall in the Empire, especially so in the Levant, where France even intervened militarily as a “protector” of the Christian Maronites after the 1860–61 civil war. And Western ideas were indeed eagerly received also by Arab elites because they seemed to provide useful models for the East on its way to the much-desired “progress,” “civilisation,” and “modernity.”7 On the other hand, Arabs also saw the negative aspects of European influence, from direct colonisation (as in the case of Algeria) and political-­ military interference (as in Lebanon or, earlier, on the Crimea) to economic exploitation and an erosion of the East’s cultural self-esteem.8 Thus, while the Western model looked promising in many respects (technology, culture), European powers were also felt as a danger, so that, on the political scale, the good old Ottoman Empire still seemed to be the safer haven. For a long time, therefore, most Arabs saw their own interests better served within the framework of the existing Empire and readily accepted the “pan-Ottoman” social contract. Ottomanism seemed to allow them to 7  For an early encounter with Western culture and civilisation, still unbiased by the negative impact of European colonialism, cf. Rifāʿah R. al-Ṭ aht ̣āwı̄’s (1801–71) detailed—and rather appreciatory, though not at all uncritical—report about his study mission to France, 1826–31 (al-Ṭ aht ̣āwı̄ 1834). For an analysis of the later development of the image of the West in Arabic fiction (and drama), cf. Wielandt 1980 (in German) and El-Enany 2006 (in English). 8  One of the most significant expressions of criticism of Westernisation is the emergence, from the middle of the nineteenth century, of the character of the mutafarnij, the “Euromaniac,” in Arabic literature (corresponding to the alafranga züppe “Euro-fop” in Turkish). Through these types, the authors ridicule the unquestioned adoption of European fashion, attitudes, and habits, mostly from a moral (but, in Turkish, also from an economic) perspective. At the same time, they are eager to promote pride in one’s own, “Eastern” culture (termed wujūd ahlı̄ “the indigenous way of life” in the probably earliest piece of “modern” Arabic fiction, Khalı̄l al-Khūrı̄’s Way! Idhan lastu bi-Ifranjı̄ “Alas! I am not a European then!” of 1859/60; the corresponding term in Turkish is alaturkalık “life alla turca”). On the mutafarnij/alafranga züppe, cf. my own study, Guth (2020), with further references; see also Johanna Chovanec’s contribution in this volume.

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preserve their identities and proceed on the path of modernisation, seen as a combination of technological progress à l’Européenne and a “national” Arab cultural “revival” or “renaissance” (nahḍah). There did not seem to be a reason to rise against the Ottoman Empire, and love for one’s homeland (waṭan) would not be incompatible with loyalty towards the Empire and a larger “Ottoman nation.” However, whenever the Ottomans prevented, or seemed to prevent, them from following their own Arab agendas, the European states could become quasi-natural allies. As we will see below, there was also a lot of (regional and other) variation and a historical dynamic in their manoeuvring between these two poles, because Ottomanism, from the beginning, was not uncontroversial: for the Muslims, it meant the elimination of their previous superior position in the State, while non-Muslims not only gained new rights but also lost former privileges. The following essay presents some of the choices made by Arab literati“intellectuals”9 living at the time. Far from claiming to be a comprehensive overview, the chapter should be read as a selective and impressionist first approach to a vast area of research. Important complementary, and partly overlapping, information is found in the present volume. Salim Çevik discusses, among other things, the frequent vacillation between loyalty to the Empire and local patriotism, observable also among “my” Arabs. Madeleine Elfenbein emphasises the role of non-Muslim journalism in the promotion of Ottomanist attitudes and Isa Blumi studies the diverse forms and aims of Ottomanism among Albanian activists and intellectuals. However, with regard to the territory from which their sources originate, both Elfenbein and Blumi remain, by and large, within the confines of the centre, whereas “my” voices stem from the Arab provinces. And while Elfenbein sheds light particularly on Christians, my article not only covers Christians (M. al-Naqqāsh, B. al-Bustānı̄, J. Zaydān, Kh. Muṭrān, F. Anṭūn, L.M. Sawāyā, I.̄ Abū Mādı̣ ̄) but also includes some Muslim positions (A. al-Qabbānı̄, M.  S. al-Bārūdı̄, I. al-Muwayliḥı ̄, A. al-Ṣayyādı̄, ʿA. al-Kawākibı̄, M. al-Ruṣaf̄ ı̄, S. al-Ḥ uṣrı̄). As a whole, it documents a development that matches very well Çevik’s and Elfenbein’s findings: It also shows how widely spread Ottomanist attitudes 9  Although at the time no specific term had been coined yet for “intellectual” in Arabic nor was English intellectual used in the modern sense before the late nineteenth century, the group of educated people who used to be referred to as udabāʾ “literati” (sg. adı̄b) can probably be seen as “intellectuals avant la lettre,” given that they were thinkers who engaged with the vital reality of the contemporary world and commented in public on matters they regarded of relevance for their community.

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were, and perhaps especially, among non-Muslims and in the peripheries and how active these groups remained for a long time in promoting an all-inclusive Ottoman identity (perhaps more active than the Muslim Ottomans in the centre themselves), but it also demonstrates that loyalty towards the Ottoman state decreased in relation to the degree Ottoman authorities would narrow their vision of the Ottoman nation from an inclusive multinational Habsburgian model to an exclusive Romanov type of nationalism (Çevik).

Mid- to End-Nineteenth Century As mentioned above, the “starting position” that we can assume for the middle of the nineteenth century to have been the prevalent Arab attitude vis-à-vis Ottoman authority was, in general, loyalty towards the state, seen mostly as a guarantor and protector of relative freedom to preserve one’s religious, linguistic, and ethnic-cultural identity and as a bulwark against European colonialism. As pointed out by Madeleine Elfenbein in the present volume,10 Buṭrus al-Bustānı̄ (1819–83) had prepared an Arabic translation of the Imperial Edict of 1856, and it is no wonder to find many Arabs of the time continuing the old panegyrical tradition (madı̄ḥ) in praising the Empire and the Sultan or his local representatives wherever appropriate (Sadgrove 2010b, 248). For instance, Mārūn al-Naqqāsh (1817–55), a famous pioneer of Arab theatre,11 after obtaining permission from the Ottoman authorities in Syria to produce al-Bakhı̄l (The Miser, 1847), a play inspired by Molière’s L’Avare, lets its protagonist sing (in Act II, Scene 5) the praises of Sultan ʿAbd al-Majı̄d (Abdülmecid), and this is repeated by the actors behind the curtain (Sadgrove 2010b, 248). In a similar vein, another play, al-Salı̄ṭ al-ḥasūd (The Envious, Impertinent One), staged a few years later, ends with a prayer to God to punish the enemies and bring victory to the Sultan, followed by an epilogue, a prayer for sultan ʿAbd al-Majı̄d and the foreign minister ʿAlı̄ Pasha, sung by the actors […]. Thanks are also 10  See her contribution on the “Unruly Children of the Homeland: Ottomanism’s NonMuslim Authors.” 11  For more on al-Naqqāsh, see Sadgrove 2010b, with further references. As also operas and the novel, theatre counted among the “modern” genres, introduced in the Middle East, in adaptations from the European model, by the mid-nineteenth century with the hope that it would help reform society and advance civilisational progress. For more on the history of Arab(ic) drama and theatre in general, cf. Starkey 1998, with further references (among them Badawi 1988, Landau 1958, and Tomiche 1969); a more recent study is Ruocco 2010.

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addressed to Amı̄n Mukhliṣ Pasha, the governor of Sidon, who had encouraged Mārūn to set up the theatre and write the plays to open the ‘door of civilization’ in the country. (Sadgrove 2010b, 249)

Al-Naqqāsh was prudent enough to make sure he had the authorities’ backing. He died before the first Lebanese civil war of 1860–61,12 but in the sectarian atmosphere prevailing after the events, it would certainly have been difficult for him, as a Christian, to continue his activities without official support, especially since conservative Muslim circles often disapproved of theatre as “idolatry,” or of the “misrepresentation” of revered historical personalities in it. As the case of Naqqāsh’s younger colleague, Abū Khalı̄l al-Qabbānı̄ (1833–1902),13 shows, these circles could become very influential. When a chief ulema allegedly complained to the Sultan that, “as a result of the theatre’s increasing popularity, adultery and sin were spreading in Syria, and women were mixing with men,” then obviously it did not matter that al-Qabbānı̄, too, used to begin and end his performances “with praise or prayers for the Ottoman caliph and sultan” and that he even compared, in the epilogue of one play, Sultan ʿAbdülḥamı̄d’s justice to that of the great ʿAbbāsid caliph Hārūn al-Rashı̄d (Sadgrove 2010a, 273). Nor was it relevant that he was Muslim and from a family of Turkish origin and that his theatrical enterprises had been firmly and even financially supported, since 1879, by the enlightened governor, Midḥat Pasha. The chief ulama’s complaint evidently weighed heavier, so that as a consequence, it is alleged, “an order was issued banning acting in Damascus in 1884, and al-Qabbānı̄’s theatre was burnt to the ground, perhaps as the result of an arson attack” (Sadgrove 2010a, 268). Following this, the director decided to leave Syria. Together with most of his troupe of actors, writers, poets, composers, singers, musicians, and dancers he moved to the “greener pastures” of Egypt (Elfenbein in the present 12  Tensions that had been smouldering for some years between Maronite Christian peasants and their Druze landlords eventually erupted in 1860 after the peasants’ leader, Ṭ anyūs Shāhı̄n, had demanded that the feudal class abolish their privileges, and the peasants had begun to revolt. During the clashes, thousands of Maronites were massacred, with Ottoman troops directly or indirectly aiding the Druze forces. The conflict became even more complicated through the involvement of France (as a “protector” of the Maronites) and the British (who objected to prolonged French presence in the country and argued that pacification should be left to the Ottomans). 13  Despite al-Naqqāsh’s precedence, it is usually al-Qabbānı̄ who is regarded today the “father” of Arab(ic) theatre.

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volume) that was nominally still part of the Ottoman Empire but since 1882 already under British occupation, where he found a much more liberal atmosphere, as did several other Levantine intellectuals who had gone through similar experiences. In spite of such experiences, but also because of the severe censorship that ʿAbdülḥamı̄d had introduced,14 as well as the corresponding “inquisition” (Hassan 2006, 31) and persecution, many of this group of shawām, that is, immigrants from Greater Syria (al-Shām),15 nevertheless remained loyal to the Sultan and/or the Empire even after their emigration. Thus, the first thing for the Syrian writer-philosopher Faraḥ Anṭūn (1874–1922) to do after his arrival in Egypt in 1897 was to found a journal he significantly named al-Jāmiʿah al-ʿUthmāniyyah,16 a term that usually is translated as “Ottoman Union/Community” but may perhaps even be rendered as “Ottoman Patriotism.”17 From this we may conclude that, for intellectuals like Ant ̣ūn, Ottomanism obviously still made sense—perhaps  On censorship in the Empire in general, cf. Cioeta 1979.  Often, emigration from Greater Syria was also motivated by other than political reasons—economic, social, religious, and so on—and headed for the Americas rather than Egypt (although Egypt was de facto independent already since the Ottoman governor, Meḥmed/Muḥammad ʿAlı̄, in 1841, had been granted the right to life-long rule and hereditary successorship to his position). The first immigrants to North America, for example, arrived around 1850. A larger wave left their home countries after the 1860/61 civil war. During the following years, many sought refuge abroad from periodic inter-communal strife at home. In the American exile (“the” mahjar) as well as in Egypt, Syrians, mostly Christian literati, played an important role in the establishment and operation of the private printing press and, through it, the stimulation of lively public debate on all kinds of issues of relevance for the local societies, and the Arabs at large; in this way, they played a prominent role in the development of a modern public discourse and the creation of an Arab civil society. See, for example, Landau 1968 (check index for “Diaspora” and “Emigranten, Emigration”). 16  Hassan 2006, 29. From the 13th issue (15 Sept. 1899) onwards, the attribute ʿuthmāniyyah was dropped, cutting the title down to the more general al-Jāmiʿah. 17  Late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century Arabic conceptual terminology is still rather unspecific and “volatile.” While, today, jāmiʿah most often denotes “university,” the literal sense of the word—an active participle meaning “the gathering one, uniting one”—is still more graspable in expressions like jāmiʿah riyāḍiyyah “sport association” or al-Jāmiʿah al-ʿarabiyyah “The Arab League.” The latter term, however, can be found in Monteil (1960, 108) also as denoting “panarabisme,” while the same study gives the whole semantic range of jāmiʿah as “communauté, union, fédération; ligue; université; accumulateur” (Monteil 1960, 108). “Ottoman Patriotism” for al-jāmiʿah al-ʿuthmāniyyah is the rendering chosen by Hilary Kilpatrick in her translation of the term as used by Jurjı̄ Zaydān a decade after Faraḥ Ant ̣ūn in an article on “Arabs and Turks—Before and After the Constitution” (1909, see below). 14 15

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even still as much, or nearly as much, as it had made sense for Abū l-Hudà al-Ṣayyādı̄ (1850–1909) whom earlier scholarly literature viewed as one of the most important Arab propagandists of the Sultan’s pan-Islamic-­ coloured Ottomanism (Eich 2007). Al-Ṣayyādı̄ had become naqı̄b al-ashrāf18 of Aleppo at a very young age and in 1879 advanced to the position of a religious adviser to the young ʿAbdülḥamı̄d II. “Once established in the Sultan’s entourage in Istanbul, he [also] became the most important Rifāʿiyya shaykh of the Ottoman Empire” (Eich 2007), a position he used primarily to work for the integration of scholars from northern Syria and Iraq—indeed, “integration” could be yet another apt translation of the term jāmiʿah! In addition, more recent research tends to see the scholar more as a reformer than as a pan-Islamist, so that one may have to regard his Ottomanism as more secular than previously assumed. This can be corroborated by the fact that, “[i]n his later writings, especially those from after 1900, Abū l-Hudà devoted more space to political issues, particularly the new ideology of nationalism, and argued for a multinational empire” (Eich 2007).19 However, stating that Arabs by and large remained loyal to the Empire is not so say that there weren’t also, occasionally, more critical attitudes and voices of protest. In the case of the Egyptian poet Maḥmūd Sāmı̄ al-Bārūdı̄ (1839–1904), expressions of deep loyalty may even be followed, in one and the same person and quite unexpectedly, by calls to rise against the rulers. Serving in the Ottoman army in its campaign against separatist uprisings in Crete (1866–68), al-Bārūdı̄ had composed a poem in which he condemned the inhabitants of the island for rising up against their Ottoman overlords, calling them a “people mired in the temptations of Satan (al-shayt ̣ān), having slunk away from their obedience to the Sultan (al-sult ̣ān),” thus implying that rebellion was a sin for which not only secular, but religious, judgment awaited. (DeYoung 2010a, 63)

When he returned victorious from the campaign, he was awarded the Ottoman Medal of Merit, Fourth Class, by the Sultan, and at first continued to behave like a “staunch supporter of the monarchy” (DeYoung 2010a, 62). In 1868, only two years after his pro-Ottoman poem,  That is, head of the descendants of the Prophet.  For Ottomanism transforming into Ottoman nationalism, and the Empire into an object of love, see below, pp. 139–40 (Sāt ̣iʿ al-Ḥ uṣrı̄’s idea). 18 19

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however, he suddenly, and for reasons that have remained unclear so far, composed another poem in which he depicted himself as calling out to the Egyptians: “O People, rise up! Life is but an opportunity and, over time, there are many paths abounding and chances to secure advantage.” This clarion challenge […] could hardly be read in the context of the times as anything but the most radical exhortation to his audience to rid themselves of the tyrants oppressing them. (DeYoung 2010a, 63)20

When Landau observes a similarly fluctuating attitude almost three decades later in Ibrāhı̄m al-Muwayliḥı’̄ s stance vis-à-vis the Sultan and the Turks, it seems to him “ambivalent, not to say opportunist” (Landau 1987, 73).21 Thus, al-Bārūdı̄ and al-Muwayliḥı ̄ are probably good cases in point to demonstrate that we can never be sure whether an intellectual’s use of traditional panegyrics has to be taken as a serious expression of wholehearted support or merely a strategic measure of careful self-­ protection when an author felt the need to voice discontent and criticism but knew very well that this could have severe consequences.

The Situation “Over There” The Egyptian Ibrāhı̄m al-Muwayliḥı ̄ (1844–1906) had already had several unpleasant encounters with the Ottoman authorities before he published his “renowned, indeed infamous” report (Allen 2008, 1), titled Mā hunālika (Over Yonder22), on the state of affairs in contemporary Istanbul, as he viewed it. While in Italy (where he had joined the Egyptian “vice-­ king,” khedive23 Ismāʿı̄l, on the latter’s deposition/abdication in 1879), 20  For a similar vacillation, also in the context of the rebellion on Crete, cf. M. Elfenbein’s chapter in the present volume (section “Dissidents or Palace Journalists?”). 21  For another case where a local’s vacillating opinion is interpreted by Westerners as “rich illustration of […] shifty Oriental character” instead of a cautiously and prudently manoeuvring subject, cf. M. Elfenbein, in the present volume. 22  Literally, “what (is/can be found) there (i.e., in Istanbul).” “Over Yonder” is Roger Allen’s rendering, Allen 2008, 1 (with note 1, p. 18). 23  The title “khedive” (Arabic khidiww/ı̄, from Persian khidı̄w, khadı̄w “lord, prince, ruler”) “was formally conferred by the Sultan upon Ismāʿı̄l in a firmān issued on 8 June 1867 […]. [… With it,] Ismāʿı̄l assumed a rank which elevated his standing to a position closer to royalty. [… The title also marked] the virtual independence of Egypt and her right to enter into special treaties and agreements governing posts, customs and trade transit. These provisions were to give Ismāʿı̄l freedom in the financial, administrative and judicial arrangements

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al-Muwayliḥı ̄ had continued to publish newspapers, most notably al-Ittiḥād (The Union), and had penned in it some critical commentaries that “provoked the anger of the Ottoman Sultan.”24 Shortly later (1884/85), while in France, al-Muwayliḥı ̄ had “published a further issue of Al-Ittihad which was so critical of Ottoman foreign policy that his expulsion from France was engineered by the Ottoman authorities” (Allen 2008, 3). The affair taught al-Muwayliḥı ̄ that it might be wiser to change both his topic and approach. While in London, he therefore turned to attacking the British government and writing in support of the Sultan (earlier, he had reproached ʿAbdülḥamı̄d for having remained too passive when England intervened and eventually occupied Egypt after the ʿUrābı̄ uprisings, 1879–82). His tactic worked: Seeking to secure the eloquent journalist’s support, the Sultan invited him to Istanbul in 1885 and appointed him a Member of the Encümen-i dānış (≈ Academy of Science) and Under-­ Secretary of State for Education. During the following ten years, al-Muwayliḥı ̄ gained intimate insight into the structure and processes taking place in the Ottoman state administration. He was shocked and very concerned about the situation, but knowing that the Sultan had his spies everywhere and critics had to reckon with severe punishment he remained silent and held back his observations for more than seven years. However from 1893, it seems that he felt he had to break his silence and inform the public about the dangers he saw lying ahead, and so he began to publish, under various pseudonyms, a series of articles in the Cairene press, mostly in the pro-British al-Muqaṭṭam. When it came to voicing Ottoman-critical opinions, a certain affiliation with the occupying forces seemed to be a viable compromise although al-Muwayliḥı,̄ ultimately, regarded foreign intervention as the real cause of the current deplorable situation (as we will soon see below). “The Sultan’s spies were on his trail, however,” and “eventually he was found out [and] charged” (Landau 1987, 73). Luckily, he was subsequently acquitted, but, evidently, the lesson sufficed to tell the author that he should leave and he of the country” (Vatikiotis 2012). (Reinkowski 2016, 240, n. 9, speaks of a “Phantasietitel,” which is not completely correct.) When Ottoman suzerainty ended and Egypt officially became a British protectorate (1914), the local rulers would even call themselves “sultan,” and after the end of the protectorate (1922) “kings.” 24  Citation is from Allen 2008, 3; cf., however, for the other elements of the author’s biography, Landau 1987, 71–72, and Allen 2008 in general.

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did so in 1895. Back in Egypt, he somehow “exploded”: from June 1895 to February 1896, he published, in al-Muqaṭt ̣am, his highly critical and uncensored report about what he had observed hunālika “over there,” in Istanbul. His articles were then also collected and brought out as a 256-­ page book the same year, still under a pseudonym—“by an honourable/ worthy Egyptian man-of-letters” (li-adı̄b fāḍil min al-Miṣriyyı̄n).25 Al-Muwayliḥı ̄ paints a devastating picture: a weak sultan, driven in many of his actions by an almost paranoid fear, surrounded by an incapable, only privately motivated entourage “who have driven away all faithful and capable state officials” (Landau 1987, 74) but are themselves living in permanent fear of the myriad of spies whom the Sultan has employed to keep him informed about the smallest details—allegedly, “over 150 reports [are] submitted [to him] daily” (Landau 1987, 74). Add to this the “duplication of functions as well as the venality, nepotism and ignorance” of many dignitaries, whom the author also accuses of “lacking a minimal sense of patriotism, as in “selling” Tunisia to France or not attending to Egypt’s affairs at the time of uprising.” An inflated bureaucracy and an inefficient military are to blame for the grievous territorial losses of the Empire, financial disorganisation, miscarriages of justice, and state expropriation of individual land-holdings (Landau 1987, 75). Interestingly enough, however, al-Muwayliḥı ̄ nevertheless always remains loyal to the Ottoman state as such. In an article entitled “The Ottoman Nation” (al-­ Ummah al-ʿUthmāniyyah26), published a week before the Mā hunālika 25  Publishing anonymously or with a pseudonym was a common practice during the reign of ʿAbdülḥamı̄d II (but also later). It secured a certain degree of protection from persecution—not the least so, I would claim, because it turned criticism into a kind of “game” that, by hiding the identity of the speaker, observed the rules of politeness (adab) and in this way facilitated non-persecution also for those targeted by criticism. 26  The Arabic title corresponds to the Turkish ʿOs̱mānlı millet or millet-i ʿOs̱mānı̄ye “Ottoman nation” mentioned in Salim Çevik’s contribution (following Masami Arai) as referring to the idea of the Empire as a nation state. Arabic ummah is attested already in preIslamic times. With all likelihood, it is a borrowing, either from Hebrew ummāʰ “tribe, people” or from the same Sumerian source from which the Hebrew word itself is taken (Jeffery 1938, 69; Pennacchio 2014, 158). In the Koran, where ummah is of frequent occurrence, it has a broad meaning, signifying a group of people sharing ethnic, religious, moral, and/or ideological allegiance. In classical Islamic literature, the word was mainly used to denote the universal Islamic religio-political community (Lewis  1991, 32). During the Arabic nahḍah, the term underwent a process of semantic extension and came to encompass (like Turkish millet) the equivalent of French nation (as in al-Umam [pl.] al-muttaḥidah “The United Nations”), see, for example, Massignon 1941–46. In this sense, ummah features as one of the “eight (key) concepts” of the time in the influential Egyptian educator

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series and later serving as a kind of introduction to the book version,27 he underlines that, in his opinion, the current situation of disintegration and fragmentation (tamazzuq, tashattut) of the Empire is caused, ultimately, by “the foreigners’ interference into its properties” (tadākhul al-ajānib fı̄ amlākihā—al-Muwayliḥı ̄ 1896, 10).28 Unlike the many opportunists who look at the Ottoman state as if it were a burning house from which one should try to take what the flames have not touched yet, praising oneself lucky to have preceded the collapse, he thinks that a constitutional system could still save the Empire and that it therefore is the task of all honourable men (aḥrār) to work towards reform (iṣlāḥ) and convince people that “the Ottoman nation’s health is in their [own] hands and that this nation is far from disintegrating and declining [… After all,] the glory [earned] in reviving a nation is better than to be wealthy at its death” (al-Muwayliḥı ̄ 1896, 12).29 To support his argument, he points to the Austrian Empire as a positive example: with regard to religions (adyān), it consists of Catholics, Muslims, Orthodox, Protestants, and Jews, and with regard to ethnic groups (ajnās), of Poles, Bohemians, Germans, Italians, Hungarians, Slaves. But this has not been an obstacle for the well-ordered condition (ḥusn al-niẓām) in which it finds itself. (al-Muwayliḥı ̄ 1896, 11)30

For al-Muwayliḥı,̄ the ideal is  still a centralised state headed by the Sultan (Landau 1987, 75); but in order for the system to function Ḥ usayn al-Marṣafı̄’s al-Kalim al-thamān (1881/82); for the author, an ummah is held together by a unity of language (lisān), territory (makān), and religion (dı̄n), where language is most important (Delanoue 1963, 10). For the modern development of the term, where it for some time “competed” with millah (which is the source of the Turkish term), see, for example, Lewis 1991, 38–39, 41. 27  Al-Muqaṭtạ m, no. 1898 (22 June 1895), and al-Muwayliḥı ̄ 1896, 9–13, respectively. 28  The author does not specify which interventions he has in mind, but one may think of the French turning Algeria into a colony, the Russians on the Crimea, the French and British in Lebanon, and, of course, the British occupation of Egypt. 29  inna l-ummah al-ʿuthmāniyyah dawāʾuhā fı̄ yadihim, wa-hiya abʿad al-umam ʿan al-talāshı̄ wa-l-inḥilāl … al-majd fı̄ iḥyāʾ umma khayr min al-māl fı̄ mawtihā. 30  tataʾallaf, min jihat al-adyān, min kāthūlı̄k wa-muslimı̄n wa-urthūdhuks wa-brūtistānt wa-yahūd, wa-tatashakkal, min jihat al-ajnās, min būlūniyyı̄n wa-būhı̄miyyı̄n wa-almāniyyı̄n wa-t ̣alyāniyyı̄n wa-majariyyı̄n wa-ṣaqālibah, wa-mā manaʿahā dhālika min ḥusn al-niẓām alladhı̄ hiya ʿalayhi.

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properly, it has to be reformed. As an “expert in the characteristics of nations” (ʿālim bi-akhlāq al-umam—al-Muwayliḥı ̄ 1896, 9), the author regards it as his task to inform the nation of the alarming situation in the capital, to point out the dangers that lie ahead if things continue like they are now, and to urge the “Ottoman nation” “to demand its rights and call on its Government to institute self-reform, maintain the constitution, reconvene parliament, institute a responsible cabinet and extend freedom of thought” (Landau 1987, 74). He draws his motivation from the conviction that, “as it was possible for one man [ʿAbdülḥamı̄d] to paralyze [lit., make lie down, put to sleep] a [whole] nation, it should be possible for one individual also to awaken it again” (al-Muwayliḥı ̄ 1896, 10). Given the author’s loyalty and patriotism, “it is undoubtedly ironic,” Landau concludes in his analysis of al-Muwayliḥı’̄ s report, “that the authorities in Egypt, acting upon demands from Istanbul, seized and destroyed most copies of Mā hunālika soon after its publication in 1896. A few copies of this work have survived, however, and serve as witness to al-Muwayliḥı’̄ s courage” (Landau 1987, 81).

Mecca, the “Mother of the Cities” A case that resembles al-Muwayliḥı’̄ s in many ways but also goes an important step further is that of the Syrian ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Kawākibı̄ (1849 or 1854/55–1902). Like al-Muwayliḥı,̄ al-Kawākibı̄ had gathered intimate knowledge about the Ottoman state and its administration both from serving in official positions and from a longer stay in Istanbul, and, like his Egyptian contemporary, he had suffered unpleasant experiences with the authorities when he had voiced sharp, if constructive, criticism. The weekly al-Shahbāʾ that he had started to publish in 1878 in Aleppo had been closed down after only 15 issues by order of the Ottoman governor due to its outspoken criticism of despotism (in general, but of course alluding to the Sultan) and of his local representative, the vali (wālı̄) Cemil (Jamı̄l) Pasha. Sometime later, quarrels with the wālı̄ had also brought him to a trial where he was found guilty of treason and sentenced to death; luckily he was acquitted after an appeal, but his property was confiscated nevertheless so that he eventually decided to leave the country. He arrived in Cairo in 1898 or 1899, that is, only four or five years after al-Muwayliḥı ̄ had returned from Istanbul, and like his Egyptian colleague, the first thing al-Kawākibı̄ felt urged to do was publish his critical comments (under pseudonyms, as also al-Muwayliḥı ̄ had chosen to do), drafted previously in

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Syria, on the state of affairs in the Empire. The first of the two books, titled Umm al-qurà (lit., Mother of Cities, i.e., Mecca), came out in 1899—“almost certainly clandestinely,” as Sylvia Haim assumes (Haim 2012)—and presented a kind of utopia: the vision of an Islamic conference taking place in Mecca, thus not only “illustrating the importance of Mecca to the Islamic world” but also discussing the caliphate and arguing, in Haim’s paraphrasis, that the problems of Islam would be solved by transferring the caliphate from the house of ʿUthmān to Ḳuraysh.31 An Arab caliph would be installed in Mecca and would exercise, with the concurrence of a special council of consultation (shūrà), political authority over the Ḥ idjāz32 only. This caliphate would be devoid of all other political and military powers; its spiritual nature, as well as the special position of the Arabs within Islam, are greatly stressed. (Haim 2012)

The fact that al-Kawākibı̄ had stayed in Syria for a long time and continued to work in several official positions—among which even that of mayor of Aleppo—despite regular harassment and intimidation can give proof of his wish to serve his Arab compatriots from within the system, that is, within the existing structures of the late Empire. However, in contrast to al-Muwayliḥı ̄ and many others who stuck to this overall framework although they were highly critical of it, ideas like those expressed in Umm al-qurà give clear evidence of the fact that, from a certain moment onwards, al-Kawākibı̄ must have come to the conclusion that a more radical solution was needed, a solution that also reinstalled the Arabs in their historic position as leaders of the Muslim world. Umm al-qurà clearly marks al-Kawākibı̄’s transition from an earlier, still ultimately Ottomanloyal attitude to a position that stresses the Arabs’ historical entitlement to spiritual leadership in the Muslim world and also claims back for them parts of the Arab territory that is currently under Ottoman rule—the 31  That is, from the (Turkish) Ottomans (who traced their dynasty back to Osman [Arabic ʿUthmān] I, r. c. 1299–1323/24) to the (Arab) Quraysh, a Meccan clan to which the Prophet Muhammad belonged and who later claimed the right to genealogical successorship against the Shı̄ʿah who tried to convey successorship on ʿAlı̄, the Prophet’s son-in-law, and his offspring, as well as against the Khārijiyyah, who wanted to elect the “best Muslim” as Muhammad’s successor (i.e., khalı̄fah “caliph”). 32  That is, the Hejaz, the region in the west of what today is Saudi Arabia where Islam emerged and where its two holiest sites, the cities of Mecca and Medina, are situated.

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Hijaz. It does not explicitly demand the ousting of the Sultan and the end of the Ottoman Empire, but could one imagine an empire in which the caliph was an Arab (from the tribe of Quraysh) and the Sultan a Turk and which had two capitals—Mecca as its spiritual centre and Istanbul as the seat of worldly power? It is no wonder that, from a later perspective, al-Kawākibı̄ could appear as a pioneer of pan-Arab nationalism and a voice calling for Arab sovereignty, all the more so as he also denounced, in the follow-up work to Umm al-qurà, the Sultan as a despot (mustabidd). Ṭ abāʾiʿ al-istibdād wa-maṣāriʿ al-istiʿbād (The Characteristics of Despotism and the Fatalities of Enslavement) first appeared in 1900 as a series of anonymous articles in the influential daily al-Muʾayyad (The Stronghold [?]33)34 and is “to a large extent a faithful rendering in Arabic of Della Tirannide (1800) by Vittorio Alfieri” (Haim 1954, 2012).35 In the work, al-Kawākibı̄ develops the idea that despotism operates by stripping the individuals it enslaves of their will and agency. Moreover, he sets forth an account of a democratic and quasi-socialist Islamic order that establishes individual freedom and social cohesion through its institutions and the virtues it inculcates in all citizens. (Y. Noorani, in El-Ariss 2018, 354)

The author did not live to see much of what his writings provoked. He died in 1902, of “mysterious” causes, allegedly poisoned by Turkish agents, although this was never proven.

33  The title is a passive participle, form II, from root ʾ-Y-D, meaning, literally, “the supported, aided one” or, more idiomatically, “steadfast, victorious; a fortification, or stronghold.” In former times, the word could be part of a sultan’s name (e.g., al-Muʾayyad fı̄ l-Dı̄n, i.e., the one who receives—divine—support in religion, is a steadfast believer, a stronghold of Islamic belief). It is not clear what exactly the newspaper title expresses. It may also have been chosen in allusion to the Koran, where ʔayd can mean “might, power, strength” (as in surah 51:47) and the verb ʔayyada signifies “to support, bolster up, strengthen” (as in 2:87). 34  Founded in 1889 and later mainly edited by the Egyptian journalist ʿAlı̄ Yūsuf (1863–1913). According to Peri Bearman (article “Yūsuf, ʿAlı̄,” in Encyclopædia of Islam, second edition), the paper dominated the Muslim press between 1889 and 1913; it was considered anti-British and pan-Islamic, served as a platform for Egyptian nationalists and an advocate of constitutional reform. For a standard reference on the history of the Arab press, see Ayalon 1995. 35  For a detailed analysis of Ṭ abāʾiʿ al-istibdād, see Zimeri 2007.

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The “National” Voice Becoming Stronger Al-Kawākibı̄’s case did not remain an exception. When, for instance, the Lebanese poet Khalı̄l Mut ̣rān (1872?–1949) published his poem 1806–1870 (1908) in which he hailed the newly united Germans’ victory over Napoléon III and depicted the emperor as a tyrant, this was read “as an indirect expression of the youthful poet’s rebellion against the rule of the Ottoman sultan.” It did not take long until his “uncompromising attitude […] land[ed] him in political trouble and end[ed] in his abrupt departure for Paris and eventually Egypt” (DeYoung 2010b, 229). Shortly after his arrival there, Mut ̣rān used his new freedom to underline, in what is probably the “most memorable and frequently anthologised of Muṭrān’s political poems” (DeYoung 2010b, 232), al-Muqāt ̣aʿah (The Boycott, 1909, consisting of only six lines), that no matter what they [the censors, prosecutors, tormentors] do—destroy their [i.e., his fellow lovers of liberty] pens, cut off their hands or their tongues—he and his allies will [always] find another means to express themselves [… and their] spirit will [always] remain free. (DeYoung 2010b, 232)

Al-Kawākibı̄’s and Muṭrān’s cases may be extreme. Yet, they can probably serve as an indicator of a general shift in Arabs’ attitudes vis-à-vis the political framework that most of them still belonged to at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century. Although, in contrast to a radical critic like al-Kawākibı̄, many of them still would not question the Ottoman Empire and Ottomanism as such, there is a clear tendency to stress, within the given system, one’s Arab identity and interests, and a desire that this particular “national” voice be heard and considered in religious, political, and administrative contexts. The exodus of many shawām, mentioned above, of which al-Qabbānı̄, Faraḥ Anṭūn, al-Kawākibı̄, Mut ̣rān and other literati-“intellectuals” formed part, is to a large extent motivated by the fact that it had become almost impossible under Ottoman censorship to express any more this self-confident Arab(ic) voice and critical opinion. This was the case even if they did not contradict the basic idea of Ottomanism and even if many of them, ultimately, still remained loyal: it was prohibited to use words like “fatherland” (wat ̣an), “constitution” (dustūr), “despotism” (istibdād), “council of representatives” (majlis

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shūrà), “liberty” (ḥurriyyah), and so on, in any writing, “and newspapers making use of these words were often abolished” (Zimeri 2007, 836).

̇ /CUP 1908—Arabs, the Constitution, and the ITC However, the abolition of “despotism” and the re-introduction of the constitution and a council-based system of governance were exactly what the majority of literati now supported. Even al-Kawākibı̄’s vision of a future Islamic conference in Mecca demonstrates this: not even the Caliph should rule without asking the advice of a consultative council (majlis shūrà), and in contrast to an autocratic despot (mustabidd) he will have to obey the (divine) laws himself. No wonder then that in general Arabs wel̇ comed the Young Turk revolution, the ITC/CUP, and the Constitution of 1908. Shortly after the event, we find, for example, the Lebanese woman writer Labı̄bah Mı̄khāʾı̄l Sawāyā (1876–1916)37 publishing a historical romance, Ḥ asnāʾ Sālō nı̄k (The Beautiful Lady of Salonika [Thessaloniki], 1909), in which a “prominent Young Turk who fights for freedom and as a result ultimately loses his life” is heroicised (Moosa 1997, 248). A similar picture emerges from Jurjı̄ Zaydān’s (1861–1914) novel al-Inqilāb al-ʿUthmānı̄ (The Ottoman Coup, 1911). Matti Moosa’s summary shows how the author frames contemporary politics with a lachrymose love story and in this way makes the reader sympathise with the oppositional movement: Shirin, a young lady, is in love with Ramiz, a revolutionary, who attacks the Sultan’s despotism. But Sadiq, an opportunist who comes from an influential Turkish family, is also in love with Shirin and connives with her father to destroy the love between Shirin and Ramiz so that he might marry Shirin. After many intrigues which take us in and out of the Sultan’s palace and the company of Young Turks, Shirin finally marries Ramiz, while Sadiq is killed in the revolution of 1908. (Moosa 1997, 213–14)

 Drawing on Cioeta 1979, 176, and J. Deny’s entry (1960) on “ʿAbd al-Ḥ amı̄d II” in EI2.  Sawāyā was one of the first Arab women writers, most famous among whom is probably her (slightly younger) contemporary, Mayy Ziyādah (May Ziade, 1886–1941). For a short overview of early Arab women writing, see Cooke 1986; for more detailed surveys, cf. Cooke 1993/2012 and Zeidan 1995. 36 37

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“It is reported,” Moosa further tells us, that the novel “provoked great concern in contemporary Syria and Egypt” and that even the Russian novelist Maxim Gorki showed interest in it (Moosa 1997, 218). ̄ As, among others, the example of the famous poet Iliyyā Abū Māḍı ̄ (1898/90–1957) shows, an Arab’s support for the Young Turks and the re-institution of the Constitution still does not necessarily imply disloyalty towards the Sultan. The poet can, on the one hand, in a poem titled Taḥiyyat al-dustūr (Greeting the Constitution), welcome the Constitution in eloquent verses and praise the return of freedom, including freedom of expression, concluding with the statement that, from now on, there is “no unjust ruler anymore,” because, from now on, “every just man rules.”38 At the same time, however, he can, in another poem, specifically address “ʿAbdülḥamı̄d after the Proclamation of the Constitution” (ʿAbd al-Ḥ amı̄d baʿda iʿlān al-dustūr, as the title has it) to congratulate the Sultan on his luck and assure him of the support of his subjects: Oh, Father of the people, [...] Look, and you’ll find them [your people] standing around your palace, / looking [at you] like a lover looks at someone who is favoured [by God/Destiny]. […] The mischief-makers are dispersed now, you got rid of them / after they had all the time long accused the people of sowing discord, fearing [themselves] fragmentation. Oh, how much anxiety/fear had they sown on earth and always retreated [i.e., denied own responsibility] / saying ‘[to blame is] a people that is a disturber (muqliq), and what a disturber!’39

In these verses, the poet—like al-Muwayliḥı ̄ before him (see above)— puts all blame for the inner fragmentation and current disintegration of the Empire on the Sultan’s entourage, disloyal advisors and egoistic officials, not on the Sultan himself. The latter is rather shown as a victim of 38  “fa-lam yabqa fı̄nā ḥākimun ghayru ʿādilı̄/wa-lam yabqa fı̄nā ʿādilun ghayru ḥākimı̄.” Last line of Taḥiyyat al-dustūr (Long Live the Constitution, 1908; metre: ṭawı̄l)—Abū Māḍı ̄ [1911] = [n.d.], 641. 39  My translation, S.G.—The original has “abā l-shaʿbi […]//taṭallaʿ tajid-hu [sc. al-shaʿba] ḥawla qaṣrika wāqifan/yuḥaddiqu taḥdı̄qa l-muḥibbi li-muwaffaqı̄//[…]/tafarraqa ʿanka l-mufsidūna wa-t ̣ālamā/ramū [sic!] l-shaʿba bi-l-tafrı̄qi khawfa l-tafarruqı̄//wa-kam aqlaqū fı̄ l-arḍi thumma tarājaʿū/yaqūlūna ‘shaʿbun muqliqun ayyu muqliqı̄.’” From ʿAbd al-Ḥ amı̄d baʿda iʿlān al-dustūr (ʿAbdülḥamı̄d after the Proclamation of the Constitution, 1908; metre: ṭawı̄l), quoted as in Abū Māḍı ̄ [1911] = [n.d.], 507–508.

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those traitors. If he is to blame at all, then for a certain weakness (cf., again, al-Muwayliḥı ̄ who depicts the ruler as governed by paranoia), a weakness the poet urges him to eventually overcome, now that the coup fortunately has done away with the Empire’s enemies. All injustice and oppression suffered from the Ottoman authorities before 1908 are interpreted as having occurred against the Sultan’s will; coming to ʿAbdülḥamı̄d’s defence, Abū Māḍı ̄ assures him of the continuing loyalty of his subjects— they have always been on his side, always shown deep understanding for his difficult situation, even if the “mischief-makers” (al-mufsidūn) had regularly accused the people of instigating rebellion, and the people will be with him all the more now. But now, they also have all right to expect that he will act according to his true nature and let them feel that he is indeed the benevolent “Father of the People” as whom his subjects love him. Voices like this make clear that the idea of an all-inclusive empire under the sultan’s wise rule remained a constant hope for the educated elites for a very long time indeed. Other Arab poetry of the time may be less positive about the Sultan than Abū Māḍı’̄ s verses. But in general, most contemporaries still stick to the ideas of “union” (ittiḥād) (of the Empire) and “progress” (taraqqı̄) (of society, of the East) that also the Committee for ̇ ād ve Teraḳḳı̄ Cemʿı̄yeti, ITC) ̇ Union and Progress (CUP, Turkish Ittiḥ (of the Empire) has in its name. Arab writing therefore mostly comes in suṗ port of the coup and the ITC/CUP’s agenda. An exemplary voice in this respect may be that of the Iraqi poet Maʿrūf al-Ruṣāfı̄ (1875–1945). For him, like for numerous other writers and intellectuals [t]he announcement lifting the suspension of the Ottoman Constitution in July 1908 meant […] that political debate could flourish at home […]. Newspaper publishing in Iraq also received a boost, because the strict censorship ʿAbdülḥamı̄d had imposed was lifted and licenses to publish private newspapers could more easily be obtained. (DeYoung 2010c, 277)

It is not surprising, then, to find that al-Ruṣāfı̄ composed many of his poems during this period as vehicles for support of CUP policies (DeYoung 2010c, 279).

Love for the Ottoman Fatherland In a similar vein, but augmented by the emotional element of patriotic fervour, the famous educator Sāt ̣iʿ al-Ḥ uṣrı̄ (1880–1968) in 1913 delivered five lectures in Istanbul, entitled Vaṭan için (For the Fatherland), in

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which “he called for building a new Ottoman community based on the idea of the fatherland as an object of love” (Choueiri 2012). A quick glance at al-Ḥ uṣrı̄’s background and early life40 is enough to understand his strong Ottomanist leanings: he was a real “child of the (multinational) Empire.” Born in Ṣanʿāʾ, Yemen, to parents from Aleppo, Syria—his father had graduated from al-Azhar, Egypt, before he became an Ottoman judge and Director of the Court of Criminal Appeals in the Yemeni capital—Sāt ̣iʿ had learned Arabic, Turkish, and French at an early age and then received his higher education from the Mülkı̄ye in Istanbul. After graduating with distinction in 1900, al-Ḥ uṣrı̄ went to the Balkans to work as a natural-­ science teacher before he soon became district governor in Kosovo and Fiorina. Having developed a keen interest in both the rights of “national” communities and questions of modern education, he had already been in ̇ contact with the ITC/CUP before 1908, and, when he returned to Istanbul after 1908, he was “determined to propagate and implement his belief in a modern education system, coupled with his desire to articulate a secular notion of Ottomanism” (Choueiri 2012). He tried to achieve this goal by editing new journals, publishing modern-style school textbooks and taking part in public debates on contemporary issues. Between 1909 and 1912 he even assumed the directorship of the Dārülmuʿallimı̄n (Teachers’ Training College), “restructuring and modernising […] its entire curricula and management” (Choueiri 2012). Given al-Ḥ usrı̄’s prominent position, it is no surprise that his ideas of producing loyal Ottoman citizens by installing love for the Empire-fatherland into their hearts through education became rather influential at the time and laid the foundation for later nationalist theory.

After the Balkan Wars After the Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913 in which the Ottomans suffered significant territorial losses in Europe, the Empire “was increasingly becoming an association of Arabic speakers and Turkish speakers, and this cast into higher relief the role of the Arab territories in the fabric of the state” (DeYoung 2010c, 279). The awareness of their increased importance and strengthened position encouraged many Arabs to demand a greater autonomy for their territories, a controversial idea for the 40  Biographical data given in this paragraph are excerpted from Choueiri 2012. For more details see Cleveland 1971 (and later editions).

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discussion of which an Arab Congress was convened in Paris in June 1913. The option of combining, on the one hand, the maintenance of “the integrity of the Empire as a bulwark against European colonization” with, on the other hand, a higher degree of Arab independence within its boundaries was debated under the heading of “decentralisation” (lā-­ markaziyyah) (DeYoung 2010c, 279). It did not take long, however, until such calls not only began to take on a sharper tone but, ultimately, also demanded complete national independence. Apparently, the general shift of opinion was triggered by the strictures imposed by the CUP’s advocacy of “Turkification”41 in the territories they ruled, that is, the deliberate adoption of rules specifying Turkish as the only language to be employed in all official activities, from the schools to the law courts, and (as some Arabs believed) a preference for the appointment of ethnic Turks in upper level government positions. (DeYoung 2010c, 279)

Even then, however, some Arabs still favoured looking for solutions to these issues within the framework of adherence to the Empire. Al-Ruṣāfı̄, for instance, at first welcomed “decentralisation” proposals in the poem Fı̄ ̇ muʿriḍ al-sayf (The Flat of the Sword); then, when the ITC/CUP had ̇ increasingly become hostile to the Congress, he condemned both ITC/ CUP and the Arab advocates of decentralisation, “suggesting that they were agents for European colonial designs on the Ottoman provinces” (DeYoung 2010c, 279–80). Jurjı̄ Zaydān showed a similar reaction. As we saw above, he had admired the Young Turks. Moreover, he “saw in the resurrected Ottoman constitution and the reopened parliament the instruments for holding this multiethnic and multifaith empire together” (Philipp 2014, 114). However, his sympathies with the Young Turks notwithstanding, only a few months after the coup in an article of April 1909,42 he felt he had to acknowledge that “the Turks and even the members of the Committee for Union and Progress had exercised tyranny over the other people of the empire” and that “the option of separation existed” (Philipp 2014, 115). Nevertheless he still comes to the Sultan’s and the ̇ ITC/CUP’s defence when he argues that separatist tendencies in the past were only due to “bad government and suspicion between the ruler and 41  In the present volume, Salim Çevik describes this process as a shift from a multinational Habsburgian model to a Romanov model that aimed at the creation of one single core nation. 42  “Al-ʿArab wa-l-Turk qabla l-dustūr wa-baʿdahū,” al-Hilāl, 17 (April 1909): 408–17.

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his subjects.” Now, however, “[i]ntelligent Turks, having been exposed to civilised people in Europe and seen how they advocate the tie of patriotism [al-jāmiʿah al-wat ̣aniyyah],” have chosen “Ottoman patriotism [al-jāmiʿah al-ʿuthmāniyyah] as their form of solidarity [ʿaṣabiyyah] […], out of their belief that if they did not do so, their state would be torn apart and collapse” (Zaydān 1909, tr. H. Kilpatrick, in Philipp 2014, 403–04). According to Zaydān, it may indeed look now—after the elections to the ̇ new parliament—as if the ITC/CUP was becoming insincere, seeking exclusively Turkish privileges; but we ascribe that not to its [sc. the CUP’s] desire to monopolize power to the detriment of the Arabs or others. [… The CUP] carried out the acts it is reproached with, out of a desire to maintain the state’s security and in order to protect the Constitution […]. How dare we blame the CUP […] for their suspicion of us, since we have not given them proof of our desire to unite with them heart and soul? […] Apart from supporting the establishment of an Arab league, these Arabs set up the Arab Brotherhood Society in Istanbul. […] They founded newspapers to defend the Arabs, denigrate the Turks and boast of Arab glory, Arab empires and Arab science. Others wrote articles calling for a Syrian (Arab) union, seeking administrative autonomy […]. How can the Turks be blamed for their suspicion of the Arabs after that? (Zaydān 1909, tr. H. Kilpatrick, in Philipp 2014, 404–05) It may be objected that the CUP’s autocratic use of power goes against the spirit of the Constitution. But we would reply: how splendid autocracy is, when it is the autocracy of the intelligent and the just! […] If it is autocratic, its autocracy goes hand in hand with consultation, because it is made up of scores or hundreds of members. (Zaydān 1909, tr. H. Kilpatrick, in Philipp 2014, 406)

Zaydān therefore proposes to “restrain ourselves and overlook” what may seem, at the moment, as attempts at Turkification; the Arabs should have confidence in “their brothers the Turks” and focus on the “tie of common interest” (Zaydān 1909, tr. H. Kilpatrick, in Philipp 2014, 406). For the patriotic community of all Ottomans is a “community of mutual benefit or usefulness” (Philipp 2014, 11543).

 Quoting from Zaydān’s article “Jāmiʿat al-manfaʿah,” al-Hilāl, 19 (Feb 1911): 280–85.

43

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In Lieu of a Conclusion: Fading Loyalty and the Arab Revolt For some time, Zaydān was anything but alone with such an opinion. ̇ However, when the ITC/CUP’s policy of Turkification intensified in order to extend central control in the provinces (cf. Krämer 1998, 44744), this seemed to be too much. Many Arabs may have felt that there was a bitter truth to the old Egyptian proverb saying that “All the thanks you get for serving a Turk (lit., an Oghuz) is a beating”45 and that all previous loyalty towards the Turks was to no avail and would not pay out. It is in this climate that Arab secessionist tendencies gained ground against the previous “pan-Ottoman” imperial nationalism and with British support the Sharı̄f Ḥ usayn of Mecca in 1916 “would revolt against Ottoman suzerainty and declare himself the leader of all the Arabs in their struggle for independence from Turkish rule” (DeYoung 2010c, 280). The aim of the revolt was to create an Arab state stretching from Syria to Yemen, which the British had promised to recognise. In Tawfı̄q Yūsuf ʿAwwād’s (1911–89) debut novel, al-Raghı̄f (The Loaf) of 1939—“the first significant Lebanese novel of the twentieth century” (Starkey 2010, 40)—the Arab revolt is shown in a very positive light. The events unfold during WWI in a period that had proved a particularly difficult one for the Lebanese, who had been subject to oppressive measures from the Ottoman authorities under the military governor Jamāl Pāshā, and who had suffered a disastrous famine in which up to one fifth of the population of Mount Lebanon […] had died of starvation or disease. […] The hero of the novel […] is a fervent Arab nationalist […] who belongs to a secret revolutionary organization devoted to the struggle against Ottoman rule [… and later leads] the Arab forces in their fight 44  Krämer here refers to Landau 1994, 9–142, and Khalidi et al. (eds.) 1991, esp. chs. 2, 3, and 8. 45  ākhir khidmit il-ghuzz ʿalqah—Badawi and Hinds 1986, s.r. √3ɣzz. If we are to believe the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia, the proverb goes back to Mamluk times: “Ghuzz is the colloquial name for the Oghuz, an ethnic group among the Turkish Mamluks. When the Mamluks settled in a[n Egyptian] village, they used to drive its inhabitants out of it, forced them to work for them and serve them, and confiscated their food and drink without paying anything in recompense. When they [then] ended their stay […], they used to beat the people and mistreat them, out of a desire for harassment and pure chicane […]”—https:// arz.wikipedia.org/wiki/‫اخر_خدمة_الغز_علقه‬, as of 24 July 2019 (my translation, S.G.). For a similar traditional saying, quoted by Nasser in his Philosophy of the Revolution, see above, note 2.

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against the Turks. [… In the course of the troubled events, he loses his life, but the novel nevertheless culminates in] the victorious Arabs enter[ing] Damascus in triumph […] thus win[ning] back for themselves not only their freedom but also the loaf of bread that provides the work with its title. (Starkey 2010, 39–40)

As Starkey rightly observes, this view is already biased by the experience of the French Protectorate in Greater Syria where it could seem that the former Ottoman yoke only “had been replaced by […] the French Protectorate” and, thus, “looking back with pride to the struggle against the Ottomans of two decades previously, the work also contained a further relevance for the author’s contemporaries” (Starkey 2010, 40). Two decades earlier, when the Arab Revolt actually had taken place, comments were often less positive, as, for example, Maʿrūf al-Ruṣāfı̄’s poem Thālith al-thalāthah (The Third of the Three) makes clear. The poem linked Sharı̄f Ḥ usayn to two other Ḥ usayns seen as traitors to the Ottoman cause: Ḥ usayn al-Kāmil, who accepted the position of Khedive of Egypt when the British declared that country a Protectorate at the beginning of World War I, completely severing it from any ties to the Ottoman Empire […], and Ḥ usayn al-Rushdı̄ Pasha, the Egyptian Prime Minister who had loyally followed his master into the British camp. This satire was so scathing in its denunciation of Sharı̄f Ḥ usayn of Mecca that it was only published in truncated form in al-Ruṣāfı̄’s Diwan, with many of the most offensive verses omitted. (DeYoung 2010c, 280)

As the aftermath of the Arab Revolt shows, al-Ruṣāfı̄ and other critics of the 1917 rebellion certainly had a point—in hindsight, the rebellion helped to pave the way for decades of Anglo-French colonial presence in the region. Nevertheless, and in spite of the many obvious manifestations of the Ottoman past in Arab city architecture—mosques, public fountains, street names, and so on—this past “has hardly left any but unpleasant traces in the collective memory of Arab societies” today, as Reinkowski (2016, 248) observes. Whenever Arab authors of later decades came to look back to the past with a nostalgic eye, it was certainly not associated with the Ottoman period.46 Reinkowski argues that this “amnesia” may be 46  There are, for instance, some Alexandria novels in which the cosmopolitan past is remembered with a good deal of nostalgia (e.g., Edward al-Kharrāt’̣ s Turābuhā zaʿfarān, 1985, translated into English by F. Liardet as City of Saffron). But in these, the city’s former

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explained as due to ideological necessity in the course of nation building: in order to gain a new present, the past had to be forgotten (2016, 249). But this is another story ….47

References ʿAbd al-Nāsị r, Gamāl. (n.d.; orig. ca. 1960). Falsafat al-thawrah. 10th print. Cairo: al-Maṭbaʿah al-ʿālamiyyah. Abū Māḍı̄ , Ī liyyā. (1911). “Taḥiyyat al-dustūr al-ʿuthmānı̄ ” (Long Live the Ottoman Constitution [first published 1908]), https://klmat.com/­-‫­ادل�ستور‬-‫حت ّية‬ ‫­مايض‬-‫­�أبو‬-‫­�إيليا‬-‫العامثين‬/, from the poet’s first collection, Tadhkār al-māḍı̄ (1911) (20 October 2019). ———. (n.d.). Dı̄wān Īliyyā Abı̄ Māḍı ̄ / ed. [N.N.]. Beirut: Dār al-Quwwah / Dār al-ʿAwdah. Volume III. Allen, Roger. 2008. Introduction. In his translation of al-Muwayliḥı ̄ 1896 (see below): 1–20. Ayalon, Ami. 1995. The Press in the Arab Middle East: A History. New  York: Oxford University Press. Badawi, M.M. 1988. Early Arabic Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Badawi, El-Said, and Martin Hinds. 1986. A Dictionary of Egyptian Arabic: Arabic-English. Beirut: Librairie du Liban. Berger, Johannes, Friedemann Büttner, and Bertold Spuler. 1987. Nahost-­ PLOETZ: Geschichte der arabisch-islamischen Welt zum Nachschlagen. Freiburg & Würzburg: Verlag Ploetz. Choueiri, Youssef M. 2012. Sāt ̣iʿ al-Ḥ uṣrı̄. EI2, http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.uio. no/10.1163/1573-­3912_islam_SIM_8887. First published online: 2012 (unpaginated), consulted online on 23 July 2019. Cioeta, D.J. 1979. Ottoman Censorship in Lebanon and Syria, 1876–1908. International Journal of Middle East Studies 10 (2): 167–186. cosmopolitan character is usually described as the result of its location on the shores of the Mediterranean, with a centuries-old history as a commercial centre, open to the world, a melting-pot whose identity was formed in Old Egyptian, Hellenistic, and Roman times and by Greek and Italian tradesmen and sailors rather by contact with the Ottomans. As for Cairo, its cosmopolitan history is recalled nostalgically by, for example, the connoisseur, womanizer, and whisky drinker Shawqı̄ “Beğ” al-Dasūqı̄ in ʿAlāʾ al-Aswānı̄’s best-selling ʿImārat Yaʿqūbiān (2002, translated into English by H. Davies as The Yacoubian Building). But here, the memory does not take the reader farther back than to the times when the big building—symbolising Egypt—was erected, in 1934, by its Armenian proprietor, Hagop Yacoubian, that is, in post-Ottoman times. Neither Shawqı̄’s “title” beğ nor the mentioning of the Armenian owner are connected to an Ottoman past in the novel. 47  For this, cf. esp. Toledano 2001, whose findings Reinkowski develops further.

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Cleveland, William L. 1971 (and later editions). The Making of an Arab Nationalist: Ottomanism and Arabism in the Life and Thought of Sati‘ Al-Husri. Princeton: Princeton UP. Cooke, Miriam. 1986. Telling Their Lives: A Hundred Years of Arab Women’s Writings. World Literature Today 60.2 (“Literatures of the Middle East: A Fertile Crescent”): 212–216. ———. 1993/2012. Arab women writers. = Ch. 13  in Modern Arabic Literature,  ed.  M.  M. Badawi.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Cambridge History of Arabic Literature; vol. 4). 1993 (print) / 2012 (online). 443–462. Delanoue, Gilbert. 1963. L’épître des huit mots du cheikh Ḥ usayn Al-Marṣafı̄ (Analyse). Annales Islamologiques 5: 1–29. DeYoung, Terri. 2010a. Maḥmūd Sāmı̄ al-Bārūdı̄. In EALB iii: 57–71. ———. 2010b. Khalı̄l Muṭrān. In EALB iii: 226–236. ———. 2010c. Maʿrūf al-Ruṣāfı̄. In EALB iii: 274–284. EAL = Starkey, Paul, and Julie Scott Meisami, ed. 1998. Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature. Vol. 2. London: Routledge. EALB, III = Allen, Roger, ed. 2010. Essays in Arabic Literary Biography, 1850–1950. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. EI2 = Encyclopædia of Islam, second edition. Eds. P.  Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C.E.  Bosworth, E. van Donzel, W.P.  Heinrichs. First Print Edition: Leiden: Brill, 1960–2007. First Published Online: 2012. EI3 = Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE.  Eds. Kate Fleet, Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, Everett Rowson. Eich, Thomas. 2007. “Abū l-Hudā al-Ṣayyādı̄.” EI3, https://doi. org/10.1163/1573-­3912_ei3_SIM_0028, first published online 2007, first print edition 2007; (23 July 2019). El-Ariss, Tarek. Ed. 2018. The Arab Renaissance: A Bilingual Anthology of the Nahda. Assistant editors Anthony Edwards and Anna Ziajka Stanton. New York: The Modern Language Association of America. El-Enany, Rasheed. 2006. Arab Representations of the Occident: East-West Encounters in Arabic Fiction. Abingdon: Routledge. Flores, Alexander. 2003. Die arabische Welt: ein kleines Sachlexikon. Stuttgart: Reclam. Guth, Stephan. 2020. Adab as the Art to Make the Right Choice between Local Tradition and Euromania: A Comparative Analysis of Khalı̄l al-Khūrı̄’s Way, idhan lastu bi-Ifranjı̄! (1859) and Aḥmed Midḥat’s Felātụ ̄n Beğ ile Rāḳım Efendı̄ (1875), or: On the Threshold of Inventing National Middle Eastern Culture. In  Adab  and Modernity: A "Civilising Process"? (Sixteenth–Twenty-­ First Century), ed. Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen. Leiden: Brill. 311–345. Haim, Sylvia G. 1954. Alfieri and al-Kawākibı̄. Oriente Moderno 34 (7): 321–334. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25812484.

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———. 2012. al-Kawākibı̄. EI2, https://doi.org/10.1163/1573-­3912_islam_ SIM_4033 (unpaginated), (17 October 2018). Hassan, Kadhim Jihad. 2006. Le roman arabe (1834–2004). Arles: Actes Sud. Jeffery, Arthur. 1938. The Foreign Vocabulary in the Qur’ān. Baroda: The Oriental Institute. (Reprint Lahore: Al-Biruni, 1977). Khalidi, Rashid, Lisa Anderson, Muhammad Muslih, and Reeva S.  Simon, eds. 1991. The Origins of Arab Nationalism. New York & Chichester. Krämer, Gudrun. 1998. Die islamische Welt im 20. Jahrhundert. In Der islamische Orient: Grundzüge seiner Geschichte, ed. Albrecht Noth and Jürgen Paul, 439–502. Würzburg: Ergon. Landau, Jacob M. 1958 [and many later editions]. Studies in the Arab Theater and Cinema. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 1968. Arabische Literaturgeschichte der neuesten Zeit: 20. Jahrhundert. In Arabische Literaturgeschichte, ed. Hamilton A.R. Gibb and Jacob M. Landau. Zurich & Stuttgart: Artemis. 187–288, 314–319 (bibliography). ———. 1987. An Insider’s View of Istanbul: Ibrāhı̄m Al-Muwayliḥı’̄ s Mā Hunālika. Die Welt des Islams 27 (1): 70–81. https://doi.org/10.116 3/157006087X00060. ———. 1994. The Politics of Pan-Islam: Ideology and Organization. Rev. ed. Oxford. Lewis, Bernard. 1991. The Political Language of Islam. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, paperback ed. (orig. 1988). Massignon, Louis. 1941–46. L’Umma et ses synonymes: notions de ‘communauté sociale’ en Islam. REJ, 1941–1946: 151–157. Monteil, Vincent. 1960. L’arabe moderne. Paris: Klincksieck. Moosa, Matti. 1997. The Origins of Modern Arabic Fiction. 2nd ed. Boulder & London: Lynne Rienner Publ. al-Muwayliḥı,̄ Ibrāhı̄m. 1896. Mā hunālika/li-adı̄b fāḍil min al-Miṣriyyı̄n. Cairo: Maṭbaʿat al-Muqaṭtạ m.—Translated into English and Introduced by Roger Allen as Spies, Scandals, and Sultans: Istanbul in the Twilight of the Ottoman Empire, Lanham [etc.]: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008. Pennacchio, Catherine. 2014. Les emprunts à l’hébreu et au judéo-araméen dans le Coran. Paris: Librairie d’Amérique et d’Orient Jean Maisonneuve. Philipp, Thomas. 2014. Jurji Zaidan and the Foundations of Arab Nationalism: A Study by Thomas Philipp; selected writings by Jurji Zaidan translated by Hilary Kilpatrick and Paul Starkey. Bethesda MD: Syracuse UP. Reinkowski, Maurus. 2016. Osmanen und Post-Osmanen in Ägypten. In Hoşsohbet: Erika Glassen zu Ehren, ed. Börte Sagaster, Karin Schweißgut, Barbara Kellner-Heinkele, and Claus Schönig, 237–250. Würzburg: Ergon (in Kommission. Ruocco, Monica. 2010. Storia del teatro arabo: Dalla nahḍah a oggi. Rome: Carocci. Sadgrove, Philip. 2010a. Aḥmad Abū Khalı̄l al-Qabbānı̄. In EALB iii: 265–273.

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———. 2010b. Mārūn al-Naqqāsh. In EALB iii: 244–251. Shaw, Standford J. 1971. Das Osmanische Reich und die moderne Türkei. In Der Islam II: Die islamischen Reiche nach dem Fall von Konstantinopel, ed. Gustav Edmund von Grunebaum. Fischer Tachenbuch Vlg. (Fischer Weltgeschichte; 15). 24–159. Starkey, Paul. 1998. Theatre and Drama, Modern. In EAL ii: 769–772. ———. 2010. Tawfı̄q Yūsuf ʿAwwād. In EALB iii: 37–44. al-Ṭ ahṭāwı̄, Rifāʿah Rāfiʿ. (1834). Takhlı̄s ̣ al-ibrı̄z fı̄ talkhı̄s ̣ Bārı̄z / English translation by Daniel Newman under the title An Imam in Paris: Al-Tahtawi’s Visit to France (1826–1831), London: Saqi, 2004; German translation by Karl Stowasser as Rifāʿa al-Ṭ ahṭāwı̄, Ein Muslim entdeckt Europa: Die Reise eines Ägypters im 19. Jahrhundert nach Paris, München: Beck, 1989. Toledano, Ehud. 2001. Forgetting Egypt’s Ottoman Past. In Cultural Horizons: A Festschrift in Honor of Talat S.  Halman, ed. Jayne L.  Warner, 150–167. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Tomiche, Nada. 1969. Le théâtre arabe. Paris: UNESCO. Vatikiotis, P.J. 2012. K̲h̲idı̄w. EI2, https://doi.org/10.1163/1573-­3912_islam_ SIM_4283, (21 September 2019) (unpaginated). Wielandt, Rotraud. 1980. Das Bild der Europäer in der modernen arabischen Erzähl- und Theaterliteratur. Beirut and Wiesbaden: Orient-Institut and Steiner. Zaydān, Jurjı̄. 1909. al-ʿArab wa’l-Turk qabla ’l-dustūr wa-baʿdahū. al-Hilāl, 17 (April 1909): 408–417. Zaydān, Jurjı̄. (n.d.; orig. 1911). Al-Inqilāb al-ʿUthmānı̄ (The Ottoman Coup). Beirut: Dār Maktabat al-Ḥ ayāh. Zeidan, Joseph T. 1995. Arab Women Novelists: The Formative Years and Beyond. Albany: State University of New York Press. Zimeri, Hazel Lian. 2007. Knowledge in the Era of Despotism: A Reading of ʿAbd ar-Raḥmān al-Kawākibı̄’s Ṭ abāʾiʿ al-Istibdād wa-Maṣāriʿ al-Istiʿbād. MA thesis, University of Oslo November 2007, https://www.duo.uio.no/bitstream/ handle/10852/24258/1/MicrosoftxWordx-­xKnowledge_in_the_Era_of_ Despotism%5B1%5D.pdf.

PART III

Empires of Diversity and States of Change: Nations and Identities Between Centres and Frontiers

CHAPTER 7

Zrinski-Myths: A Vehicle for Imperial and National Narratives Marijan Bobinac

Introduction At the end of the eleventh century, the succession crisis in the medieval Croatian Kingdom led the country, which was already weakened by internal conflicts, into chaos. Taking advantage of this state of confusion, the emerging Kingdom of Hungary occupied its southern neighbour; finally, in 1102 Koloman of Hungary was crowned as the Croatian king, an act that established a kind of personal union between Hungary and Croatia.1 In the following centuries, due to its autonomous status within the lands of the Hungarian crown and, moreover, to the flourishing feudal system, a layer of powerful magnates was formed in Croatia. Standing out among 1  For more detailed information about Croatian and Hungarian history cf. Goldstein 1999, Gross 1985, Engel 2001, Okey 1994, Rumpler 1997, Suppan 1980, Sugar 1990, Šidak 1973.

M. Bobinac (*) Department for German Language and Literature, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Chovanec, O. Heilo (eds.), Narrated Empires, Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55199-5_7

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these families was the house of Šubić, later known as Zrinski (Hungarian: Zrínyi), a house that like various other Croatian aristocratic families, over time merged with the Hungarian nobility and also purchased estates in Hungary. In the early modern period, as great parts of Hungary were conquered by the Ottoman Empire, the Zrinskis managed to maintain their position in the western regions of the country, which came under the rule of the Habsburg dynasty in the 1520s. Prominent members of the family were later appointed as bans (viceroys) of Croatia and also played a central role in the series of wars that the Habsburgs waged against the Ottomans. The most distinguished members of the house during this period of history included Nikola Šubić Zrinski (Miklós Zrínyi, 1508–1566), ban of Croatia and an Austrian imperial general, known for his heroic involvement in the Battle of Szigetvár in 1566, and his great-grandson Petar Zrinski (Péter Zrínyi, 1621–1671), viceroy of Croatia and a Baroque poet, who was involved in an attempted Croatian-Hungarian Magnate Conspiracy to overthrow the Habsburgs, which ultimately led to his execution for high treason. During the nineteenth century both of these Zrinskis served as an inspiration for myth making in Croatia, a phenomenon that, in combination with certain national and supranational political concepts, reverberated in different cultural forms. But while the cult of the elder Zrinski, whose heroic sacrifice delayed the Ottoman campaign against Vienna, was used as a framework for both imperial and Croatian (as well as Hungarian) national narratives, the cult built around his descendant, executed by the Austrian imperial government as a high traitor, has been instrumentalized by exclusively national, anti-Habsburg-oriented narratives. This led to the construction of two different national narratives in Croatia—a Yugoslav one, founded on solidarity between Croats, Serbs and other South Slavs, and an exclusively Croatian one, focusing on a particular ethnic reading. Before tackling this topic by using the example of two representative Croatian literary texts of the nineteenth century (Hugo Badalić’s libretto for Ivan Zajc’s opera Nikola Šubić Zrinjski and Eugen Kumičić’s drama Petar Zrinski), it is perhaps useful to present a brief outline of the Croatian history after 1848 and, in particular, the previously mentioned Croatian national narratives.

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The Habsburg Monarchy and the ‘Croatian Lands’ After 1848 The consequences which Vienna decided to draw from the 1848 revolutions included a series of constitutional and administrative reforms aimed at re-establishing imperial rule on a more centralized level. These measures brought also a new territorial organization of the Empire that, in the case of Croatia-Slavonia, meant the separation from its centennial union with the Kingdom of Hungary. Nonetheless, the longed-for self-­ government, one of the main goals of the Croatian nation-building process, was not achieved because the newly established provinces were to a large extent dependent on the central Austrian government. Another important goal, the unification of the ‘Croatian lands’ (as the territories inhabited by Croats have been named by Croatian historiography), could not be reached as well: Dalmatia and Istria (Austrian Littoral) continued to exist as separate provinces, whereas the Croatian-Slavonian Military Frontier, a cordon sanitaire along the border with Ottoman Bosnia, remained subordinated to the Ministry of War in Vienna. However, the Neo-Absolutist policies failed largely because the Habsburg Monarchy lost a war in Italy in 1859 and was once again faced with demands of its peoples and crown lands for more political autonomy. Another military defeat, this time against Prussia in 1866, led eventually to a result feared by the Habsburgs ever since the nation-building projects began, namely, the expulsion of Austria from its dominant position in Central Europe and the proclamation of the German and Italian national states. Following the failure of its previous political experiments, in the mid-1860s Vienna confronted three institutional options: to continue the widely unpopular centralizing policies, to introduce a federal structure, which the Slav politicians favoured and the Hungarians opposed, or to achieve a settlement with Hungary alone, which however was resisted by Slavs and other nationalities. The Austrian elites opted eventually for the latter solution, believing that “the cooperation of the German and Hungarian elements in opposition to panslavism” would bring—as the then Austrian foreign minister Friedrich von Beust said—a “solid ground” (cf. Sugar et  al. 1990, 249) for the Monarchy. The Austro-Hungarian Settlement of 1867 established the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary, a state framework which assured a degree of institutional stability for the next decades. On the other side, the complicated institutional arrangements and procedures revealed its fundamental fragility, a fact that led to

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a state of permanent crisis (often referred to with the pejorative term ‘muddling along’). It is no wonder that these difficult circumstances were mainly caused by the dissatisfaction of other nationalities, especially the Slavs. After the transformation of the Habsburg Empire into the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary in 1867, Croatia, a year later, was provided with a limited autonomous status within Transleithania, the Hungarian half of the Monarchy. However, Nagodba or the Croatian-Hungarian Settlement (1868) annihilated Croatian hopes for a ‘Trialist’ solution that would entail a third—Croatian/ South Slav—entity within the Monarchy. Although the Nagodba can be considered as a kind of response to the Austrian-Hungarian Settlement, similarities between the two treaties are rather superficial. Full parity between two equal sides was not achieved by the Croatian-Hungarian Settlement: quite the contrary, as the treaty between the unitary Hungarian state and Croatia was a compromise that heavily favoured the dominant partner. So it is no wonder that due to this disproportion Croatian political movements consistently called for equal participation in decision-making processes, whereas the Hungarians for their part strictly opposed demands for an enlargement of Croatian autonomy. In this context the above-mentioned Croatian national narratives also obtained a new position in the political and cultural life of the country.

Yugoslavism and Croatian Exclusivism What can be seen as a problem specific to the process of the Croatian nation-building is the oscillation between two opposite master narratives—Yugoslavism, advocating for the solution of the Croatian national question within a broader South Slav frame, and Croatian Exclusivism, insisting on a particular national path of Croatia, whatever that might be. Formulated at the beginning of the 1860s and afterwards only rarely present in their pure form, these narratives have had a lasting impact on political, social and cultural life in Croatia, not only until the fall of the Danubian Monarchy but also throughout the twentieth century until the collapse of the Communist Yugoslavia (cf. Bobinac 2011, Agičić and Najbar-­ Agičić 2016). The leading exponent of Yugoslavism, the liberally minded bishop Josip Juraj Strossmayer (1815–1905), continued the tradition of the Croatian national reunification movement of the 1830s and 1840s (called also Illyrism because its representatives falsely presumed that the South Slavs

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were descendants of the ancient Illyrians). The Croatian revival movement had already laid the foundation for the formation of a modern Croatian nation in a framework of (South) Slav solidarity, created a new Croatian standard language and reached its peak—and its end—in the revolutionary year of 1848. In discussions on the reform of the Austrian Empire after the fall of the Neo-Absolutism, Strossmayer and his followers claimed that the national affirmation and progress of Croatians could only be achieved in a broader South Slav context. Their Yugoslavism can therefore be regarded as an ideology of Croatian national integration as well as an ideology that called for unification of all South Slavs, first on the cultural, but later also on the political level. However, the question as to how the ultimate political solution should be attained inside or outside the Habsburg Monarchy remained unanswered by the founders of the Yugoslavism. This ideology primarily addressed the contemporary Croatian elite, a thin layer of intelligentsia, the liberal middle classes and the catholic clergy; convinced that the Yugoslav idea could only then spread among the masses, their supporters first intended a rapprochement of the educated South Slavs. However, instead of the ideology of Strossmayer and his National Party (Narodna stranka), the less-educated lower classes were much more impressed by the Greater Croatian narrative, as formulated by a contemporary of Strossmayer, the lawyer and writer Ante Starčević (1823–1896). Starčević’s exclusively Croatian national ideology was based on the so-­ called Croatian historical state rights, according to which his Party of Rights (Hrvatska stranka prava) also derived its name. As an ancient European nation Croatia had—according to Starčević—initially entered into a state association with Hungary, and since the sixteenth century also with Habsburgs, but had nevertheless retained its status as an independent state. Croatia therefore had nothing in common with other parts of the Empire except the mutual sovereign, that is, a personal union. This essential element of the exclusive Croatian national ideology allows two interpretations: the break-up of the personal union and the solving of the Croatian question outside the Habsburg Monarchy, on the one hand, and the recognition of common matters and the solving of the Croatian question inside the Monarchy, but on the basis of a shared understanding of Croatian statehood, on the other. In later times, the Party of Rights often oscillated between these two options. Whereas Strossmayer advocated South Slav unification within a frame that would preserve individual national identities, Starčević’s ideology was basically one of Croatian unity

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and hegemony, which aimed for the assimilation of other South Slav ethnicities to a common Croatian nation within one state.

Tracing the Zrinski Myths in Literary Texts As has already been pointed out, contemporary political and ideological phenomena have been often thematized in literature as well as in other cultural forms. In the remainder of the chapter, therefore, I will examine the entanglements of culture and politics in Croatia by using the example of two remarkable literary works of the second half of the nineteenth century, both of which—as indicated above—deal with the Zrinski myth. I will mainly explore to what extent the two opposite master narratives, the Yugoslav and the exclusive Croatian ideology, were dealt with within this framework. It is thus quite natural that in such a context more attention will be paid to ideological signatures than to aesthetic values. This aim is closely associated with the genre of historical drama to which both selected works belong. Although the older one of the two is a libretto, written by Hugo Badalić for Ivan Zajc’s opera Nikola Šubić Zrinjski (1876), it was originally based on a romanticist historical drama. The second text, the historical tragedy Petar Zrinski (1900), comes from the pen of the writer Eugen Kumičić, one of the most important supporters of Ante Starčević. Regardless of differences in artistic method, they each clearly refer to one of the two basic ideological positions mentioned above, positions whose dynamic interplay set the tone for the contemporary political scene in Croatia.

Hugo Badalić The work on which Badalić based his libretto for Zajc’s opera Nikola Šubić Zrinjski (premiered in Zagreb in 1876) was the historical tragedy Zriny, a stage representation of the Battle of Szigetvár written in 1812 by Theodor Körner, a representative of German late romanticism. Körner’s play, which had for a long time been a part of the German literary canon, is nowadays considered to be aesthetically irrelevant. Apart from high aesthetic esteem awarded to this drama in German as well as in several other national contexts in the nineteenth century, the work itself has a significantly strong political relevance: Körner, who, after a fast and extremely successful career as a Viennese court theatre poet, perished at the age of 22 as a volunteer in the first months of the anti-Napoleon uprising in 1813. It connects the

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fate of the Christian heroes in his play with the desperate situation of contemporary Germans, and with the Turkish army he finds the image of the hateful French occupier, represented by the figure of the Sultan Suleyman as a diabolical Napoleon. Körner’s desperate activism from the time of the ‘liberation wars’ was also used in the following decades for various cultural and political purposes in connection with the difficult project to bring about a German national state. Despite this German-national interpretation, it was also possible to introduce the story of Zrinski, a commander loyal to the emperor and who heroically but futilely resisted the huge Ottoman army on their planned march to Vienna, into the patriotic-dynastic narrative of the Danubian Monarchy. However, the Zrinski theme had already assumed a central role in older Croatian and Hungarian literatures at a much earlier date2—a role that was not only perpetuated in the nineteenth century within the framework of national-integrative movements but also acquired the status of a genuine national myth. In Hungary, Nikola Šubić Zrinski/Miklós Zrínyi was hence stylized into a Hungarian and in Croatia into a Croatian, that is, Slav, Leonidas, and on this basis his image also entered some other Slav national narratives (especially Czech and Slovakian) within the Habsburg Empire. It is only superficially paradoxical that a commander who had for a long time been celebrated as a ‘loyal servant of his master’ should be seen by the Croatians (and Slovakians) during the pre-1848 period as ‘the defender of the nation’ against the danger of Magyar assimilation, while at the same time a comparable adoption of the Zrinski figure in Hungary moved in a completely different direction. (At the time, of course, there were also other national programmes apart from the most important images of enemies, which were considered antagonistic, as was the case with the German image in Croatia.) The way in which Körner’s play, which connects popular drama with a strict friend-fiend theme, succeeds in countering such national-political instrumentalizations can be observed in its lively reception by many of the smaller nations of the Austrian Empire 2  The first literary representation of the Siege of Szigetvár was the historical epic written by the Croatian Renaissance poet Brne Karnautić Vazetje Sigeta grada (The Conquest of the City of Sziget, ca. 1573). Miklós Zrínyi/ Nikola Zrinski, Zrinski’s great-grandson, wrote the most significant work dealing with the Szigetvár battle in Hungarian, the epic poem Szigeti Veszedelem (Peril of Sziget, 1651); his brother Péter Zrínyi/ Petar Zrinski translated the poem to Croatian as Opsida sigecka (The Siege of Sziget, 1652). The Siege of Szigetvár was also the topic of many other literary works in Croatian and Hungarian as well as in German (cf. Šrepel 1902, Batušić 1993, Kovács 2017).

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during the 1830s and 1840s, when representatives of national revival movements often resorted to authors like Körner when they created new theatrical repertories in the national language.3 The success of Körner’s Zriny in nineteenth-century Croatia was impressive: the play was among the first theatre texts to have been translated and printed (1840) in the new Croatian standard, and soon afterwards (1841)—also as one of first pieces ever—performed on the newly established Croatian national stage in Zagreb.4 It was staged in Zagreb in the 1840s and 1850s, when Croatian performances were presented alongside German ones, as well as in the subsequent early phase of the exclusively Croatian theatre repertoire, which began in 1860 after German-speaking actors were ‘expelled’ from the Zagreb stage.5 In addition to this, Körner’s work also played a crucial role in the development of contemporary Croatian historical drama (cf. Bobinac 2008).6 With respect to the reception of Körner’s plays as well as to the emergence of Croatian historical drama, both cases represent a kind of the cultural-political functionalization of certain literary forms and themes which the Illyrians, representatives of the Croatian national revival in the pre-1848 period, stated as one of their principal goals. However, as soon as a new generation of authors entered the Croatian cultural scene in the 1860s trying to achieve higher aesthetical standards, the concerns of the elder generation appeared completely obsolete. Although historical dramas by Illyrian playwrights occupied the highest place in the hierarchy of literary genres, they, however, failed to interest the broad public and soon disappeared from the theatre repertoire. A similar fate also befell the dramatic work of Theodor Körner: Before completely disappearing from the 3  This parallel development is evident from the almost simultaneous printing of Körner’s Zriny in the Hungarian (1826), Czech (1838) and Croatian (1840) languages, and also from the publication of a Hungarian edition in French (1835). For more information on the national assignments in different translations of Zriny, see Bobinac 2008, 62–67. 4  Public theatre performances in Zagreb had been presented until 1840 exclusively in German. 5  With the designation “expulsion of German actors”, the traditional Croatian cultural history refers to a campaign of Croatian theatre activists in 1860, which—in the wake of the New Absolutism—succeeded to put an end to the performances in the German language on the Zagreb stage (cf. Bobinac 2008, 2011). 6  These remarks on the history of the nineteenth-century Croatian theatre and drama are based on the studies carried out by Nikola Batušić (1968, 1976, 1978, 1986). The details about the repertoire of the Zagreb theatre are taken from Hećimović (1990), Breyer (1938), and Batušić (1968).

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Croatian repertory, Zriny was again used for a cultural-political purpose, when in 1866 a new translation of the play was presented in Zagreb as a gala performance during the 300th anniversary celebration of the Battle of Szigetvár. Even though Körner’s pieces have not appeared on a Croatian stage since the 1860s, his most known dramatic work Zriny continues to live on in Croatian musical theatre through Zajc’s opera Nikola Šubić Zrinjski. Critics of the premiere of the opera fully recognized the similarities between the drama and the libretto, but did not regard them as essential (cf. Bobinac 2008). Although the librettist Hugo Badalić did not conceal his principal source, Körner’s Zriny, he apparently considered the lyrics he wrote to be his own original work (cf. Badalić 1876, 4). While older scholars (Ogrizović 1921) assumed that the libretto should be considered as a paraphrase of Körner’s play, more recent research points out the personal creativity of Badalić’s work. In particular, Pavao Pavličić (1993) emphasizes the prosodic features of the libretto, which contains various registers of newer and older Croatian verse forms and beyond that also convincingly combines the plot with music. Due to the extreme reduction in the amount of text (Badalić reduced Körner’s 3000 blank verses to 1000 shorter Croatian verses), as well the introduction of several new motifs in the storyline, Badalić—according to Pavličić (1993, 20–34)—succeeded in rectifying the literary deficiencies of the original. Reflections on the transpositions of (supra)national narratives in the opera Nikola Šubić Zrinjski must also include remarks about the significance of the music composed by Ivan Zajc. As emphasized by John Neubauer “the music of the national operas”—and shortly after its premiere Zrinjski became the Croatian national opera—“was by no means nationally or ethnically homogeneous”; certainly, “each composer introduced some national elements”, Zajc, for instance, includes “folk melodies” as the lullaby of Zrinski’s daughter Jelena. Even more important—and this must have been essential for the success of Zrinjski and similar operas—was the fact that they “were usually saturated by Italian style music” (Neubauer 2002, 225). It is also noteworthy that Zajc, who, before becoming the director of the opera in Zagreb in the 1870s, had a successful music career in Vienna, integrated clear echoes of Joseph Haydn’s Kaiserhymne into his concept of the Croatian national opera. The repeated quotation of the old Austrian imperial hymn obviously reminds that, as Tamara Marković rightly stresses, a central motif of “Zrinjski’s heroic act of sacrificing his own life in the battle with the much more

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powerful Ottoman army was his loyalty to the Emperor and Empire” (Marković 2014, 14–15). It might be confusing for later audiences that Zrinjski, which has in twentieth century been perceived as an exclusively national opera, could refer to something other than a Croatian national narrative. For Zajc’s contemporaries however, it was by no means contradictory that elements of the national and supranational could coexist in the same work of art. As already shown in the example of Körner’s Zrinski figure in earlier translations of the drama, his ethnic allegiance—and that applies also to other Christian characters—was adapted to local circumstances. Defining his Christian heroes as Hungarians and presenting them in an unequal struggle against a predominant Turkish army, Körner, as mentioned before, actually drew attention to Germans in the decisive moment of their struggle against Napoleon’s France. Ethnic interchangeability, a characteristic feature of Körner’s dramatic concept, could have greatly facilitated the emergence of Zriny translations into other languages. This was the easiest for Hungarian editors and translators because they just had to stick to the original: Around 1820, at the beginnings of the Hungarian nation-building process, Körner’s drama was translated into Hungarian not only once but twice.7 When translating the German piece into the new Croatian standard, Stjepan Marjanović ̵ Brodanin, an Illyrian activist, faced several challenges, including how to return the Zrinski plot to its allegedly initial, that is, Croatian setting.8 In 1840, when his translation was published, Croatian national activists had not yet definitively decided whether to call their nation and its new standard language Illyrian or Croatian. (Three years later, when the Hungarians succeeded in prohibiting the Illyrian name, they opted for the latter solution.) In trying to replace the Hungarian national affiliation of Körner’s heroes, Marjanović therefore sways between ‘Illyrians’, ‘Christians’ and ‘Croatians’. Twenty-five years later, there was no uncertainty regarding national designation for the second Croatian translator, Spiro Dimitrović Kotaranin: All Christian protagonists were therefore clearly designated as Croatians.9 7  In 1818 by Pál Szemere and in 1821 by Dániel Horváth; Szemere’s translation was printed in 1826 (cf. Kovács 2017). 8  Nikola Šubić knez Zrinjski. U Petčuhu [Pecs]: Tiskom biskupske tiskarne 1840. 9  The translation by Spiro Dimitrović Kotaranin was published in the review Domobran (28 November, 29 November, and 18 December 1865).

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Hugo Badalić and Ivan Zajc also carried out a comparable ‘nationalization’: As Neubauer also states in his article (Neubauer 2002, 231–233), where all ethnic references relate to Croatians and Croatia. Like Körner’s work in the German context, the version of Zrinski by Zajc and Badalić also could not evade the danger of political instrumentalization. Due to its patriotic content and especially because of its great popularity, in the twentieth century their highly sophisticated opera was often regarded as a vehicle for the promotion of exclusively Croatian national causes. However, in the beginning, the reception of the opera had been entirely different: Against the later generally widespread opinion that Zrinjski was a uniquely Croatian work, the opera’s contemporaries rather saw it as a double-coded text, that is, both in its specifically Croatian as well as in its Austrian-­ imperial dimension. In 1866, as the 300th anniversary of the Siege of Szigetvár was approaching, Ante Starčević and other representatives of the exclusively Croatian national ideology took advantage of this ambiguity by campaigning for a revision of the Croatian national pantheon. In so doing, the leader of the Party of Rights turned not only against the elder Zrinski, but also against ban Jelačić, who did indeed fight for the Croatian national cause in 1840s, but at the same time was one of the Habsburg’s crucial supporters against the revolutionaries of 1848. Yet Starčević reduced them to the role of imperial, and not national defenders. Speaking in the Croatian Diet about the planned Szigetvár festivities in 1866, Starčević also admitted that he himself had previously considered Zrinski to be “a Croatian Leonidas, but while Leonidas died for his fatherland, Zrinski died defending the enemies of his fatherland” (cf. Batušić 1993, 163). In other words, his heroic death was nothing but a senseless sacrifice for the Habsburgs and had no relevance for Croatia. Starčević’s call for a transformation of the Croatian politics of memory, a symbolic image standing for a general reorientation of Croatian politics as a whole, went hand in hand with debates about the prospective constitutional framework of the Danubian Monarchy. With regard to Croatia’s new position, potentially inside or outside the Empire, Starčević also proposed new heroes for the Croatian pantheon, above all Petar Zrinski, the great-­ grandson of the defender of Szigetvár, and his fellow campaigner, Fran Krsto Frankopan. This shift followed a plausible anti-Habsburg logic: In their unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the Austrian dynasty in 1660s, the last descendants of the noble aristocratic families Zrinski and Frankopan were executed as high traitors in 1671.

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Eugen Kumičić With the emergence of new national narratives in the second half of the nineteenth century, a modern Croatian historiography also emerged, step by step, and, inter alia, dealt with the Zrinski-Frankopan Conspiracy, as this major historical event of the seventeenth century was called after its major Croatian protagonists. Just as in the case of the Siege of Szigetvár, such a complex historical issue could not be limited to only one national tradition, particularly because it had serious consequences for all of the sides involved, including Hungary as well as Croatia. The historical event—also known as the Wesselényi Conspiracy after its main Hungarian protagonist, or the Magnate Conspiracy, referring to the attempted aristocratic rebellion against the Habsburgs—stemmed from the dissatisfaction of major Croatian and Hungarian aristocrats caused by the Vasvár peace treaty (1664) between the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. This treaty had particularly negative effects for those noble families who expected to be able to preserve their territories near the front line they had recently re-conquered, and also hoped to get back all other Hungarian and Croatian lands occupied by the Ottomans. However, Austrian Emperor Leopold I., who was focused on maintaining the Habsburg position of power in the West, especially against Louis XIV of France, was uninterested in an intensification of the conflict with the Ottomans. Convinced that the peace settlement would essentially weaken their position, the conspirators, led by the Croatian ban Nikola Zrinski and the Hungarian palatine Ferenc Wesselényi, began to seek for foreign help in an attempt to overthrow the Austrian dynasty and liberate Hungary (and Croatia). After Nikola Zrinski’s accidental death in 1664, his younger brother Petar took the lead of the rebellion that, however, had not attracted allies outside the Habsburg Empire. As the desperate coup plotters finally called for an intervention by the Ottomans in 1670, the Emperor, who was well informed about this—evidently poor organized— action, decided to put an end to the Conspiracy: Almost all of the magnates involved, including Petar Zrinski and Fran Krsto Frankopan were arrested and executed. The estates of the Zrinskis, Frankopans and other families were plundered, and their relatives dispersed. By doing so, the Habsburgs succeeded in eliminating their powerful opponents, simultaneously cancelling the previous autonomy of Hungary (and Croatia), the old historical rights that were only gradually returned later.

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Against this historical background, it can hardly be surprising that the brutal Habsburg repression of the conspirators was well suited to the purposes of the representatives of an exclusively Croatian narrative. Starčević’s resolute determination to modify the Croatian politics of memory, especially by moving away from blind obedience to the Austrian dynasty, was well received by contemporary Croatian authors. However, during the previous two centuries in Croatia, the Conspiracy was “almost completely forgotten” (Dukić 2018, 148). It therefore took some time to find adequate literary devices for the implementation of these objectives. On the other side, the nascent narrative had to be harmonized with historical facts that could jeopardize the building of the myth. As Davor Dukić emphasizes, there were “three potential ruptures related to three unpleasant facts” (Dukić 2018, 149): first, the collaboration with the Ottomans, incompatible with South Slav anti-Turkish narratives as well as with the tradition of the families of Zrinski and Frankopan; secondly, the fact that during the investigation, Petar Zrinski and Fran Krsto Frankopan tried to justify themselves before the emperor and therefore did not behave as heroically as a mythical context would require; and, thirdly, the weak support that conspirators received from the rest of the domestic aristocracy and the Catholic Church. Inspired by contemporary historiographic research, the literary representation of the Conspiracy could not ignore its inconvenient aspects; rather, it was necessary to find “ways to make them acceptable” (Dukić 2018, 149). The first relevant and, furthermore, very popular literary works concerning the Zrinski-Frankopan Conspiracy originate from the writings of Eugen Kumičić (1850–1904). Like many other representatives of the realist era, Kumičić believed that his keen interest in history by no means signified an escape from reality. On the contrary, he regarded it as his primary task to link historical topics with respect for their relevance to contemporary social and political life. However, Kumičić’s literary work was closely connected with his political activism dedicated to the Party of Rights. Following the ideology of Croatian exclusivism and, as a result, stressing the challenges that the nation was currently facing, Kumičić wrote two historical novels, both of them representing turning points in earlier Croatian history that related to the loss of national statehood.10 His 10  Urota zrinsko-frankopanska (The Zrinski-Frankopani Conspiracy, 1892–1893); Kraljica Lepa ili Propast kraljeva hrvatske krvi (The Queen Lepa or the Decay of Kings of the Croatian Blood, 1902).

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conspiracy novel (Urota zrinsko-frankopanska) was met by an exceptionally broad response among the Croatian reading public in the 1890s, and succeeded in creating a martyr cult surrounding Zrinskis and Frankopans (cf. Batušić 1993, 164), in accordance with one of the main topics of the exclusively Croatian national narrative. Assuming that a dramatization could further strengthen the cult of the conspirators, Kumičić wrote the ‘historical drama’ Petar Zrinski based on the themes of his own novel. The piece, dedicated to Josip Frank, Starčević’s successor as the head of the Party of Rights, was indeed enthusiastically received by the contemporary audience (cf. Barac 1950, 13). Focusing on key events of the conspiracy between 1664, the year of the Vasvár peace and Nikola Zrinski’s death, and 1671, the year of the execution of Petar Zrinski and Fran Krsto Frankopan, Kumičić’s drama also presents an illustrative and comprehensive overview of the main aspects of the exclusively Croatian national ideology. Written at the end of the long and much-hated rule of ban Khuen-Hédérvary in Croatia, Petar Zrinski was clearly understood by the spectators as a demand for national independence. By obviously alluding to the division of the Croatian lands between Hungary and Austria in the present day, Kumičić let his heroes, above all Petar Zrinski, speak about the nation’s precarious situation in the second half of the seventeenth century: “Split up is our homeland: Slavonia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Lika and Krbava and a part of Dalmatia are dying under Turkish hooves, whereas the rest is moaning and bleeding in the claws of the Venetian lion and under German violence. Cut off also are the remnants of the remnants of the Croatian kingdom, because in one part rules the ban, in the other German generals” (Kumičić 1950, 16–17).11 However, as Petar goes on to say, it would be completely different if Croatian lands occupied by the Ottomans were under the reign of the ban, a position traditionally held by the Zrinskis; in that case “all our rights could not be trampled by Vienna”, and “Vienna would understand that the old and glorious Croatian kingdom will never be what the Austrian hereditary lands are!” (Kumičić 1950, 17).12 The fact that at the time a 11  “Rastrgana je naša otadžbina: Slavonija, Bosna, Hercegovina, Lika i Krbava i dio Dalmacije izdišu pod turskim kopitom, a ostalo stenje i krvari pod pandžama mletačkoga lava i njemačkim nasiljem. Rasječeni su i sami ostanci ostanaka hrvatskoga kraljevstva, jer u jednom dijelu vlada ban, a u drugom njemački generali”. 12  “[…] da ne bi Beč mogao mogao gaziti sva naša prava. […] Beč bi onda razabrao, da staro i slavno hrvatsko kraljevstvo ne će nikada biti ono, što su austrijske nasljedne pokrajine”.

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great part of Croatia was occupied by (Austrian) Germans offers Zrinski— and Kumičić as well—a legal argument for the removal of the Habsburgs from the Croatian throne. In presenting all of the key elements of Croatian exclusivism in his theatre staging of the Conspiracy, Kumičić focuses on a seamless integration of the two discourses, especially by adjusting disturbing historical facts to fit the emerging Zrinski-Frankopan myth, a phenomenon that gradually reached broad sections of the population. As Dukić rightly notes, the collaboration of the conspirators with the Ottomans was especially disturbing. Zrinski’s attempts to achieve an agreement with Croatia’s arch-enemies were difficult to reconcile with the nineteenth century’s anti-Turkish attitudes among South Slavs, and are therefore shown by Kumičić as an initiative of the Emperor himself; moreover, the negotiations with the Ottomans are carried out by an envoy of Zrinski, not by Zrinski himself. The historical fact that during the investigation Zrinski and Frankopan tried to shift the blame onto each other is underplayed in the drama; Kumičić presented this as a trick of the Emperor’s officials. The third inconvenient fact, according to Dukić, the weak domestic support for the Conspiracy, is omitted by focusing on violent attacks on Zrinski’s possessions, carried out by German troops stationed in Croatia. Kumičić’s Petar Zrinski also offers further explanations of the Conspiracy that later became an integral part of the Zrinski-Frankopan myth and of its subsequent literary utilizations as well.13 The most important of these is probably the correspondence between the violent deaths of the Zrinski brothers. While in the beginning the protagonists are willing to accept the official version of Nikola’s death, according to which the elder brother was killed by a wild boar during a hunt, as time goes by, more and more suspicions arise that the Emperor’s men murdered him. Consequently, there can be no doubt that the sacrificial deaths of both Zrinskis—Petar’s execution is staged as an extremely brutal act—must be associated with the martyrdom suffered by the Croatian nation, both then and, as the author obviously suggests, in the present day. Appearing as 13  The most significant theatre texts written about this theme include Milan Ogrizović’s U Bečkom Novom mjestu: Epilog zrinskofrankopanskoj tragediji u jednom činu (In Wiener Neustadt: An Epilogue to the Zrinski-Frankopan Tragedy in One Act, 1923), Tito Strozzi’s Zrinjski: dramska kronika u dva dijela (Zrinski: A Dramatic Chronicle in Two Parts, 1924), Ivan Raos’ drama Navik on živi ki zgine pošteno (Forever Lives He, Who Dies an Honorable Death, 1971) and Vladimir Stojsavljević’s Kronika nestajanja (A Chronicle of Disappearance, 2010).

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representatives of the nation as a whole, as personifications of the national idea, Kumičić’s Zrinski and Frankopan are clearly marked by a mythical aura. As characters without a specific individuality, they should be regarded as the mouthpiece of an author who understood his own literary work as a vehicle for the promotion of Starčević’s ideology of Croatian national exclusivism.

Conclusion In conclusion, it must also be noted that the Croatian national narratives, arising in the second half of the nineteenth century, later adopted other forms and meanings. It is not surprising that these changes had an impact on the reception of literary works dealing with national narratives, for instance, in the case of the opera Nikola Šubić Zrinjski by Zajc and Badalić. Although the opera was initially received as a double, that is, nationally (Croatian as well as South Slav) and supranationally (Habsburg) coded work of art, after the dissolution of the Danube Monarchy it was gradually seen more and more as an exclusively Croatian national work. In contrast to the narrative about Nikola Šubić Zrinski, the hero of Szigetvár, which was transposed into different national contexts as well as into the common imperial framework, the Zrinski-Frankopan Conspiracy was only situated in a national Croatian setting. As illustrated by Kumičić’s drama Petar Zrinski, the mobilizing effect of the Conspiracy stemmed from that aspect of the plot that could be symbolically realized as the much-desired liberation from the central, joint state dominated by Austrian Germans. Kumičić’s nationally coded play can therefore be read in analogy with authentic historic reality, in which Croatian patriotism, understood in the broader Habsburg frame, was slowly being transformed into a claim for an independent state. As I have tried to show, during the nineteenth century, Nikola Šubić Zrinski and his great-grandson Petar served as an inspiration for myth making in Croatia. This phenomenon resonated both in literature and in other cultural forms, and was generally associated with certain political and ideological concepts and positions. Two examples taken from the nineteenth-century Croatian theatre, Zajc’s and Badalić’s Nikola Šubić Zrinjski and Kumičić’s Petar Zrinski, vividly illustrate how inherently different interpretations and adjoining national and supranational narratives can emerge from the same historical material. At the same time, such an approach offers various possibilities for analysing empires, in this case the

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Habsburg Monarchy as a complex narrative construct in which the supranational sphere of the joint state under German-Austrian (and, from 1867 Hungarian as well) domination overlaps with and simultaneously opposes the particular, often conflicting spheres of specific ethnicities. Finally, these analyses also encompass Yugoslav and Croatian exclusivist ideologies, both Croatian metanarratives, which not only affected social and political spheres but also, as I have shown, exerted a long-lasting influence on the national culture.

References Agičić, Damir, and Magdalena Najbar-Agičić. 2016. National Narratives in Croatia. In Geschichtsbuch Mitteleuropa. Vom Fin de Siècle bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Anton Pelinka, Karin Bischof, Walter Fend, Karin Stögner, and Thomas Köhler, 287–314. Vienna: New Academic Press. Badalić, Hugo. 1876. Nikola Šubić Zrinjski. Glazbena tragedija u 3 čina (8 slika). Zagreb: C.  Albrecht (further editions: Zagreb: Nakl. Akademijske knjižare L. Hartmana [Kugli i Deutsch] 1885; Zagreb: Hrvatska kazališna biblioteka 11 1901 Zagreb: HNK 1967). Barac, Antun. 1950. Evgenij Kumičić (1850–1904). In Djela I, ed. Evgenij Kumičić, 7–26. Zagreb: Zora. Batušić, Nikola. 1968. Uloga njemačkog kazališta u Zagrebu u hrvatskom kulturnom životu od 1840. do 1860. Zagreb: JAZU. ———. 1976. Hrvatska drama od Demetra do Šenoe. Zagreb: Matica hrvatska. ———. 1978. Povijest hrvatskog kazališta. Zagreb: Školska knjiga. ———. 1986. Hrvatska drama 19. stoljeća. Split: Logos. ———. 1993. Zrinski i Frankopani u hrvatskoj drami. Umjetnost riječi 3–4: 155–182. Bobinac, Marijan. 2008. Zwischen Übernahme und Ablehnung. Aufsätze zur Rezeption deutschsprachiger Dramatiker im kroatischen Theater. Wrocław-­ Dresden: ATUT—Neisse. ———. 2011. Zwischen Jugoslawismus und kroatischem Exklusivismus. Kroatien und die Doppelmonarchie. In Von der Doppelmonarchie zur europäischen Union. Österreichs Vermächtnis und Erbe, ed. Pierre Béhar and Eva Philippoff, 137–154. Hildesheim: Peter Lang. Breyer, Blanka. 1938. Das deutsche Theater in Zagreb 1780–1840. Mit besonderer Berücksichtigung des dramatischen Repertoires. Diss. Zagreb. Dukić, Davor. 2018. The Zrinski-Frankopan Conspiracy as a National Sacrificial Narrative. Frontiers of Narrative Studies 4: 146–157. Engel, Pál. 2001. The Realm of St Stephen. A History of Medieval Hungary, 895–1526. London/New York: I.B. Tauris.

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Goldstein, Ivo. 1999. Croatia. A History. London: Hurst. Gross, Mirjana. 1985. Počeci moderne Hrvatske. Neoapsolutizam u civilnoj Hrvatskoj i Slavoniji 1850–1860. Zagreb: Globus. Hećimović, Branko. 1990. Repertoar hrvatskih kazališta. 1840–1860–1980, 1–2. Zagreb: Globus. Kovács, Kálmán, ed. 2017. “Zrínyi, Zriny, Zrinski”. Szigetvár német-magyar emlékezete 1790–1826. Debrecen: Debrecen UP. Kumičić, Evgenij. 1950. Petar Zrinski. In Djela II.  Evgenij Kumičić, 7–80. Zagreb: Zora. Marković, Tatjana. 2014. Memorizing battle musically. The Siege of Szigetvár (1566) as an identity signifier. Zeitschrift für die Literatur- und Theatersoziologie 10 (2014): 5–17. Neubauer, John. 2002. Zrinyi. Zriny. Zrinski. Neohelicon 1: 219–234. Ogrizović, Milan. 1921. Libretto Zajčeva ‘Zrinskog. Sveta Cecilija 4: 93–94. Okey, Robert. 1994. Austria and the South Slavs. In The Habsburg Legacy. National Identity in Historical Perspective, ed. Ritchie Robertson and Edward Timms, 46–57. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Pavličić, Pavao. 1993. Povijesna drama i periodizacija hrvatske književnosti. In Krležini dani u Osijeku 1992. Hrvatska dramska književnost i kazalište i hrvatska povijest, ed. Branko Hećimović, 20–34. Osijek-Zagreb: HNK—HAZU. Rumpler, Helmut. 1997. Eine Chance für Mitteleuropa. Bürgerliche Emanzipation und Staatsverfall in der Habsburgermonarchie. Wien: Ueberreuther. Šidak, Jaroslav. 1973. Studije iz hrvatske povijesti XIX stoljeća. Zagreb: Školska knjiga. Šrepel, Milivoj. 1902. Sigetski junak u povjesti hrvatskog pjesništva. Zagreb: JAZU. Sugar, Peter F., Tibor Frank, and Peter Hanak, eds. 1990. A History of Hungary. Bloomington-Indianapolis: Indiana UP. Suppan, Arnold. 1980. Die Kroaten. In Die Habsburgermonarchie 1848 bis 1918. Vol. III: Die Völker des Reiches, ed. Adam Wandruszka and Peter Urbanitsch, 626–733. Wien: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften.

CHAPTER 8

Ottoman Reform, Non-Muslim Subjects, and Constitutive Legislation: The Reform Edict of 1856 and the Greek General Regulations of 1862 Ayşe Ozil

Introduction The Ottoman sultan Abdülmecid issued an edict on 18 February 1856. Known as the Islahat Fermanı, or the reform edict, it marked a period of change in the Ottoman Empire in the middle of the nineteenth century. The Islahat edict followed on from the broader modernization path of the Tanzimat, the edict for order or reordering, which had been issued in 1839. It reified, yet also specified and modified, the course of reform. The Tanzimat and the Islahat edict have been considered to be two constitu̇ tive documents of the late Ottoman state and of modern Turkey (Inalcık 1992 [1942], 2, 5; Shaw and Shaw 1977, Part 2; Ahmad 1993, 26–29; Tanör 1999, 75–97; Hanioğlu 2008, 72, 85; among others). A. Ozil (*) Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Sabancı University, Istanbul, Turkey e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Chovanec, O. Heilo (eds.), Narrated Empires, Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55199-5_8

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While the significance of these documents is recognized as a turning point in scholarship, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the content of the documents, that is, what the documents actually said. There have been only a few detailed and critical analyses of the texts mainly focusing on the Tanzimat (primarily Tanzimat 1940; Karal 1995 [1954], ̇ vol. 6; Inalcık 1993 [1964]). This shortcoming has recently been addressed by limited yet effective scholarship with regard to the Tanzimat (primarily ̇ Abou-Manneh 1994; Inalcık and Seyitdanlıoğlu 20061; Topal 2017). While some of this literature has also included the Islahat edict (primarily Deringil 2012; Anscombe 2014; Koçunyan 2018),2 the latter still largely remains underexplored (Ozil 2013, 8). The main characteristic of the Islahat edict is that it was almost entirely about the non-Muslim and specifically Christian subjects of the empire. The edict was not a document that referred to non-Muslims among other more general matters; rather it was mainly and nearly exclusively about non-Muslims.3 More particularly, the edict was about the specifics of non-­ Muslim administration from communal institutions and buildings, to judicial and fiscal matters.4 In that sense, the Islahat edict was a practical document (Berkes 1973, 190).5 It was also a quintessentially modern document specifying a comprehensive set of written and all-pervading regulations for non-Muslims to be applied empire-wide. Why, then, did one of the fundamental documents of the late Ottoman period focus on the situation of non-Muslims? How did this focus relate to a broader understanding of Ottoman reform in the mid-nineteenth century, and  Some of the chapters in this collected volume are reprints of earlier works.  See also Topal in this volume regarding the after-effects of the Islahat which have been a more common topic of investigation among scholars. For a classic work on this, see Mardin 1962; for a recent example, see Çiçek 2010. 3  While scholarship recognizes the non-Muslim connection of the Islahat edict, the nature, the details, and the inclusivity and exclusivity of this connection are often not pursued thoroughly. For a contemporary account that outlines the non-Muslim exclusivity of the edict, and the historical tracts of the official historian and statesman of the empire, see Cevdet Paşa 1986, 66, 71. 4  As for the administrative nature of the Islahat edict, see Engelhardt 1976 [1882–1884] who recognizes how reform in the administration was seen as a move towards a more equalitarian status for non-Muslims, 92. 5  Official Ottoman documents referred to the edict as “auspicious administrative reform and privileges of non-Muslims” (Islahât-ı hayriyye-i mülkiye ve imtiyazât-ı tebaa-i gayrimüslime), Devlet Arşivleri Başkanlığı Osmanlı Arşivi (BOA), A.MKT.UM 228/16, 1272 B 2 (9 March 1856). 1 2

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what evidence do these matters provide for a more thorough view of the characteristics of the late Ottoman world? At the time of the promulgation of the edict in the mid-nineteenth century, non-Muslims—mainly Christians—still made up about 40% of the population of the empire (Karpat 1985, 116; Quataert 1994, 782). Orthodox Christians, who had a significant concentration of the population in the western provinces especially the Balkan lands, was the largest Christian group in the empire. It was here in the Balkans and in relation to Orthodox Christians that nationalism and international politics had begun to erode the borders of the empire, manifested by the establishment of a Greek nation-state in 1830. Partly, the Islahat edict was a response to the forces of nationalism, which also gave rise to similar movements among Orthodox groups such as Serbs in the first half of the nineteenth century. The promulgation of the edict was also connected to a series of interrelated domestic and international contexts, including (a) developments among Ottoman non-Muslims, especially Christians, regarding modernization and secularization of their social and communal institutions that involved elements of “embourgeoisement”; (b) a wider drive for modernization by the centralizing Ottoman state administration which aimed for a stronger and far-reaching penetration into the loosely connected imperial realms; for a closer connection between state and society; and for transforming the hierarchical order of society of which the Muslim/non-Muslim divide was a significant part in the medieval and post-medieval periods; (c) Great Power rivalry among mainly Britain, France, and Russia in the eastern Mediterranean which was increasingly played out in and around the borders of the Ottoman Empire. This article traces the promulgation of the Islahat edict against this background. Focusing on the case of Greek Christians, it explores the situation of and perspectives on non-Muslims in the mid-nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire which would produce such a regulatory text with an exclusive and detailed emphasis on non-Muslim communal and public presence. The examination juxtaposes political positions and realities on the ground and traces how politics and practice were reflected in the content of this document. Inquiring about the contexts of Ottoman non-­ Muslim subjecthood at this time, the article refers to the positions of the Ottoman and British governments,6 and to Greek leadership and 6  Among the Great Powers, the focus will be on Britain as the strongest and the most active ally of the Ottoman Empire in the mid-nineteenth century.

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c­ ommunal institutions. In pursuing the relationship between the Ottoman government and Greek administration, the article further looks at the Greek General Regulations, which were prescribed in the edict and were duly issued in 1862 as part of the promulgation of reform for and by all the three major and traditionally recognized non-Muslim communities of the empire, including not only Greeks but also Armenians and Jews. By examining these issues, this essay pursues the ways in which the Ottoman Empire responded to the challenges of accommodating ethno-religious diversity in the age of modernization and how policies of centralization, secularization, and standardization emerged in legal reform in the mid-­ nineteenth century.

The Islahat Edict: Communal Administrative Reform and Regulations for Communal Institutions The Islahat edict, in its introductory section, reiterated the guarantees given in the Tanzimat for the protection of life, honour, and property for all subjects of the empire regardless of religion. Immediately after this, the main thematic section of the edict began with two major and interrelated issues: (a) non-Muslim communal administrative reform and (b) regulation of the construction and reconstruction of communal buildings. Starting with the call for administrative reform for Christian and other non-Muslim communities, the edict set this issue as the principal matter from which other issues would develop. Within administrative reform, first, it asked non-Muslim communities to examine their existing privileges to propose reforms. This would be done by special councils to be set up in Patriarchates in cooperation with the Ottoman government.7 The edict, then, followed on a specific path, laying out which administrative areas were in need of reform. The first item on the agenda was patriarchal elections and the position of the clergy: The principle of nominating the patriarchs for life, after the revision of the rule of election now in force, shall be exactly carried out, conformably to the tenor of their firmans of investiture. The patriarchs, metropolitans, archbishops, bishops and rabbis shall take an oath, on their entrance into office, 7 ̇  For the text of the edict, see HR.SYS 1860/2, 18 February 1856 (in French), I.MMS 6/245, 1272 C 29 (7 March 1856) (in Ottoman Turkish), the transcription in Karal 1995, vol. 5, 258–264, and English translation in Hurewitz 1956, 149–153.

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according to a form agreed upon in common by my Sublime Porte and the spiritual heads of the different religious communities. The ecclesiastical dues, of whatever sort or nature they be, shall be abolished and replaced by fixed revenues of the patriarchs and heads of communities, and by the allocations of allowances and salaries equitably proportioned to the importance, the rank, and the dignity of the different members of the clergy.8 (Eng. trans. in Hurewitz 1956, 150)

On the one hand this was the continuation of a running scheme for reform in the Orthodox Christian upper clergy from the eighteenth century onward (Kitromilides 2014, 20–21). On the other hand, what the Islahat edict brought about anew was Ottoman state intervention into and guardianship of such reform. The Ottoman government demanded reform from these communities because it perceived it necessary as part of a much broader attempt for administrative reorganization in the empire. While the government focused on a reform of state institutions, it expected parallel reforms from non-Muslims, and this pointed at the communal administration, that is, the upper clergy/Patriarchates (Stamatopoulos 2003, 36; Anagnostopoulou 1998, Introduction and Part 2, Chapter 1). Attention to a reorganization of the Patriarchates was parallel to state centralization: empowering the centre at the expense of the provinces and regional magnates was replicated in the drive for the empowerment of the Patriarchate in Istanbul over other Patriarchates and metropolitan bishoprics in the provinces. Following the order for the reorganization of the clergy, the Islahat edict proceeded with a call for the establishment of a new council within each Christian and non-Muslim community. This council would be composed of both ecclesiastics and laymen and would be in charge of the management of communal affairs (see below, The Permanent National Mixed Council). With this call, it was for the first time that laymen would officially and institutionally be included in the administration of 8  “… patriklerin el-hâletü hâzihi cârî olan usûl-ı intihâbiyeleri ıslah olunduktan sonra patriklik berât-ı âlîsinin ahkâmına tatbîken kayd-ı hayât ile nasb ve tayîn olunmaları usûlünün tamâmen ve sahihen icrâ ve bâb-ı âlîmiz ile cemâât-ı muhtelifenin rüesây-ı rûhâniyesi beyninde karârgîr olacak bir sûrete tatbîkan patrik ve metropolid ve murahhasa ve piskopos ve hahamların hîn-i nasbında usûl-i tahlîfiyenin îfâ kılınması ve her ne sûret ve nâm ile olur ise olsun râhiplere verilmekte olan cevâiz ve avâidât cümleten men olunarak yerine patriklere ve cemâât başılarına vâridât-ı muayyene tahsîs ve ruhbân-ı sâirenin rütbe ve mansıblarının ehemmiyetlerine ve bundan sonra verilecek karâra göre kendilerine ber vech-i hakkâniyet ̇ maâşlar tayîn olunup …”, I.MMS, 6/245, 1272 C 29 (7 March 1856), line nos. 8–10.

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non-Muslim communities. These laymen were upper- and upper-middle-­ class figures including merchants, bankers, intellectuals, and other professionals (Kitromilides 2014, 21). As for the Ottoman government, it would act as the overseer of secularization in the communities, a policy that the government was concomitantly putting forward in the wider imperial sphere (Davison 1963, 114–120; Berkes 1973, 201–202; Shaw and Shaw 1977, 123–128). This statement about the inclusion of lay leaders provided a crucial link in the Islahat document between issues concerning the upper levels of administration—placed at the start of the text—and that of communal buildings, which would follow as the next item. In other words, following on from the reform of religious administration and the inclusion of laymen in communal administration came the issue of what this newly designed upper administration would actually manage, that is, communal institutions and their buildings. Indeed, after this point the edict goes into a detailed set of prescriptions about the conditions and regulations for the construction and reconstruction of communal buildings such as churches, schools, hospitals, and cemeteries. Overall, the two main issues, which appeared at the start of the edict, that is, the communal administration and construction of communal buildings, were strictly intertwined matters. The reorganization of one directly related to the reorganization of the other, and was under the supervision of the Ottoman government. More specifically in regard to communal buildings, the edict stated that if a city, town, or village was entirely composed of members of one religious group, houses of worship, schools, hospitals, cemeteries, and similar places would not be barred from being repaired on the original construction. If there was a need for the new erection of such buildings, the patriarch or communal leaders would approve of the plan for erection, which would then be submitted to the Ottoman government. The government would either approve it and issue an imperial order or respond with its concerns or objections in due time. If a locality was entirely composed of members of one religious group, there would be no obstacle against public worship. If a city, town, or village was composed of various religious groups, every group would have the power to apply for the repair of their church, hospital, school, or cemetery in the specific section of the locality where they resided, according to the rules described above; for the new erection of buildings, patriarchs or metropolitan bishops would be responsible for getting the necessary licences from the state (Hurewitz 1956, 151; Karal 1995, vol. 5, 260). This meant that the Islahat edict set the

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path of reform in terms of the specification and standardization of the construction and reconstruction of communal institutions under a more centralized and secularized upper non-Muslim leadership in close cooperation with the Ottoman government.

Lay Leadership, Communal Institutions, and Their Buildings In order to attain a better understanding of the above prescriptions, it would be useful to look at the developments on the ground as they had been shaped by the time of the edict. A most important development in the nineteenth century was the strengthening of the lay classes among Ottoman Christians based on entrepreneurial activities in commerce, banking, and business, accompanied by new social and cultural orientations. The entry of lay leaders into the upper communal administration of non-Muslim communities would be a direct result of this development. In reference to the Greek community within the confines of this paper, lay circles had traditionally been an integral part of the Patriarchal administration, particularly when we consider the Phanariots, who were a powerful group in the eighteenth century until the Greek War of Independence, which began in 1821. Owing to the administrative seats they held and the trade networks they controlled between Romania and Istanbul for the provisioning of the empire, they had a central political and economic position in the Romanian Principalities (Moldavia and Wallachia). These Principalities were significant for their large revenue-generating monastic estates, which belonged to the Orthodox Church. Orthodox monasteries in Moldavia and Wallachia were a major source of economic and political power for ecclesiastical and lay leaders of the Orthodox world and a major financial resource for Orthodox communal institutions. Monastic estates were also economic assets for the Ottoman state through taxation and provisioning and a significant political element in the border conflicts with Russia over the Orthodox connection (see below) (Runciman 1999 [1968], Ch. 10; Stamatopoulos 2003, 62, 185–193; Philliou 2010). Despite the demise of the Phanariots during the Greek War of Independence, newer families that were engaged in the emerging entrepreneurial activities and middle-class professional work would begin to rejuvenate the lay leadership in the 1840s and 1850s. Members of these families would be influential players in Greek upper leadership building

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alliances with members of the clergy and would act in the wider Ottoman and international political spheres (Stamatopoulos 2003, 37–62). Continuing the Phanariot tradition, yet characteristically different from it, the Greek “bourgeoisie” from the mid-nineteenth century onward would take part in the communal administration in structurally new ways. Lay leaders would not only fill new secular positions, such as the headmastership of a modernizing school, but also become part of the religious administration within a reorganization of the latter that would make this possible. As prescribed by the Islahat edict, the religious administration would not only be run by the clergy but also involve lay leadership. Up until this time, religious administration was the only type of communal administration, and their duties included the administration of communal institutions such as churches and hospitals. From around the middle of the nineteenth century, religious administration, that is, Patriarchate, continued to be the top communal administration, which also formally had the capacity to communicate with the Ottoman government, yet it began to share power with the secular leadership, particularly with regard to the management of communal institutions, which gradually comprised the more ‘civic’ side of the communal realm in distinction to the purely religious. Beyond their engagement with existing communal institutions, lay leaders initiated a new kind of communal building activity, which the Islahat edict aimed to put in a framework. Legal prescriptions, in that sense, corresponded to and communicated with institutional realities and demands on the ground. From the nineteenth century onwards many new churches were built or reconstructed and philanthropic associations created under the new lay leadership, which played a major role in terms of administration and finances. Particularly owing to the efforts of the same lay circles there were also developments in modern educational institutionalization. From the early nineteenth century, lay leadership began to promote schools for primary and secondary education. During that period this was a novelty as these schools of mass education were replacing an old system where education was not widespread and was confined for the majority to basic letter learning for the church mass and more advanced private schooling for an elite minority. Throughout the nineteenth century, the buildings of these schools, which were also new, began to mark their places in the urban and rural areas. They were increasingly separated from the buildings of the churches and at times constructed at some

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distance from them, signifying an increasing separation between the lay and ecclesiastical circles9 (Colonas 2005; Exertzoglou 1996; Ozil 2001). The Greek Orthodox Church of Panagia Eisodion and the nearby School of Panagia close to the Grand Rue of Pera in Beyoğlu are good examples of this early development. Built in 1804 and 1808, respectively, and financed by the commercial and business classes of the time, they marked the emergence of the new Greek community and neighbourhood in Beyoğlu. Beyoğlu, at this time, was turning into an urban sprawl and would ultimately form the quintessentially modernist section of Istanbul. Unlike earlier traditional forms, the building of the school was not situated on the grounds of the church, rather the school occupied a separate building in another part of the same neighbourhood (first in Parmakkapı, later in Galatasaray). This can be seen as a sign both of a literal expansion and development of Greek communities and a symbolic expression of a secularizing path in communal education (Ozil 2001, 64–71). Such developments in the Christian sphere, marking new communal institutions and claiming a space for them in the physical environment, necessitated corresponding codification and supervision. The Islahat edict, which included specific regulations regarding the construction and reconstruction of buildings, would put forth the main regulatory and empire-­ wide framework and act as a guide for future administrative reorganization.10 While the edict approached the issue of construction and rebuilding in terms of legality vis-à-vis the state and legitimacy vis-à-vis the wider society, the Greek upper administration had begun to devise codifications regarding the internal administration and functioning of such institutions. One of the initial and fundamental steps of reform for the regulation of communal institutions came in 1836 with the establishment of the Patriarchal Commission for Ecclesiastical and Communal Affairs. This 9  Within the confines of this chapter, I lay out some of the fundamental steps in the historical development of lay and ecclesiastical circles as the two main administrative and social groups. The relationship between them were in fact multi-layered which resulted in many cross alliances (including Ottoman state leaders and European consular representation) on political, institutional, and individual levels, Ozil 2001, Ch. 3; Stamatopoulos 2003, and, for specific examples, see The National Archives (TNA), FO 352/43 A (1), from Etienne Pisani to Stratford Canning, 23 February 1856; Cevdet Paşa 1986, 82–83. 10  In the last decades of the Ottoman Empire, the construction and reconstruction of communal buildings would be closely monitored by the Ministry of Justice and Religious Denominations (Adliye ve Mezahib Nezareti). Detailed information about communal builḋ ings and their construction and rebuilding can be found in the BOA, I.AZN catalogues.

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committee would later be separated as the Patriarchal Ecclesiastical Commission (1868) and the Patriarchal Educational Commission (1873) with a further specialization of administrative areas and a demarcation of the purely religious affairs from other communal areas, mainly education.11 In the meantime two regulations for primary and secondary schools were promulgated, first for primary schools and boys’ secondary schools in 1846 and later for girls’ secondary schools in 1851.12 All these developments in the communal administrative sphere provided the background for the edict. Therefore, when the latter was promulgated in 1856, it did not mark unchartered territory, but rested on earlier communal institutional reform. The edict was based on, responded to, and was bolstered by an ongoing communal transformation, which involved institutional modernization and secularization.

Reform in Upper Communal Leadership: Greek General Regulations A few years after the proclamation of the Islahat edict, each of the three main non-Muslim communities issued a reform document. The General Regulations,13 which were published in Greek by the Orthodox Christian Patriarchate in Istanbul, followed the pattern and demands of the edict in dealing exclusively with organizational and administrative matters.14 First 11  “Announcement regarding the establishment of an ecclesiastical and communal commission” [Eidopoiesis peri systaseos epitropis ekklesiastikis kai pneumatikis] 1836; “Code of the central ecclesiastical commission” [Kanonismos tis kentrikis ekklesiastikis epitropis] 1868; “Code of the patriarchal central educational commission” [Kanonismos tis patriarchikis kentrikis ekpaideutikis epitropis] 1873, in Ziogou-Karastergiou 1998, 48–58, 97–106, 118–130, respectively. 12  The Patriarchal Circular (1845) and the Code for Primary and Boys’ Secondary schools (1846) [Kanonismos ton allilodidaktikon kai ellinikon scholeion]; the Patriarchal Circular (1851) and the Regulations for Girls’ Secondary Schools (1851) [Diorganismos ton ellinikon parthenagogeion] (1851), in Ziogou-Karastergiou 1998, 59–65, 428–441, 66–68, 442–457, respectively. 13  “Genikoi Kanonismoi peri dieuthetiseos ton ekklisiastikon kai ethnikon pragmaton ton ypo ton Oikoumenikon Thronon diatelounton Orth. Xristianon yphkoon tis A.  M. tou Soultanou” [General Regulations on the administration of the ecclesiastical and ethnic/communal matters of the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s Orthodox Christian subjects of the Sultan] Istanbul, 1862. 14  This article primarily focuses on the finished document as it existed at this time and does not delve into the power struggles among the Greek Orthodox circles which played into the text of the document.

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of all, the Orthodox administration applied the first prescription of the edict and began with the task of setting up a special council composed of seven ecclesiastical and ten lay members, to oversee patriarchal administrative reform (Genikoi Kanonismoi 1862, 4–18). This council prepared the General Regulations, which oversaw reform under four main headings: First, it regulated the elections of the upper clergy and the organization of the Holy Synod; second, it regulated the establishment of a Mixed Council; third, it regulated the organization of the salaries of the Patriarch; and, lastly, it regulated the administration of monasteries. The first three sections concerned reform in religious administration and the inclusion of lay leadership in administration. The Holy Synod would share power with a new administrative council, The Permanent National Mixed Council (To Ethnikon Diarkes Mikton Symvoulion), which would be composed of four ecclesiastical and eight lay leaders. While the Synod would administer the purely religious matters, the Mixed Council would be responsible for communal issues. In this scheme, the control of communal institutions mostly passed to a council that involved laymen, marking a step towards the secularization of the Greek upper administration. The council would be in charge of the management of schools, hospitals, philanthropic institutions, the financial issues of churches, and any other institutional matter which was not considered to be an ecclesiastical issue. As the Islahat edict prioritized and emphasized the central communal administration as an actor of reform, we see a reciprocal approach in the text of the General Regulations towards the Ottoman administration. There was a clear and recurring discourse in the Regulations about the ties of the Orthodox community to the Ottoman state and on how the former was an integral part of the latter. In the frequent references to the Ottoman state, the Regulations not only followed on the prescriptions of the edict but they stated their acknowledgement of the Ottoman state as the broader governing structure and the upper supervising authority of Orthodox organization. A good example of this is from the regulation on the election of the upper clergy. The regulation stated that an eligible candidate first of all had to be a subject of the empire, highlighting the Ottoman context and the legal status of the candidate. Most significantly the section of the edict on the election of the upper clergy included the term nation/community (ethnos) in the text as the candidate had to be of impeccable character in the face of the community. The term ethnos does not necessarily refer to a Greek nation, even though it would gradually assume this meaning further on in the century as other

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Orthodox groups, such as Serbians and Bulgarians, would set up their own states (Anagnostopoulou 2004). Ethnos was also used at this time as a term to refer to the Orthodox Christian community. According to Article no. 1 of the organization of the Mixed Council, the secretaries of the Council should be competent at translation into not only Ottoman, Greek, and French but also Bulgarian (Genikoi Kanonismoi 1862, 21), which shows the still encompassing nature of Orthodox Christianity from Istanbul. Another way in which the term ethnos was used in the document was apparent in the title of the Regulations which separated Orthodox Christian affairs in terms of ecclesiastical (ekklesiastika) and national or communal (ethnika) matters. This division delineated the religious or more properly ecclesiastical issues from communal affairs and is suggestive of secularizing developments. Furthermore, General Regulations in the title did not refer to “Greekness”. The Regulations were Greek only to the extent that the upper administration and leadership in Istanbul was linguistically and culturally Greek. While the first three sections of the General Regulations followed on the prescriptions of the edict and were about the reorganization of the upper administrative structure of the Patriarchate, the last section about monasteries diverted slightly from this line. This section was largely the result of an ongoing attention at the time directed at the Principalities. However, the issue of the monasteries was not something that related to all Orthodox Christians of the Ottoman Empire. Thus, the inclusion of a section on monasteries in the General Regulations was indicative of their special significance in the Orthodox and Ottoman power networks during the promulgation of the Regulations. This specificity reiterates how the Regulations under discussion here followed on particular practical developments on the ground. The attention on monasteries also confirms the focus of reform in the upper administration at this time.

The Great Powers, the Crimean War, and the Paris Peace Treaty Communal reform was not only a domestic issue. In the mid-nineteenth-­ century Ottoman non-Muslims increasingly found themselves at the centre of intensifying relations between the Great Powers of Europe and the Ottoman Empire. The promulgation of the Islahat edict was directly tied to the Crimean War (1853–1856) and the resulting Paris Peace Treaty

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(1856). Fought between Russian on the one side and an allied group composed of Great Britain, France, the Ottoman Empire, and Sardinia-­ Piedmont on the other side, the Crimean War was one of the largest, most long-lasting, and transformative confrontations of the nineteenth century. It emerged out of Great Power rivalry over the eastern Mediterranean and more specifically related to British (and French) resistance to Russian advances in the Ottoman Empire. Christian subjects of the latter were immediately implicated in this struggle. The specific confrontation that led to the war occurred over the Holy Sites in Ottoman Palestine regarding the question of the protection of Orthodox Christians versus Catholics, by Russia and France respectively (Figes 2010, xxiii, Ch. 1). As the war was drawing to a close after three years of fighting with an allied victory, peace negotiations duly got under way in the winter of 1855–1856. The allied proposals for peace rested on four points. Two of these points concerned Ottoman Christians. The first point demanded from Russia the abandonment of her protectorate over the Wallachian and Moldavian Principalities.15 The fourth point was about the privileges of Ottoman Christians.16 During the negotiations, both points were treated together and it was stated that delay in the former would lead to delay in the latter.17 Both of these points were related to the allied goal of preventing Russian involvement in Ottoman affairs through Orthodox Christians. Since the eighteenth century this had been a Russian policy as Russia claimed rights on Ottoman Orthodox Christians based on the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca, which it signed with the Ottomans in 1774. The common line of the first and the fourth points was the Russian and Orthodox Christian connection. While the first point further raised the question of reform in the Principalities,18 the fourth point involved an extension of reform on the privileges beyond Orthodox Christians.

15  The second point was about the freedom of navigation on the Danube and the third point about the neutralization of the Black Sea. 16  FO 424/315, Eastern Papers, Part VIII: Correspondence respecting the rights and privileges of the Latin and Greek Churches in Turkey, November 1855–March 1856, pp. 1–2. It was also connected to the broader question of administrative reform, FO 424/9, Correspondence respecting Christian privileges in Turkey, 1851–1856, from Stratford Canning to Earl of Clarendon, 9 January 1856, p. 135. 17  FO 352/44, from Stratford Canning to Earl of Clarendon, 28 January 1856; FO 424/9, from Earl of Clarendon to S. Canning, 24 January 1856, p. 137. 18  FO 424/9, from Stratford Canning to Earl of Clarendon, 9 January 1856, p. 135.

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Indeed, while Orthodox Christians of the Ottoman Empire were the main point of attention vis-à-vis Russian claims of protection over them, the peace negotiations in Paris provided an opportunity to extend this focus towards a larger reform of the existing privileges of all Christians and eventually all non-Muslims, including Jews.19 In this context, the negotiations between the allies and the Ottoman Empire rested on the formulation and promulgation of a decree, that is, the Islahat edict, by the Ottoman sultan with respect to Christian and non-Muslim privileges which was the focus of the fourth point. There were major areas of debate regarding what the edict covered. Other than the question of its extension to all non-Muslims, there was the British demand to put a clause regarding the abolishment of the death penalty for conversion from Islam to Christianity. The other major point of contention was whether the edict should be added to the peace treaty to guarantee the application of the former, accordingly the wellbeing of Christians, through international law.20

The Coverage of the Edict: From (Greek) “Christians” to “Christians and Non-Muslims” In the context of the Crimean War, Great Britain and France demanded from the Ottoman government better protection of the latter’s (Orthodox) Christian subjects to counteract Russian intervention in Ottoman lands. This demand was at the same time connected to the wider policies of Britain and France who were seeking authority over the Ottoman state in which the discourse of the protection of Christians was dominant. Particularly for Britain, maintaining the integrity (in both senses of the word) of the Ottoman Empire was of paramount importance at this time. Other than clearing the ground of Russian intervention, pushing for Christian reform would serve two main and intertwined purposes. One of these was to prevent a further loss of land and a decrease in population due to nationalist movements. The memory of the Greek War of Independence in which all of these powers had been involved was all too recent and there were similar developments that continued particularly in the Balkans. The other goal particularly of Britain was not only to prevent the disintegration  FO 424/9, from Earl of Clarendon to Stratford Canning, 24 January 1856, p. 137.  Cevdet Paşa 1986, 73–74; FO 424/9, from Stratford Canning to Earl of Clarendon, 9 January 1856, p. 136. 19 20

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of the Ottoman Empire but also to turn it into a legally modernized state with which it could conduct politics and business. The civilizational discourse attached to these purposes worked through the rights of their Christian co-religionists. The following statement by Stratford Canning—the British ambassador at Istanbul and a most active and influential politician in the Ottoman Empire—combined the three issues (the maintenance and progress of the empire, the situation of its Christian subjects, and Russian belligerency) and presented them within a civilizational discourse: We are bleeding of every rain and pouring out our treasures for this empire which surely gives us a right to require that protection for the Christian and that better system of administration which are essential to the progress and even to the continued existence of this empire. Russia single, ambitious, overreacting is a very different kind of superintendent from Europe composed of several powers and pledged to the conservation of the empire.21

In the eyes of the Ottoman state, the major threat to imperial unity likewise came from the outlying provinces, particularly in the Christian-­ dominated Balkans. This threat was shaped in terms of national movements or provincial power struggles linked directly or indirectly to national concerns. The response of the Ottoman state, therefore, also related to the place, conditions, and rights of Christians in the empire. This concern became more emphatic as the Ottoman state aimed not only to preserve its empire but also to modernize it, with an eye to changing the existing premodern hierarchical legal structures, one of which concerned the Muslim/non-Muslim divide (Cevdet Paşa 1986, Tezkire no. 10; Badem 2011; Eldem 2017, 28–29). Within the context of the Crimean War, the growing attention to Christians on the part of the Ottoman state was also connected to finding for itself a place among the Great Powers of Europe. Legal modernization and a more equalitarian structure between Muslim and non-Muslim subjects was necessary for entry into the European concert. In a letter of instruction to the Ottoman ambassador in Brussels, Fuad Pasha—a leading Ottoman reformist and the Foreign Minister of the time—formulated

 FO 352/43 B (5), from Stratford Canning to Earl of Clarendon, 15 January 1856.

21

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the issue as radical administrative reform which would serve the wellbeing of Ottoman peoples, the strength of the empire and its progress.22 Ultimately, the resulting text of the Islahat edict clearly prioritized and underlined Christians. During the negotiations, the British extended their position with regard to the coverage of the privileges and argued that Christian privileges should apply to all non-Muslims including Jews (Koçunyan 2018, 94–96).23 Yet, in most cases, the wording was “Christians and other non-Muslims”, that is, with the inclusion of non-Muslims and also retaining the primacy of Christians. The later extension of the coverage from Christians to non-Muslims was apparent and an ambiguity remained. The text, for example, specifically referred to the Patriarchates, which are exclusively Christian. In certain cases, the reference was to Christians only.

Freedom of Religion: The Question of the Abolition of the Death Penalty for Converts from Islam to Christianity Another major point of contention between the Ottoman government and the allies at the peace negotiations were reforms to religious freedom in the Ottoman realm. Particularly, the discussion revolved around whether there would be a statement in the edict for abolishing the prosecution (death penalty) of converts from Islam to Christianity (Engelhardt 1976 [1882–1884], 87–91). Fuad Pasha declared that they would comply by the promises made earlier with regard to converts (see below), in fact they were looking to put this in the text to show “the sincerity of the Porte”, but they did not overall welcome this proposal warmly.24 Eventually, it would not be a part of the edict as an open declaration. The closest statement that the Islahat edict had in regard to conversion was this: All forms of religion are and shall be freely professed in my dominions, no subject of my empire shall be hindered in the exercise of the religion that he

 BOA, HR.ŞFR 24/20 (2), 18 February 1856.  FO 352/55A (1), from Stratford Canning to Earl of Clarendon, 25 January 1856. 24  FO 352/43 A (1), from Etienne Pisani to Stratford Canning, 3 February 1856. 22 23

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professes, nor shall be in any way annoyed on this account. No one shall be compelled to change their religion.25 (Eng. trans. in Hurewitz 1956, 151)

Just like the issue of communal institutions discussed above, the question regarding Christian converts rested on previous developments. Due to Canning’s efforts, capital punishment for apostates was in practice thwarted in 1844 (Deringil 2012, 24, 52, 74), that is, before the promulgation of the edict. Eventually, the fact that this did not appear in the edict itself still mattered in terms of the absence of a legal and international guarantee. Since the issue of conversion was a highly sensitive religious subject, the British were not in favour of insisting on it,26 as the Ottoman government could reciprocate by not making the necessary concessions on the fourth point, and the fourth point was the most urgent proposal.27

The Islahat Edict and the Question of Its Inclusion in the Paris Treaty For the British, a real and thorough stipulation of Christian privileges was crucial. In fact, it was even much more important to enforce the existing provisions rather than come up with new reforms.28 Regarding the British demand to put the privileges in the treaty, this would be “most desirable” and “indispensable” as it would guarantee allied supervision with regard to the application of reforms, the emphasis being on both “allied” vis-à-vis Russia and “supervision” vis-à-vis the Ottoman government.29 The Ottoman government, on the other hand, was not in favour of including the Islahat edict in the treaty.30 Fuad Pasha was concerned that this would turn the edict into an official agreement with the Great Powers,31 which in order to guarantee its enforcement was in fact what the Great Powers wanted. 25  “… memâlik-i mahrûsemde bulunan her dîn ve mezhebin âyîni ber-vech-i serbestî icrâ olunduğundan tebaa-i şâhânemden hiç bir kimesne bulunduğu dînin âyînini icrâdan men olunmaması ve bundan dolayı cevr ü ezâ görmemesi ve tebdîl-i din ve mezheb etmek üzere ̇ kimse icbâr olunmaması …”, I.MMS, 6/245, 1272 C 29 (7 March 1856), line no. 15. 26  FO 352/55A (1), from Stratford Canning to Earl of Clarendon, 6 February 1856. 27  FO 352/43B (5), from Stratford Canning to Etienne Pisani, 6 February 1856. 28  FO 424/9, from Stratford Canning to Earl Clarendon, 9 January 1856, pp. 135–36; from Earl of Clarendon to Stratford Canning, 4 February 1856, p. 150. 29  FO 352/44, from Stratford Canning to Earl of Clarendon, 15 January 1856. 30  FO 352/44, from Stratford Canning to Earl of Clarendon, 2 March 1856. 31  BOA, HSD.AFT 2/691272 B 1 (8 March 1856).

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Beyond the privileges, the fourth point also included Russia as one of the guarantors, which was particularly unfavourable in the eyes of the Ottoman government.32 France tried to persuade the latter claiming that the inclusion of the edict in the treaty would help deter outside intervention. In fact, the British went further and argued that if the treaty included “a declaration that the Hatt-ı şerif [Islahat] confers no right of interference in the internal affairs of Turkey, the Porte will obtain an additional guarantee against any misuse being made of the official communication of the Hatt-ı şerif to foreign powers”.33 In other words, the British position was for the edict to include a declaration about non-interference in the internal affairs of the Ottoman Empire and for the treaty to refer to that declaration. If the Ottoman government did this, then they would obtain an additional guarantee against encroachment in their internal affairs.34 Finally, the treaty referred to the edict (Article no. 9) stating briefly that the Sultan issued a ferman (edict) to carry out reform regarding the conditions of his subjects without religious distinction and that he extended his generous intentions towards the Christian population of the empire. Yet the edict did not have a declaration about non-interference in affairs of the Ottoman Empire, which would be the extra mile.35 The treaty’s reference to the edict guaranteed the allies overseeing powers over the Ottoman state, but did not extend to legal interference (Davison 1963, 52–54; Çiçek 2010, 109–113). The two matters discussed at the beginning of this article, which would open the thematic sections of the edict (communal administrative reform and regulation of building construction), do not seem to have created a controversy at the negotiations, or at least they were less conflictual.36 With regard to the clause on the construction and reconstruction of buildings, there seemed to be a consensus since building and rebuilding was largely a continuation of older privileges with greater freedoms, which henceforward having been written down were made more specific and legally binding. As for the issue of the inclusion of lay members to the administration to some extent it was debated since it was a novelty.37 Yet it  FO 352/43 A (1), 3, 10–11, 16, 22 March 1856.  FO 352/43B (5) 1856, Stratford Canning, n.d. 34  FO 352/43B (5) 1856, Stratford Canning, n.d. 35  Stratford Canning, 1st Viscount Stratford de Redcliffe was a hugely influential figure in Britain’s relationship with the Ottoman government. In some situations, he acted more assertively and more radically than the British Foreign Office policy called for, Richmond 2014. 36  FO 424/9, from Stratford Canning to Earl of Clarendon, 9 January 1856, p. 136. 37  At the beginning of the negotiations, a draft prepared by the Ottoman government with regard to existing communal administrative privileges showed the exclusive position of the clergy in administrative affairs. 32 33

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did not form an ongoing point of contention. In line with the policies of the Ottoman government, the Great Powers, each in their own way, had a secularizing agenda. The British were concerned with the absence of checks on the power of the clergy38 and the French more so with their radical republican secularist policies.

Conclusion The Islahat edict of 1856 was primarily a practical document with highly specific administrative regulations for non-Muslim communal and public life. It did not deal with philosophical abstractions and it was less about general principles. Only through specific administrative regulations could one delineate wider tendencies regarding forms of conduct, or more specifically the place of non-Muslims in the Ottoman state. Indeed, the focus of the edict was almost exclusively on the Christian and non-Muslim subjects of the empire. It was comprised of far-reaching and pervasive modern reforms for Ottoman Christians and other non-Muslims. The characteristics of the edict were the result of a particular conjuncture of policies and developments in the mid-nineteenth century relating to the Ottoman government, non-Muslim leadership, and the Great Powers. The centralizing and secularizing aims of the Ottoman administrators met with the demands and contexts created by the emergence of a non-Muslim lay leadership and the development of the Great Power rivalry around the Crimean war. Ultimately, by prescribing administrative reform, the Ottoman state attempted to more closely tie the non-Muslim communities to itself within a newly shaped organizational framework. In turn, non-Muslim communities would reassert their presence and reaffirm the supervisory power of the Ottoman state in an overall improved legal status for non-Muslims. This design was also expected to prevent the empire from further disintegration and fulfil the civilizational goals of the Great Powers. In addition to the political decisions leading to the formulation and the promulgation of the edict, there was a growing and changing infrastructural ground for non-Muslim institutions, which necessitated and shaped reform. The significance of this development not only can be followed in the references to non-Muslim communal institutions/buildings in the  FO 424/9, from Stratford Canning to Earl of Clarendon, 16 January 1856, pp. 142–143.

38

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edict but can also be traced in the Greek General Regulations (1862), which were promulgated by the Greek leadership according to the prescriptions of the edict itself. From the reorganization of the upper administration of the Greek Orthodox community to monastic reform, new regulations, just like those of the edict, dealt with specific, concrete and tangible matters. Again in connection to the Islahat edict these regulations were also concerned with the detailed functioning of the upper communal administration, such as the organization of Patriarchal elections and administrative committees, in a centralizing and secularizing manner. Just as the Islahat edict and the General Regulations were about the circumstances in the mid-nineteenth century, they were also about the future. Both documents prescribed reform. With the Islahat edict, and combined with new freedoms, non-Muslim rights as a whole were for the first time written down in a very specific manner and addressed the empire as a whole. Similarly, with the Greek General Regulations, the communal administrative sphere was clearly delineated and set on a path for reform. The two documents eventually specified and clearly defined a space that could not be contravened legally. Here was a legal regulation mediating, specifying, and shaping a field of action for non-Muslims of the empire. Administrative prescriptions defined by the edict and the General Regulations would guide discussions and power struggles around issues of subjecthood, citizenship, nation, ethno-religious identification, and diversity in the following decades. While such general principles would be intensely debated and it was not at all clear to what extent there would be a consensus on them, tangible matters of non-Muslim administrative and institutional reform and communal building regulations were largely applied. Both the Islahat edict and the General Regulations would be far from remaining a dead letter in the later years of the empire. Fundamentally both documents were an attempt not to revive an existing premodern relationship between the Ottoman state and its non-­ Muslim subjects, but rather to rethink this relationship and reshape the place of non-Muslims in a modernizing, secularizing, and nationalizing world. The prescriptions of the Islahat edict can be regarded as an early version of modern minority status with rights for both equal citizenship and ethno-religious privilege.

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CHAPTER 9

Ottoman Albanians in an Era of Transition: An Engagement with a Fluid Modern World Isa Blumi

Introduction Administrators of modern empires such as the Ottoman and its immediate neighbours—Habsburgs, Romanovs, Italy, France, Germany, and Britain—had a primary role to play in the period leading up to World War I.  Charged with maximizing the profitability of commercial enterprises increasingly co-opting their states (often at the behest of financiers issuing debt to sustain these costly imperialist regimes), these administrators have left mountains of documentation making it clear that the complexities of rule troubled them. Unfortunately for them, the trans-continental nature of their empires (with the incumbent cultural, economic, and thus political diversity) punished those incapable of adapting to changes resulting from their battles with multi-ethnic ‘subjects’. As greater pressures were put onto state

I. Blumi (*) Department of International Studies, American University of Sharjah, Sharjah, UAE SUITS, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Chovanec, O. Heilo (eds.), Narrated Empires, Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55199-5_9

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officials to secure the resources on which ‘subjects’ laid conflictual claim (and still largely controlled), the resulting struggles often induced the crisis to which Antonio Gramsci (1971, 275–276) once referred. Critically, the enduring quest for hegemony over those failing to comply actually induced those state bureaucracies to invest in the technologies and administrative tactics that ultimately defined what we identify as the modern era (Burbank and Cooper 2019). In reading the archives of such investments in modernity, however, the driving force of those inducing the changes— indigenous actors—proves still elusive to the historian. Studying these conflicted periods of ‘modernization’ today is often done with the benefit of hindsight by comparing relatively successful administrative adaptations. Empires that ‘failed’ presumably did not survive World War I because its state bureaucracies did not effectively conjoin the larger society with the forces of change. Who were those agents of change—positive or negative—may be a more complicated question to answer, requiring investing time into studying that goes beyond our sweeping post-facto conclusions that their projects ultimately failed. As suggested below, perhaps an investment in differentiating the variable actions political actors took during periods of transition could prove illuminating. The following case of a generation of Ottoman activists aims to provide access to the depth of indigenous engagements with ‘modernization’, upsetting, as a result, the normative reference to, for instance, Ottoman ‘collapse’ and allowing for a more complicated story of transition to emerge. Known in subsequent generations as heroes of Albanian nationalism, the Ottoman-Southern Albanian (Tosk) authors and activists studied here offer us insights into how a self-selective constituency, dispersed from its Western Balkan homelands into the diaspora of the larger Balkans, Egypt, Central Europe, and as far as the Americas, challenged the Ottoman government in Istanbul (and its international financial masters) by using a variety of at once universal claims (and thus au courant to the era) with demands addressing their specific Eastern Mediterranean contexts.1 By studying such activism through the newspaper articles, speeches, and private correspondences these activists produced, it is proposed that we 1  Albanian speakers are linguistically and culturally distinct by region. The reference to Southern Tosk and Northern Gheg Albanians here serves to highlight how many under study self-identified prior to World War I using more sub-regional affiliations (Blumi 2011, 20–25).

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can observe the shifting concerns of Ottoman state officials similarly linked to their West Balkan homelands and adapting policies that often involved Italian, Greek, and Austrian interlocutors as well. Southern Tosk Albanians such as the remarkable Frashëri family (Sami, Abdyl, and Naim Frashëri), linked to a land-owning class of Ottomans based throughout the Balkans and Egypt (from the 1750s, the economic engine of the Empire’s Mediterranean enterprise), mobilized the ecumenical possibilities embedded in the era’s iteration of ‘nationalism’.2 Studying the contingent iterations of these Tosk Albanian Ottomans’ associations with both Albanian and non-Albanian speakers, both in the Balkans and in Egypt, we can appreciate that Ottoman subjects of various means actively instrumentalized the empire’s diverse cultural, political, and socio-­ economic heritage to support their ever-shifting political and economic aims. In the end, the stories of diverse Tosk Albanian Ottoman attempts to forge alliances that cut across all kinds of conventional boundaries supposedly separating them from Greeks, Italians, or Arabs impacted the futures of all states competing for influence in the Eastern Mediterranean.3

The Mediterranean as an Ottoman Theatre of Crisis A student of the region’s history knows that since the eighteenth century, Egypt drew immigrants from across the Mediterranean. The initial reason for this was the economic boom experienced by the larger society that translated its massive food surpluses into wealth that was reinvested in as much in intellectual activities as in palaces or making political alliances. In time, especially with the rise of the dynasty of Mehmed Ali (r. 1805–1849), the state and the land-owning classes recruited labourers from the homelands from which most of the Egyptian elite originated, including, and 2  While geographically dispersed by the end of the nineteenth century, the primary members of this powerful family are Sami (1850–1904) known in Ottoman studies as Şemsaddin Sami, perhaps his generation’s greatest scholar (Blumi 2011, 89–90); Naim (1846–1900), a poet with strong links to the Bektashi Sufi order banned in the Ottoman Empire since 1826 (Blumi 2011, 107–117); and Abdyl (1839–1892), a member of the short-lived parliament in 1876 and a radical reformer who opportunistically called for a Balkan-wide unified state, be it ‘Albania’ or, in Ottoman, Arnavutluk. This governorship was not ethnic in nature and it would have remained firmly in the confines of a reformed Ottoman state, an early form of a federation proposed elsewhere years later (Clayer 2007, 245–258). 3  The dynamism induced by migration through the Mediterranean blurred the lines distinguishing ‘Europe’ from the Ottoman ‘orient’ (Clancy-Smith 2012).

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most relevant to the present discussion, Albanian-speaking Ottomans (Blumi 2012, 34–54). With the cotton boom of the 1850s and the construction of the Suez Canal in the 1860s, the Egyptian ruling classes flooded the autonomous Ottoman territory with debt, leading ultimately to Egypt’s bankruptcy. The economic activity, however, did allow much of the cultural, economic and political elite in Lower Egypt to establish links with the larger Mediterranean, especially the Balkans and Istanbul. Unfortunately, much as China’s and India’s wealth would draw Britain into a quest for direct occupation by way of illegal economic practices and treachery, by 1878 and 1882, the Ottoman Balkans and Egypt respectively became a different kind of political arena in the larger Mediterranean context (Blumi 2013). After the British invasion of Egypt in 1882, the occupation regime steered the financially crippled Egyptian state towards investing in supporting ‘nationalist cells’ in the hope of destabilizing entrenched Ottoman constituencies throughout the region. Such opportunities of British ‘patronage’ proved especially lucrative for the many talented Albanian Tosk Ottoman writers and artists who had settled in Egypt over the previous century. Their presence helped cultivate the panoply of modern-­ looking ethno-national, or sectarian orientated communities through a boom in publishing, a nurturing of selective communalism that ironically would serve British imperial interests in direct conflict with the activism of many of these same Tosks in their Balkan homelands. Indeed, while short-­ lived, many of the journals published in Egypt under British direct rule explicitly articulated support for what was framed ‘Albanian’ political rights in both Egypt and the Balkans that clashed with the patriotic Ottoman calls for unity made by the Frashëri brothers.4 What this demonstrates is a range of possible loyalties and interests among Tosk Albanians, a diversity of positions that help us better understand the dynamic political, cultural, and social economic processes shaping this transitional era throughout the Eastern Mediterranean. In Egypt, it is not clear that British strategies alone explain this boom in publishing quasi nationalist texts advocating separation from the Ottoman Empire. A prominent advocate for Albanian cultural rights in Brussels, Faik Konitza (1875–1942), once pointed out to an Austro-­ Hungarian agent the close relationship the Khedive’s family (of Albanian 4  AQSH F.23.D.25.f.5–6, enclosure, 30 June 1900, copy of the journal Bashkimi i Shqiptarëve published out of Cairo.

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Tosk origin) had with select groups of self-identified Ottoman Albanians living in Egypt. Often the collaboration extended to Ahmed Fuad Pasha, the uncle of Khedive Abbas II, openly promoting the publishing of Albanian-language journals, written both in Arabic and Greek script.5 In the past, such activism was treated as an emblem of ethno-nationalist separatism that reflected an almost ‘primordial’ quest to realize independence from an ‘occupying’ Ottoman ‘Turkish’ empire. Recent comparisons, however, have successfully analysed the literary productions of rebellious subjects within these complex societies to challenge such unnuanced labels.6 Much as elsewhere, the Tosk-Ottoman intelligentsia engaged in trans-regional debates (reflecting tensions, anxieties, hopes), and such interactions informed rapidly changing political associations which twentieth-­ century historians have misrepresented as exclusively ethno-nationalist.

The Balkans as a Projection Screen of Inner-­Ottoman ‘Orientalism’: The Case of Neo-Liberal Ottomanism A more nuanced understanding of Ottoman cultural production of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries links Tosk Albanian intellectuals to the discourses spreading around the halls of global power that sought to consolidate loyalties across supposed ethnic and sectarian lines. Their projects, at times, took the form of an Ottomanism that reflected the iterations of ‘modern men’ embracing liberalism as the only rational way to move forward for the otherwise ‘backward’ corners of Ottoman society.7 Among others, the Frashëri brothers’ explicit adoption of such discourses long seen exclusively as Western ‘Orientalism’ helps demonstrate that 5  HHStA PA XIV/18 Liasse XII/2, Konitza à Zwiedinek, dated Bruxelles, 5 May 1899. What is critical here is the strong trans-regional ties influential Tosk families working with the Ottoman state secured with those based in Egypt and beyond. 6  Spreicer and Chovanec both note in this volume that Habsburg/Ottoman-era as well as post-imperial Austrian and Turkish literature reflected tensions between the need to streamline the productive capacities of the human (and mechanical) labour that made capitalists wealthy and the moral conflicts such as a never-ending drive to profits produced. 7  Space does not permit a discussion on the largely unacknowledged links between capitalism and liberalism to Ottomanism. For detailed discussions consult the special issue of Die Welt des Islams Vol. 56: 3.4 (2016). For more on Ottomanism see the contributions in this volume by Topal, Guth, Elfenbein, and Çevik.

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interpretative possibilities remain when looking at the productions of Ottomans engaged in the political tumult afflicting the larger Eastern Mediterranean prior to World War I (Eldem 2010). Emblematic of this dynamic of possibilities are the ways in which various Balkan constituencies idiosyncratically lobbied for ‘reforms’, known in the historiography as the Tanzimat, in order to instrumentalize state modernization to service contradictory interests embedded in capital markets in Europe and their often rival regional intermediaries (Blumi 2013, 66–87). Paradoxically, local advocacy for better governance also undermined the capacity of the state to manage its regional affairs effectively when confronted by externally supported agitators. Often, for example, attempts to pressure the Ottoman government to implement reforms invited belligerent outside agents into the domestic political and economic fray. The resulting tensions, what have been identified retrospectively as forms of nationalist revolt, informed moments of reconciliation, cooperation, and solidarity as much as separation. Put differently, the driving engine in this era of transition was the advocacy for improvement, not destruction, of the Ottoman state (Blumi 2011). The dynamic arena in which those Tosk Ottomans made their pleas for reform was shaped by the fact their subsequent ‘interests’ did not coalesce around ‘Albanian’ associations exclusively. Many reflected concerns with domestic Ottoman politics that extended well beyond the Balkans, as seen with the case of those seeking to mobilize local support for reforms recently undermined by the imposition of Sultan Abdülhamid II by outside financial interests (Blumi 2013, 30–33). It was these decidedly sub-­ national loyalties that determined towards whom Albanian speakers gravitated in places like Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, and Egypt. With a closer contextualization of the activities of the famous Frashëri family, it is possible to identify different roles for their activism otherwise treated in the scholarship as iterations of an exclusively Albanian nationalism. The first critical prism through which to study the productivity of the larger Frashëri family is their class orientation. Drawn from political and cultural roots embedded in Ottoman centres of learning (and thus power), the Frashëris were firstly responding to transition as members of a college of educated gentlemen called in the Ottoman context as effendiyya (Lord or Sir being the closest equivalent in English). This class of ‘reformers’ sought to steer the empire in directions befitting their self-perceived status as natural leaders of a larger Ottoman society that geographically extended from the Balkans to the Gulf and Yemen. The Frashëri’s various activities

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at that time were thus no different than those of the activist bourgeoisie in larger Europe, straddling the divides that shaped Ottoman society while seeking stability and order. Of primary concern were the aggressive expansion of Ottoman rivals and the negative influence of finance capitalism. Barely two years prior to the Berlin Congress of 1878, for instance, the Ottoman elites feared the formal partition of Ottoman Europe into distinctive nation-states and the imposition of Abdülhamid II as sultan. Surrounded by an assertive cadre of advisors who seemed intent on wresting power away from the effendiyya, one of the first acts of the new Sultan was to reverse the new constitution of 1876 and shut down Parliament in 1878, sending the Frashëri brothers into action. Tellingly, while there was plenty of blame to go around during the latter weeks of 1877 when Russian troops were practically at the gates of Istanbul itself, the most vicious criticism was reserved for the tens of thousands of refugees created by the Russo-Ottoman war. Abdyl Frashëri, at the time trying to mobilize the reformist elite among whom he socialized in Istanbul, seemed to articulate best an elitist accounting for the near collapse of the empire. Before a short-lived Parliament in January 1878, Abdyl declared that the quintessential enemy of ‘progress’ in the Ottoman Empire was the ‘ignorance’ (cehalet) of rural society (Blumi 2011, 105–106). Abdyl, and many from within his effendiyya cohort, believed that the only antidote available to Ottoman collapse was the investment in the kind of social engineering projects devised in the 1860s by the likes of Midhat Pasha (Topal in this volume). No longer able to advocate for change from within a now disbanded Parliament, Abdyl took to rallying those on the frontlines in the Balkans. Over the few weeks Abdyl spent in alien Balkan territories (inhabited by Gheg Northern Albanians who, unlike Southern Tosk Albanians, were mostly Catholic and Sunni Muslim), he penned letters to an Istanbul newspaper edited by his younger brother Sami (Şemseddin Sami). In these fiery letters he again evoked the lack of ‘progress and civilization’ as the reason locals failed to defend against foreign encroachments. As his letters circulated in the Ottoman press, Abdyl’s blaming the ‘tribesmen’ inhabiting Northern Albania as ‘uncivilized’ contrasted wildly from the way he understood his fellow Tosk Albanians further south. Their role as largely incorporated into the folds of civilization was to lead in a locally driven regime of state building (Abdül Fraşerli 1879).

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Driving Home Reforms: ‘Arnavutluk’ as an Ottoman Enterprise Abdyl’s intellectual younger brother, Sami Frashëri, took a more nuanced approach in arguing for the same thing. Sami’s own contributions to Tercüman-ı Hakikat, which he edited, included using distinctively ecumenical arguments that highlighted a role for Islam to play (Şemseddin Sami 1878, 3). While sharing Abdyl’s Ottoman nationalist position, Sami advocated for a less explicitly class-driven form of Ottoman state expansion into previously autonomously governed regions like the Western Balkans in order to bring otherwise backward regions into the fold of civilization. Crucially, Sami was much more emphatic that the solution required a firm embrace of Islamic civilization as much as the power of the modern secular state, a point he also made clear later in the introduction of his six-volume encyclopaedia Kamus-ül A’lamı (1889–1899).8 To do this efficiently, Sami suggested creating a mega territory called Arnavutluk (Ahmet Mithat 1878, 2). While Arnavutluk literally translates into ‘Albania’, the proposal had few ethno-national underpinnings; the underlying hope was that a firm investment in direct rule through a large single governorship would help build up resistance against the encroachments of Russia and the Habsburgs (who would occupy Bosnia and Sanjak in 1878 and then annex the former in 1908) while also allowing the Ottoman elite to finally ‘civilize’ the Western Balkans (Blumi 2011, 106–109). Encompassing the entirety of what later became five separate governorates (vilayets), this reconstitution of the Western Balkans promised to secure the capacities of ‘different’ peoples (South Slavs, Greeks, Albanians, Bulgars, Romanians) who would embrace the Ottoman modernization project through the filter of Islamic traditions of tolerance and ecumenism. To expedite the process during this critical period of crisis, the Frashëri brothers, in their occasionally contradictory ways, formed committees in Istanbul and throughout the Balkans to draw up plans for establishing a renewed administrative investment in the Albanian-inhabited Balkans. The most active of these committees took on the title Unionist Committees in Tosk Regions (Toskalık Cemiyet-ı Ittihadiyye). Most likely organized by Abdyl during his previously noted tour of the Balkans, the Dibër-based committee (a town on the border between present-day Albania and North 8

 “Ifade-i Meram,” vol. 1 (1889), xiv–xv.

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Macedonia) mimicked Sami’s demands for empire-wide reform, suggesting close coordination both behind closed doors and publicly through the Ottoman press.9 After setting up this unionist committee in Dibër, Abdyl moved further south in search of fruitful exchange with a more sympathetic audience in Gjirokastër (Ergiri/Argyrokastro). Now exclusively among fellow Tosks, Abdyl cultivated a narrative that envisioned southern Albanians leading these larger imperial efforts at regional consolidation. Some reporting on Abdyl’s activities in his homeland simply interpreted them as efforts to consolidate vulnerable southern borderlands from expansive Greek and Italian ambitions (Skendi 1967, 78–79). But this runs into the problem of identifying ethno-nationalism as the primary animating factor as there are elements of class privilege that also come into play regarding Abdyl’s motivations. The primary actors involved in these committees were local Tosk landowners and merchants who bankrolled in this period much of the Frashëri brothers’ activities with newspapers and political committees. Being already ‘civilized’ by way of wealth and education, they embraced Abdyl’s campaign that would anoint them as the logical intermediaries for the expanding Ottoman state. Beyond profiting from serving the role as chief agent of the Ottoman state, they too sought stability in the face of a sudden shift in regional economic activity caused by the potential threats of further annexation by rival states. This is evidenced in correspondence between Abdyl and fellow Tosks whose influences extended to Egypt, a successful outreach to a loyalist Tosk Albanian Ottoman elite in Egypt who wanted support in developing the means to educate some within the ranks who were pursuing alliances with neighbouring countries.10 Long mistaken as an advocacy for reform (ıslahat) meant to strengthen Albanians exclusively and to help stifle any future attempts to undermine local elite power, the demands voiced by these committees stressed the need for greater state and private capital investment in the region, 9  It is clear from correspondence between Italian-based influencers and Abdyl Frashëri that there was considerable debate about the need for locals to govern on behalf of the Ottoman state within a structure that followed the mega-state advocated by the Frasheri brothers. AQSH, F.24.D.54/1.f.246–253, Dora D’Istria to Abdyl Frahsëri, dated Rome, 26 June 1878. 10  See correspondence written in the Greek alphabet sent by Jani Vretos in Egypt to Abdyl Frashëri, found in AQSH, F.21.D.8.f.4–31, dated between 31 July 1878 and 15 October 1878.

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especially in education and infrastructure. As such, Ottoman authority in the Balkans would be co-opted to protect local elites.11 By early 1879, Sami initiated a series of educational programmes that included the creation of Cemiyet-i ilmiyye-i arnavudiyye (the Society of Learned Albanians) that aimed to establish a universal language for all Ottoman subjects residing in Sami’s proposed mega-province Arnavutluk. It was assumed that poor communications due to illiteracy and regionalism undermined the capacity to implement education programmes long envisioned by reformers. To help install the necessary ‘universal language’, the committee on behalf of the state proposed to oversee all future educational and sociocultural development campaigns in the region.12 Considering the overall tensions between the ‘enlightened’ effendiyya and the new sultan, the collaboration between the palace and Sami towards satiating the demands of powerful Tosks proves critical to smoothing out the transition of power after 1878. Together, the palace and Istanbul-­ based activists worked to ensure stability in the Frashëri heartland and to pull its inhabitants out of a ‘state of ignorance’ (Şemseddin Sami 1880). To accomplish this, a new period of investment by the state-assured development funds flowed into sectors of the economy dominated by those supporting Frashëri. State funds, for instance, started to flow into schools built and managed by close allies of the Frashëris (Şemseddin Sami 1879). These schools were to be the Ottomanist foundations of building a loyal polity (regardless of affiliation) now exclusively associated in the literature with the Hamidian and the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) period (Blumi 2011, 165–168). The problem arose that while Sami emphasized a state-sanctioned curriculum that identified streamlining the teaching of Sunni Islam as a tool of social engineering, others, including members of Sami’s own family, identified other solutions.

11 ̇  In a copy of the Geneva-based Ottoman opposition newspaper, Istikbal, a “letter from Prizren” advocates the implementation of regional autonomy to guard against (and not advocating for) the dismemberment of the empire. See letter signed by a member of a Dibërbased committee (most likely directed by Abdyl), in AQSH, F.23.D.25.f.1–4, dated 22 February 1880. 12  The Cemiyet-i ilmiyye-i arnavudiyye publicly issued its bylaws in the scientific journal Mecmua-i ulûm 3 (15 December 1879): 216–217.

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Local, Religious, and Imperial Identities Unlike Sami’s periodic emphasis on ‘mainstream Islam’, Naim Frashëri saw the persecuted Bektashi Sufi order as crucial to realizing the establishment of cross-sectarian links among Tosk Orthodox Christians and Muslims (Tosks being primarily Bektashi Sufis) and citizens of the Greek state. This overture to southern Balkan unity as the necessary solution to the lack of civilization further north stemmed largely from the roles played by Tosk intellectuals like Abdyl and Naim Frashëri, Ismail Qemali (1844–1919), and Prevezeli Abidin Pasha Dino (1843–1906). Not only did these men play an active role in promoting a form of particularistic self-identification that today is associated with Albanian nationalism, but they also promoted religious and cultural syncretism that, by the end of the nineteenth century among many elites in Southern Albania, blurred the distinction between Orthodox Christianity and Bektashism. This fusion of communities constitutes a uniquely Tosk cultural formula during this time of transition. It betrays a powerful regionalism that existed in some quarters of the late Ottoman Balkans, one that Sami was especially keen on erasing. In Naim’s poetry celebrating critical events in the past like the battle for Kerbela, we can find this form of regionalism portrayed most prominently.13 For Naim, the Bektashi Sufis, despite being banned since 1826, remained influential as many powerful members of the Ottoman cultural, economic, and political elite remained secret members of the order. As such, Bektashism helped preserve an authentic local spiritual core from the corrupted outside world that filtered into the Ottoman (Sunni) state. From the perspective of the powerful land-owning class who bankrolled Naim’s increasingly virulent form of political advocacy, the chaos affecting the Ottoman Empire as a whole left Tosk elites little option but to explore new avenues of social and political action, including pushing for political union along regional and spiritual lines distinctive from the rest of the world. One primary resource was a Bektashi community that formally linked the southern Balkans to Egypt as thousands of Tosk Ottomans had migrated since the rise of the Mehmed Ali regime. Naim’s message is crucial to understanding the further development of regional schisms that made it politically impossible to unify the Balkans 13  Taking place in 10 October 860 in today’s Iraq, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad and son of Ali, Husayn ibn Ali, battled with the nominated successor to the Umayyad caliph over the right to lead the young Muslim community. The consequences of the battle are commemorated until today by Shi’as the world over.

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after 1878. Eager to arrest developments that led to structural collapse and expansion of Russian interests in the Balkans, Naim and his allies scattered in a diaspora across the world and recruited representatives of regional powers, like Italy, independent Greece, and the Habsburgs to their cause. Dangling the hope of influence across the Balkans by patronizing Tosk advocates, men like Faik Konitza captured the interest of the authorities in Vienna. Commenting on Abdyl Frashëri’s efforts to recruit future loyalists through Bektashi circles established throughout his Tosk homeland, Konitza transmitted an overstated message that hinted these activities within Bektashi circles also included the collaboration with Northern Albanian Ghegs, a possibility of political unity that had long interested Vienna/Budapest.14 What Konitiza did not clarify was the fact that Naim was deeply involved in distributing Bektashi polemics against Sunnis (among whom Gheg Albanians were a majority). Such pronouncements of local sectarianism were tied to the subtle claims that Ghegs, Arabs, Turks, and other Muslims needed to be subordinate to Tosk-Ottoman intellectual guidance. In writing about the unique qualities of Bektashi beliefs, for instance, Naim insisted that Bektashi beliefs were more ‘European’ than ‘oriental’, suggesting the proximate links to Hellenism, their ‘Aryan qualities’ and their ‘freethinking’ made them the natural agents for managing the transitions threatening the Ottoman Balkans (Blumi 2011, 110–117).

Albanian Activism Between Habsburg, Ottoman, Italian, and British Interests Such advocacy confuses the neat binaries filling the scholarship since the end of World War I that excludes the possibility of these Southern Albanians embracing several associations that were not fixed ethnically, culturally, or geographically. To make this last point, appreciating how those based in Egypt supported the Naim and Abdyl Frashëri efforts entails consulting hitherto unread documents produced in North Africa, previously assumed beyond the frame of analysis for historians of the 14  HHStA, PA, XIV/18 Liasse XII/2, “Mémoire sur le mouvement national albanais,” dated Brussels, 1899, 7–9. The Habsburg empire, it should be recalled, long hoped to gain leverage in the Balkans against further Russian, Italian, and other rivals’ encroachments by helping create a unified Albanian client constituency, who, if ever unified, would constitute a sizable portion of the Balkans’ population.

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Balkans. Documents produced by Austrian consuls based in Cairo during the period of 1880–1912 offer a detailed picture of the way in which Tosk Albanian Ottoman migrants and the Habsburg Empire reacted to the activism of the Frashëri brothers.15 Based mostly in Cairo and the Nile Delta towns that boomed in the earlier period, powerful constituencies built around Tosk Albanian landowners proved capable of establishing strong links with the well-established Ottoman-Albanian elite in Istanbul, the Balkans and Albanian diasporas established in Napoli and Calabria.16 As reflective of Naim and Abdyl’s particular quest to forge alliances across blurred ethno-national lines as well, large numbers of Orthodox Christian and Bektashi Sufi Tosks based in Egypt embraced the new wave of activism. Among the more aggressive allies of these efforts was Thimi Mitko. This affluent merchant based in Beni Souef in the Nile delta compiled patriotic folk songs and proverbs—written both in the Greek and Tosk languages using an early, experimental non-Arabic script—to inspire pride among his compatriots in Egypt.17 Other Orthodox Christian Tosks, including Thimi Krei, Spiro Dine, Thimi Brandi, Anton Çajupi, and Loni (Toni) Logori, also emerged as activists in Egypt. As suggested earlier, after 1882, the British had begun to patronize groups whose overall function was to challenge Ottoman claims to the Caliphate and secure influence in the volatile Balkans. The rise of ‘nationalist’ movements under the protection of Lord Cromer’s administration thus proves an important  HHStA PA XIV/16 Liasse XII/7, Velics to Gołuchowski, dated Cairo, 15 March 1901.  Tosk Albanian speakers have long migrated to the Italian peninsula, with the largest wave following the successful expansion of the Ottoman Empire in the fourteenth century. Still known today as Arbrëshë, a distinctive Albanian-speaking minority found throughout southern Italy, these Italo-Albanians have played a prominent role in regional commercial and political affairs and count as members, numerous prominent figures in modern Italian history, including Antonio Gramsci and Francesco Crispi, Prime Minister from 1887 to 1891. 17  Born in Korçë in 1820, Mitko settled in Egypt in 1865, where he maintained important links with other members of the southern Balkan diaspora and had especially productive collaborative projects with Girolamo de Rada, an Italo-Albanian whose tireless work promoting Albanian consciousness would have an impact on Italian domestic politics as well. For one, Mitko assisted in the distribution of de Rada’s journal, Fiamuri Arbërit, in Egypt. AQSH, F.24.D.54/6.f.236–7, Thimi Mitko to Jeronim De Rades, 31 January 1886. Mitko also appears to have maintained a number of links with Toskë in Greece, where he collaborated with A. Kullurioti on the Zëri i Shqiptarërisë, published in Athens between 1878 and 1879. Mitko is also known for his Alvanike Melissa (The Albanian Bee) published in Greek script in Alexandria in 1878. This was the first attempt to collect the Albanian-language oral literature—love songs, festival songs, fairy tales, fables, wedding songs, funerary songs, epics, and anecdotes—that were circulating throughout Egypt at the time. 15 16

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added context to the events affecting the story told throughout. Aware of what their British rivals were beginning to accomplish with their patronage of peoples in Egypt with deep links to the Balkans, the Austrians would adopt similar patronage policies. In one intriguing instance, the Austrian consul in Cairo commissioned the writing of a patriotic history of Albania by a Catholic originally from Shkodër. Written under the pen-­ name Stefan Zurani, this openly nationalistic textbook hoped to initiate a spirit of inter-regional unity among Ghegs and Tosks, in contrast to those local Tosks embracing the Frashëri agenda.18 There is good reason for Austria’s line of thinking. Many Tosks maintained a complex web of trans-regional links that extended influence from the Balkans to throughout the Eastern Mediterranean and Northern Africa. We know, for instance, that in 1882 Jani Vruto (1822–1900) helped to establish a branch office of Sami Frashëri’s Association for Writing in Albanian in Alexandria. While Vruto’s money came from recruited benefactors in Sicilia, there was always the threat that Britain would recruit the group once established.19 Another way of looking at this period, however, redirects our emphasis on Tosk (and Gheg) Ottomans being the proactive agents of the period. They, in other words, were creating the pretext conditions for eventual European state patronage. Indeed, the aggressive recruitment by Tosk activists of various European state patrons became a central driving force for the subsequent investment in their groups by Britain, Austria, Italy, and the Ottomans. In 1894, an association calling itself Vëllazëria e Shqipëtarëve, or the Albanian Brotherhood, was established in Cairo with Milo Duçi as president.20 In the medium term, because of infighting over strategy, this association appeared to fail in its task to link Egypt to struggles in the Balkans.21 In time, however, these groups did forge useful alliances that linked large  HHStA, PA, XIV/20, Liasse XIII/1.  Faik Konitza, “Mémoire sur le mouvement national albanais,” Brussels, January 1899, found in HHStA, PA, XIV/18, Liasse Albanien XII/2, pp. 11–12. 20  Milo Duçi (1870–1933) was another major figure in the Albanian Orthodox community in Egypt. He spent most of his life in Cairo. Among other activities he served as the Brotherhood’s president and edited various publications, including Besa, which he edited with Thoma Abrami and Shqipëria and which was written specifically for Tosk Orthodox Christians in Cairo. In 1922, he founded the publishing company Shoqëria botonjëse shqiptare/Société albanaise d’éditions in Cairo and then published the journal Bisedimet in 1925. 21  Although it is not clear whether it is the same Albanian Brotherhood, as late as December of 1912, an organization calling itself the Vellazerise Shqipëtarëve was writing letters to Thanas Tashko and Sotir Kolea demanding that Tosks in Egypt help fund Albanian-language 18 19

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numbers of Arbëresh (Southern Italian-Albanians) entering into the Italian government at the time, including the Foreign Ministry, with activists in the Balkans. That the subsequent investment by the Italian state in cultivating alliances between Tosk (Orthodox Christian and Bektashi Sufi) and Gheg (Catholic and Sunni Muslim) associations contrasted to Habsburg efforts, which focused only on Catholics, these Albanian-Italians spread their influence through the culturally diverse Western Balkans while making it possible for Italian interests to negotiate with both Gheg and Tosk Albanians (Blumi 2011, 157–160). Thanks to the growing advisory role of Arbëresh inside the halls of Italian state power, the Italian Foreign Ministry supported prominent Tosk Albanians living in Rome in return for serving Rome as intermediaries in the larger Ottoman Balkans. Among the more active players in the period was Dervish Hima (1872–1928). Like others mentioned throughout, by marketing himself as a crucial interlocutor, Hima secured a source of funding, and thus a platform to produce volumes of polemic that openly challenged more explicit powerbrokers, like the Frashëri brothers, discussed throughout.22 Using money supplied by the Italian Foreign Ministry, Hima began to mobilize an otherwise disjointed diaspora scattered throughout Europe. More importantly for Rome-based officials and commercial agents was Hima’s continued (and perhaps enhanced) influence in Sofia and Bucharest, two other centres of Tosk migrant settlement.23 The aim to harness Tosk Albanians’ to service a new Italian bid for influence was not lost on other regional activists who often recruited support from Italy’s regional rivals. As an example, the Vienna-based Gheg Albanian activist Mati Logoreci (1867–1941) supplied Habsburg officials with assurances that, without his help, Hima’s (and thus Italian) attempts at securing influence in the larger region would be for naught.24 In return for money and a place at any future negotiation table, Logoreci would help Vienna by blurring the established lines of influences that gave the Italian state an advantage in Albanian populated lands. schools in the homeland. AQSH, F.54.D.67.f.54–55, Vellazërise to Tashko, dated Cairo, 6 December 1912. 22  Born Ibrahim Mehmet Naxhi in Struga in 1872, Hima became the chief liaison between fellow Tosk Albanians and Ibrahim Temo, the leader of the CUP in the Balkans, who opposed Abdyl and Naim’s Bektashi-centred activities. 23  ASMAE SAP Pacco 667, no. 1144/103, consul to MAE, dated Bucharest, 22 May 1902. 24  AQSH F.12.D.5.f.1. Copy of letter from Mati Logoreci to editors of Albania, dated Vienna, 1 July 1898.

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In a letter published in Dervish Hima’s Rome newspaper Albania, Logoreci demanded a greater effort to help bridge the linguistic, regional, and sectarian divide afflicting the homeland.25 As previously agreed, this appeal was tied to better relations with the Habsburgs. Crucially, the objective was not to break into a ‘separatist’ struggle along the lines of a nationalist revolt, but to influence domestic Ottoman affairs. Logoreci, in sum, demanded that prominent Tosks begin to see Ghegs living in the Kosova and Shkodër provinces as kin warranting collaboration. This plea should be read as a direct response to the polemic of the time that Tosks played a central role in Ottoman reforms to ‘civilize’ not only Arab and Kurdish nomads but Gheg ‘tribes’ as well. As promised, Hima began to work openly with Logoreci with monies first provided exclusively by the Italians, and then soon after, by Vienna as well. This alliance united for the first time Ottoman activists aligned with the Austro-Hungarian Empire and those tied to Italy. Hima’s collaboration with Logoreci is especially informative because it helped give Hima some leverage vis-à-vis his Italian hosts, who were especially concerned that their Habsburg rivals did not gain a foothold in southern Albania at their own strategic expense. As such, letters sent by Vienna-backed activists translated into political clout for Hima in Italy, Vienna, and, crucially, Bucharest as well.26 Hima used the possibility of Austro-Hungarian patronage to mobilize Italian funds, a windfall for him and for the allied groups he would soon be supporting in the Balkans and Egypt.27 Such political capital earned from delivering the Italians to cash-strapped Tosk exiles in the Balkans and Egypt reflects the interactive dynamic that blurs the distinctions we often make between local and external, state, and society.28 Ultimately, seeing a possible lucrative source of funds, the leadership 25  It is crucial that Logoreci frames his arguments in language increasingly useful in context of Habsburg society’s growing concern with identity politics (Scheer 2018). 26  Indeed, struggling to secure money for his besieged Drita, Bucharest-based Nikolla Naço openly solicited funds from Austria by referencing this triangle of action and counteraction. HHStA PA, XIV/13, Liasse VIII/I, Pallavicini to Gołuchowski, dated Bucharest, 8 January 1904. 27  In two letters sent by Devish Hima to Ibrahim Temo in 1903, it becomes clear how outside intervention had changed life in much of Kosovo. Hima describes how Italian and Austrian agents encouraged northern Albanian (Gheg) Catholics to organize towards “liberating” occupied lands rather than collaborating with the CUP. AQSH F.19.D.32/2. f. 278–280, Hima to Temo, dated Rome, 20 March 1903. 28  HHStA PA, XIV/24, Albanien Liasse XVI/4. Orhan Bey and Athanas Sina, “Aperçu über die albanesische Knabenschule in Kortscha und die Notwendigkeit ihrer

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at Drita (a crucial activist group based in Bucharest) invested the group’s political influence in Romania to support Hima’s activism in Rome: an alliance that led to continued interaction between Rome (and Vienna) and Tosk exiles in the greater Balkans for years.29

The Orthodox Christian Church in Albania as a Battlefield of Interests With such a range of possible patronage, other projects gained traction among the same Tosk elites concerned with foreign encroachments on their interests. For much of the period from the 1880s until World War I, for example, some factions within the larger Tosk elite expanded support for efforts to protect Ottoman Orthodox Christians from the ‘nationalist’ overtures of neighbouring states. Be it Serbian, Bulgarian, or Greek ambitions, the association with national churches helped politicians make extra-­ territorial claims on Albanian-inhabited (and thus Ottoman) lands. To counter such efforts to ‘reunite’ lost Orthodox Christian Tosks, Ottoman state allies encouraged the Albanian Tosk clergy within the Orthodox Church to practise their faith using their distinctive cultural heritage. The resulting struggle between the increasingly Hellenistic Patriarch and an Albanian Christian community took its most violent form when Constantinople-based authorities of the Orthodox Church allied with locals such as the Metropolitan of Kastoria, Karavangjelis, to suppress Tosk Albanian-speaking priests using their mother tongue during mass. Papa Kristo Negovani, for instance, was murdered on 12 February 1905, just two days after performing a sermon in his native Tosk Albanian in front of the outraged Metropolitan Karavangjelis. This act of defiance and the formal institutional response served as the platform for a generation of would-be nationalists to invest in collaborative activism across the world.

Weiterentwicklung” (written in November 1899) enclosed in no. 2, Kral to Gołuchowski, dated Monastir, 4 January 1901. 29  Hima claimed in a newspaper article that he convinced the Italian state to invest in schools in return for greater support from Albanian readers based in Italy. Dervish Hima (Ibrahim Nagi), “Shkollat Shqipe”, dated Rome, 22 October 1899, published in La Nazione Albanese, no. 20, dated Pellagorio, 30 October 1899. Italian authorities acknowledged later that Hima convinced the Italian government to fund projects advocated by Bucharest and Sofia-based organizations to open schools in the Ottoman-administered Yanya province. ASMAE SAP Pacco 667, no. 1144/103, consul to MAE, dated Bucharest, 22 May 1902.

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Following Negovani’s lead, Petro Nini Luarasi (1864–1911) defied Church authorities by translating many critical Christian texts into local Tosk Albanian. While today celebrated, these efforts, repeated throughout the larger Mediterranean world where Albanians lived, provoked considerable debate at the time. Well into the interwar period, Albanian speakers in the diaspora struggled to conjoin their spiritual needs with the necessity to adjust to a new liberal political order that broke apart multi-ethnic empires. The investment towards securing some ethnic national home in the Balkans meant greater collaboration among various Albanian diasporas against the pan-Hellenist creed of the Church. In part because the Church’s cultural politics became indistinguishable from Greek nationalism, the nature of this deadly struggle for a multi-faith Albanian homeland would prove the primary reason that different kinds of alliances would emerge among Tosk Albanians throughout the Eastern Mediterranean. In apparent coordination with activists from Boston and throughout the Balkans, the previously mentioned Milo Duçi invested in the publication of crucial religious texts translated into regional Tosk Albanian. While these efforts to help teach Christianity in the native language of the Western Balkans’ inhabitants would carry on beyond the truncated and besieged Albania’s formal independence in 1912, the beginning years were part of joint Ottoman state-Tosk elite effort that eventually would draw Italy, Austria-Hungary, and even Greece into the fray.30 In contrast with the well-connected Bektashi Tosks described above, Orthodox Christian Tosks in Egypt took advantage of the identity politics being played out in the larger region. One unlikely patron in Egypt was the same Greek state advocating the violent suppression of Tosk cultural practices within the Orthodox Church. For Orthodox Christian Tosks, the opportunity to exploit Athens’ larger fears of expansive Russian and Pan-Slav efforts in the Eastern Mediterranean to claim rights over Church properties was clear. Eventually, compromises were made that allowed Tosk Christians in Egypt to leverage their willingness not to align with Russia or the Coptic Church in return for obtaining travel documents that ostensibly made them Greek citizens. The Austrian Consul Velić based in Cairo reported that the Egyptian government grew concerned that by liberally granting Greek nationality to Tosks, Greece threatened to 30  By 1922, Duçi had also arranged for the creation of the publishing company Shoqëria botonjëse shqiptare/Société albanaise d’éditions to help distribute translated religious texts produced by priests such as Luarasi (Blumi 2011, 118, 205).

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undermine the Egyptian economy and even its political stability. With an alliance with powerful Tosk families, Athens could help its companies infiltrate local markets (and labour unions) and then divert regional trade (and political loyalties) into ‘Greek’ hands.31 In fact, the Cairo-based Tosk Albanian-language newspaper Toska published an entire issue on the subject of Tosk Albanians claiming Greek citizenship. To the editors and the Khedive government, this constituted a crisis that reflected how successful Greek challenges to Ottoman Tosk interests had become.32 For other members of the Tosk Albanian diaspora, however, Greek citizenship was one of the many spoils available from interested foreign parties, inducements for facilitating better leverage over an Eastern Mediterranean in transition.

Conclusion Ultimately the developments discussed throughout suggest that sectarian, class, and or ethno-national identities were malleable. The emergence of new states whose political and economic interests needed to forge alliances with Tosk Albanians, in particular, gave many in Ottoman territories an advantage that extended to political leverage and even lucrative trading partnerships that extended globally (Blumi 2013). As such, this study upsets the accounts of a post-imperial story of national origins that misconstrue the contexts in which polemic in the late Ottoman Empire’s vibrant literary and journalistic production emerged. Catalogued to fit into typologies of agents who, as the post-imperial era societies demanded, spoke to the origins of the ethnic nation from which we all currently write, the productivity of Ottoman-era polemists prior to World War I, many who intermingled in convoluted ways with Austro-Hungarian, Greek, Italian, and other state agents, has often been labelled in ways at best anachronistic. The mistake, for instance, of characterizing the literature produced in local language newspapers as inherently ‘nationalistic’, ‘anti-colonial’, or ‘an imperialist mouthpiece’ when writers lobbied for the Ottoman state to impose ‘civilization’ on ‘backward’ subjects sometimes misplaces critical moments of exchange. As seen throughout this chapter, there is a rich  HHStA PA XIV/16 Liasse XII/7, Velić to Gołuchowski, dated Cairo, 15 March 1901.  A copy of this paper may be found in HHStA PA XIV/16 Liasse XII/7, Velić to Gołuchowski, dated Cairo, 15 March 1901. 31 32

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history of collaboration between Ottoman Albanians and outside actors seeking both political influence and commercial opportunity during critical periods of structural transformation in the larger Eastern Mediterranean world. From pushing in Istanbul policies that would consolidate Ottoman rule over the Western Balkans to establishing deep ties with some of those same rival states threatening Ottoman rule, Tosk Albanians were exemplary of a wider complexity in pre-World War I history. Some of these overtures to Ottoman Albanians in Egypt even reached the small communities in the Delta region like Beni Souef (Bini Suif), where considerable money was being made in the production of cash crops like cotton. Milo Duçi, son of a powerful cotton merchant from Korçë, established in Beni Souef a branch of the Albanian Brotherhood with direct assistance from the Khedive’s office (then supposedly a mere subordinate of British Capitalist imperialism) and both the Ottoman political elite and Austro-­ Hungarian/Italian/Greek rival states. Class interests and business opportunities, therefore, informed as much these activists’ endeavours as a quest for political independence in the homeland. As seen with the complicated links the Frashëri family had with the larger world, so too did Milo Duçi’s family emerge as an important player in the general economic development of Egypt’s delta region and by extension the larger Eastern Mediterranean. By 1901, Duçi started working with his well-connected uncle, Loni Logori, on projects that explicitly tied the commercial interests of members within the British administration and local landowners. Crucially, Logori, who had built much of the canal network in the Minah district several years earlier, was known to have maintained contacts with members of émigré organizations in Bucharest, Istanbul, Italy, and Brussels.33 These interlinking channels of political, cultural, and economic exchange deserves greater scholarly attention in the future but suggest they did affect the manner in which a post-imperial transitional period would take shape. For our current purposes, we need to read the transactions between the Ottoman state and multiple local actors as informed concerns of varied interests that predate nationalism. Most importantly, these included efforts to secure more direct state investment in economically and culturally developing the Western Balkan homelands of many prominent Ottoman authorities based in Istanbul. In so doing, we can reinterpret events that involved a broad range of conflicting interests without trying to force fit  HHStA PA XIV/16 Liasse XII/7, Velić to Gołuchowski, dated Cairo, 18 December 1901.

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the nationalist teleology. As local entrepreneurs, the political acumen and/ or economic influence of these Tosk Ottomans, however modest on the global scale, proved overwhelmingly valuable for different imperialist efforts. As such, the examples provided above offer a window into how Tosk Ottomans mobilized seemingly contradictory narratives to excite as much as influence certain kinds of interpretation from these rival state authorities. If, for example, the audience happened to be Italian or Austrian officials seeking to gain otherwise impossible access to the day-to-day affairs of the Ottoman Balkans, some Tosk activists proved willing to advocate something entirely different from what they were ‘lobbying’ for Ottoman officials to address. The forms these exchanges took reveal that a small number of Tosk Ottomans had leverage over those claiming global power, be they British administrators in Egypt or ‘market-makers’ in Paris or Boston. This dual role of stabilizing ally and weaponized rival may have constituted the very foundations of the modern world (Blumi 2012, 15–45).

References Abdül Fraşerli. 26 April 1879. Arnavutlarin Arzuhalı. Tercüman-ı Hakikat, no. 255. Ahmet Mithat. 17 July 1878. “Arnavutluk.” Tercüman-ı Hakikat 5. Albanian National Archives. “Arkivi Qëndror i Shtetit” (AQSH). Austrian State Archive. “Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv” (HHStA). Blumi, Isa. 2011. Reinstating the Ottomans: Alternative Balkan Modernities, 1800–1912. Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan. ———. 2012. Foundations of Modernity: Human Agency and the Imperial State. New York: Routledge. ———. 2013. Ottoman Refugees, 1878–1939: Migration in a Post-Imperial World. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Burbank, Jane, and Frederick Cooper. 2019. Empires After 1919: Old, New, Transformed. International Affairs 95 (1): 81–100. Clancy-Smith, Julia. 2012. Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an age of migration, c. 1800–1900. Berkeley: University of California Press. Clayer, Nathalie. 2007. Aux origines du nationalisme albanais: La naissance d’une nation majoritairement musulmane en Europe. Paris: Karthala. Eldem, Edhem. 2010. Ottoman and Turkish Orientalism. Architectural Design 80 (1): 26–31. Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks: “Wave of Materialism” and “Crisis of Authority”. New York: International Publishers. Italian Historic Diplomatic Archive. “Archivio Storico del Ministero degli Affari Esteri” (ASMAE).

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Scheer, Tamara. 2018. Ethnic Boxes: The Unintended Consequences of Habsburg Bureaucratic Classification. Nationalities Papers 46 (4): 575–591. Şemseddin Sami. 24 December 1878. Muharrir Efendi’ye. Tercüman-ı Hakikat, no. 150 3. ———. 13 January 1879. Arnavutluk. Tercüman-ı Hakikat, no. 169. ———. 22 June 1880. Arnavutlukta hizmet-i maarif. Tercüman-ı Hakikat, no. 609. Skendi, Stavro. 1967. The Albanian National Awakening, 1878–1912. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

CHAPTER 10

Unravelling Multinational Legacies: National Affiliations of Government Employees in Post-Habsburg Austria Therese Garstenauer

Introduction We finally have a German-Austria1 now, but when it comes to purging the civil service of Czech, Polish, and Italian elements, things still look very bad. We have a letter from Linz concerning the current circumstances. Apart from the countless Wenzels in postal and railway service (“Post- und 1  The Republic of German-Austria was proclaimed on 12 November 1918 in the “Law on the form of state and government of German-Austria” (StGBl. Nr. 5/1918). The law declared German-Austria as a part of the German Republic and enumerated among its provinces some of the regions that would later become part of Czechoslovakia, Italy, and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croatians and Slovenes. The Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye of 10 September 2019 (taking effect on 16 July 1920) which regulated the status of the Habsburg successor states in the Austrian half of the monarchy prohibited any economic or political union with Germany and the use of the name “Deutsch-Österreich” (Haslinger 2016).

T. Garstenauer (*) Department of Economic and Social History, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Chovanec, O. Heilo (eds.), Narrated Empires, Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55199-5_10

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Bahnwenzeln”; please see explanation below) who now suddenly show off as good Germans and are called German-minded by their nationally indifferent superiors, a number of Czechoslovaks is sitting about especially at the provincial government (formerly prefecture) Linz. (Salzburger Chronik 1919, 2)2

This quote from a conservative Catholic daily newspaper of January 1919 suggests that the national composition of the Austrian civil service was a matter of some public concern. Apart from the superiors who were supposed to be patriotic German-Austrians but rather indulged in national indifference,3 the newspaper comment evokes a mass of non-German staff at the lower ranks and some allegedly Czechoslovak government employees who were in positions that they were not entitled to hold because of their national affiliation. The names of the latter persons are even explicitly mentioned later in the newspaper text. Below I will return to the term Postwenzel in general, specifically in cases regarding the provincial government in Linz. After the downfall of the Habsburg monarchy, reconstructing the state apparatus constituted a vital part in building the new German-Austrian republic. The politicians in charge of this task had to deal with a multinational workforce of government employees. What they aimed for as the result of the reconstruction was a civil service ideally consisting only of persons of “German nationality.” Statisticians of the Habsburg monarchy had refused to include “nation” as a category in the census (Göderle 2016, 71); thus, there was no clear-cut way to distinguish who belonged to which nation. Therefore, the so-called Zwischenstaatsamtliche Komitee für Staatsbedienstetenangelegenheiten, that is, interdepartmental committee for matters of government employees,4 consisting of members of several ministries, developed a list of criteria for determining the nationality of a 2  “Wir haben nun endlich ein Deutschösterreich, aber mit der Reinigung der Beamtenschaft von tschechischen, polnischen und welschen Elementen sieht es immer noch sehr schlimm aus. Es liegt uns eine Zuschrift aus Linz vor, welche sich mit dort herrschenden Verhältnissen beschäftigt. Abgesehen von den ungezählten Post- und Bahnwenzeln, welche jetzt auf einmal als gute Deutsche sich auftun und von nationalgleichgültigen Vorgesetzten als deutschgesinnt bezeichnet werden, sitzen speziell bei der Landesregierung (der früheren Statthalterei) Linz noch eine Reihe von Tschechoslowaken herum.” All translations from German are mine unless otherwise stated. 3  For “national indifference” as category of analysis, see Zahra (2010). 4  Whereas John Deak translates this committee as “intergovernmental committee” (Deak 2019b, 131–135), in my opinion the term “interdepartmental committee” is more appropriate due to the composition of the committee.

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government employee. In dubious cases, the persons in question had to declare and prove that they belonged to the “German nation.” In recent years, research on government employees and administration in the late Habsburg Empire and the early post-Habsburg period has gained some momentum after a period of relative neglect (Adlgasser and Lindström 2019; Becker et al. 2020). The research explores new theoretical perspectives besides “bureaucratic absolutism” (Deak 2019a), presents collective biographies (Bavouzet 2019; Klečacký 2019) and discusses questions of restructuring the civil service (Deak 2019b; Becker et  al. 2020) or the proper conduct of life of government employees (Garstenauer 2019). National affiliation was a major issue for government employees after the end of the monarchy, especially when their livelihood depended on it. The practices of nationalizing the civil service differed between the successor states. This chapter sheds additional light on the multinational legacies of the Habsburg Empire as reflected in the civil service of the young Austrian republic. Although the primary focus of this chapter is on the Republic of German-Austria in the time period of 1918–1919, I will at first take a look on the preceding period, presenting narratives of multinationalism, supranationalism and nationalism with regard to government employees in the late Habsburg Empire. I will also expound the extent to which language use became an instrument of assigning nationality to citizens of the Empire. This will allow for a better understanding of the problems presented in the post-1918 section, in which I will discuss the efforts the German-Austrian state made to distinguish who was “German” and therefore allowed to work for the state. Furthermore, I will provide some examples of how persons who wanted to be employed by the government presented themselves in order to give convincing evidence of their “German nationality.”

Multinational, Nationalist or Beyond Nations? Government Employees of the Late Habsburg Empire The civil and military officers in the Austrian service form a race of their own; their fathers have been in the service of the Kaiser, and so will their sons be; they belong to none of the multifarious nationalities congregated under the wing of the double-headed eagle; they are, and ever have been, removed from one end of the empire to the other, from Poland to Italy, from Germany to Transylvania; Hungarian, Pole, German, Roumanian,

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Italian, Croat, every individual not stamped with ‘imperial and royal authority,’ etc., bearing a separate national character, is equally despised by them; they have no nationality, or rather, they alone make up the really Austrian nation. It is evident what a pliable, and at the same time powerful instrument, in the hands of an intelligent and energetic chief, such a civil and military hierarchy must be. (Marx 1896, 34)5

The political philosopher Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) wrote these lines in 1851. His account reflects a powerful narrative that had some relation to reality and coincided with the ideal self-conception of government employees. Adam Wandruszka’s depiction of ideal-typical government employees from the era of Emperor Franz Joseph I (1830–1916) indicates that members of “dynasties” of government employees and officers were less inclined to feel they belonged to a particular nation or crownland, due to frequent changes in their places of employment. Rather, they were representatives of an Austrian patriotism directed towards the entire state (Wandruszka 1975, xvi). As early as the end of the eighteenth century, as Pieter Judson has explained, “more and more Austrians chose to position themselves on the side of this larger imperial whole” (Judson 2016, 63). The reign of Emperor Joseph II (1741–1790) was a period of reforms for which a dedicated, loyal and hardworking civil service was to be a linchpin. According to the ideas and the example of emperor, who laid most of the groundwork for modern civil service in Austria (Hattenhauer 1980, 166–173; Heindl 2013a; 25–40; Deak 2015, 21–29), civil servants should devote their lives to state service. The state in question was supposed to be Austria rather than “Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary, or Croatia—all entities that had earlier histories as independent states” (Judson 2016, 62). In the later period of the Empire, however, national affiliation became increasingly more relevant (Judson 2005, 2–3), something which also affected the group of the government employees. But let us stop for a moment and ask about nations and nationalities, and how they came to gain importance in the course of the nineteenth century.6 5  The text was first published under Karl Marx’s name in the New-York Daily Tribune in November of the same year in a series of articles titled “Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany” and later as a book of the same title; see Marx (1896). The quote is also mentioned in Goldinger (1980, 311). 6  I am aware of the vast body of research on nationalities and nationalism in the Habsburg monarchy. In this paper, I do not intend to give a full account of it. For an overview, see for example Judson (2005), Cole (2012).

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Nations did not emerge as a historical necessity, owing to primordially existing ethnic or linguistic groups fighting for their rights. A summary of recent scholarship on Habsburg history regarding nations affirms: “[…] it was a process marked by a variety of options, discontinuities, chance, and failure. Nations were established as heterogeneous populations that spoke a variety of vernaculars and lacked a common identity were transformed into imagined communities” (Scheer and Stergar 2018, 575–576). The authors of these lines make an important point in their article: it was not nationalist activists alone who facilitated the increasing importance of nations within the Empire, but to a considerable extent it was imperial bureaucracy that helped unintentionally to create—through institutions like schools, churches or the army—“ethnic boxes” into which each and every citizen could be put. Usually, language served as a proxy to determine the national affiliation of a person (Brix 1982, 17). In the first half of the nineteenth century, the various languages and dialects spoken in the Habsburg monarchy became increasingly standardized, culminating in the publication of the Imperial Law Gazettes (Reichsgesetzblätter) in nine languages from 1849 onwards: German, Italian, Hungarian, Czech, Polish, Ruthenian, Slovene, Serbo-Croatian (in a Latin and a Cyrillic edition) and Romanian (Scheer and Stergar 2018, 579). This linguistic classification later served as a basis for classifying the inhabitants of the Empire by their nationalities,7 for instance, when used in the censuses undertaken in “Cisleithania,” the Austrian part of the Dual Monarchy (Brix 1982; Göderle 2016). It was not until the census in 1880 that a question about spoken language (Umgangssprache) was included. Many methodological and political discussions preceded this decision. Should one include “nation” as a category, and if so, on what grounds? Is language a valid indicator for national affiliation? Should the question refer to the mother tongue or the spoken language instead (Brix 1982, 67–115)? The decision to ask about the vernacular in the census and allow for only one possible answer failed to acknowledge the widespread bi- and multilinguality practised especially in border regions (Judson 2014, 68). It is safe to say that the Habsburg civil service was multinational inasmuch as it included persons from various crownlands and speakers of various languages. For instance, a 1914 survey of the personnel in most of the ministries and the high courts in Vienna shows that about a quarter of the 7  For the role of administration and statistics in making Durkheimian social facts or “things which hold together,” cf. Desrosières (1991).

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staff were of non-German nationality (Hugelmann 1934, 280). The following diagram shows the distribution of nationalities within this quarter (Fig. 10.1). However, it is unclear on what the numbers—presented in a 1934 book by the conservative legal scholar, politician and former government employee Karl Gottfried Hugelmann—are actually based (Goldinger 1980, 318–319), especially since nationality was not a statistical or legal category and was also not recorded in personnel files. Investigating the ethnic affiliation of government employees is “beset with grave methodological difficulties” for historians (Urbanitsch 2008, 210; see also Heindl 2013a, 210). The ideal public image, but also the self-perception of government

Ukrainians; 1.6 %

Romanians; 1.8 %

Italians; 4.8 % South Slavs; 10.4 %

Czechs; 42.9 %

Hungarians; 18.1 % n = 1521

Poles; 20.2 %

Fig. 10.1  Government employees of non-German nationality in the Zentralstellen (i.e. “central offices”) in Vienna in 1914, according to Hugelmann (1934)

employees, as already mentioned above, was that of non-partisan servants of the state who stood above political or national affiliations (Urbanitsch 2008, 208). We have reason to believe that this was not always the case,

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especially in the last decades of the monarchy, although, according to Waltraud Heindl’s assessment of memoirs of government employees, ranks and hierarchies were more important criteria of differentiation than national affiliations (Heindl 2013b, 183–184). In an article about the High Civil Service Corps in the last period of the Empire, Peter Urbanitsch describes a situation in which politicians tried to influence government employees of “their” political and/or national affiliation and those government employees, in turn, often acted accordingly (Urbanitsch 2008, 209). Furthermore, he remarks: “It is also a fact that especially in the last years of the Habsburg monarchy some posts were traditionally ‘reserved’ for members of a given nationality” (Urbanitsch 2008, 210).8 The politician and expert Josef Redlich (1869–1936) and an insider, the former employee of the Ministry of Finance Friedrich Kleinwächter (1877–1959), lament the spreading of nationalist ideas among government employees, which they deem as detrimental to the traditional ideal of loyalty to an empire of many nations. Both of them wrote books in the early and mid-­1920s (Kleinwächter 1925; Redlich 1925) that commented on the decline of the Habsburg monarchy, where they complained about the national bias of non-German government employees and stressed the relative impartiality of the German representatives of the group. Here, there may have been a bit of a bias on the part of members of the German majority, which also resonated in Adam Wandruszka’s characterization of Habsburg government employees as “agents of an Austrian patriotism oriented to the state as a whole, which could often go hand in hand with a German cultural awareness that was entirely non-nationalistic” (Wandruszka 1975, xvi). Or, put differently, “On top of this supranational ethos existed a cultural Germanophilia, an outlook that saw the German language as a key to social mobility and higher cultural status” (Deak 2019b, 128). Josef Redlich highlights the negative influence of a growing number of government employees of a new type in postal and railway services who were strangers to the Josephinist ideals. He complains about “the decreasing traditional authority of the magisterial civil service to which, due to the nationalization of the railways, the expansion of the modern postal system and the many other new technical branches the enormous annex of a subaltern mass officialdom has accrued that could not have a connection with 8  Friedrich Kleinwächter also describes this practice in an autobiographical novel about his service in the Ministry of Finance from 1910 to 1917; Kleinwächter (1947).

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that old conservative tradition” (Redlich 1925, 80). Government employees of this new kind were likely to champion political and nationalist concerns openly and even founded their own professional associations. This brings us back to the protagonist of the newspaper quote at the beginning of this article: who or what was a “Postwenzel”? “Wenzel” was a common ethnophaulism to denote Czech people (similar to “Michel” for Germans or “Ivan” for Russians) (Džambo 1997, 31). The connection to postal services was possibly established in the person of Wenzel Schmidl (1783–1857), an entrepreneur and postmaster active in various cities of the monarchy in the first half of the nineteenth century who was dubbed “Postwenzel” (Lebensaft and Mentschl 1993, 326). As the number of employees in postal services grew, along with the number of Czechs in that sector, the term Postwenzel emerged and was generally used in a pejorative manner. A search in the database of Austrian newspapers compiled and hosted by the Austrian National Library9 yields first mentions of the term in the late 1890s. In 1907, a “Dr. A.G.” complained that as a result of the appointment of a Czech minister of commerce, Cisleithania, including the Alpine countries, had been virtually flooded with Postwenzels (Wiener Montags-Post 1907, 2). Furthermore, they are mentioned in relation to a specific practice related to postal work, language and nationalism. If German people in bilingual regions were handed postcards printed in German only when they asked for it specifically (otherwise, they would get postcards printed in German and Czech), malicious Postwenzel were thought to be behind it (Znaimer Tagblatt 1898, 1). If somebody wrote a letter to “Töplitz in Österreich” and the address was crossed out and corrected as “Teplitz in Böhmen” (thereby using the Czech toponym for the same place), it was also thought to be their doing (Kikeriki 1899, 2). The term Postwenzel was sometimes used to denote Slavic postmen in general and did not disappear in the First Republic, as revealed in a 1921 newspaper article. At that time, the postal administration of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croatians and Slovenes had informed Austrians that postal deliveries to places in this state with names in the German language would be forwarded and delivered; however, in order to avoid misrouting and delays one should instead use the currently used place names. This led a German-nationalist newspaper in Carinthia to respond as follows: 9   ANNO—Austrian Newspapers Online, http://anno.onb.ac.at/, accessed on 19 September 2019.

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The answer to the postal administration of the Kingdom of Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia should be that it is advisable to keep the traditional German names of cities, market towns and villages such as Marburg, Cilli, Windisch-­ Feistritz, Unterdrauburg, Gutenstein, Mieß, Schwarzenbach10 etc., which have been illegally stolen by Yugoslavia, and to spare us Germans in German-­ Austria from having to dislocate our tongues or ruin our pens for the sake of Yugoslavian ‘Postwenzels’.11 (Freie Stimmen 1921, 3)

Postwenzels, to conclude, were quite different from the traditional civil service corps insofar as they were numerous, as well as politically and nationally involved. The term thus turns up in connection with occasions of national conflict. It was used mainly in those Austrian printed media sympathetic to the German-nationalist movement, yet never as a self-­ designation but instead to insult a group and to refer to third persons.

How to Be German (Enough) to Serve the German-Austrian State As Judson and Deak have suggested (Judson 2006, 239; Deak 2019b, 127), German-Austria can be regarded as a nationalizing state in the sense of Rogers Brubaker, that is, “states that are conceived by their dominant elites as nation-states, as the states of and for particular nations, yet as ‘incomplete’ or ‘unrealized’ nation-states, as insufficiently “national” in a variety of senses […]” (Brubaker 1996, 79). German-Austria was supposed to have a civil service staffed with Austrians of German nationality only. This was not only the intention of the government but also of some of its employees, judging from an article in the journal Der Staatsbeamte12 of March 1919:

10  The Slovene toponyms for these places are Maribor, Celje, Slovenska Bistrica, Dravograd, Guštanj, Č rna and Mežica. 11  “Darauf wäre der Postverwaltung des Königreiches SHS mitzuteilen, daß es sich empfiehlt, den von Jugoslawien widerrechtlich geraubten deutschen Städten, Märkten und Orten wie Marburg, Cilli, Windisch-Feistritz, Unterdrauburg, Gutenstein, Mieß, Schwarzenbach usw. ihre angestammten deutschen Namen zu belassen und uns Deutsche in Deutschösterreich mit der Zumutung zu verschonen, daß wir den jugoslawischen Postwenzeln zuliebe uns die Zunge auskegeln oder die Feder ‘zersprageln’ sollen.” 12  The journal was the organ of the “Verein der Staatsbeamten Österreichs in Wien,” an association of government employees that the government employees’ unions of the First Republic considered as their predecessor organization (Boyer 1981, 159; Megner 2010, 312).

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With the formation of independent national states in the territory of the former Austrian Empire, the imperial bureaucracy has fallen prey to a sharp nationalization and, with respect to that, must be subject to a special purification. […] In the same measure, just as German officials are said to be ruthlessly besieged, so must our enemies be treated, it would therefore be the surest path if the German-Austrian state would only take Germans as its employees. (Staatsbeamte 1919, 1)13

So how did the young republic implement this plan? As early as November 1918, just a few weeks after the republic was declared, a committee was formed from high officials from various ministries (Staatsämter): the aforementioned Zwischenstaatsamtliche Komitee (Hafner 1990, 218–219). The activities of this interdepartmental committee are documented in the minutes of its sessions in 1918 and 1919 (consisting of 61 protocols)14 which “provide a wealth of information about how the Austrian government began to transverse the chasm between multinational empire and nation-state” (Deak 2019b, 131). On 23 November 1918 the committee published guidelines “for the preliminary handling of some questions regarding state employees” (Richtlinien für die vorläufige Behandlung einiger Staatsbedienstetenfragen, Richtlinien 1918). The two main purposes of these guidelines, consisting of five articles, were to nationalize and reduce the former imperial state apparatus. The first article stipulated that only government employees of German nationality were permitted to take the oath of loyalty (Gelöbnis) to the republic. The following three articles explained what was supposed to happen with government employees of German nationality within German-Austria, with government employees of German nationality located in the other successor states of the monarchy, and with government employees of non-German nationality situated within German-Austria. The final article stated that the payment of pensions for Germans living outside German-Austria and for non-Germans living in German-Austria was to be settled as a result of intergovernmental negotiations (Hafner 1990, 219–222). If only persons of German nationality were allowed to enter civil service, how exactly was their “Germanness” to be determined? The guidelines provided a list of criteria: their spoken language as indicated in the  Quoted from Deak (2019b, 130) in his translation.  All the protocols are kept in the Austrian State Archive, Archive of the Republic, Bundeskanzleramt /Staatskanzlei / Bundeskanzleramt alt, Karton 246/1919. The protocols Nr. 1–25 and 26–50 are also available in print (Verhandlungsschriften 1919a, b). 13 14

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census of 1910, their mother tongue, the language in which they were schooled, the national affiliation of their parents and their social activities (such as membership in associations). Finally, some importance was ascribed to their allegiance to the German nation. In dubious cases, the guidelines required that the government employee should give a written declaration explaining the grounds on which he or she claimed affiliation to the German nationality. These criteria for determining the national affiliation were not invented by the committee members from scratch but had been utilized before. The so-called Moravian Compromise of 1905 was a fairly successful political measure for resolving nationalist tensions between Germans and Czechs (Kelly 2003). It entailed nationally separate school boards, Czech and German schools and two separate nets of constituencies, a Czech one and a German one for the entire province of Moravia. Voters were to be registered in two nationally separate voting registers. In preparing for the parliamentary elections of 1911, a questionnaire was used to determine in doubtful cases to which voting register a person would be assigned (Stourzh 2007, 167; Kelly 2003, 294–295). Those questions are mirrored in the aforementioned guidelines of 1918.15 The final decision on the national affiliation of a government employee left to the discretion of the superior authorities. On 17 January 1919, the State Council ruled that personnel of non-German nationality should be removed from office in order to make positions available to government employees who had lost their jobs in the other new nation-states emerging out of the Empire. It was, however, considered more urgent to remove non-German personnel from higher positions. Nonetheless, those who performed manual labour or simple clerical or medical services could stay on if they were married to German women, educated their children in German and were behaving at least “nationally indifferent” (Hafner 1990, 229–230). The main criterion in doubtful cases was a person’s spoken language as indicated in the last census of 1910. The unintended construction of national categories by the Habsburg bureaucracy (Scheer and Stergar 2018) had repercussions until after the end of the monarchy. It brought with it all the weaknesses of these categories, especially their non-­ acknowledgement of multilingualism and the invalid assumption that language use and national affiliation were congruent. 15  I am indebted to Peter Becker for referring me to the connection to the Moravian Compromise.

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As a result, what we find in many of the statements made by government employees who wanted to stay on in the German-Austrian civil service is that they explain to the authorities the realities of multinational and multilingual lives. Largely, their arguments correspond with the criteria for “Germanness” as specified in the aforementioned guidelines, but we do find some noteworthy individual strategies. My examples are taken from the provincial archives of Carinthia and Upper Austria.16 The files in the Carinthian Federal Archive concerning the oaths of allegiance of government employees to the Republic of German-Austria include printed declarations with the following text: “I declare herewith that despite mastering the Slovene language I have a pro-German attitude and declare my affiliation to the German-Austrian Republic” (Carinthian Federal Archive 1919). What becomes obvious in the individual declarations of government employees is the variety of languages and dialects used in the border region between Carinthia and Slovenia—and the absurdity of the idea of linking language use and national affiliation. On 27 February 1919 a chancery clerk (Kanzleibeamter) named Franz Jauk declared: “I am a Carinthian. Although in my parents’ house the Windish17 dialect of Rosental was spoken as the family language, I fully claim for myself affiliation to the German nation.”18 He then goes on to describe his schooling, his membership in German associations and his rejection of Yugoslavian propaganda “aiming at ripping out my native soil from the rest of Carinthia.”19 Jauk’s concluding sentence is remarkable inasmuch as it evokes the loyalty of the Habsburg government employees 16  There are a number of interesting cases in the minutes of the Zwischenstaatsamtliches Komitee which have already been presented and discussed in Hafner (1990), Deak (2019b), Megner and Steiner (2020), Garstenauer (2020). This is why I will draw upon different source materials here. 17  “Windisch” is a political rather than a linguistic term. It had been used in the nineteenth century to denote what was later called the Slovene language. In the context of Jauk’s declaration, it refers to a Germanophile speaker of a variety of Slovene who lives in Carinthia. In the course of the 1920s, a so-called “Windischentheorie” was developed (Wutte 1927) claiming that “Windische” were a non-Slovene ethnic group. This theory gained importance in the interwar and the National Socialist period. “Windisch” was included as a self-reporting label for language in the census for 1939 (Priestly 1997, 93) and was retained until the last Austrian census in 2001. 18  “Ich bin ein Kärntner. Obzwar im Hause meiner Eltern der windische Dialekt des Rosentales als Familiensprache gesprochen wurde, nehme ich die Zugehörigkeit zur deutschen Nation für mich voll und ganz in Anspruch.” 19  “[…] die die Losreissung meines Heimatbodens vom übrigen Kärnten bezweckt.”

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of old and implies that, for him, German-Austria was unquestionably the successor of imperial Austria: “The same loyalty that I have shown to old Austria as a government employee I have also transferred to my new fatherland of German-Austria.”20 (KLA Declaration Jauk). The chancery clerk (Landesregierungskanzlist) Felix Mack declared “I was born on 18 May 1879 in Ferlach in Carinthia / before I was appointed government employee I had right of residence there / attended the elementary school in Ferlach for 5  years, where classes were held only in German. […] I speak German and some Slovene / the latter only in Ferlach dialect. My spoken language has always been German. My wife speaks only German and was a postal clerk before marriage. I therefore request to be accepted as a German-Austrian government employee”21 (KLA Declaration Mack). The Bezirkssekretär Josef Wuntschek made the following declaration on 16 December 1918: “[…] the spoken language of my parents was Slovene (Carinthian, Windish) because it was common in this area. […] We all [siblings] have been educated in both national languages, attended only German schools.” Wuntschek even provided the names of his teachers in elementary school. He was married twice, to German-speaking women, the children from theses marriages were educated exclusively in German. He ends his declaration on a rather emotional note: “In the censuses I have always indicated my spoken language as German. Being a native Carinthian and attached to my beautiful fatherland with body and soul, I hereby request to be allowed to stay in German-Austria, and in particular in my fatherland of Carinthia”22 (KLA Declaration Wuntschek). The files from the Upper Austrian provincial archives are linked to the newspaper article about national cleansing of the civil service quoted at 20  “Die gleiche Treue, die ich dem alten Oesterreich als Staatsdiener bezeigt habe, habe ich auch auf mein neues Vaterland Deutschösterreich übertragen.” 21  “Ich bin am 18. Mai 1879 zu Ferlach in Kärnten geboren, /: vor Ernennung zum Staatsbeamten auch dorthin zuständig gewesen:/ besuchte in Ferlach die 5klassige Volksschule, in welcher stets deutscher Unterricht erteilt wurde. […] Ich spreche deutsch und etwas slowenisch /: letztere Sprache jedoch nur Ferlacher Dialekt: / Meine Umgangssprache war stets deutsch. Meine Frau spricht nur deutsch und war vor der Verehelichung Postbeamtin. Ich bitte daher um Aufnahme als deutschösterreichischen Staatsbeamten.” 22  “Bei den Volkszählungen gab ich meine Umgangssprache stets als deutsch an. Nachdem ich ein geborener Kärntner bin und mit Leib und Seele an meinem schönen Vaterlande hänge, erlaube ich mir die Bitte zu stellen, mich in Deutsch-Österreich und zwar in meinem Vaterlande Kärnten belassen zu wollen.”

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the beginning of this contribution. Among the persons mentioned by their names in that text is a certain Alois Nožička. He had been asked by the provincial government of Upper Austria to declare his affiliation to the German nationality. Nožička begins and ends his intervention of 1 March 1919 with a reference to his economic situation and an allusion to it in the middle of his lengthy text: a mandatory retirement would ruin his future and that of his family. He insists that he has always felt himself to be German and describes his family and his children thus: “I have also educated my children in Austrian spirit and planted in their hearts the conviction that here in a German environment [hier im Deutschen] we must feel ourselves to be German-Austrians and be able to do so with pride.”23 He elaborates on his own education and professional career, emphasizing that he had better grades in his German commercial college than in his Czech high school. When enumerating the jobs he had held before entering government employment, he points to the fact that all of them had been German: “For if I had already had an inclination towards things Czech by then, I could have chosen Czech places of employment. This is evidence that, even though the Czech propaganda was trying to win young people for the Czech nation by all available means, I felt attracted to the German people.”24 He argued that he qualifies as German by all criteria with the exception of his last name—Nožička, and that he should not be reproached for not yet having his name changed. At the end of his letter, he requested that his baptism certificate be returned to him so he could apply for a name change (Upper Austrian Federal Archive Declaration Nožička). Nožička’s arguments obviously convinced the provincial government: he was able to keep his job and was in later years promoted to director of the Upper Austrian “Hilfsämter.” A notice in a newspaper of June 1919 informs us that Offizial Alois Nožička had changed his last name to “Losert” (Linzer Tagespost 1919, 4). In this case, the connection between national affiliation and livelihood was very pronounced, although being German was in Nožička’s declaration also a matter of “feeling German.” 23  “Ich habe auch meine Kinder in österreichischem Geiste erzogen und ihnen ins Herz gepflanzt, daß wir hier im Deutschen uns als Deutschösterreicher fühlen müssen und mit Stolz fühlen können.” 24  “Denn wenn ich schon damals die Neigung zum Tschechischen gehabt hätte, so hätte ich mir tschechische Anstellungsposten wählen können. Es ist dies ein Beweis daß ich damals, trotzdem der tschechischen Propaganda mit allen möglichen Mitteln die jungen Leute für die tschechische Nation zu gewinnen versuchte, mich zum deutschen Volke hingezogen fühlte.”

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One Bezirkssekretär Alois Czepl reported on 26 December 1918 that he had the spelling of his name changed already in 1913—from Č epl to Czepl. Apart from the usual descriptions of his origin, schooling, military service and career, he also enclosed a family tree and pointed out that all his ancestors had purely German first names (Upper Austrian Federal Archive Declaration Czepl). The District Commissioner (Bezirkshauptmann) of Freistadt in Upper Austria, Count Sigmund Sedlnitzky expressed irritation: “It is completely incomprehensible to me how any doubts about my German ethnicity could arise. I am the child of German parents, raised on German soil, have attended German primary and grammar schools in Kremsmünster and Troppau, studied at the University of Vienna; I have been politically active as a German, was […] elected to the state diet in Schlesien, where I belonged to the association of German members of the state diet and to the Center Party [Mittelpartei] in the House of Lords [Herrenhaus] which had only German members, with the exception of a Romanian and a South Slav. My non-German language skills are confined to French, that I speak poorly, but understand quite well, and a bit of Bohemian, a language that I hardly acquired during my time in service and pretty much forgot afterwards.”25 (Upper Austrian Federal Archive Declaration Sedlnitzky). The provincial government of Upper Austria wrote a statement to the Ministry of the Interior on 13 March 1919, explaining that in most of the dubious cases (including Nožička, Czepl and Sedlnitzky) the decision was made that they were German enough to be taken over into the service of German-Austria. The government held the view that “government employees who may be of Czech descent, but who have been living in German areas of settlement continuously for many years, have married German women and educated their children in German, who speak only German at home and have declared themselves German in the census and 25   “Es ist mir vollständig unverständlich, wieso sich Zweifel an meiner deutschen Stammeszugehörigkeit ergeben können. Ich bin Kind deutscher Eltern, auf deutschem Boden aufgewachsen, habe an deutschen Schulen/Gymnasien in Kremsmünster und Troppau, Universität Wien studiert, habe in späteren Jahren mich als deutscher politisch betätigt, war […] in Schlesien in den Landtag gewählt, wo ich zum Verband deutscher Landtagsabgeordneter gehörte und zählte im Herrnhause zur Mittelpartei, welche mit Ausnahme eines Rumänen und eines Südslawen auch nur deutsche Mitglieder besaß. Meine nicht-deutschen Sprachkenntnisse beschränken sich auf Französisch, das ich zwar schlecht spreche, aber ziemlich gut verstehe, und etwas wenig böhmisch, welche Sprache ich mir während meiner Dienstzeit mangelhaft aneignete und nachher ziemlich vergessen habe.”

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in other occasions, should be considered as such”26 (Upper Austrian Federal Archive Letter to the Ministry of Interior). Thus, they were following the guidelines and the aforementioned decision of the State Council and doing so in a rather generous manner.

Concluding Remarks with a Perspective on Other Successor States As the guidelines of November 1918 stipulated, arrangements were to be negotiated between successor states about the payment of allowances, pensions and severance packages for government employees now belonging to other nations. Already on 29 November 1918 an international conference took place to achieve this goal, involving envoys of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Ukraine, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, and Romania (Deak 2019b, 129). These arrangements were valid only until January 1919. By then, the successor states handled the matters of government employees of other nationalities in different ways (Hafner 1990, 238). I will not go into the details of the mutual agreements (see Hafner 1990, 238–242) but focus on the role that national affiliation played and how it was ascertained in some of the other successor states. In Czechoslovakia, we can observe more continuity than change in the first years. Competent staff could often remain in their positions. The continuity was more pronounced in Bohemia than in Moravia (Klečacký 2020). On 7 February 1919 the government passed a law to the effect that those former Habsburg government employees who wished to serve the Czechoslovak Republic had to apply actively for a position and take an oath of allegiance to the state. National affiliation and even a good command of the Czech language were of secondary importance (Klečacký 2020). Before the Treaty of St. Germain en Laye, the status was uncertain of government employees of German nationality who lived in areas claimed by Czechoslovakia as well as German-Austria. German-­Austria urged them to stay in their positions pending a decision but did not guarantee them a position in Austrian civil service. Czechoslovakia for its part urged them to 26  “[…] daß Staatsbedienstete von zwar tschechischer Abstammung, die aber seit vielen Jahren ununterbrochen in deutschen Siedlungsgebeten leben, deutsche Frauen geheiratet haben, die Kinder deutsch erziehen, zuhause nur deutsch sprechen und sich bei der Volkszählung und bei anderen Anlässen als Deutsch bekannten, auch als solche anzusehen sind.”

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take the oath of allegiance. In some cases, as we can see from the minutes of the interdepartmental committee, these government employees took a “lighter” version of this oath, pledging allegiance to the superior authorities but not to the state (Verhandlungsschriften 1–25 1919a, 15). The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was firm in its intention of nationalizing the civil service. Slovenia as well adopted a rather harsh policy of nationalizing its civil service. Rok Stergar has highlighted the ethnolinguistic, if not biological, view of nationhood that was adopted in the national purges—one was born Slovene or one was not one. However, even under these circumstances the authorities exercised a certain degree of discretion in individual cases, especially when there was a shortage of competent personnel (Stergar 2020). In Hungary, by contrast, not much national purging was indicated because a Magyarization of the civil service had already been introduced by the 1890s. Owing to the political upheavals of 1919, however, political purges were carried out by the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic and following its demise as well (Bavouzet 2020). How massive was the reconstruction of the Austrian civil service in numerical terms? This is hard to estimate since no reliable numbers are available. We have no information about how many non-German government employees were removed from their positions in German-Austria. Extrapolating from the 1914 survey on nationalities in the Zentralstellen published by Karl Hugelmann, Herta Hafner estimates a number of 880 government employees of non-German nationality in the Zentralstellen (excluding the common ministries). Yet she herself discourages making such calculations (Hafner 1990, 248). The cases of the ministries of Finance and Social Welfare in Hafner’s study (Hafner 1990, 243–248) as well my inquiries in some Austrian provincial archives suggest that the numbers of those removed were not very high and that dubious cases were often decided in favour of those who wanted to continue serving the state. As for German government employees who returned from other successor states of the monarchy, we have numbers from the final report of the “Schutzstelle” (i.e. a state organization that was taking care of German government employees outside the Republic of Austria beginning in 1919, Hafner 1990, 264–272): 1733 government employees, most of them coming from Italy, moved to Austria during the active period of the organization which lasted until autumn 1921. That figure does not include railway employees; according to sources from the Ministry of Finance,

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there were about 4000 of them (Austrian State Archive, Schlußbericht der Schutzstelle). The general reduction in the number of government employees had more severe consequences than the national purges. It would gather momentum only a few years later when the League of Nations granted a loan to Austria on the condition (among others) that it would reduce its state apparatus dramatically. Between 1922 and 1925, nearly 100,000 government employees were pensioned off or made redundant (Heindl 1995, 98–99).27 What, then, are we to make of the declarations of government employees? I do not intend to construe them as assertions of genuine national feelings. Though individually phrased, they clearly follow the guidelines and cover all the points required for presenting oneself as an exemplary German(-Austrian). It stands to reason that these persons wanted to retain their jobs, and this livelihood was inextricably linked with belonging to the proper nationality. When Alois Nožička (later “Losert”) argues that he had always sought employment in German-language contexts, we see this linkage also expressed. For “[q]uestions of citizenship and ethnicity were […] immediately combined with questions of existence. Employment meant payment of salary. Recognition of service meant the payment of pensions” (Deak 2019b, 132). Therefore, these people may or may not have felt themselves to be Germans, but they wanted to keep their position in government employment, and many of them succeeded in doing so. The 1912 case of the grocer Johann Lehar (or Léhar) reported in Gerald Stourzh’s study on the Moravian Compromise and its consequences tells a similar story, though not of a government employee. Mr. Lehar wished to send his six-year-old daughter to a German school but was blocked from doing so because he had registered himself as a Czech voter. He had done that because, having had Czech clients at his grocery store, he had been fearful of losing these clients. “Mr. Lehar argued like a trimmer, yet his arguments have, through the ages, great plausibility. He—or his lawyer—argued that indications given in the (ethnically separate) electoral register, or on the occasion of the census, were often determined by economic considerations and were motivated not by national feeling but out of fear of the results of a possible boycott” (Stourzh 2007, 27  Due to divergent statistical data, it is hard to tell the number of government employees before the massive reduction. Various sources enumerate between 200,000 and 300,000 persons in the years 1921–1922; see Garstenauer (2019, 218–220).

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170–171). With the massive cutbacks in the civil service and the high inflation of the early 1920s, economic considerations—if not existential ones—were certainly more relevant for government employees of the First Austrian Republic than questions of national affiliation (Megner 2010, 319–349). In nationalizing its civil service, the Austrian Republic took another step away from a multinational past in which, at least in principle, anyone within the required age limits, without criminal convictions and with the prerequisite abilities could become a government employee,28 irrespective of their national affiliation. The traditional, time-honoured principle of a civil service that was above national or political affinities dwindled in importance. As a result of this, government employees saw themselves in a different light. Their sentiment is lucidly expressed by the defendant in a 1928 disciplinary procedure. In his pleading in the case of a police officer accused of aiding a smuggler he maintained, We are the last pillars keeping together the old state; the civil service has epitomized the monarchy […]. Today we are dulled by the hardships of the present but also by the class shifts that have taken place. We must be ready for a decline in standards; we can no longer demand as much as in 1914.29 (Disciplinary file Wilhelm Friedrich 1928)

References Adlgasser, Franz, and Fredrik Lindström, eds. 2019. The Habsburg Civil Service and Beyond. Bureaucracy and Civil Servants from the Vormärz to the Inter-War Years. Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. ANNO  – Austrian Newspapers Online. http://anno.onb.ac.at/. Accessed 19 September 2019.

28  Women were not excluded from civil service, but their access to it was limited. Women who got married had to leave their jobs. They were not admitted to the study of law before 1919, which prevented them from attaining higher positions in civil service (Heindl 2013b, 182). 29  “Wir sind die letzten Pfeiler, die den alten Staat zusammengehalten haben; der Beamtenstand hat die Monarchie verkörpert […]. Heute sind wir durch die Not des Augenblickes, aber auch durch die eingetretene ständische Verschiebung abgestumpfter; wir müssen mit einem Sinken des Niveaus rechnen, wir können nicht mehr so viel verlangen wie im Jahre 1914.”

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Austrian State Archive, Archive of the Republic, Bundeskanzleramt, BKA-I Präs, Disziplinaroberkommission (DOK), box 17: Disciplinary file Wilhelm Friedrich, 1928. Austrian State Archive, Archive of the Republic, Bundeskanzleramt, Staatskanzlei, BKA-alt, Materien-Sonderlegung (1918–1923), Karton 242, Schlußbericht der Schutzstelle, 24 October 1921. ——— (1918–1923), Karton 246: Staatsbedienstetenangelegenheiten: Verhandlungsschriften zu den Sitzungen des zwischenstaatlichen Komitees für Staatsbedienstetenangelegenheiten, 1919. Bavouzet, Julia. 2019. A Prosopographical Survey of the High Civil Service Corps of the Ministries in the Hungarian Part of the Dual Monarchy. In The Habsburg Civil Service and Beyond. Bureaucracy and Civil Servants from the Vormärz to the Inter-War Years, ed. Franz Adlgasser and Fredrik Lindström, 167–186. Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. ———. 2020. Hungarian Ministerial Konzeptsbeamten in the Post-war Turmoil. In Hofratsdämmerung? Verwaltung und ihr Personal in den Nachfolgestaaten der Habsburgermonarchie 1918 bis 1920, eds. Peter Becker, Therese Garstenauer, Veronika Helfert, Karl Megner, Günther Steiner, and Thomas Stockinger. Vienna: Böhlau: 113–136. https://doi.org/uaccess.univie.ac.at/10.7767/ 9783205211525.113 Becker, Peter, Therese Garstenauer, Veronika Helfert, Karl Megner, Günther Steiner, and Thomas Stockinger, eds. 2020. Hofratsdämmerung? Verwaltung und ihr Personal in den Nachfolgestaaten der Habsburgermonarchie 1918 bis 1920. Vienna: Böhlau. Boyer, John. 1981. Veränderungen im politischen Leben Wiens. Die Großstadt Wien, der Radikalismus der Beamten und die Wahl von 1891. Jahrbuch des Vereins für Geschichte der Stadt Wien 37: 117–173. Brix, Emil. 1982. Umgangssprachen in Altösterreich zwischen Agitation und Assimilation. Vienna: Böhlau. Brubaker, Rogers. 1996. Nationalism reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carinthian Federal Archive, Kärntner Landesregierung, Präsidium 1850–1939, box 413, 1919: Declarations of Carinthian government employees. Cole, Laurence. 2012. Differentiation or Indifference? Changing Perspectives on National Identification in the Austrian Half of the Habsburg Monarchy. In Nationhood from Below: Europe in the Long 19th Century, ed. Maarten Van Ginderachter and Marnix Beyen, 96–119. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Deak, John. 2015. Forging a Multinational State: State Making in Imperial Austria from the Enlightenment to the First World War. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2019a. After ‘Bureaucratic Absolutism’: A Search for New Paradigms in late Imperial Habsburg History. In The Habsburg Civil Service and Beyond. Bureaucracy and Civil Servants from the Vormärz to the Inter-War Years. Eds.

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PART IV

Habsburg Press(ure): Reading Between the Lines of a Many-­ Tongued Journalism

CHAPTER 11

Pester Lloyd and the German-Speaking Upper Classes of Hungary: A Budapest Newspaper in the Context of Increasing Magyarisation Andrea Seidler

Introduction The daily newspaper Pester Lloyd, which was published from 1854 to 1945, was originally based on the establishment of a trading company in Pest.1 In 1852, four years after the revolution of 1848, merchants and business people had joined forces in the city and founded the Pester Lloyd 1  I took the information about the foundation of the company and the newspaper from Hedvig Újváry (2001) and Andrea Seidler (1981). It should be noted that there are remarkably few works on the history and cultural-historical mission of Pester Lloyd. Most analyses refer to the time around the turn of the century and the development of modernity. Nobody but Hedvig Újváry has yet dealt with the early Pester Lloyd. For general information on the German-language Hungarian press of the revolutionary period around 1848 see Maria Róza’s publication (2006) or the recent study by Zsuzsa Bognár (2019).

A. Seidler (*) Department for Finno-Ungrian Studies, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Chovanec, O. Heilo (eds.), Narrated Empires, Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55199-5_11

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Society. The aim of the collaboration was to try and bring together the economic strengths of Hungary that were waiting for financial stimulation after the revolution. Pest, the capital of the country, grew rapidly in the 1840s, and with a population of 100,000, it was the largest city in the Kingdom of Hungary and an important economic centre. There were many reasons for this: new transport routes had opened up, steam navigation on the Danube between Vienna and Pest had been put into operation, the railway network had expanded and economic trade fairs were held, to which up to 30,000 visitors travelled every year. The city became more and more integrated into the economics of Europe as a whole, and the Hungarian business community began to organize itself. The businessman Jakob Kern was the founder of the Pester Lloyd Society, which first built a granary, an office building and then established a stock exchange and financed economic and cultural projects. Shortly after the foundation of the Society, it was agreed within the organization to establish a daily newspaper that would be published in German and distributed both in the Habsburg Monarchy and throughout German-speaking Europe. In the 1840s, before the revolution of 1848, most newspapers and magazines in Pest were published in German, mainly because the majority of Hungarians living in the cities spoke German in everyday life. However, at that time many of them for patriotic reasons were already learning Hungarian and it can be assumed that the majority of Pest’s newspaper subscribers also read the news in the national language. Publications in Hungary had the support of a growing number of bourgeois subscribers in Buda-Pest and Preßburg/Pozsony who self-­ consciously defined themselves as patriots and treated their subscription to Hungarian language papers as a public affirmation of their loyalty (Judson 2016, 148). Even if the readers spoke German in everyday life, they certainly read Hungarian language periodicals.2

2  The Pesti Hírlap newspaper was founded in Pest in 1841. It grew rapidly from 60 to 5200 copies in 1845 and later had a readership of 100,000. The number of readers in Hungary at this time was about one million. Between the census of 1787 and 1851 there is no exact data on the population of Hungary. According to official evidence, however, the number rose from 95,15,000 to over 13 million. In Europe at that time, this was regarded as the average figure. The increase was therefore small and can be attributed almost exclusively to natural reproduction. Immigration was low, only among the Jewish population was there an increase from 85,000 to 270,000 persons. Most immigrants came from Galicia, unlike in earlier decades, when immigration from Austria, Bohemia and Moravia were

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The aim of the German-language Pester Lloyd was to report on the economy of the Kingdom of Hungary, to develop trade networks and thus serve both the fatherland, that was the Kingdom of Hungary, and the entire state, the Habsburg monarchy. István György Tóth states that the highly differentiated, financially, culturally and religiously complex and rapidly growing Jewish bourgeoisie played an increasingly important role in the establishment of companies in the industrial and commercial sectors or in the agricultural lease system (Tóth 2005, 530). The Jewish population of Hungary accounted for 2% of the total population and they became increasingly involved in the media as well. In the beginning the editors responsible for the Pester Lloyd were Johann Weisz and Samuel Rothfeld and from 1853 onwards Karl Weisskirchner took over. All of them were members of the trading company and representatives of the German-speaking Pest bourgeoisie and of Jewish origin. Famous journalists such as Viktor Horányszky, editor of the Pester Zeitung, or Max Friedländer, who later became a journalist for the Viennese Presse, had applied for the position, but were not considered by the Society. In 1853 the paper was given an official imprimatur by the Police Director of Pest. The first copy appeared on 11 December 1853, and the bookseller and printer Gusztáv Emich was entrusted with the printing, on the condition that from the outset he would produce 5000 copies per day. On 1 January 1854, the daily publication of the periodical began and it was to continue for over ninety years. From the time of its foundation onwards, the paper was subject to strict censorship, as was the case for all journalism at the time of centralized control under the Austrian Minister of the Interior, Baron Alexander von Bach. People still feared the spread of revolutionary ideas.3 Thus the first years of the newspaper published mainly politically harmless business and trade news, business reports, advertisements and made a name for itself as a business paper or Handelsblatt. In the beginning the newspaper ran at a loss, but despite this half a year after the publication of the first issue it was decided to also publish an evening paper, which turned out to be a financial success. Despite the introduction of taxes (stamp duty) on newspapers in 1857 and the resulting price increase, the number of subscribers numerous. The population density was 43 people per square kilometre, making Hungary one of the least populated areas of the Habsburg Empire (Tóth 2005). 3  See the recent works of Norbert Bachleitner (2017) on censorship as well as Pieter M. Judson (2016).

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remained consistently high. In social terms, the readers belonged to the upper and middle classes of the bourgeoisie, who formed the social elite and included those that held more politically liberal views. The readership already included businessmen, members of the educated classes and aristocrats.4 “People who joined these associations [such as the Pester Lloyd Society, emphasize mine] increasingly viewed their activism as a public reflection of their private economic, cultural, and social contribution to society” (Judson 2016, 144). The first years were challenging and there was a division between the editorial staff of Pester Lloyd and the trading company itself. The former editors founded a new newspaper with the title Ungarischer Lloyd, (1867–1876), but Pester Lloyd continued to exist, albeit with different personnel. The company succeeded in acquiring Dr. Max Falk as editor-­ in-­chief, and his work helped strengthen the newspaper considerably. Max (Hung. Miksa) Falk was born in Pest in 1828,5 and came from a German-speaking family with a Jewish background. His father was a merchant. As a student Falk had already translated articles from Hungarian into German for Pester periodicals, later he worked for various newspapers and magazines as a critic and assistant editor. The Revolution of 1848 and its political consequences put an end to his studies in Vienna and Falk started to work for politically radical newspapers until they were banned: the Studenten-Courier (Vienna 1948) and the Freimüthige (Vienna 1848). By the age of 20 he had already written editorials for several newspapers and following the prohibition on all the newspapers and magazines where he had been employed he secured a position at the Wanderer (Vienna 1814–1873), where he remained as a journalist for the following 15 years. From 1856 he wrote foreign policy reports for the newspaper Pesti Napló (Pester Diary; Pest 1850–1939), a paper which often fell victim to censorship. His close relationship with Count István (Stefan) Széchenyi, a cult figure of the Hungarian nineteenth century is also of interest.6 Falk was his 4  See Judson (2016) on the formation of trade and industry associations in general. The Pester Lloyd Society and the periodical it initiated was by no means an isolated case. Urban and provincial examples are available. The foundations of such societies, which had different aims, as well as the periodicals were mostly directed at members of the middle class. It concerned the possibility to articulate oneself on current social questions and to establish discussion. And by the time it came to the abolition of the differences of status in these societies. 5  See Gotthard B. Schicker (2004). 6  Count István Széchenyi (1791–1860), Hungarian aristocrat, state reformer, influenced by English economists of his time. The construction of the Chain Bridge in Budapest and the

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confidant and he visited the Hungarian count weekly in the Döbling district of Vienna, where he lived in his last years. In 1830 and 1831 the Count published two works that made Hungarian economists pay attention; Hitel (Credit; 1830) and Világ (Light; 1831), in which he blamed the feudal production conditions of the Kingdom of Hungary for the backwardness and trade weakness of the state.7 Falk edited the Count’s writings and later published his life story in German and Hungarian. He also taught Hungarian to the Empress Elisabeth in Vienna. Besides all these activities, Falk was also involved in politics as a member of the Hungarian Parliament and was close to the Deák Party (named after its leader Ferenc Deák), which had worked extensively for the so called Ausgleich agreement between Austria and Hungary in 1867. Falk’s career took a leap forward in 1867 when he became editor-in-chief of Pester Lloyd where he remained almost until his death in 1908. He had probably been given the post at the newspaper at the instigation of Count Gyula Andrássy, the first Prime Minister of Hungary after the Ausgleich and because he was a close confidant of the Empress Elisabeth. Falk enlivened the content of the paper with his liberal political views and was also an amiable partner to his employer, the Pester Lloyd Society. In his opinion, freedom and prosperity was the goal of society and this could only be achieved through hard work and fulfilling one’s duty to the state. Only by uniting all forces could Hungary’s economy flourish for the good of all the people, who in turn must be rewarded for their efforts with a higher degree of rights. However, Falk did not want to bind himself and the newspaper to any political party. As a supporter of the Ausgleich, he was clearly loyal to the Habsburg views. “In political terms, the absolute loyalty with the Habsburg dynasty was decisive. The reference to Hungary’s special position within the monarchy seemed to be strong enough as a founding of the Academy of Sciences are credited to him. In the last 11 years of his life he lived in a mental hospital in Vienna Döbling, where he died by suicide. Széchenyi is a good example of a Hungarian patriot who, however, spoke much better German and French than Hungarian. 7  See Judson (2016). Széchenyi denounced the unpaid labour of unfree farmers in Hungary and the tradition of inalienability of aristocratic land ownership, which made it impossible to borrow money from the estates. This has prevented the modernization of agriculture. 920,000 farming families were registered without land and more than two thirds of the land were owned by the nobility, although large areas remained unoccupied. Szécheny’s ideas had been very positively received in Hungary in the 1930s and 1940s, but they did not lead to a social change.

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basis for all kinds of independence efforts […] to declare it illegal. Both in the editorials and in the commentaries, Pester Lloyd’s basic attitude of avoiding conflict was clearly expressed” (Bognár 2014, 137). The feuilleton played a dominant role in the newspaper and strongly influenced the cultural-political image of the Hungarian urban upper class. As such the paper published some of the most renowned cultural critics of the time: Adolf Dux, Adolf Silberstein, Emil Rothauser and later Ludwig Hevesi and Max Nordau.

The Ausgleich and the Political Position of Pester Lloyd As one can see, 1867 was not only an important year for Max Falk and Pester Lloyd, but also for the Habsburg Monarchy.8 It was the year of the Ausgleich, the agreement for the formation of two states, Austria and Hungary, where both were to have their own parliament with immediate effect. The states were put on a de jure equal basis (Dualism). Due to the constitutional reorganization of the relations of both states, representatives from both parliaments were sent to a joint committee, chaired by the emperor and king who represented the actual political power. Foreign affairs, the military and finance were reorganized into three joint ministries. For Hungary, which had traditionally been an agricultural country, the long-awaited political balance brought economic opportunities with Western Europe, new markets opened up, and conversely, the Western European economic power now also promoted the expansion of industry and transport in Hungary through the granting of loans. The social conditions in Hungary, however, were almost as archaic and feudal as in preceding centuries. Around the turn of the century only about 300 families, most of them aristocrats, shared a quarter of the developable land of Hungary. The rest of the landowners consisted of the middle nobility and the rich bourgeoisie, who had been allowed to acquire land after 1848. Sales of landowners’ produce were secured by the then already highly developed trading centre in Budapest. In the Hungarian capital, the Jewish bourgeoisie had meanwhile also developed into a considerable financial power, contributing to the city’s rise to become a financial and industrial metropolis. Until 1919, when the Miklós Horthy’s regime was e­ stablished, 8  See the works of Ignác Romsics (2017), István György Tóth (2005) as well as Pieter M. Judson (2016) on the impact of the Ausgleich on Hungary and Austria.

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Jews and the Hungarian capital had entered into a relationship with the promise of goals for both sides, in which the Jews usually took on all the functions which the nobility considered to be inappropriate, such as expertise in money trading, management positions in industry, agriculture and trade. As mentioned before, numerous members of the Pester Lloyd Society, as well as the editorial staff of the newspaper originated from the Jewish metropolitan bourgeoisie and confessed themselves as fully assimilated members of society with the Hungarian nation. The term nation however is somewhat problematic for Hungary: until the beginning of the nineteenth century it was understood as the social group of Hungarian aristocrats and the clergy, and only they formed the Natio Hungarica. The Hungarian equivalent for the above is nemzet. Magyar nemzet, Hungarian nation included all citizens of the Hungarian part of the Habsburg Monarchy. Even today the term is more than problematic as it refers to a shared history and language of Hungarian citizens. So it was not until the revolution of 1848–1849 that Jewish families were given equal rights, thus making their involvement in the economic world completely possible. Many of them assumed influential positions in finance and administration. The anti-Semitic propaganda in Hungary mainly based on the economic success of Jewish entrepreneurs, which repeatedly erupted, started from the proportionally small lower middle classes. However, in the second half of the nineteenth century it did not succeed in distracting the Hungarian government from their intended course, which welcomed the position of (assimilated) Jews in society. The upper middle classes in Budapest consisted of 800 to 1000 families, the elite of which consisted of about 100 to 150 families working in the wholesale trade, large scale industry and banking sectors. Compared to the noble families, however, their social prestige lagged far behind their economic status, especially in the case of Jewish families. Their way of life was also marked by a dichotomy. In their private life and as entrepreneurs, they cultivated the classical bourgeois values such as saving money, hard work and traditional family life, while at the same time adapting to the aristocrats’ representative lifestyle, building urban palaces and keeping servants. In politics, the ideals of the nobility were adopted: nationalism and liberalism. (Tóth 2005, 586) As early as 1873, however, the now independent Hungarian state was struggling with a financial crisis. The national debt had grown, the costs for the army had to be supported, and this led to the resignation of the politically ineffective Deák Party. It had to join forces with the Centre-Left Party, who had originally opposed the Ausgleich but acknowledged the

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political framework of the Habsburg Empire. What the party wanted was a better equilibrium within a dualistic state system. Later the two parties formed the Liberal Party, headed by Prime Minister Kálmán Tisza until 1900. Pester Lloyd and its editorial staff were close to this Liberal Party and its political programme. On 1 January 1891, Max Falk once again defined the concept of liberalism in an article in Pester Lloyd and campaigned for it. He saw the political system in Hungary threatened by new reactionary forces: In certain circles, it has not recently become fashionable to revile liberalism, to put all the evil in the world on its shoulders and, as a result, to issue the slogan: Delendum est [it should be destroyed]. Such efforts can only be smiled at […]. For liberalism is not just any theory which has been thought up by one or more people and which other people can then contrast with another theory, or any political system which can be summarized in certain points of the program, but a simple recognition of the fact that every human being without distinction has an innate right to freedom, which is necessary for his happiness, and the striving to satisfy this justified claim of every human being, as far as this is possible without endangering the existence of society and the state, as well as to eliminate all that stands in his way. […]9 (Pester Lloyd 1 January 1891)

Falk basically stated that society was still moving forward on questions of extending people’s freedom, and small setbacks did not prevent liberalism from continuing on its successful path. As far as Hungary was

9  “In gewissen Kreisen ist es neuestens weder Mode geworden, den Liberalismus zu schmähen, alles Uebel auf der Welt ihm in die Schuhe zu schieben und in Folge dessen die Parole auszugeben: Delendum est. Derlei Bemühungen kann man nur belächeln […]. Denn der Liberalismus ist nicht irgendeine Theorie, welche von einem oder mehreren Menschen ausgedacht wurde und welcher dann andere Menschen wieder eine andere Theorie gegenüberstellen können, oder irgend ein politisches System, welches sich in gewissen Programmpunkten zusammenfassen lässt, sondern eine einfache Anerkennung dessen, dass jeder Mensch ohne Unterschied ein angeborenes Recht?? auf Freiheit, welches zu seinem Glücke nothwendig ist und das Streben, diesen berechtigten Anspruch eines jeden Menschen, so weit dies ohne Gefährdung des Bestandes der Gesellschaft und des Staates möglich ist, zu befriedigen, so wie all Dasjenige zu beseitigen, was ihm im Wege steht. […]” Die Gesellschaft bewege sich in Fragen der Ausweitung der Freiheit der Menschen stets nach vorne, kleine Rückschläge hinderten den Liberalismus nicht daran, auf seiner Siegesstraße weiter zu gehen. Was Ungarn anging, so war er überzeugt, dass “die weitaus überwiegende Mehrheit […] auch fernerhin stets im liberalen Lager stehen werde” (Englisch translation by AS).

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concerned, he was convinced that “the vast majority […] would also continue to be in the liberal camp.” (Pester Lloyd 1 January 1891) During the second half of the nineteenth century, under the leadership of Falk, the newspaper developed into the leading liberal, commercial and cultural newspaper of the German-language press in Budapest and, at the same time, of the German-speaking bourgeoisie. But it was, as Hedvig Újváry correctly writes, a Hungarian newspaper written in German and increasingly aiming at foreign German-speaking countries. It wanted to provide accurate information to the readers who had been informed about the conditions in Hungary only by the “not always impartial reporting of foreign, mostly hostile Viennese newspapers…” (Újváry 2001, 8).

The Concepts of National Identity, the Question of Nationalities and Pester Lloyd The question of nationality in Hungary was closely linked to the question of the use of language, therefore, the social and political situation was extremely complicated. A total of six large ethnic groups and twelve smaller lived in the kingdom, many of them with their own language. Among these citizens, Hungarians formed a minority of around 40%.10 The Hungarian language had only begun to become a literary language towards the end of the eighteenth century, not least as a reaction to the language policy of Joseph II, who wanted to make German the administrative language of the entire Habsburg Empire (1784). After the withdrawal of the decree of 1789, Latin was re-established as the official language in the Kingdom of Hungary and was to remain so until 1844. This also had a practical side, as none of the national languages was therefore given preference. Hungarian was out of the question as an official language because at the turn of the nineteenth century it was still regarded as the unrefined language of the peasants and the lower classes. It was a language whose rules first needed to be laid down. However, driven by political considerations in the 1830s and 1840s it became increasingly 10  Around 1842 there were up to 18 larger and smaller ethnic groups on the territory of Hungary. The largest group were the Hungarians with 4.8 million people, followed by the Romanians with 2.2  million, the Slovaks with 1.7  million. The German nationality was 1.27 million, roughly the same as the Serbian and Croatian nationalities. The rest consisted of Croats, Ruthenians and Jews as well as immigrant Bulgarians, Greeks, French and other smaller ethnic groups (Tóth 2005, 441).

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established as the official language of the kingdom, which in itself was problematic with regard to the other ethnic groups living in the territory. “In the longer run this assertion undermined the way in which many non-­ Hungarian-­speaking Hungarians understood their own identities, as well as threatening to divide Hungary” (Judson 2016, 158). After 1848 many German-speaking Hungarians learned Hungarian and often acquired Hungarian-sounding names instead of their German or Slavic ones. This, of course, served as proof of their loyalty to Hungary. Many of them were Jews who wanted to show their patriotism. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the liberal policies of Kálmán Tisza and Ferenc Deák helped to restrain an emerging conflict of nationalities, but it still simmered among different ethnic groups. The free exercise of language and religion was granted to everyone, but the first problems arose with the strengthened position of the economically significant national minorities, who had gradually also come into possession of land and capital and now demanded their own rights. The ideological reinforcement of Hungarian national propaganda was a vociferous response to this. As Szász puts it: Deák and Eötvös [Jószef Eötvös, 1813–1871] also sought to implement the liberal principles contained in nationality legislation. They assured the Serbs and Romanians of ecclesiastical autonomy, assured that every pupil should acquire education, considered it natural that the Serbian or Romanian government should offer its support to the ecclesiastical and cultural institutions of the native Serbs and Romanians. But also the ruling party, like the independent opposition, turned away from this liberal inheritance [...] (Szász 201)

The policy of the future that was intended stood for the assimilation of ethnic minorities within the territory of the Kingdom of Hungary and for a more effective Magyarization and to some degree this had already begun to take place. The unresolved and complex questions of how one might deal with the nationality of different peoples is also reflected in Pester Lloyd. In a contribution dated 24 October 1895, the editorial team takes a pragmatic approach to the question of nationality and shows a tendency to deny the problems that were developing: “[…] because in such studies, which are mostly academic, it is important to determine whether the focus is more on the ‘Hungarian’ or on the ‘state’ when defining the concept of the ‘Hungarian state’. […] the question of nationality […] has only been

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raised in those circles which still cannot come to terms, or let alone be friends with the idea, or rather the living fact of the Hungarian state”11 (Pester Lloyd 24 October 1895). Pieter M. Judson, in agreement with the editorial position states in this context that national movements have at best had a fleeting influence on the affairs and rhythm of everyday life. The broad masses would not have aligned themselves with national goals either in terms of their economic behaviour or their educational goals. As he puts it: “The mere existence of linguistic, religious and regional differences among the citizens of empire did not by themselves determine the course of imperial history…” (Judson 2016, 10). Further proof that the editors were convinced that the question of nationality seen as a problem, was a construct of destructive political forces, is provided by a report on 13 August 1902 from the annual celebration of the poet Nikolaus Lenau (1802–1850) in his birthplace of Csatád. The celebration was attended by important representatives from the worlds of politics and culture as well as by the predominantly peasant population of the village. Although the author of the article doubted that Lenau’s significance was clear to the “simple people,” he liked their display of commitment to the Hungarian nation: on 14 August 1902, a cultural editor from Zsombolya wrote: The fact is that these splendid, intelligent, and also gratifyingly wealthy Swabians were aware of the occasion and the man whose memory was celebrated, and that they regarded the interest of the guests from near and far as a rare honor. These farmers spontaneously paid homage to Magyarisation; most of them know a few Hungarian words and their children already come from Hungarian elementary and civic schools to their father’s economy with complete command of the national language […]12 (Pester Lloyd 14 August 1902) 11  “ […] denn es kommt bei solchen, zumeist doch nur akademischen Untersuchungen darauf an, ob man bei der Ausgestaltung des Begriffs vom ‘ungarischen Staat’ den Schwerpunkt mehr auf das ‘ungarisch’ oder auf den ‘Staat’ verlegt.[ …]; die Nationalitätenfrage ist […] nur in solchen Kreisen aufgeworfen worden, welche sich mit der Idee, oder besser gesagt, mit der lebendigen Tatsache des ungarischen Staates noch immer nicht abfinden, geschweige denn befreunden können” (Englisch translation by AS). 12  “Tatsache ist, dass sich diese prächtigen, intelligenten und auch erfreulich wohlhabenden Schwaben über den Anlaß und den Mann, dessen Andenken gefeiert wurde, im Klaren waren und daß sie das Interesse der Gäste von Nah und Fern als seltene Ehrung dankbar empfanden. Der Magyarisierung huldigten diese Landwirthe spontan; ein paar ungarische Worte wissen die Meisten unter ihnen und ihre Kinder kommen bereits aus ungarischen

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He continues his argument quoting a story of a high-ranking military figure and a Swabian from Rekas. After the freedom fight of 1848 the military officer visited the village and asked the honour guard if they would “if necessary, take up arms as good Austrian subjects?” And the good Upper Swabian defiantly said, “Wir, K. Hoheit, san ungarische Schwaben!” (Your Highness, we are Hungarian Swabians!). The “German Agitation” would only fall on deaf ears here (Pester Lloyd 14 August 1902). As far as Pester Lloyd’s political commitment to the multi-ethnic Kingdom of Hungary is concerned, it can be said that the editors consistently trusted in the efficacy of cultural diversity.

Magyarization and the Dominance of Hungarian National Literature Looking at the feuilleton and the other cultural columns of the newspaper in the second half of the nineteenth century and the turn of the century, there are no articles that deal with, or report on, the culture and literature of the nationalities in the political territory of the Kingdom of Hungary. Rather, the editorial aim of the newspaper was the dissemination of Hungarian literature and culture throughout the entire state under Hungarian rule. In 1904 Albert Berzewiczy, the later president of the important Budapest Kisfaludy Society,13 wrote in Pester Lloyd: “In the old days it was our task to save our language from decay, to bring it to a new development, to re-conquer the alienated Magyars, our national world of thought and to maintain in Magyarism the consciousness of the unity of national individuality. This task has now been completed; now our literature has a greater role: to extend the dominion of our literature to the whole territory to which our power extends, to promote with its influence the spiritual fusion of the nation divided into race and language, to justify its political independence and weight …”14 (Pester Lloyd 7 February Elementar- und Bürgerschulen mit vollständiger Beherrschung der Landessprache in die väterliche Wirtschaft[…]” (Englisch translation by AS). 13  The Kisfaludy Society was founded in 1837  in memory of the brothers Sándor and Károly Kisfaludy, two leading figures of Hungarian literary life. 14  “In der alten Zeit war es unsere Aufgabe, unsere Sprache vor dem Verderb zu bewahren, sie einer neuen Entwicklung zuzuführen, die entfremdeten Magyaren, unsere nationale Gedankenwelt zurückzuerobern und in dem Magyarentum das Bewusstsein der Zusammengehörigkeit der nationalen Individualität zu erhalten. Diese Aufgabe ist jetzt vollendet; nun hat unsere Literatur eine größere Rolle: sie soll die Herrschaft unserer Literatur

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1904). From this perspective it was necessary to finally recognize that in literature, the national is what reflects the “genius” of a society, and that only matters rooted in history are of any importance. The selection of Hungarian writers presented in the newspaper underlines its political position.15 Among the celebrated authors is a man who is almost forgotten today, who distinguished himself above all through his novels and stage plays, but who also wrote political papers: Ferenc Herczeg.16 Herczeg was born in 1863 and was the son of a German family from Banat and at that time he still bore the name Franz Herzog. Only in his time at school did he learn Hungarian, and his Magyarized name and went through a transformation into militant Hungarian. At first Herczeg wrote unsuccessfully in German. In 1890 at the age of 27, he published his first novel, Fenn és lenn (Top and Bottom), and was immediately awarded a major prize by the Reclams Universal Library. On 7 May 1892 he was for the first time mentioned in Pester Lloyd by the editor Adolf Silberstein who wrote: “There is just something of all good in Herczeg […] his people are well characterized, without being obtrusively painted black or red, […] all well-bred, act according to catechism […] We move mostly in decent company […] Like the circles, the tone of the young author is also moderate […] The little human foolish things make him smile, without him falling into the popular extreme of pessimism or world-­ improving intolerance”17 (Pester Lloyd 7 May 1892). Herczeg liked to call himself a naturalist (something he obviously had never been) and with his auf das ganze Gebiet ausdehnen, auf das sich unsere Macht erstreckt, mit ihrem Einfluss die geistige Verschmelzung nach Rasse und Sprache zerstückelten Nation fördern, ihre politische Selbständigkeit und ihr politisches Gewicht auch durch unsere geistige Selbständigkeit und unser geistiges Gewicht auch durch unsere geistige Selbständigkeit und unser geistiges Gewicht rechtfertigen” (English translation by AS). 15  Naturalism as a movement was also much quoted and discussed in the newspaper, and Hungarian authors who could be subsumed under this term, such as Sándor Bródy, and so on, were discussed. The all too faithful depiction of lower social strata and their way of life did not always meet with the understanding of the editors, however. 16  For the life and work of see Jenő Pintér, o.J. 17  “Es ist eben etwas von allem Guten in Herczeg […] seine Menschen sind gut charakterisiert, ohne aufdringlich schwarz oder roth bemalt zu sein, […] alle wohlerzogen, handeln nach dem Kathechismus [...] Wir bewegen uns meist in wohlanständiger Gesellschaft […] Wie die Kreise ist auch der Ton des jungen Autors ein modern feiner […] Die kleinen menschlichen Thorheiten nötigen ihm ein Lächeln ab, ohne dass er dadurch gleich in das beliebte Extrem des Pessimismus oder weltverbessernder Unausstehlichkeit verfallen würde” (English translation by AS)

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works he served the literary tastes of the upper middle classes and the conservative-liberal cultural journalists. His subjects originated in the halcyon “golden age of peace” in Hungary and the backdrop of his literature were depictions of the gentry, the Hungarian military, the dashing Hussars and their code of honour. His attitudes were undoubtedly elitist. After his initial success he experienced a real breakthrough with his play A dolovai nábob leánya (The Daughter of the Nabob of Dolova, 1894), which was performed more than 200 times at the Hungarian National Theatre. In reaction to the work, Silberstein wrote in Pester Lloyd on 11 March 1893 that Herczeg was the hero of the day, “the ruler of the feuilleton and of all libraries.” “The intelligent audience […] rewarded […] the natural, simple and at the same time cosmopolitan dialogue, the charming military figures and scenes, which are splendidly drawn after nature[…]” (Pester Lloyd 11 March 1893). The “hero of the day,” Herczeg, moves in his play amongst imperial hussars and the gentry, and the play it is about marriage; the way to make a prudent choice when finding a suitable husband and an adequate dowry. In 1896 the journalist and art critic Emil Rothauser wrote: “Franz Herczeg occupies an exceptional position in the Hungarian writing world. He is called the leader of the young generation, and it would not be easy to name two writers who would even try to come close to him”18 (Pester Lloyd 25 September 1896). For years Herczeg would remain as the darling of the cultural critics of Pester Lloyd. Around the turn of the century, however, Herczeg’s popularity on stage began to gradually dwindle as his audiences began to expect more varied topics. As a reaction to this Herczeg turned to Hungarian history, successfully staging a number of works. Of course, Pester Lloyd didn’t drop its favourite and as late as 1904, Rothauser wrote that “the fine, clever playwright and the most distinguished stage in Budapest belonged together like a precious gem in a beautiful setting” (Pester Lloyd 23 April 1904).19 Between 1892 and 1909 Herczeg was mentioned in 297 articles in Pester Lloyd and celebrated throughout as the star of young Hungarian literature. As far as Herczeg’s later reception is concerned, he experienced 18  “Franz Herczeg nimmt in der ungarischen Schriftstellerwelt eine ganz exceptionelle Stellung ein. Man nennt ihn den Führer der jungen Generation und es wäre nicht leicht in der Geschwindigkeit zwei Schriftsteller zu bezeichnen, die auch nur versuchen würden, es ihm gleich zu tun” (English translation AS). 19  PL, 23 April 1904.

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another peak of recognition at the time of the Horthy regime. However, since the Second World War he cannot be regarded as belonging to the important literary canon of Hungary. After 1949 he lived in Hungary as a politically disgraced representative of a reactionary and elitist view of the world and died in 1954. Neither the reading public nor literary critics have paid him much recent attention, despite the fact that was once nominated for the Nobel Prize. In his political writings, his German descent and position as an “assimilated Hungarian” is clearly articulated. This can be seen in his 1902 paper on the question of nationality which bears similarities to the way that Berzewiczy would express this a short time later: “In Hungary there is only one race that possesses a culture worth mentioning: the Hungarian one. There is no other culture here, there won’t be, and there can’t be […]. There is only culture where there is a national feeling, since the national feeling is the driving force in the great works of mankind […]. In Hungary, only the Hungarian race can live a national and cultural life, because for 1000 years it has assimilated to all climatic and other external conditions that make national and cultural life possible on this earth. Whoever wants to be a man of culture in this country must become Hungarian.”20 (Herczeg 1902) His essays were based on an idea of overcoming national differences and the unconditional desire to maintain the old order of the Kingdom of Hungary. The editorial staff of Pester Lloyd had finally reached the same conclusions. It did not only not mention the culture of the peoples living in the Hungarian sphere of power, but also that of the other nationalities of the entire Habsburg Empire—with the exception of Austria. The paper was mainly oriented towards Western European literature, music, the performing arts, German, Austrian, French, English and Italian culture. It was not in the interest of Pester Lloyd to introduce Hungarian culture to the Eastern parts of Europe, but only to the Western sphere, to the German-­ speaking world, where, after Budapest, it had its largest readership. In the case of Slavic literature, the Russian authors Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and 20  “In Ungarn gibt es nur eine Rasse, die eine nennenswerte Kultur besitzt: die ungarische. Eine andere Kultur gibt es hier nicht, wird es nicht geben, und kann es auch nicht geben[…]. Kultur gibt es nur dort, wo es ein nationales Gefühl gibt, nachdem das Nationalgefühl die treibende Kraft in den großen Werken der Menschheit ist […]. In Ungarn kann nur die ungarische Rasse ein nationales und kulturelles Leben leben, da sie sich seit 1000 Jahren an alle klimatischen und andere äußere Verhältnisse assimilierte, die auf dieser Erde das nationale und kulturelle Leben möglich machen. Wer in diesem Land ein Kulturmensch sein will, der muss Ungar werden” (English translation by AS).

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Gorky were discussed in the paper. Gabriele Melischek comes to a similar conclusion in her analysis of the literary frame of reference of the Neue Freie Presse and Pester Lloyd, namely, an orientation of the newspaper towards the West. It describes a survey of reviews, literary criticism and theatre reviews as well as authors discussed in the years 1880/1890, 1900/1910, which results in 491 entries for Neue Freie Presse and 347 for Pester Lloyd. Pester Lloyd mainly included contemporary authors, while the more conservative newspaper Neue Freie Presse mainly wrote about established authors. Before the turn of the century, and with regard to the selection of authors in the Neue Freie Presse, Melischek writes of a German-­ national framing. According to her evaluation, Hungarian literature in Pester Lloyd and Neue Freie Presse accounted, respectively, for only 11% and 9% of its cited content, while foreign-language literature accounted for 59% and 93%, respectively (of which German-language literature accounted for 21% and 40%, respectively, followed by a very high proportion of French and English literature). While above all the Vienna newspaper preferred the German classical period, which in turn was replaced at the end of the century by German authors such as Gerhard Hauptmann or Theodor Fontane, the proportion of international, non-German authors in the Pester Lloyd’s frame of reference grew steadily. The newspaper is characterized by a wider spectrum of international writing, including Italian and Spanish literature. “The frame of reference conveyed in Budapest’s leading medium is largely determined by foreign-language authors, even if the German-language ones are not included. […] The international—or rather Western European—frame of reference undoubtedly served to legitimise a national Hungarian literature and was in line with the state policy objectives supported by Pester Lloyd, which he sought to communicate to the German-speaking elite public” (Melischek 2014, 22).

Conclusion Pester Lloyd in its development from a politically independent business paper or Handelsblatt to one of the most important opinion-forming organs of the Kingdom of Hungary offers a very good foil for an analysis of the national, social, economic and cultural development of the state. The liberal editorial staff of the newspaper saw its task as supporting the Ausgleich with Austria and emphasizing the political opportunities that this created for Hungary. The possible negative influences that the

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growing nationalism among the peoples of the Kingdom of Hungary might have had on the country are happily negated or regarded as calculated forms of disturbance. At the same time, what was happening at a macrocosmic level in Hungarian society is perfectly reflected in microcosm in the editorial office of the paper: the systematic repression of the non-­ Hungarian forces of the kingdom, the compulsion to assimilate and the commitment to the Hungarian nation and the growing lack of freedom of other peoples living in the Kingdom of Hungary to maintain their own cultures. At the broadest level, the wellbeing of all citizens is paramount and the only way to achieve this is through Magyarization. It must be pointed out that the newspaper has today still been the subject of very little research. More detailed investigations regarding the individual editors and their political positions are still needed. Miksa Falk was only one of the representatives of the Llyod! Nevertheless, I believe that only a general understanding of the direction of the periodical has been adequately analysed. However, the turn of the century also brought a change for Pester Lloyd. The significance of modernity in art, literature and society was gradually recognized and acknowledged in the paper as well. Ferenc Herczeg was replaced by Ady Endre and the Nyugat-generation, but this change is due to a completely different generation of newspaper contributors.

References Bachleitner, Norbert. 2017. Literarische Zensur in Österreich von 1751 bis 1848. Wien: Böhlau. http://www.boehlau-verlag.com/download/164840/ 978-3-205-20502-9_OpenAccess.pdf. 6 May 2019. Bognár, Zsuzsa. 2014. Völkerbilder und Völkerkontakte im Pester Lloyd während des Ersten Weltkrieges. In Medialisierung des Zerfalls der Doppelmonarchie in deutschsprachigen Regionalperiodika zwischen 1880 und 1914, ed. Zoltán Szendi, 129–149. Wien: Lit Verlag. ———. 2019. Moderne-Debatten auf der Grundlage des kulturellen Transfers im Pester Lloyd der 1900-er Jahre. Hungarian Studies 2019(1), 23–38. ———. 1902. Német nemzetiségi kérdés. Budapest: Singer & Wolfner. https:// archive.org/stream/nmetnemzetisgik00hercgoog/nmetnemzetisgik00hercgoog_djvu.txt. 6 May 2019. Judson, Pieter M. 2016. The Habsburg Empire. A New History. Cambridge: The Belknap Press. (Kindle Edition). Melischek, Gabriele. 2014. Krisenkommunikation am Vorabend des Ersten Weltkriegs. In Medialisierung des Zerfalls der Doppelmonarchie in deutschsprachi-

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gen Regionalperiodika zwischen 1880 und 1914, ed. Zoltán Szendi, 13–24. Wien: Lit Verlag. Pester Lloyd. 1854–1954. Ofen-Pest: various publishers. Pesti Napló. 1850–1939. Pest. https://adtplus.arcanum.hu/hu/collection/ PestiNaplo/. 6 May 2019. Pintér, Jenő. https://www.arcanum.hu/hu/online-kiadvanyok/ MagyarIrodalom-magyar-irodalomtortenet-1/magyar-irodalomtortenetpinter-jeno-5116/8-a-magyar-irodalom-a-xx-szazad-elso-harmadaban-2885/ herczeg-ferenc-2B77/herczeg-ferenc-elete-2B78/. 1 June 2019. Romsics, Ignác. 2017. Magyarország története. Budapest: Kossuth kiadó. Róza, Maria. 2006. ‘Ihr Männer auf, jetzt ruft die Zeit’ Deutsche Texte aus Ungarn zur Revolution und zum Freiheitskampf 1848/1849. Kakanien Revisited. http://www.kakanien-revisited.at/beitr/materialien/MRozsa1.pdf. 6 May 2019. Schicker, Gotthard B. 2004. Der Falk der Königin, Exkurs über den Chefredakteur des Pester Lloyd und Vertrauten der ungarischen Königin Elisabeth, Dr. Maximilian Falk. http://www.pesterlloyd.net/html/2004schickergfalkderkoe nigin.html. 6 May 2019. Seidler, Andrea. 1981. Literaturkritik im Feuilleton des Pester Lloyd um 1900. Eine Untersuchung anhand von Beispielen aus der deutschen, österreichischen und ungarischen Literatur. Diss. Vienna: Phil. Szász, Zoltán, and András Gergely. 1978. Kiegyezés után. Budapest: Gondolat. Tóth, István Görgy. 2005. Geschichte Ungarns. Budapest: Corvina. Újváry, Hedvig. 2001. Die Geschichte des Pester Lloyd zwischen 1854–1875.I. Magyar Könyvszemle 2001 (2): 189–203. Online http://epa. oszk.hu/00000/00021/00029/0006-230.html. 6 May 2019.

CHAPTER 12

A “Roman Affair”: A Croatian Priest College in the Habsburg Press Debate of 1901 Tamara Scheer

Introduction On 16 November 2001, the Vatican published a congratulation address in the name of Pope John Paul II. It was directed to the Croatian Pontifical College San Girolamo in Rome, which celebrated its 100th birthday. The papal note referred to the college’s foundation in 1901 as the “Collegium Hieronymianum pro Chroatica Gente” (College of Jerome for the Croatian People), and highlighted its historic tradition of serving “diligently for the Croatian nation” by offering priests, “who belong due to geographic origin and language to the Croatian nation, to complement their studies at the papal universities in Rome” (Pope John Paul II 2001). This note briefly mentioned that the institution had been called “Collegium Hieronymianum Illiricorum” (Jerome College of Illyrians) for a while, but did not explain why or what the background had been for its foundation in 1901.

T. Scheer (*) Institute for East European History, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Chovanec, O. Heilo (eds.), Narrated Empires, Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55199-5_12

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When reading the papal note, one might wonder why it could be of importance to write an article specifically on the Habsburg state’s opinion on the Croatian college, rather than referring to other academic literature which is already available on its history (e.g. see Golub 1968–1969; Žutić 2010; Zvonar 2005; Mandušić 2006). What these scholarly works often under-value or even leave out, however, is the perspective of the Habsburg state institutions that accompanied what was, in practice, the re-­foundation of an existing hospice and college under a new name which trace back their existence to the fifteenth century. When going through the existing scholarly work it is confusing what exactly the name, structure and beneficiaries of this institution were during the nineteenth century. Names changed, but also the beneficiaries’ national attributions differed depending on the author and the language used. What is important to highlight is that until 1901 the institution used the term “Illyrian” in its name rather than Croatian (Žutić 2010, 24). The uncertainty over the institution’s (national) character becomes also apparent in the Habsburg debate that surrounded its re-foundation. Thus, in 1901 a cross-governmental and press debate took place across the Habsburg Monarchy, which stressed in particular the historic and future national character of the existing institution, which stood under the patronage of the Habsburg sovereign Franz Joseph I. This chapter will take a closer look at how the 1901 re-­founding of the “Illyrian” college as “Croatian” institution was interpreted in the Habsburg press, and how the allegedly transnational empire and the allegedly transnational Roman Catholic church found themselves caught in various languages and narratives of nationhood that they could not always control. Taking the college as an example for the complex negotiation processes between state, church, and local agents it shows how fluid identity conceptions and national affiliations were towards the turn of the century.

Religion and Nation in the Late Habsburg Monarchy The late Habsburg Monarchy from the 1867 Ausgleich with Hungary to the 1918 dissolution was characterized by its diversity—not just administratively, ethnically, and linguistically, but also religiously. By constitution, all recognized denominations were at least officially equal before the law (see Wandruszka and Urbanitsch 1995). Different kinds of believers shared common spaces, although Catholics constituted the largest number and resided in all parts of the Monarchy. Around 1900, Roman

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Catholics of the so-called Croatian nationality—the term used by the Habsburg bureaucracy—settled not only in both halves of Austria-­ Hungary: in Austrian Dalmatia, Littoral, and Istria, but also in Hungarian Croatia-Slavonia and the city of Rijeka. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, under the Habsburg occupation of 1878, they  made up roughly one third of the population. Around 1900, regardless of language use and ethnic background, the term Croatian could have therefore meant an inhabitant of Hungarian Croatia, a member of the Croat ethno-linguistic “nation” or a nationality. For centuries by demonstrating their unity with the pope Habsburg emperors had promulgated themselves as Roman Catholic rulers. In the late nineteenth century, both the Habsburg rulers and the pope were challenged by nationalism, and officially claimed for themselves the preservation of a supra-national/transnational identity rather than a national one. Andreas Gottsmann has argued that similar to Austria-Hungary, the Popes and their bureaucrats (Holy See) reacted on the ever-growing questions relating to national unification movements with “cluelessness” (Gottsmann 2010, 16). Pope Leo XIII (1810–1903) tried to counter the national zeitgeist through tough policies of centralization (Gottsmann 2010, 74). However, this was met with the increasing agency of local non-state actors who attempted to influence imperial politics. Isa Blumi has emphasized, and this is also apparent for the Habsburg Monarchy, that for the Ottoman Empire, and by not asking imperial authorities first, “local community leaders proved adept at securing some leverage through creating alliances with [religious and state] authorities in Istanbul, Rome, etc.” (Blumi 2011, 158). Thus, the debate about the foundation of the Croatian college was characterized by the initiatives of local bishops who by not informing Habsburg, Austrian, or Hungarian state institutions in advance directly intervened with papal institutions. For the later Croatian college this meant that both the Holy See and the Habsburg Monarchy had to manoeuvre carefully to ensure their own political interests, a good diplomatic relationship with each other, but also with believers and citizens for whom the bishops claimed to take over agency (Gottsmann 2010, 74). Reorganizing or founding a Roman Catholic institution in Rome in which Habsburg citizens participated—as was the case when a new Croatian college should be created out of an older one—involved a number of Habsburg ministries, in particular the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Austrian and Hungarian ministries of Religious Affairs, not least since the college enjoyed state financial support. In addition to this

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administrative interest, there was political interest in the collegium on behalf of the state authorities. This was the case for every issue concerning national issues which touched upon the Habsburg nationality question in general, and in particular for Croatian, and the South Slavic national movements. Last but not least, all issues that related to questions of nationality gained immediate reflection in newspapers across the Monarchy. For this chapter, I analyse not only the governmental and ministerial debate, but also the media of which Pieter M. Judson has concluded that it often “tell[s] the historian far more about their producers than about their subjects” (Judson 2006, 182). Thus, this study demonstrates how carefully Habsburg bureaucrats had to manoeuvre through the public debate, which accompanied the college foundation, and how they argued for balance in their decisions by trying not to harm any nationality or party involved. Catholic priest colleges were important institutions for Habsburg citizens in Rome. They organized pilgrimages from the empire, ran so-called national churches that celebrated mass in the mother tongues of their visitors, and hosted priests or seminarians from various crown lands and nationalities of the Monarchy. In the second half of the nineteenth century, all of them underwent a reform process for the negotiation of their “national” character, as well as for future members and beneficiaries. While, for most institutions, this did not garner much public attention, the creation of the “Croatian” identity was discussed throughout the Monarchy and beyond. Throughout most of its existence, the ethnic Croatian character of the hospice and collegium of St. Jerome—catering to priests and pilgrims from Illyria and Dalmatia—had been a non-issue, but from the perspective of the state administration and public press in 1901, it seemed to be of crucial importance. When analysing state administrative files and newspapers published in the Habsburg Monarchy1 at the turn of the century, it becomes obvious that the foundation of the college in no way took place without friction, and it was accompanied by a major dispute about who should benefit from and participate in the future college. The debate became more heated in September 1901, when the Viennese daily Reichspost even entitled the dispute the “Roman Affair” (Reichspost 1901b, 1–2). 1  I have limited the press analysis to the major newspapers in the German language, as they are more easily comparable when it comes to historic terminology, situated in Vienna, Budapest, and Zagreb as the administrative towns mostly involved in the college issue.

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Although questions (and even public debates) of national belonging, identities, and loyalties were a daily concern in the late Habsburg Monarchy, with its multiple newspapers in many languages and vivid parliamentary debates, this example is one of the rare ones where not only almost all main administrative parts were involved (Austria, Hungary/ Croatia-Slavonia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina), but also two foreign authorities, the Holy See and Italian ministries. The Habsburg Monarchy’s relationship with Italy, which according to its own definition had conquered vast regions to liberate Italians from imperial Austrian reign, was still troublesome at the turn of the century. According to Isa Blumi, particularly when it came to Balkan affairs, this relationship was characterized by a decades-old rivalry. And it was exactly through church institutions where this rivalry was fought out in South Eastern Europe (Blumi 2011, 157–158).

A “Croatian” College: From a Reformation Plan to a Papal Breve In early 1901, the Holy See informed the Habsburg Ministry of Foreign Affairs of a reform work that would lay ground for the foundation of a Croatian college in Rome, replacing the already existent college for Illyrians. The Habsburg minister who was involved might have thought the issue would not meet with difficulties, and simply handed the note over to the Croatian governor (Jelić 1902, 68). It was not until April of the same year that Habsburg institutions started to deal with the college issue more closely. In that month the Hungarian Minister President Kálmán Széll asked the joint government in Vienna for support and even for intervention. This was a rare occurrence, as usually Hungarian authorities tended to point to their sole responsibility over so-called internal Hungarian issues. This could have probably been the case if only bishops from Hungarian Croatian-Slavonia had been involved. On this occasion, the Hungarian prime minister indicated to Vienna that the issue should be a common concern. His note indicates that he opposed the papal reorganization plans for the already existing, “Illyrian”, or “Dalmatian” college as Croatian. A booklet published after the affair, which drew readers’ attention on the college foundation, later called this intervention a “Hungarian diplomatic intrigue” (Jelić 1902, 78). In fact, the notes exchanged between Vienna and Budapest during the spring of 1901

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indicate that it was not at all clear what exactly the papal plans had been. Thus, the Habsburg ambassador to the Vatican, Friedrich Count Revertera von Salandra, was ordered to investigate and report about the papal plans, as well as the history of the existing college and its current status. While Revertera was a well-experienced envoy, the Hungarian minister president Széll was relatively new in his post (since 1899). Nevertheless, what becomes clear through the exchanged notes is that it was Revertera who first expressed concerns that the papal reorganization plans might cause trouble and probably conflict with Hungarian as well as Habsburg state interests. Revertera, who heralded from an Italian family, had already become ambassador to the Holy See in 1888. For a long time, he had become known as an expert on national issues in which the Roman Catholic church was involved (Urbanitsch 2003, 478–479). The lengthy report Revertera compiled offered not only general information on the history of the college since its foundation as a hospice in 1453, but in particular on who founded it, who had subsequently paid for or donated to it, and who benefited from it or gained access to it. He ended with a comment on the ratio in which Croats and Dalmatians participate(d) in the institute.2 According to Revertera’s report the college was founded by a pilgrim from Dalmatia who asked for papal permission to establish a hospice for poor pilgrims of “Dalmatian and Illyrian nation” (Natio Dalmatica seu Illirica). However, in the fifteenth century, the term natio was not used in an ethnic sense, nor was it based on language use, but was simply referring to someone’s place of origin (Judson 2016, 43–44). Since the papal plans seemed to transform the “Illyrian” college into an ethnic Croatian institution, a dispute occurred among Habsburg bureaucrats over who contributed and benefited from the institution in the centuries since its foundation. As Revertera emphasized, since its foundation the institute was run on the basis of private donors, whose Slavic names are exactly listed. In its more recent history, Revertera noted, the hospice’s administration was run by members of the “local Dalmatian community” who lived in the Papal State.3 Interestingly, Revertera referred to this community as Dalmatians, which was probably the term they used themselves. 2   Austrian State Archives Vienna (ÖStA)/Allgemeines Ministerium für Kultus und Unterricht (MKU), Neuer Kultus Konv. Institut San Girolamo, Revertera Report (7 May 1901). 3   Austrian State Archives Vienna (ÖStA)/Allgemeines Ministerium für Kultus und Unterricht (MKU), Neuer Kultus Konv. Institut San Girolamo, Revertera Report (7 May 1901).

Verwaltungsarchiv (AVA), (NK), Katholisch, Kt. 894, Verwaltungsarchiv (AVA), (NK), Katholisch, Kt. 894,

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Dalmatia, although it had seen changes in its geographical borders and state belonging over the centuries, around 1900 it was mostly part of Habsburg Austria, and according to the state census, members of the Croatian and Italian nationality made up the majority of its residents. Dominique Reill has argued that due to some local elites it was “a self propagated multi-national region,” although Croatian nationalism had since 1894 heated up in Dalmatia (Gottsmann 2010, 98). However, owing to its Venetian history, it was the Italian language and literature that had influenced this region culturally despite the fact that over ninety per cent of the population spoke a Slavic dialect (Kirchner Reill 2012, 118–119). What will be discussed in the next part of this text is how many Habsburg contemporaries, not only Croats from Croatia, but also newspapers and state authorities across the Monarchy tended to use the term Dalmatian synonymously for its resident Italian speakers, while local elites, had for a long time held to a perception of Dalmatian identity (nazione Dalmata) and always understood it as a bilingual entity (see Clewing 2001). But even the perspective of the state authorities was contradictory. For example and for a long time, army statistics had used a category such as “Croats (Serbs and Dalmatians)”, which at least clearly indicates that the biggest state institution understood them as Slavs, as Italians made up an own category (Militär-Statistisches Jahrbuch 1902, 150). Thus, while Revertera’s report emphasized that the college was once dedicated to the members of the Dalmatian and Illyrian nation, the latter a term as he emphasized at that time used for Croats, he also pointed to the fact that it was mostly Slavs from Dalmatia who contributed and benefited. Revertera reported that since in the seventeenth century there was a dispute: if “all Slavs or only these from Southern countries where entitled to benefit”, which clearly indicates that no other group than Slavs were allowed to benefit. It was decided in the seventeenth century that with the exception of Dalmatians “Croats, Bosniaks and Slavonians” would have access, while “Carniolans, Carinthians, Styrians, Serbs, Montenegrins, and Bulgarians, as well as Poles, Russians and Czechs”, would be excluded from the hospice. The reorganization of the institution in 1901 was not the first. Already in the 1850s, reorganization had taken place, which was part of a general reformation of priest colleges in Rome. For many centuries all Roman priest colleges had been located in the Papal State, but this changed in 1859 with the establishment of the Italian Kingdom, which dismantled

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the Papal State and confined it to the city of Rome, which in turn was conquered in 1870. Afterwards this, colleges and hospices were no longer under papal, but rather Italian state jurisdiction, which made reforms inevitable: for example they were required to pay higher taxes to the Italian state.4 Moreover, most of these institutions still bore names from regions whose state belonging had changed severely since they were founded, and some of which were not even in use any more. While Dalmatian was at least still the name of a province, Illyria had primarily become the name of a political movement aiming at Croatian national unification. As Revertera mentioned the hospice and college of St. Jerome was reorganized during these years, but on a very limited scale. In these years, Josip Juraj Strossmayer, an Osijek born, Roman Catholic priest, who was an important figure for the Illyrian movement, became majorly involved (see Marijan Bobinac’ contribution in this volume). At an early age, Strossmayer had become chaplain in the Hofburg-parish in Vienna, which placed him in close proximity to both, bureaucratic and church authorities. In 1849, he had become bishop of the Slavonian Djakovo diocese and started to use his networks to financially support church and educational institutions for Croats not only in his home region but also beyond. In the 1850s he majorly supported the renovation of the hospice, later the college. Despite Strossmayer’s support, the institute still lacked money, and the number of resident priests decreased. As the whole structure, its administration and beneficiaries were still under discussion, in 1889 the pope installed a committee to decide upon its facilities, (church and houses), and the institution’s future organization and purpose. Revertera emphasized that, he had watched carefully to ensure the influence of both governments [Austrian and Hungarian] through the embassy is always in time, and tried to ensure that a future college in all ways would meet state interests.5 Revertera was convinced that a reform and reorganization were “inevitable,” as the institution would have become “a source of Pan-Slavic machinations that could not be tolerated for longer, neither by the church nor by the state”.6 By speaking on behalf of his (Habsburg) government, 4   Archive of the Papal Institute Santa Maria dell’ Anima Rom, CV Priesterkolleg, Bewerbungen, Schachtel b, Vordruck, Anschreiben an die Bischöfe, 1859, 65. 5  ÖStA/AVA, MKU, NK, Katholisch, Kt. 894, Konv. Institut San Girolamo, Revertera Report (7 May 1901). 6  “ […] weil […] das Institut von Girolamo einen Herd panslawistischer Umtriebe bildete, der weder im kirchlichen noch im staatlichen Interesse länger geduldet werden konnte.”

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he directed his argument towards the Holy See, that a future Croatian college should be organized in the same way as the other colleges under Habsburg patronage that were located in Rome. Among them was the Collegium Teutonicum di Santa Maria dell’Anima, which headed the so-­ called German National Church in Rome. Despite the name the priests who worked there were not only of German nationality, but also from Habsburg and Slavic nationalities such as Slovenes and Czechs (Lenzenweger, 140–200). The Bohemicum, founded in 1884, had been recently set up for priests from Bohemia, both of Czech and German nationality. Both institutions were under the patronage of emperor Franz Joseph and received state benefits.7 Following their examples, the Habsburg institutions now sought to assert their influence by two means: first, the Habsburg state authorities claimed that their embassy should have a representative in the college’s administrative body. This was already the case for the Collegium Teutonicum di Santa Maria dell’Anima. Secondly, that no “national rector”—in this case of Croatian background—was to be elected as head of the college, but rather an authority of the Holy See. This was already the case for the Bohemicum, where—in order to avoid disputes between German and Czech speakers from this crownland—a bureaucrat from the Holy See headed the college.8 Revertera ended his report in May 1901 with “we need to settle these open questions quickly, before the pope issues his bull”9. As soon as the pope had made up his mind, he expected any intervention to become obsolete. In addition to suggestions on the college’s future organization, Habsburg state authorities aimed to ensure that their interests were respected in the naming of the institution and its statutes.10 Meanwhile, the Croatian bishops had already provided a future rector who was asked to work out statutes. Josip Pazman, born in 1863  in Slavonia, was a professor at the faculty of Theology in Zagreb (Zvonar 2005, 424–425). As Pazman was a Hungarian citizen, the Hungarian 7  These colleges and their benefits and beneficiaries are part of two major collections housed in the Austrian State Archives: the documents of the Austrian Ministry of Religious and Educational Affairs, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 8  ÖStA/AVA, MKU, NK, Katholisch, Kt. 894, Konv. Collegium Bohemicum, 1884–1886, Ministerium des Äußern an MKU (2 May 1885), as well as: Ministry of Foreign Affairs to MKU (31 October 1884). 9  “Unbedingt schnell machen, bevor Papst Bulle erlässt. ” 10  ÖStA/AVA, MKU, NK, Katholisch, Kt. 894, Konv. Institut San Girolamo, Revertera Report (7 May 1901).

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government was asked to investigate his political viewpoint. Széll protested. What becomes visible in the letters sent to Revertera from Vienna and the internal administrative discussion between Austrian and Hungarian ministerial bureaucrats was that Pazman’s suggestions did not meet their interests for a variety of reasons. According to Revertera, Pazman was against the “traditional” term “for Illyrians”, in particular “because the planned college is not intended for a non-existent Illyrian nation, nor for Slavs in general, but only for southern Catholic Slavs, of whom the Croats make up the vast majority”.11 The Austrian ministry of religious affairs protested, as for them a Croatian college should be either only organized by bishops from Croatia, or include all bishops in dioceses where Croats lived. They emphasized that while the bishop from Sarajevo, Josip Stadler, was included in the plans, the Dalmatian bishop of Zadar was left out.12 Revertera reported that for a while the Holy See kept him informed about reformation plans, and that they lent towards supporting Habsburg interests over the demands of the Croatian bishops. Revertera, still, suspected two opposing parties within the Holy See: one that supported the Croatian demands and one that favouritized Habsburg state interests.13 Meanwhile, Pazman finished his work on the statutes and the Croatian bishops submitted them to the Holy See. In late June 1901, Pazman’s work became known. Revertera immediately intervened and protested to the Holy See’s Cardinal Secretary of the State: “Above all, it is necessary to avoid giving the college a political touch, as Croatia is not only a geographical term, and Croats a tribe in the South Slavic area, but a name which serves as the slogan of a political party whose tendencies are well-­ known and incompatible with the constitutional conditions of the monarchy”.14 He also protested against the planned name, and Pazman 11  ”Denn das geplante Collegium sei weder für eine nicht existierende illyrische Nation bestimmt, noch für Slawen im allgemeinen, sondern nur für katholische Südslawen, von denen die Croaten die überwiegende Mehrzahl bilden.“ ÖStA/AVA, MKU, NK, Katholisch, Kt. 894, Konv. Institut San Girolamo, Ministerium des Äußern an MKU (27 June 1901). 12  ÖStA/AVA, MKU, NK, Katholisch, Kt. 894, Konv. Institut San Girolamo, Interne Note MKU (3 June 1901), as well as MKU an Ministerium des Äußern (11 June 1901). 13  ÖStA/AVA, MKU, NK, Katholisch, Kt. 894, Konv. Institut San Girolamo, Ministerium des Äußern to MKU, (27 June 1901). 14  “Er stellte ihm vor, dass vor allem zu vermeiden sei, dem Collegium eine politischen Anstrich zu geben, Croatien sei nicht allein ein geographischer Begriff, und Croaten die Benennung eines Volkstammes im südslawischen Wohnungsgebiete, sondern es diene der Name als das Schlagwort einer politischen Partei, deren Tendenzen wohl bekannt und mit den staatsrechtlichen Verhältnissen der Monarchie unvereinbar seien.” ÖStA/AVA, MKU,

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suggested instead either the Croatian College (Collegio Croato) or College of the Croats (Collegio dei Croati).15 The cardinal agreed with Revertera’s concerns. The Habsburg administrative correspondence indicates that, from the perspective of the Holy See, the overall issue was characterized by the fact that almost on a daily basis either Revertera or Croatian bishops came before the Holy See to argue and intervene, both calling the other’s suggestions unacceptable. Still, Pazman’s draft was fully accepted by the pope, and Revertera called it a “complete surprise”, when on 1 August 1901 a papal breve entitled “Slavorum gentem” was issued which dismantled the existing structures of the hospice and transferred the entire budget to the foundation of the new college. The statute stipulated that from now on it had to serve exclusively for the education of Slavic priests from the dioceses of Zagreb, Syrmia, Senj, Zadar, Dubrovnik, Split, Šibenik, Hvar, Kotor, Krk, Trieste, Poreč, Vrhbosna, Mostar-Trebinje, and Banjaluka und Bar. The name changed into “Collegium Hieronymianum pro croatica gente”.16 In fact, the dioceses listed above included not only Dalmatia, but also Austrian Istria, but the title indicated that non-Slavic nationalities and other Slavic nationalities had no access, which excluded native Italian speakers from Dalmatia and Slovene and Italian speakers from Istria. Agenor Gołuchowski, minister of foreign affairs, reported to Széll that to him the curia’s motives were unknown. He blamed the Croatian bishops, above all Strossmayer and Stadler, for convincing the Holy See to opt for a fait accompli. Revertera was ordered to officially protest at the Holy See and to remind them that such an act would violate the encyclica according to which actions of this kind had to be undertaken only in agreement with the Habsburg state.17

NK, Katholisch, Kt. 894, Konv. Institut San Girolamo, Ministerium des Äußern toMKU (27 June 1901). 15  ÖStA/AVA, MKU, NK, Katholisch, Kt. 894, Konv. Institut San Girolamo, MKU to Ministerium des Äußern (3 July 1901). 16  ÖStA/AVA, MKU, NK, Katholisch, Kt. 894, Konv. Institut San Girolamo, Streng vertauliche Note Ministerium des Äußern to MP Szell (2 January 1902). 17  ÖStA/AVA, MKU, NK, Katholisch, Kt. 894, Konv. Institut San Girolamo, Streng vertrauliche Note Ministerium des Äußern to MP Szell (2 January 1902).

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Press Reviews from Throughout the Monarchy: From “Occupation” to “Armistice” At the time a papal breve was issued on 1 August the college began to be discussed in the Habsburg press. In the beginning, in particular the Viennese press did not draw attention to what was going on in Rome or in Croatia; rather, for example, the Viennese Reichspost known as the conservative voice of the overall state (Gesamtstaat), drew its readers’ attention to an incident which took place in Istria, whose citizens were a mixture of Croatian, Italian, and Slovene speakers of which two were excluded from the college. During one of the meetings of the provincial parliament (Landtag) in Trieste, visitors in the gallery intervened loudly when so-­ called Croatian delegates tried to speak. The head of the Landtag, Matteo Campitelli, even had to warn them to stop or to be thrown out of the house. One delegate asked Campitelli, which steps he had undertaken to ensure that the Istrian coat of arms would be hang up again in the new college in Rome, where it had apparently been taken down. Campitelli replied that he had already intervened at the minister of foreign affairs in order to ensure that it would be put back under the Croatian coat of arms (Reichspost 1901a, 2). This press report, although rather short, brought up another facet of the overall issue. Firstly, although only briefly mentioned in the list of benefiting dioceses, it would seem that in Istria there was a strong interest in and a well-known historical claim to the hospice-college in Rome. Secondly, it seems there were local (non-Croatian) residents who were well aware of the “Croatization” process and protested. Unfortunately, the short press note does not mention who these people were, but blamed “the Croats” for the removal of the coat of arms in Rome. Indeed, what this short note informed readers was that there was a place in Rome which was more diverse in history and that an undertaking had taken place to transform it into a Croatian place. Although this incident in an Austrian province was re-produced by some other newspapers, it did not turn into a cover story, and was not more widely discussed. The situation changed drastically at the end of August 1901 when an incident happened in Rome, right in the college itself. What will become visible in the press debate is that the official state opinion is often left out. At that time, state authorities usually did not share their intentions, for example, through press conferences or interviews with state authorities: that practice was only invented in a modern

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sense during the First World War (Scheer 2010, 123–124). Therefore, newspapers were full of assumptions about the official state opinion, and as already quoted by Judson above, they really told more about their producers than their subjects, subordinating them to their own political standpoint (Judson 2006, 182). In late August 1901, the Habsburg Foreign Ministry informed the Hungarian minister president that after the announcement of the papal breve “several Dalmatians, […] entered the institute, and claimed that it exclusively belonged to Dalmatians, and that their rights were violated by the Breve”.18 At that time, the college issue was considered interesting enough to make cover stories in all major newspapers across the Monarchy. For example, the Viennese Reichspost entitled their report in a very catchy way with the headline “A Roman affair”. Already in its initial paragraph, readers were presented with a clear standpoint. The Reichspost started with a critique of the other Viennese press which was not unusual: It is a public scandal that our entire liberal and pan-German press in this case again sided with irredentist Italians and Dalmatians, and make out of the papal step […] a support and promotion of the big Croatian idea. […] Where there is no affair, they make one, and where it is about to choose between the brave Catholic Croats or the demands of rabid liberal Italians, the Jewish press is always on the side of the Italians, a typical “Austrian” [in the original under quotes] press working against Austrian interests (Reichspost 1901b, 2).19

Interestingly, who was assigned blamed here and what was seen to be against Austrian interests was exactly the opposite of what imperial, 18  “Nach Publizierung des Breves drangen am 29.8.1901 mehrere Dalmatiner unter Führung des Canonicus von S. Girolomao, Vitic, in das Institut ein und ergriffen von demselben unter dem Vorgeben Besitz, dass es ausschließlich den Dalmatinern gehöre, und die Rechte derselben durch das Breve verletzt werden.” ÖStA/AVA, MKU, NK, Katholisch, Kt. 894, Konv. Institut San Girolamo, Streng vertrauliche Note Ministerium des Äußern to MP Szell (2 January 1902). 19  “Nun ist es aber geradezu ein öffentlicher Scandal, dass unsere gesammte liberale und alldeutsche Presse in dieser Sache wieder die Partei der irredentistischen Italiener und Dalmatiner ergreift und aus dem Schritte des Papstes eine eine Affrontirung Oesterreichs, eine Unterstützung und Förderung der großcroatischen Idee macht. […] Wo eben keine ‘Affaire’ ist, da macht man eine, und wo es sich handelt um die Wahl zwischen den wackeren katholischen Croaten oder den Forderungen rabiater liberaler Italiener, da findet man die Judenpresse immer auf Seite der Italiener, immer sieht man diese ‘österreichische’ Presse gegen die Interessen Oesterreichs arbeiten […]”.

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Austrian, and Hungarian authorities had been working for since the spring of the same year; namely ensuring that all residents of Dalmatia, regardless of their nationality, gain access to the college. While the Reichspost blamed the other press heavily for criticizing papal decisions, at the same time, state authorities intervened regularly at the Holy See trying to convince the pope that his decision was unacceptable. Noteworthy here was the anti-Semitic tone the Reichspost used, and there was no mention of the fact that like the Croats, most Italian speakers from Dalmatia were Roman Catholics. The Reichspost went on and presented a historical overview that was clearly subordinate to their own political agenda. It was argued that the hospice was never meant for all Catholics of Dalmatia, “and even less for Italian Dalmatians”. Here, the identity of the saint, Jerome, was brought into the public discussion for the first time: On the contrary, they [the Dalmatians] always seemed excluded, as Jerome, a Slav who had arrived to establish the Hospice in Rome, invoked that other nations already had a hospice in Rome. […] Slavs, only Slavs, were then, according to the documents, the benefactors of the institute, and are called in the documents as coming from Illyria (Reichspost 1901b, 1–2).20

Unfortunately, as usual, neither an author is mentioned, nor a source, but the article concluded with the suggestion that this change, which took place in the purely ecclesiastical and religious interest of the Croats, was undoubtedly also made in consent with the Austrian government, which has a great deal to do with the prosperous development of Catholicism, particularly in the Balkans, since Austria has to accomplish a cultural mission there, which can only be a Catholic one. (Reichspost 1901c, 9)

20  “Nicht aber war es bestimmt für alle Katholiken Dalmatiens schlechthin, noch weniger für die italienischen Dalmatiner. Im Gegenteil, diese erscheinen ausgeschlossen, da Hieronymus von Potomia, ein Slave, der um die Errichtung des Hospizes in Rom eingekommen war, sich darauf berief, dass andere Nationen ohnehin schon Hospize in Rom besaßen. […] Slaven, nur Slaven, waren denn auch, laut den Urkunden, die Wohlthäter des Instituts, und werden dieselben als aus ‘Illyrien’ stammend in den Urkunden bezeichnet.” According to the historian Ines Ivić in present day Croatia, St Jerome is considered a Croatian national saint, the outcome of a long period of appropriation beginning in the Middle Ages. The spread of his cult in medieval Dalmatia can be traced to the fifteenth century, when Jerome became a synonym for Dalmatia and the Dalmatians: (Ivić 2016, 618–644)

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Indeed, the previous part of my analysis has already demonstrated that the papal decision was not taken “in consent” with the Austrian government (nor with the Hungarian). Interestingly, although it was a Croatian, and therefore Hungarian matter, the role of the Budapest government was almost entirely left out in Viennese press coverage. When the Reichspost criticized the “liberal”, “pan-German”, and “Jewish” Viennese press, it is likely that they had among minor important ones, the Neue Freie Presse in mind. Like the Reichspost, the Neue Freie Presse, had reported about the incident in the Triestine parliament in early August (Neue Freie Presse 1901a, 3). We do not know if this report was the basis of the Reichspost’s later criticism as it only referred to the “Jewish” and “liberal” press in general. Already in early August, the Neue Freie Presse had reported that Dalmatians living in Rome […] complained against the coup d’état by which bishops Strossmayer and Stadler, with the help of the Vatican, laid their hands on the Dalmatian Congregation of St. Hieronymus, and after appointing a rector in the person of the priest Pazman transformed it into a pan-Croatian alumnat.

According to the Neue Freie Presse (1901b, 7) the Dalmatians (if they were Italians was not mentioned) then simply appealed for the restoration of the institution’s “original purpose”.21 The wording of the Neue Freie Presse—again, no author was mentioned nor a source—was similar to the imperial complaints that Austrian and Hungarian bureaucrats had raised to the Holy See since the spring. In addition, the Neue Freie Presse article made it clear that the demonstration of the Dalmatians at the college in early September had not been a “counter-reaction” (Gegenreaktion), rather—as was the case for the Reichspost and many others—it was an original action that seemingly came out of nothing. The Reichspost responded that the “Dalmatian Italians’” action had to be clearly condemned as “illegal”. What made it for them even worse was that this had occurred in an institution “under the protection of the Austrian government”; probably 21  “Die in Rom lebenden Dalmatiner haben […] gegen den Gewaltstreich Beschwerde erhoben, durch den Bischöfe Stroßmayer und Stadler mit Hilfe des Vaticans die dalmatinische Congregation zum heiligen Hieronymus in die Hand bekamen und nach Bestellung eines Rectors in der Person des Priesters Pazman in ein pancroatisches Alumnat verwandelten. Die Dalmatiner wollen, dass die Congregation wieder ihrem ursprünglichen Zwecke zugeführt […] werde”.

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the “housebreaking” was even carried out “not without foreknowledge, yes, perhaps with approval or even in consequence of encouragement of the [Italian] Roman authorities” (Reichspost 1901b, 2).22 In the days to come all over the Monarchy newspapers reported the “Dalmatian invasion” by either taking the Dalmatian or the Croatian standpoint. The wording of almost every action in Rome mirrored the two opposing sides. After the “invaders had successfully occupied the building”, according to the Reichspost, they “feasted there” (“hielten dort ein Festgelage”) (Reichspost 1901c, 9), while the Neue Freie Presse (1901c, 3) called it: “celebrating their first victory with a banquet” (“feierten ihren ersten Sieg mit einem Bankette”). The Neue Freie Presse (1901c, 3) knew about a telegram sent by Dalmatians to the mayor from Dalmatian Zadar calling his town to be the “last bulwark of Italian Culture in Dalmatia”. In contrast, the Reichspost (1901c, 9) simply referred to a telegraph sent to the mayor referring to the institute’s “occupancy” (Besitzergreifung). Interestingly, both newspapers changed their rhetoric gradually soon after, namely stepping back from their more extreme positions. On 6 September, the Reichspost (1901d, 1–2) claimed that the incident was giving “ammunition to the [Italian] irredenta”, while the Neue Freie Presse started to portray the Dalmatians a bit more negatively. Articles then read in a more balanced way and tend to portray the issue as a legal dispute between Austria-Hungary, the Holy See, and Italy over the future organization of the college (Neue Freie Presse 1901d, 7). What most Viennese press coverage left out was that Croatia was supposed to be a Hungarian concern. Indeed, in Budapest, the college had become a matter of public interest much earlier and was more intensely discussed. The Pester Lloyd published many lengthy articles already in early August, before the “invasion”, at a time when all other newspapers dealt with the issue only to a very limited extent. Again, as in the previous examples, it was already the title chosen for the article that showed the intended viewpoint: “Dalmatians against Croatian bishops”. The Pester Lloyd explained to its readers that the “occupation” in early September had a pre-history: already at the beginning of August a Dalmatian 22  “Was diesem Gewaltact—das Widerrechtliche deselben steht in jedem Falle fest—die Krone aufsetzt, ist der Umstand, daß es österreichische Unterthanen, wenn auch Italiener Nationalität sind, die sich denselben zu Schulden kommen ließen, gegenüber einem Institut, das unter dem Schutze der österreichischen Regierung steht. Daß sie diesen Einbruch nicht ohne Vorwissen, ja vielleicht mit Bewilligung oder gar in Folge Ermunterung der römischen Behörden gethan, was aus verschiedenen Anzeichen zu entnehmen ist […]”.

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deputation had travelled to Rome and sought support from the Italian government. There, the deputies allegedly argued that, “the [Croatian] bishops seized the assets of the Dalmatian Congregation to be used for anti-Italian propaganda in Istria”. They accused Pazman of being a spy for the Croatian bishops, who “will be expelled soon for public mockery of the Italian nation” (Pester Lloyd 1901, 3).23 Pester Lloyd therefore clearly took over the Hungarian minister president’s standpoint about Pazman’s role, which was also the one shared by Habsburg state authorities in Vienna. On the same day, 10 August, in its evening edition, the Pester Lloyd shifted its tone, and now its reporting was as a distant observer. They emphasized that Austro-Hungarian diplomacy together with the Viennese press would perform a “little press polemic”, which could negatively affect Hungary, “especially here, where a good relationship with Italy was always important” (Pester Lloyd 1901, 9).24 Interestingly the Pester Lloyd, in contrary to the Neue Freie Presse and Reichspost, tended to see the affair more as an issue which might become a diplomatic affair between Italy and Austria-Hungary, rather than in the context of South Slavic or Croatian nationalism. The coverage of the Zagreb German language daily Agramer Tagblatt differed from that of Budapest. Its aim was, as Milka Car writes in her contribution to this volume, “in general reflecting the conflict between imperial loyalty and its competing relationship with national integration discourses of Croatian and South Slavic provenance”. However, as was the case for most other newspapers, the college before the invasion was only portrayed to a very limited extent, although the reason might have been different. On 10 August it was only worth a short note indicating that an old institution had been dismantled, and the pope has decided to found a “Collegium Hieronymitanum pro gente Croatica” (Agramer Zeitung 1901a, 3). Not until 31 August did the issue become a cover story, 23  “Die Dalmatiner gaben an, dass die Bischöfe sich des Vermögens der dalmatinischen Kongregation San Girolamo bemächtigt hätten, um die reichen Einkünfte derselben zur antiitalienischen Propaganda in Istrien zu benützen. […] Wahrscheinlich wird der Hauptagent der kroatischen Bischöfe in Rom, Pazmann, aus Italien ausgewiesen werden, zumal gegen ihn mehrere Prozesse wegen öffentlicher Verhöhnung der italienischen Nation […] angestrengt sind.” 24  “Die kleine Preßpolemik, die in diesen Tagen zwischen Rom und Wien […] geführt worden ist, […] Bei uns, wo man seit jeher das Bundesverhältnis zu Italien hochhält und mit aller Sorgfalt plegt, […]”.

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entitled very carefully “The dispute over the Collegium St. Hieronymi”, reporting that its “transformation into a Croatian institute led to a violent coup by the Italian Dalmatians living in Rome” (Agramer Zeitung 1901b, 1).25 What then followed was—when compared to the other three newspapers—the most objective portrait about and careful manoeuvre through the incidents. The Dalmatians would have celebrated with a “banquet” and paid tribute to the Italian royal couple in the name of entire Dalmatia (Agramer Zeitung 1901b, 2). In this, the newspaper excerpts from Roman newspapers were reprinted, but also quotations from the Pester Lloyd such as “it is unjust what is done to the Roman curia and the Croats” and that “one could make sure that Italian and Albanian speakers from Istria, Dalmatia and Montenegro will be accepted, but once again that there are already more than enough institutions for Italian-speakers in Rome”, which is why they called the protest to be only politically motivated (Agramer Zeitung 1901b, 7).26 On 4 September, the Agramer Zeitung turned from carefully navigating through the incident, to becoming a solid supporter of the Croatian standpoint. Probably, this shift was also affected by how the story was portrayed in many Viennese newspapers, as the Agramer Zeitung criticized them for speak[ing] in a very unabashed way in favor of the ‘Dalmatian’ usurpers […]: The fact that the German liberal papers in their hatred of everything and in their fear of everything that is Slavic, any enterprise which is directed against Slavs, and even if it is an act of violence, is justified, that does not surprise us, […] that’s what happen when you do not know what ‘Illyrian’, ‘Dalmatian’ and ‘Croatian’ means.

This comment was followed by a lengthy portrait of the institute’s history which was neither never meant to be 25  “Wie bereits gestern gemeldet, hat die Umwandlung des Collegium des St. Hieronymus in Rom in ein kroatisches Institut zu einem Gewaltstreich seitens der in Rom lebenden italinienischen Dalmatiner geführt […]”. 26  “ […] so ist doch das Unrecht, das der römischen Curie und den Kroaten angethan wird, ganz offenkundig und klar. […] Wenn man die Streitfrage sehr genau nimmt, so könnte es sich bei Schlichtung derselben im besten Falle nur darum handeln, neben Kroaten auch italienisch, bzw. albanesisch sprechende Aspiraten aus Istrien, Dalmatien und Montenegro die Aufnahme in das neue Collegium des hl. Hieronymus sicherzustellen. […] die große Zahl der Collegien, welche den italienischen Clerikern heute schon zu Gebote stehen […]”.

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for Dalmatians, nor for Italians, but solely for Croats from the regions listed in the papal breve. […] All benefactors since 1449 according to documents were exclusively Slavs and Croats, and the Dalmatians are always referred to as Slavs. If the name of a Dalmatian has an Italian sound, it is specifically noted “from Dalmatia—Schiavo”; […] Italians were never called Illyrians, only Slavs. […] After all, the Italian name S. Girolamo degli Schiavoni says it all. The Italian never calls Italians Slavonians (Agramer Zeitung 1901b, 3).27

The Reichspost (1901b, 2) concluded with the overall zeitgeist in the Habsburg Monarchy “that priests can only be educated beneficially in an institution where all scholars speak the same language and are of the same nationality, then only then can these priests be educated in the spirit of their own nationality”.28 However, the very nature of this argument was not unusual. The Austrian schooling system since 1867 tended to educate their various speakers separately, unintentionally already supporting national classification and diversification at an early age (see Stergar and Scheer 2018). The violent dispute was not limited to the college in Rome, but soon swept over the Monarchy itself. The situation became particularly heated in Zagreb. The Neue Freie Presse reported on the public meeting (Volksmeeting) in Zagreb, where the crowd on the streets called upon the Croatian governor “to assure that satisfaction will be given to the Croatian 27  “Mehrere Wiener Blätter befassen sich in ihrer gestrigen Nummer an leitender Stelle mit der Angelegenheit des Capitels San Girolamo, wobei sie in ganz unverhohlener Weise den ‘dalmatinischen Usurpatoren’ des Instituts das Wort reden. Dass die deutschen liberalen Blätter in ihrem Hasse gegen Alles und in ihrer Angst vor Allem, was slavisch ist, jede Unternehmung, welche gegen Slaven gerichtet ist, und sei es auch ein Gewaltact, gut heißen und vertheidigen, nimmt uns nicht Wunder, […] Aber das kommt davon, wenn man nicht weiß, was ‘illyrisch, was ‘dalmatinisch’ und was ‘kroatisch’ ist. ” “ […] dass das Institut San Girolamo weder für Dalmatiner als solche, noch für Italiener, sondern stets nur für Kroaten aus den im Breve […] aufgezählten Ländern bestimmt war. […] Sämmtliche das Hospiz betreffenden Urkunden von 1449 an kennen als Wohlthäter und als Bewohner desselben nur ‘Slaven’, das ist Kroaten, und die Dalmatiner werden stets als Slaven bezeichnet, und wenn der Name eines Dalmatiner einen italienischen Klang hat, so wird eigens angemerkt: ‘aus Dalmatien—Sclavo’ […]. Italiener wurden nie als Illyrier bezeichnet, sondern nur Slaven. […] Schließlich sagt der italienische Name ‘S. Girolamo degli Schiavoni’ alles. Der Italiener nennt Italiener nie und nimmer Slavonier”. 28  “Eine gedeihliche Erziehung des Clerus kann am besten nur in Anstalten ermöglicht werden, in der alle Zöglinge einer Sprache und Nationalität sind, dann allein kann auch der Klerus im Geiste der betreffenden Nationalität erzogen werden”.

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people, and to thank the Pope for the gracious breve” (Neue Freie Presse 1901d, 7).29 The Agramer Zeitung on the other hand knew about anti-­ Italian demonstrations in Dalmatian Split (Agramer Zeitung 1901b, 2).30 The Reichspost (1901e, 6) reported from Zadar, that “all Dalmatian bishops protested against the occupancy of the institute by pseudo-­Dalmatians”, while in Dubrovnik “a big crowd of Catholic Serbs passed through the streets yesterday evening, and stopped in front of the episcopal palace where they protested against the scandalous violent Croatians. The crowd shouted: Down with Pazman, long live the Serbs”. 31 In the months to come, the Holy See rejected all demands for changes to the breve. However, Pazman had to resign from his post and left Rome.32 Upon return, Pazman was under police surveillance, who reported in December that he was still involved in college affairs, and regularly met with clergy from Dalmatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.33 In addition to how Pazman’s role was portrayed in the Viennese press and Habsburg state institutions, the narrative of a booklet published in 1902 in Dalmatian Zadar (see Jelić 1902) indicated that he himself saw his role in fighting “bravely” as a “defender of the rights of the Croatian people” to resist “a nasty and unjust rebellion” (Zvonar 2005, 225). In January 1902, the Ministry of Foreign affairs declared that the only issues achieved at the Holy See were that an envoy from the Austro-Hungarian embassy always had to be part of the college’s administrative body.34 However, in the long 29   “[…] wird gebeten, dahin zu wirken, daß dem croatischen Volke vollkommene Satisfaction werde, […] Papst für das gnädigste Breve danken”. 30  Interestingly, not only German language newspapers, but even Agramer Zeitung, used the Italian term for this town, Spalato. This practice persisted until the dissolution of the monarchy, although when Italy became an enemy during the First World War, state institutions tried to abolish these terms, but in the end they failed (Scheer 2014). 31  “Aus Zara wird gemeldet, sämtliche dalmatinische Bischöfe haben gegen die Usurpation des Instituts San Girolamo seitens der Pseudo-Dalmatiner in Rom Protest erhoben. […] Aus Ragusa wird berichtet: Eine große Masse katholischer Serben durchzog gestern Abends demonstrierend die Straßen; vor dem bischöflichen Palais wurde ein Protest gegen die ‘skandalösen croatischen Gewaltthätigkeiten’ erhoben. Die Menge rief: ‘Pereat Pazman, hoch das serbische Volk’”. Why parishes and dioceses in Dalmatia never came up jointly in this affair, see Tolja 2011. 32  ÖStA/AVA, MKU, NK, Katholisch, Kt. 894, Konv. Institut San Girolamo, Streng vertrauliche Note Ministerium des Äußern to MP Szell (2 January 1902). 33  ÖStA/AVA, MKU, NK, Katholisch, Kt. 894, Konv. Institut San Girolamo, MKU (10 December 1901). 34  ÖStA/AVA, MKU, NK, Katholisch, Kt. 894, Konv. Institut San Girolamo, Streng vertrauliche Note Ministerium des Äußern to MP Szell (2 January 1902).

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run, as the situation did not calm down, the college became again the object of a papal decision. According to an internal note from the ministry of cultural and religious affairs, “it had painfully touched the pope that his decision on the name of the College had caused mischiefs. Because so many objections had been made, he has decided to give the institute that name which it had borne over centuries”.35 In the spring of 1902 the college was named “Collegium Hieronymanum Illyricorum”. The papal decision met protests from Croatian bishops.36 However, the issue was not widely discussed in the Habsburg Monarchy anymore. Habsburg state institutions declared that the new-old name met with their interests,37 in particular as the Illyrian political cultural movement which became important around 1800, in 1900 it was almost exclusively replaced by a Croatian, or of growing importance a South Slavic/Yugoslav, movement (Stergar 2016). While the college’s name was only short-lived, so was the close collaboration between Hungarian and Austrian, respectively imperial institutions. After close collaboration in the spring and during the summer and early autumn, old animosities and struggles soon returned. Seemingly the college issue was no longer seen to be a joint interest, at least from the Hungarian perspective. Already in January 1902 the letter of the minister of foreign affairs to the Hungarian minister president Széll bore phrases that can be called typical for the relationship between Hungary and Austria since the settlement in 1867 (see: Scheer 2010). Seemingly Széll had protested that the Habsburg ambassador had intervened also in cases that were only Hungarian affairs, while Vienna stated that the college is still of joint and Austrian interest.38

35  “ […] schmerzlich habe den Papst berührt, dass seine Verfügung über den Namen des Kollegiums Missvergnügen erzeugt habe, weil so viele Einsprüche erfolgt waren hinsichtlich des Namens hat er sich entschlossen am Ende jenen Namen wieder zu nehmen, den das Institut seit Jahrhunderten hatte”. ÖStA/AVA, MKU, NK, Katholisch, Kt. 894, Konv. Institut San Girolamo, Interne Notiz MKU (18 July 1902). 36  ÖStA/AVA, MKU, NK, Katholisch, Kt. 894, Konv. Institut San Girolamo, MKU to MP (7 April 1902). 37  ÖStA/AVA, MKU, NK, Katholisch, Kt. 894, Konv. Institut San Girolamo, Ministry of Foreign Affair to k.k. Minister President (16 March 1902). 38  ÖStA/AVA, MKU, NK, Katholisch, Kt. 894, Konv. Institut San Girolamo, Streng vertrauliche Note Ministerium des Äußern to MP Szell (2 January 1902).

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Conclusion This chapter demonstrates that the reorganization and foundation of today’s Croatian College in Rome was not lacking debate, rather papal decisions and the engagement of Croatian bishops met with severe criticism from Habsburg state institutions. Both governments, the Austrian and the Hungarian, feared losing only their impact on the institution in Rome, but even more that an institution was planned to be founded whose purpose was clearly nationalist. However, the Holy See finally decided in the favour of Croatian demands, and the only achievement of the Habsburg state authorities was that the college’s name changed from Croatian to Illyrian in spring 1902. What made it even worse was that the debate about the foundation that started in spring 1901 heated up during the summer when the reorganization of the college became a widely and hotly discussed topic in newspapers all over the Monarchy. While, the bureaucratic debate showed that Habsburg, Austrian, and in this case even Hungarian authorities carefully navigated through the whole affair, by trying not to take over one side (at least in public), the press was divided between supporting Croatian claims and attempts to hold on to a supposed emerging state interest which the other side accused of being Irredentist Italian. However, the supposed emerging state interest was not at all what Habsburg authorities were arguing for. In some of the press, both standpoints were then often intermingled with liberal, anticlerical, or pro-Vatican opinions. The press as well as bureaucratic debate clearly show what Pieter M. Judson has recently aimed at: that empires functioned or malfunctioned through on-going negotiations, and the empire was heavily shaped by all citizens and not only by state bureaucrats (Judson 2016). In addition, this chapter demonstrates that state and press debates alike show that often one and the same terms for belonging were used, but in a different sense (in particular “Dalmatian”). Traditional terms of belonging were still in use at the turn of the century (“Illyrians”), but already underwent a transformation, while new ones came up which often did not replace the old ones immediately (“Croats”). This chapter shows how old terms of identification that were more geographically defined than ethnically or according to language, were increasingly replaced by purely ethnic ones. Nevertheless, although historians tend to simplify, this example shows that terms were characterized by their overlapping usage and therefore simultaneity.

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The example of the college demonstrates that it is impossible to characterize the nationalities of the late Habsburg Monarchy simply with loyal and disloyal to the overall state or better said, acting in accordance with state interests (as academic literature has done for a long time). Croats until the end of the Monarchy were most often portrayed by state authorities as being among the loyal citizens, in this case—at least some of them— followed their own aims and even risked a confrontation with Vienna. What can be called somehow exceptional was that in this particular case, at least in the beginning and during the heat wave, Hungarian politicians and bureaucrats closely collaborated with imperial and Austrian institutions. Nevertheless, as soon as the supposed common interest vanished, old habits returned. Finally, this chapter contributes to the history of the relationship between the Habsburg Monarchy and the Holy See. What is important to note is that neither “a Catholic Church” nor a “Habsburg state’s” interest ever existed. As shown above, Habsburg state interest minimum meant that the two opposing sides were divided into imperial/Austrian and Hungarian, while the Holy See oscillated between support of Habsburg demands and Croatian ones.

References Agramer Zeitung. 1901a. Aufhebung des St. Hieronymus-Capitels. 10 August, 3. ———. 1901b. Der Streit um das Collegium Sancti Hieronymi. 3 September, 1–2. Archive of the Papal Institute Santa Maria dell’ Anima Rom. Austrian State Archives Vienna (ÖStA). Blumi, Isa. 2011. Reinstating the Ottomans. Alternative Balkan Modernities. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Clewing, Konrad. 2001. Staatlichkeit und nationale Identitätsbildung. Dalmatien in Vormärz und Revolution. München: Oldenbourg. Golub, Ivan. 1968–1969. Juraj Križanić i pitanje prava Slovenaca na Svetojerominske ustanove u Rimu. Historijski zbornik 21–22: 213–258. Gottsmann, Andreas. 2010. Rom und die nationalen Katholizismen in der Donaumonarchie. Römischer Universalismus, habsburgische Reichspolitik und nationale Identitäten, 1878–1914. Wien: Verlag der Österr. Akademie der Wissenschaften. Ivić, Ines. 2016. Jerome Comes Home: The Cult of Saint Jerome in Late Medieval Dalmatia. Hungarian Historical Review 5 (3): 618–644. Jelić, Luka. 1902. L’Istituto Croato a Roma: S.  Girolamo de’ Schiavoni: studio storico. Zara: Hrvatska Knjižarnica.

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Judson, Pieter M. 2006. Guardians of the Nation. Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria. London: Harvard University Press. ———. 2016. The Habsburg Empire. A New History. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Kirchner Reill, Dominique. 2012. Nationalists who feared the nation: Adriatic Multi-Nationalism in Habsburg Dalmatia, Trieste, and Venice. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Mandušić, Iva. 2006. Bibliografija radova o bratovštini sv. Jeronima u Rimu. CCP 57: 197–203. Neue Freie Presse. 1901a. Capo d’Istria. 3 August, 3. ———. 1901b. Rom. 9 August, 7. ———. 1901c. Gegen das croatische Seminar in Rom. 30 August, 3. ———. 1901d. Der Streit um das Institut San Girolamo. 6 September, 7. Pester Lloyd. 1901. Dalmatiner gegen die kroatischen Bischöfe. 10 August, 3. Pope John Paul II. 2001. Discorso di Giovanni Paolo II allacomunitá del Pontificio Collegio Croato di San Girolamo in Roma. In: Vatican, Santa Sede, online: https://w2.vatican.va/content/john-­paul-­ii/de/speeches/2001/november/ documents/hf_jp-­ii_spe_20011116_collegio-­croato.html. Accessed 10 Sep 2019. Reichspost. 1901a. Im istrischen Landtage. 4 August, 2. ———. 1901b. Eine römische ‘Affaire’. 4 September, 1–2. ———. 1901c. Römischer Brief. 5 September, 9–10. ———. 1901d. Munition für die Irredenta. 6 September, 1–2. ———. 1901e. Der Streit um das Hospiz San Girolamo, 11 September. Scheer, Tamara. 2014. The Perfect Opportunity to Shape National Symbols? The Austro-Hungarian Occupation Regimes during the First World War on the Adriatic and in the Balkans. Acta Histriae 3 (22): 266–294. ———. 2010. Die Ringstraßenfront. Österreich-Ungarn, das Kriegsüberwachungsamt und der Ausnahmezustand während des Ersten Weltkriegs. Wien: Heeresgeschichtliches Museum. Stergar, Rok, and Tamara Scheer. 2018. Ethnic Boxes. The Unintended Consequences of Habsburg Bureaucratic Classification. Nationalities Papers: The Journal of Nationalism and Ethnicity 4: 275–291. Stergar, Rok. 2016. Illyrian Autochthonism and the Beginnings of South Slav Nationalisms in the West Balkans. In Search of Pre-Classical Antiquity: Rediscovering Ancient Peoples in Mediterranean Europe (19th and 20th c.), ed. Antonino de Francesco, 96–118. Brill. Tolja, Nikola. 2011. Dubrovački Srbikatolici—istine i zablude. Dubrovnik. Urbanitsch, Peter. 2003. Revertera von Salandra, Friedrich Graf. In Neue Deutsche Biographie 21 [Online-Version]. https://www.deutsche-­biographie.de/ pnd139112200.html#ndbcontent (2.8.2019). 478–479.

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Wandruszka, Adam, and Peter Urbanitsch. 1995. Die Habsburgermonarchie 1848–1918, Band 4: Die Konfessionen. Wien: Verlag d. österr. Akademie der Wissenschaften. Žutić, Nikola. 2010. Zavod sv. Jeronima– ilirski, srpski, jugoslavenski ili hrvatski 1453–1901. Istorija 20. veka 3: 23–44. Zvonar, Ivica. 2005. Mons. dr. Josip Pazman (1863.–1925.): prilog poznavanju političkog djelovanja. Č asopis za suvremenu povijest 37 (2): 423–443. III. Sektion des technischen und administrativen Militär-Comité. 1902. Militär-­ statistisches Jahrbuch. Wien: Hof- und Staatsdruckerei.

CHAPTER 13

Narratives of Modernisation in Periodicals: On the German-Language Agramer Tagblatt in 1918 Milka Car

Introduction: On German-Language Periodicals in Zagreb The Kingdom of Croatia and Slavonia with its capital city Zagreb was subject to direct imperial Austrian rule for a significant period of time, including its final years. The Triune Kingdom was a part of Austria-­ Hungary during the World War I and its territory was administratively divided between the Austrian and Hungarian parts of the Empire. Therefore, the unification of Croat-inhabited territories was a fundamental problem that remained unresolved by the creation of the Dual Monarchy in 1867. The main political goals of that period were linguistic unification, the modernisation of the country with an underdeveloped

M. Car (*) Department for German Language and Literature, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Chovanec, O. Heilo (eds.), Narrated Empires, Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55199-5_13

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agrarian economy and political independence. Due to the weakness of political elites, those goals were accomplished primarily through attempts to gain independence and establish cultural and educational institutions in its own language and understood as a process of national consolidation and modernisation that challenged the existent imperial structures. In his book History of Press in Croatia 1771–1939 [Povijest novinstva hrvatske 1771–1939], Josip Horvat explains on the one hand the extent of the desires to establish a national language and co-existence of diverse national programmes on the other. Therefore, “the Croatian national programme” and “a Slavic lineage” (Horvat 2003, 262) appeared side-by-side and coexisted without excluding one another. Those programmes shared a common feature—a resistance to the imperial hegemony and the monarchical rule1. That resistance crystallised in 1918 and the intention of this chapter is to investigate its impact on the periodical press. It must be pointed out that that resistance was declaratively present in newspapers published both in Croatian and German. In retrospect, it can be seen that it was further emphasised as an attempt to confirm national self-existence and thus point out how important it was to leave the imperial framework, which had significantly shaped and determined the emergence of the nation itself.2 Furthermore, during the period in which intensive disputes between Austria-Hungary and the Kingdom of Serbia had become evident, the Triune Kingdom also held very particular military and strategic significance. The aim of this chapter is to investigate the function of the German-­ language periodicals published in Zagreb in the first third of the twentieth century. Special attention will be paid to the newspaper Agramer Tagblatt, an Organ für Politik und Volkswirthschaft as the paper subtitles itself—a “paper for politics and economy”.3 In general reflecting the conflict between imperial loyalty and its competing relationship with national integration discourses of Croatian and South-Slavic provenance, in 1918, Agramer Tagblatt gradually became a voice of unification of the South-­ Slavic nations although they were still conditioned by the imperial framework. Therefore, as the Croatian patriots tried to show later, the imperial framework can be seen as not only negative. On the one hand, it played a role in the active promotion of local intelligentsias and the Croatian  On the complex dynastic and national myths in the Monarchy see Urbanitsch 2004.  “Croatian arguments for autonomy and constitutional prerogatives made no sense without the frame of the Monarchy” (Veliz 2012, 67) 3  The translations from the newspaper are from M. C. 1 2

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literary language and on the other, it proved that censorship was present on an institutional level, which limited the impact of discourses promoting local independence. This chapter will show that patterns of identity can be created, confirmed and established in the press, which can be exacerbated in the times of crisis. As such, this was the case during the last year of World War I when newspaper reports about developments on the battleground were published simultaneously with the pleas underlying various national specificities with the intention to foster the process of national integration. On the eve of and during World War I, two differing concepts about unification and a Yugoslav state became prominent. In particular, Croatian politicians, Frano Supilo and Ante Trumbić, sought a federation of equal nations within which Croatian statehood would be preserved. From 1867 to 1918, Croatian-Serbian relations passed through periods of cooperation, particularly when confronted with pressure from the governments in Vienna and Budapest, but they also showed frequent conflict. The Serbian government attempted to take advantage of World War I to create a Monarchy or favoured the creation of a joint state with Serbian hegemony. In this view, the “South Slav problem in the Habsburg Monarchy served as a code for Serbian and Croatian nationalism” (Okey 2007, 83) but the emerging Yugoslav ideology4 was supranational, which resulted in a multitude of overlapping Croatian identities. Recent scholarship has pointed to the importance of newspapers or print media in the development of nationalist or supra-nationalist narratives, as Judson noted: “We should not forget the importance of the Empire as an institutional context for understanding how nationalist politics had become so radical in the first place” (Judson 2005, 14). Regional print media were in this view “critical allies of the nationalist movements, especially those newspapers that framed local and international events in a particularly nationalist rhetoric” (Judson 2014, 67). In the case of Croatia, one can observe a multitude of ways in which local identities were expressed throughout the nineteenth century—locally, ethnically, linguistically and/or religiously. The title of this paper suggests local and regional affiliation, but at the same time since the newspapers were designed according to a monarchical political framework, was most evident during the war period, there is an undeniable importance of an imperial framework. This can be seen not only in news coming from the battlefield  See more about Yugoslav ideology in Korunić 1986.

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appearing on the front pages but in articles discussing many of the common objectives of the Monarchy. At the same time, the newspapers also published conflicting accounts of nationalist movements that favoured either the Yugoslav idea or Croatian exclusivism. The national movement was to a very large degree defined by the rather broad scope of the Illyrian movement, which advocated South-Slavic solidarity with the hope of achieving fundamental Croatian political aims. Subsequently, there were two major causes that deserve our attention: a Croatian national cause aimed primarily at the unification and independence of the people of Croatia and a pan-South-Slavic, and the Yugoslav cause also oriented towards the integration of the neighbouring South-Slavic nations. The periodical press is in this case particularly interesting as “the quintessential mode of systematic communication in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” (Okey 2007, 80). Newspapers “not only confirmed, reinforced, and normalized nationalist interpretations of the news” (Judson 2014, 68) but, as is the case with the Agramer Tagblatt during World War I, they also directed attention to the Yugoslav integration process, something that might only be seen as unexpected in a German-speaking periodical. German was the language of mobile social stratum within the whole Monarchy, but it is important to note that its agents had no intention of preventing the development of other languages; instead, the media in German participated in the process of vernacular institutionalisation, not only by disseminating information from the centre of the Monarchy5 but also by fostering the development of its own language and cultural space. At the same time, one of the objectives of the press was to maintain loyalty to the empire, as emphasised by Pieter Judson6. At the time, despite the fact that newspapers published in German contributed to further development and normalisation of the Croatian language, German-language  On the early German-speaking newspapers see Fruk 1993.  The court manipulated the public image of the emperor and his family primarily through its ability to control reporting about them in networks of newspapers throughout the empire. The newspapers in turn were eager to publish any and all details of imperial life for public consumption. When strict government censorship ended in the 1860s, this particular dynamic did not necessarily change. The court continued to carefully control the image of the imperial family, occasionally doctoring official photographs to suggest a happy domestic idyll, and the family remained the object of intense popular interest. For this reason, newspapers of all kinds, Catholic, nationalist, liberal or socialist, had to report on the family and thus participated, at least indirectly, in promoting their popularity (Judson 2016, 236–237). 5 6

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newspapers played different roles in Zagreb and their existence in the second half of the nineteenth century is perceived as direct competition to newspapers published in Croatian. It should be borne in mind that the independent and pro-Slavic periodical Pozor did not get permission to publish until the abolition of absolutism in 1860 and subsequently this periodical became the most important publication of the opposition. Their programme represented the interests and aspirations of the Croatian national activists and its editors Bogoslav Šulek and Mojsije Baltić continued propagating the ideas of the Illyrian movement emphasising their Slavic affiliation. In doing so, they paid particular attention to the education of citizenry and cultural advancement regarded as the most important instruments of the so-called integral nationalism. The northwest of Croatia and the city Zagreb both represented an example of multilingualism: the official language was Latin and later German, while Croatian (the Kajkavian and Shtokavian dialects) was used as a language of everyday communication. The German language took over the function of Latin as the language of communication, education and science and enjoyed the status of a socially prestigious idiom. This can be described as societal bilingualism that resulted from a productive co-existence of Croatian and German speakers inhabiting the same region. German was the lingua franca of the urban elite and “the language of higher social classes in Croatia” (Žepić 1996, 309). Since informative journalism increased circulation and became less mutually antagonistic during World War I with circulations ranging from 10.000 to 20.000 copies (Horvat 2003, 331), it can be seen as an indicator of political and societal change with the particularly interesting feature of a being a deviation from the Monarchy’s official policy. In the wake of the October Revolution, from 1917 and especially in 1918, political parties who stood in opposition to Austro-Hungarian dualism and feudal legitimism gradually regained their significance, articulating the desires for the unification of South-Slavic nationhood and the principles of nationality and democracy. National movements were linked with democratic and progressive ideas whereas the imperial heritage was perceived as something archaic and feudal. It is also important to note that political articles written in 1918 focus less on passing on information and far more, on mediation and legitimacy of new political ideas. Despite the fact that the Monarchy still existed, the political role played by newspapers is particularly interesting along with the unifying course towards Yugoslav and national politics.

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Throughout 1918, it is possible to track discourses in the newspapers confirming imperial loyalty combined with a new competitive relationship with the movements fighting for national integration. By the end of the nineteenth century and during World War I, the situation on the periphery of the Kingdom of Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia, on the borderline of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, was particularly complex since competing national and integrative discourses started pressuring the former loyalty to the Monarchy. This struggle first and foremost reflected on language policy. The periphery is here used as a term defining economic, political and societal indicators and coincides with the image of regions, which were lagging behind in terms of economic and social development. In addition, the literacy rate was extremely low. In that context, the media supported the process of mobilising, empowering and emphasising certain ideological positions. In 1918, war rhetoric was gradually disappearing and getting replaced by strong discourses of national integration. Such discourses can be observed in all parts of Croatia. It became clear that Austro-Hungary would not survive and that the peoples wanted to proclaim independency. The objective of this chapter is to use the example of Agramer Tagblatt newspaper editions from 1918 to portray the moment when “imperial experiences and national expectations” started separating (“imperiale Erwartung und nationale Erfahrung”; Leonhard/Hirschhausen 2009, 60). Although the stage setting of imperial power that resulted from the narrative of “Einheit in der Vielfalt” (unity in diversity) was still very much present in newspapers, this chapter will show that the Habsburg narrative gradually lost its dominance in 1918 over the South-Slavic national-­ integrative discourses. This occurred as a reaction to political events. However, the newspaper Agramer Tagblatt had a clear agenda that was gradually brought to light with the proclamations of the Yugoslav Committee. The new political course apparent in Agramer Tagblatt bears witness to the process of separation from the Monarchy: “The spread of the Yugoslav orientation in the early years of the twentieth century testified to the more rapid spread of the anti-Austrian sentiment among one part of the Croatian intelligentsia, a phenomenon unknown in the nineteenth century” (Markus 2010, 176). To a greater extent, centripetal and centrifugal forces within the Monarchy started to become confrontational and the press became the mirror of the existing identity conflicts. “Empire depended on a belief in superiority” (Howe 2002, 83) and the modernizing national integration discourses of Croatian and South-Slav

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provenance challenged this belief. With the modernization, “power had shifted to the peripheries of the empire, to new nationalist political forces in the new power centres of Prague, Cracow, Zagreb, and Lvov which were pulling away from the centre, i.e., Vienna and the Habsburg hereditary lands” (Wank 1997, 52). In order to further elaborate that thesis, the first part of the chapter provides a brief historical overview of the development of the newspapers in the German language in Zagreb followed by an analysis of Agramer Tagblatt in 1918. The history of the newspapers published in German in Zagreb is inseparable from the overall process of modernisation and the mobilisation of the population. It changed the lives of people living on the periphery of the Monarchy entirely and contributed to the development of the “urban culture in the German language” (Kessler 2005, Ch. 2). The modernisation can also be seen as a result of revolutionary inventions in transport and communication that transformed the lives of those who stayed behind. The access to local and regional newspapers was by 1900 guaranteed for the inhabitants of the smallest towns and most remote villages (Judson 2016, 334–341). In any event, the history of journalism was closely linked with the development of artisanship and industrialisation, or the broader context of social processes of modernisation. At the same time, it was linked with a number of specific disciplines, such as the history of publishing, culture and research in the history of reception. Such effects can be found in illustrative examples summarising the dominant forces of a particular epoch. We should not forget that newspapers, and consequently also the German-language newspapers with a long tradition in Croatia, actively participated in laying the foundations for civic society7 in the territory of Croatia, which was one of the preconditions for modernisation processes.

A Brief Historical Overview The history of the newspapers published in the German language in Croatian lands started in 1771 with Ephemerides Zagrabienses, followed by Kroatischer Korrespondent and Agramer Deutschen Zeitung in 1786 (Kessler 2005, 16). An overview of that development is available on the web pages dedicated to the project on German-language newspapers in

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 On development of Croatian civil society see Gross and Szabo 1992.

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Europe since the emergence of the press until the year 19458. Many Croatian intellectuals were engaged in the early development of the press, for example, the Illyrians Ljudevit Gaj and Ivan Mažuranić. The Illyrian movement or Croatian national revival is seen as one of the most important phases in the development of the modern Croatian nation (Karaman 2000) whose main objective was to establish a linguistic and cultural community within the political framework that resulted from the Croatian feudal political tradition (Kessler 1981, 91). In 1835, Gaj founded Novine horvatzke as the first newspaper published only in the Croatian language and was soon followed by the publication of the literary supplement named Danicza horvatska. Gaj published political and literary works that played a crucial role in the establishment and affirmation of the standard Croatian literary language, that is, the Ijekavian variant of the Shtokavian dialect. At that time, language was perceived “as an expression of national character” (Hroch 1996, 67) and the “new literary language was the moral duty of all intellectuals from the ranks of the non-dominant ethnic group” (Hroch 1996, 69). It was seen as a precondition for other forms of social modernisation. After the Croatian-Hungarian Settlement, Croatian journalism started developing more rapidly and this development was followed by strong pressure of the so-called Hungarisation. In response to this challenge, Croatian politics established close ties with Vienna, and German language and language as a form of resistance to the pressure coming from Hungary. Vienna was perceived as more liberal in all matters related to language and culture than the Hungarian government and for that reason, German-language newspapers oftentimes promoted Croatian or Slavic national interests. The main task of journalism, apart from establishing of the standard literary language, informing and instructing, was to create “urban linguistic culture” (“deutschsprachige Stadtkultur” Riecke 2007, 505) in an underdeveloped and rural land. In the beginning, that culture started developing in German and served for the creation of a shared “cultural and communicational space“ (Riecke 2007, 513) as an important medium of “supra-regional communication” (Kessler 2005, 17) and a horizon 8  The project “Deutschsprachige Zeitungen von den Anfängen bis” 1945 is online with the task to provide “einen Überblick über die deutschsprachigen Zeitungen unterschiedlicher Regionen (darunter vor allem die Region Ostmittel- und Osteuropa) von den Anfängen im 17. Jahrhundert bis zum Ende des zweiten Weltkrieges” https://web.archive.org/ web/20080219103702/http://www.uni-giessen.de/zeitungen/laender.php#Kroatien (6 November 2017)

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truly necessary for understanding the cultural history of the region. Therefore, research on the development of newspapers in the nineteenth century should (1) gather together and overview; (2) linguistically evaluate; and (3) demark topics of literary, scientific, cultural and historiographical relevance (Riecke 2007, 503). By doing so, it is possible to track various phases, differentiation of the press, the emergence of competing papers published in both German and Croatian and the process of adjustment to political earthquakes on the whole South-Slavic territory. Research about newspapers published in the German language in South-East Europe is one of the “scarcely investigated fields of the German research corpora” (“kaum betretenen Regionen der germanistischen Forschungslandschaft” Riecke 2007, 502). Furthermore, Wolfgang Kessler claims that the German-language newspapers published on the territories of Croatia, Slavonia and Syrmia have been preserved only selectively and unintentionally (“deutschsprachige Presse Kroatiens, Slawoniens und Syrmiens bis zum Ende des Ersten Weltkrieges nur unvollständig und zufällig überliefert” Kessler 2005, 26). Marina Fruk (Fruk 2005, 393–405) departs from the four phases in the development of the German journalism in South-East Europe: the first phase comprises of eight newspapers over the period of 1786–1848. It is important to note in this context that those newspapers were published in German with the task to inspire the Croatian national spirit9 and Croatian culture, which relativises the national activists thesis about the pressure of Germanisation or “cultural assimilation” within the Empire (Howe 2002, 94). The second phase begins in 1848 and ends in 1918. It is both extremely heterogeneous and prolific. Only in Zagreb, were there 32 newspapers available to German-­ speaking readers and their role was to create a bridge with Viennese culture. Newspapers in German were published in Osijek and Rijeka as well. The third phase follows World War I, from 1918 to 1941, and it is concentrated mainly in Zagreb and Osijek. During this period, political forces were increasingly exerting pressure on the press and historian Josip Horvat even mentions the term “party newspapers”. The last phase covers the period during the Second World War (1941–1945) with an intensive and overly ideological production of German-language newspapers.

9  An overview of newspaper production on the territory of Croatia during the nineteenth century and later: http://www.hkdrustvo.hr/clanovi/tmp/novine/novine.htm. (30 March 2019)

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Agramer Tagblatt Agramer Tagblatt was a newspaper published in Zagreb from 188610 to 1922. The paper is an example of a Landesblatt, or regional newspaper (Paupié 1960, 27) with a very important political and cultural impact in the region where it was published but relatively unknown abroad, as opposed to “Grosspresse” and “Weltblätter” (Paupié 1960, 27). “Agram” is a name used in the German language during the Habsburg period. It had been classified as a German name for Zagreb and was rarely used after the collapse of the Monarchy, mostly as a rejection of the Habsburg hegemony in nationally inspired fear from Germanisation. The newspaper changed the name to Zagreber Tagblatt to recognise the new and strictly Croatian and Slavic identity of the city remaining in use until 1926 when it was changed once again to a more neutral Morgenblatt, used until 13 April 1941. Until 1918, Agramer Tagblatt belonged to an extremely heterogeneous second phase of Croatian newspapers in German language. Franz Arnold was the first director of the newspaper and Jakob Frank the first editor and the owner of the paper. Jakob was the brother of the right-­ wing politician Josip Frank. After him, Alois-Anton Fleischer, Ivan Kralj, Josip Schlegel and Jakov Frank assumed the position, but they were not politically active. Later on, Josip Schlegel acted as the editor of Morgenblatt together with Zdenko Vernić, Hinko Hinković, Peter Preradović Jr. and Zlatko Gorjan. Morgenblatt was published by Jugoštampa together with the Croatian newspapers Riječ and Novosti. Morgenblatt was a fusion of Agramer Tagblatt and Der Morgen, which was established in 1923 by Eugen Demetrović as a commercial newspaper. Morgenblatt primarily focused on informing foreign countries about political and cultural circumstances and highlighted cultural events by systematically publishing translations of Croatian and South-Slavic literature (Horvat 2003, 354). Agramer Tagblatt was located on 26 Frankopanska Street in the centre of Zagreb. It is important to note that Agramer Tagblatt was founded as the so-called “competition paper” (“Konkurrenzblatt” Stančić 2013, 91) 10  Marina Fruk’s text begins in 1886, in Kessler 1888. Thus the availability of the 1886-edition in the National library would support Fruk’s date of beginning. See National Library in Zagreb: Agramer Tagblatt [Microfilm]: Organ für Politik und Volkswirthschaft / [verantwortlicher Redacteur Josip Schlegel]. Jg.1, Nr.1 (den 2. Jaenner 1886)—Jg.35, Nr.16 (den 18. Jaenner 1920) Jg.35, Nr.17 (den 8.Maerz 1920)—Jg.3 7, Nr. 71 (den 14. Maerz 1922). In: http://dnc.nsk.hr/Newspapers/LibraryTitle.aspx?id=416faf7b-6577-4b66-8a1cc769f54be596. (30 March 2019).

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to the traditional and popular official newspaper Agramer Zeitung, that is, a newspaper opposing the politics of Ban Khuen-Héderváry (“Oppositionsblatt zur Politik des Banus Khuen-Héderváry mit dem verantwortlichen Redakteur Josef Schlegel” Kessler 2005, 23). He reigned from 1883 to 1903 and during that period, Croatian autonomy was reduced to a bare minimum. The editor-in-chief Josef Schlegel was a Croatian patriot who remained persistently and strongly opposed to Ban Khuen-Héderváry’s politics. A historian with a special interest in journalism, Josip Horvat established that descendants of aristocratic families Ivan IX and Josip VI Drašković (1885–1912) founded Agramer Tagblatt (Horvat 2003, 247) with the aim of criticising the regime of Ban Khuen-­ Héderváry. During the period 1885–1887, they were trying to establish an opposition party named “Centrum” but after the failure of that idea in 1888, they withdrew from politics. For the purpose of that political action, they started a new German-language publication in Zagreb—Agramer Tagblatt. At the same time, Ivan Drašković proposed the establishment of a new society, which would support writers and journalists. However, that project did not see the light of day either, and the paper was taken over by Vincenz Frank remaining in moderate opposition and supporting the Independent Peoples’ Party (Nezavisna narodna stranka). In order to achieve international outreach, it was very important for the paper to report about the political and cultural life in Croatia in the German language. During the first phase following its establishment, the newspaper supported the Croatian autonomy and interests resulting from the Croatian-Hungarian Settlement or Nagodba in 186811 and was generally representing the positions of the Viennese Court. However, after 1905 and the Rijeka Resolution, designed to create a Croat-Serb Coalition,12 pro-Yugoslav tendencies started gaining a noticeable momentum. According to Wolfgang Kessler, Agramer Tagblatt was “more modern” than Agramer Zeitung, which was discontinued in 1912 and was “eher

11  “in 1868 the Unionists and the Hungarians signed the Croatian-Hungarian nagodba (agreement) which defined Croatia’s legal position as a state for the next fifty years. Croatia and Slavonia remained in control of what had been in their competence since 1861 (international affairs, judiciary, education and religion). The Croats attained the status of a political nation in Hungary, with which they formed a single state” (Goldstein 1999, 82). 12  See the translation of the original document: https://ecommons.cornell.edu/bitstream/handle/1813/2154/Rijeka_Resolution_1905.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y (5 April 2019)

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offiziöse13 Organ” (Kessler 2005, 24) or “a semi-official periodical of the Austrian command in Zagreb” (Horvat 2003, 342). Due to its open advocacy of pro-Yugoslav ideas, other newspapers together with the Croatian Party of Rights, used to derisively call Agramer Tagblatt “the coalition newspaper” (“Koalitionsblatt” AT14 1918n), referring to the Croatian-Serbian Coalition, or the leading political alliance born in 1906. The main “political twist” occurred in the beginning of the twentieth century with the emergence of the policy of the so-called New Course following the proclamation of the Rijeka and Zadar Resolutions, when Yugoslav tendencies in the emergent coalition between Croats and Serbs assumed a very concrete form. Both Resolutions accepted the policy of the “New Course” and opted for collaboration with the Serbs by declaratively embracing the political idea of cooperation between Croats and Serbs in Austria-Hungary at the beginning of the twentieth century. In the texts of both Resolutions, Croatian and Serbian parliamentarians requested promotion of Croatian and Serbian national interests, primarily focusing on the integration of Dalmatia with Croatia-Slavonia. Many Croatian intellectuals wrote for Agramer Tagblatt using German. Among them we should emphasise theatre critiques by theatre director Branko Gavella, texts written by art historian Izidor Kršnjavi, composer Hugo Badalić (mentioned in the chapter by Marijan Bobinac in this volume), painter Vlaho Bukovac, natural scientist Andrija Mohorovičić and others. Some of the associates include Camilla Lucerna (König 2003, 119–1121) and Zofka Kveder (Köstler 2006) as well as Danko Politeo, “the most talented journalist in the country” (Horvat 2003, 256). Anton (Toni) Schlegel15 assumed the position of the editor-in-chief in 1910. His political beliefs were close to the Croatian-Serbian Coalition’s programme and the Coalition’s leader Svetozar Pribićević and can be considered as the author of a number of anonymously published leading articles. These articles were inclined towards the programme of Yugoslav homogenisation and requests for future unification. The anonymously published leading articles reflect the editor-in-chief’s positions and we can therefore presume that he is their author. Particularly in the second half of that year, the 13  The term was used in the bibliography of the Austrian Press History 1848–1959 (Paupié 1960). 14  Henceforth, references to Agramer Tagblatt are abbreviated as AT in the text. 15  His biography can be found online. See: Österreichisches Bibliographisches Lexikon: http://www.biographien.ac.at/oebl/oebl_S/Schlegel_Anton_1878_1929.xml (6 November 2017).

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newspaper started moving consistently towards the Coalition’s programme. Toni Schlegel was a good friend of the politician Svetozar Pribićević, a Croatian Serb and one of the most important proponents of Yugoslavism. His “policy ran on the lines of Yugoslav unitarism, and this become crucial in the stormy events of 1918” (Goldstein 1999, 195). In addition to Agramer Tagblatt, there were other two newspapers also published in German in Zagreb in 1918, that is, Der Morgenstern and Neues Agramer Journal.

1918 and Agramer Tagblatt What did Agramer Tagblatt look like over the course of 1918? Normally comprising of only eight pages, the look of the paper was clearly under the influence the war: apart from the editor’s comment the cover contains reports from the defence headquarters and German admiralty taken from the news agency in Berlin. The lead articles set the direction of the newspaper and the first issue recapitulates 1917 with the hope to establish “the new foundations of the world” (“die neuen Grundlagen der Welt” AT 1918a) as well as “the freedom of the people” (“die Freiheit der Völker”). The author believed that the most important event was the Russian Revolution and quoted Pyotr A. Kropotkin. The newspaper also discussed “South Slavs in the Monarchy” (“Südslawen der Monarchie”) and “the events of national importance” (“Ereignisse von nationaler Bedeutung” AT 1918a) meaning the Yugoslav direction, primarily after “the Yugoslav Declaration signed on 30 May” (“südslawische Deklaration vom 30. Mai”) and the final “Parliamentary Decision of Starčević’s political party” (“Saborerklärung der Starčevićpartei”), that is, the Croatian Party of Rights regarding “the foundation of an independent state within the Monarchy that would unify all South Slavic nations in the Monarchy” (“Errichtung eines selbständigen, alle Südslaven des Reiches umfassenden Staates im Rahmen der Monarchie” AT 1918a). A feuilleton was published at the bottom of the first page, a continuation of Marija Ružička-­ Strozzi’s biography signed by S-s, most probably Ivan Souvan. The second page brought the second part of the leading article and the feuilleton together with news from Croatian newspapers such as Hrvatska Riječ, Narodne novine and Novine, and a particularly interesting “interpellation of member of the parliament Korošec” (“Interpelation des abg. Korošec” (Korošec 1918, 2)), severely condemning “persecution of South Slavs“ (südslawische Hetze) in Tiroler Soldatenzeitung, and “pro-German

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national positions” (deutschnationale Haltung) stated in those newspapers. The newspaper also published texts “On peace negotiations in BrestLitovsk” (Zu den Friedensverhandlungen in Brest-Litovsk) taken from the Czech newspapers Č eski Svaz and Das Fremdenblatt. The third page was reserved for international political affairs and reports about the Bolsheviks and the Triple Entente, negotiations in Brest-Litovsk and the position of the Monarchy. The page is a mosaic typeset as the so-called Scherenarbeit, meaning that the reports were simply taken from the whole of monarchical and European territory, for example, the report on the position of the Swedish government concerning the peace conference in Stockholm published in the Copenhagen Morgenposten. The fourth page was dedicated to regional news: a daily chronicle, local and provincial news together with Letzte Telegramme. The fifth page combined news in sections: from the battleground, from the Triple Entente states, theatre, arts and literature. It also comprised the feuilleton novel by H. Courths Mahler in sixty parts followed by another novel titled Einer Mutter Liebe by Jos. Schade Haedicke. As a rule, the last three pages of the newspaper were dedicated to advertisements. A description of the materials of the first issue clearly indicates the South-Slavic orientation of the newspaper. This orientation determines the target group, that is, educated and mobile upper-bourgeoisie strata of society showing explicit nationalist tendencies. In the beginning of the year, they were still fostering utopian solutions for the national question resulting from the so-called Trialism within the Monarchy. Croatian policy was trying to find the best solution whilst staying within the Empire, such as Trialism in Austria-Hungary or Austro-Slavism. Trialism was the political movement that aimed to reorganise the bipartite Empire into a tripartite one, creating a Croatian state. This was a very short-lived political idea advocated by Archduke Franz Ferdinand who wanted to strengthen the Slavic component within the Monarchy, which was not welcomed by Serbian and pro-Yugoslav circles. The Sunday issue was somewhat more comprehensive and the selection of topics addresses its target audience, in this case the educated bourgeoisie. Thus, it brought the inaugural speech given by the new director of the theatre, Guido pl. Hreljanović (Hreljanović 1918, 6), who called the national theatre “a special place for the Slavic South” (“hervorragende Kulturstätte des slavischen Südens”). The dominance of national topics is also apparent in the presentation of the new media, for example, the feuilleton mentions Die Filmkunst und ihre nationale Bedeutung (Veritas 1918,

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1–2). Advertisements published in the newspaper indicate that the audience was bilingual since the ads were published both in Croatian and German. This corresponds with the profile of provincial regional newspapers, that is, reports on the international affairs are taken from the monarchical sources but they also comprehensively cover the Croatian Parliament plenary sessions (AT 1918i). As opposed to the regime bound Agramer Zeitung, Tagblatt had a liberal and libertarian approach, especially in the lead articles, for example, the issue of 4th of January covered the story about the peace talks in Brest-Litovsk with a special accent on the thesis about people’s self-­ determination. Because of the war, the focus of the newspaper was on the international affairs and the peace negotiations in Brest-Litovsk, developments in Russia (“Das Regime der Boljseviki” AT 1918b) and the Monarchy. The reports were mainly taken from the Viennese newspaper Neue Freie Presse. The only commentary can be found in the lead article, which is consistently anonymous. On the contrary, international news were, as a rule, taken from other sources such as Vorwärts from Vienna, the telegraphic agency in St. Petersburg, The Daily Chronicle, Vossische Zeitung and the French press. The South-Slavic orientation should not come as a surprise. Ever since 1917, this orientation started spreading virulently. Thus, the previous war-­ dominated rhetoric was almost entirely replaced by the South-Slavic national pathos, which is evident in the relevant articles. The new South-­ Slavic identity that was propagated is apparent in the statement about the “imaginary ethnic community of South Slavs” (Matković 2007, 80). The lead article introduced the announcement of supranational Yugoslav union in January of 1918, which stated that, “we carry the South-Slavic idea in our hearts” (“wir tragen in unseren Herzen die südslawische Idee” AT 1918c), which South Slavs can only realise “on their own and using their own strength” (“allein und nur aus eigener Kraft […] erringen”). Following the proclamation on the island of Corfu, as the manifesto of the future South-Slavic unification that the Serbian government had signed with the Yugoslav Committee on 20 July 1917 in Zagreb, and which itself was already formed in Paris in April 1915, “the national cultural policy of South Slavs” (“nationalen südslawischen Kulturpolitik”; Vernić 1920, 4) started gaining a momentum. The future unification “was to be a constitutional, parliamentary and democratic monarchy ruled by the Serbian Karadjordjevic Dynasty and founded on general civil liberties” (Goldstein 1999, 110). The reflection of that policy can be traced in the lead article.

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It reflects the expressed national, social and economic engagement of the author and especially some contemporary ideas about the deprivation of small nations “on the border between the West and the East, the Adriatic and the Black Seas” (“an der Wasserscheide zwischen West und Ost, dem Adriatischen und Schwarzen Meere, durch die historische Entwicklung, die bald vom Norden, bald unter einem solchen von Süden erfolgte”; AT 1918d). In parallel with this strengthened mobilisation of the South-Slavic idea, we can also observe an old monarchical institution, that is, censorship. Although there were many comprehensive interventions in the newspapers, particularly in the second part of the year 1918, where only certain parts of articles were published, the censorship was not organised as a unique system: “The dualistic structure of the Austro-Hungarian nation allowed for two contrary, very differing systems of censorship, and the multi-ethnic society with the unresolved question of nationality made it more difficult for the public to find a consensus on the issue of the war” (Ehrenpreis 2014). Many examples can already be found in the beginning of that year, e.g. “Aus dem österreichischen Abgeordnetenhause” (AT 1918e). The topic of people’s self-determination was censored and the leading article was taken from Frankfurter Zeitung under the heading “Österreich-Ungarn und den Völkerstreit” (AT 1918f). Member of the Parliament Vjekoslav Spinčić’s speech (Spiničić 1918) was also censored (Horvat 2003, 330) as were the reports contained in the section titled “Politische Situation” concerning the rise of natural right in the districts of Gračac, Lapac and Udbina, struck by hunger and organised “gangs of looters” (“Räuberbanden”; AT 1918g). Newspapers published in the German language and a pronounced South-Slavic or pro-Yugoslav positions were no exceptions: in 1917, the last German newspaper to be established in Zagreb was called Südslavische Rundschau. Organ für Interessen der Kroaten, Serben und Slovenen. The very title of this short-lived journal indicates the programme and propaganda supporting the Croatian and Serbian unification as the new political direction. In her journalist research, Marina Fruk (Fruk 2005, 393–405) warns that since the very beginning, newspapers in German supported the mission of strengthening and fostering the matrix culture and served as a role model. A comprehensive article dedicated to poet Petar Preradović and his poem titled Ahn´ und Enkel (Horvat-Petheö 1918), published on the occasion of his jubilee, supports that claim. The ceremony dedicated to Preradović was held at the Croatian Parliament with “a lot of

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enthusiasm of young people” (“Begeisterung der Jugend”; AT 1918h) with a very strong anti-Austrian and anti-Hungarian sentiment. Josip Horvat interprets the celebration as the expression of pro-Yugoslav and anti-Habsburg position (Horvat 2003, 333) without elaborating positions related to Serbo-Croatian or Yugoslav nationalism. This indicates that the main task was the so-called unification and liberation, yet it was not politically strictly defined. These positions were further developing in the course of the year. In May, there were reports published on “nationalist waves” inspired by the ideas of “unification, freedom and statehood” (“Vereinigung, Freiheit und Staatlichkeit”; AT 1918j), and that particular article was not censored. Censorship lost its grip, for example, the paper named “The Voice of Slovenes, Croatians and Serbs” (Glas Slovenaca, Hrvata i Srba), or the three “constituent tribes” was established on 1 January 1918 as the proponent of the policy proclaimed by the Corfu Declaration. The authorities tried to abolish the paper in March of 1918 but failed. The lead article puts forward the necessity of national unification, that is, “Croatian and Serbian conviction of unification” (“kroatisch-­ serbische Einheitsgedanke” AT 1918k). At the same time, the institutions of the Monarchy kept losing their authority and the author criticised “hatred direct towards Slavs in […] Viennese newspapers […]“ (“Slavenhaß dieser […] Wiener Blätter”; AT 1918l). Count Julius Andrassy was proclaimed “a big hater of Slavs and common people” (“der große Slavenhasser und der kleine Mensch” AT 1918m). In August, Agramer Tagblatt introduced the second proclamation of the Croatian delegation (AT 1918p) aiming “to realize the right to self-determination” (“für die Verwirklichung des Selbstbestimmungsrechtes”; AT 1918q). Already in August, there were certain indications of a post-war mentality expressed in the announcement that “nations from 1918” (“Völker im Jahre 1918”) could no longer deal with “the sayings from the year 1914” (“Redensarten aus dem 1914”; AT 1918o), since “the world in 1914 and the world in 1918 were two antipodes” (Horvat 2003, 338). To claim that they were talking only about a South-Slavic affiliation would presume an oversimplification and the relicts of multiple loyalties were apparent in Kaiser-König Karl’s birthday celebration: “Isn’t the peace in all the countries of the Slavic South a clear indicator of the South-Slavic affection for the idea of the Monarchy?” (“Beweist die musterhafte Ruhe in allen Ländern des slavischen Südens nicht die Anhänglichkeit der Südslaven an den Reichsgedanken?”; AT 1918r). This marks a shift from the antagonistic relationship between the Empire and its nationalities to the compatibility between a sense of

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national belonging and imperial loyalty. “The lack of a coherent Staatsidee binding together the domains of the Habsburg Empire” (Wank 1997, 48) was not only recognised by the new political elite, but also replaced with a new Yugoslav ideology. And while on 19 October there were still mentions of the Monarchy present (AT 1918s), three days after there were reports published on “powerful manifestations” (“gewaltigen Manifestationen”) for “the national unification and liberation“ (“nationale Vereinigung und Befreiung”; AT 1918t) followed by the introduction of the new National Council16 proclaimed as “the most beautiful and simultaneously very serious days of our life together” (“schönsten und zugleich sehr ernsten Tage unseren Volkslebens”; AT 1918u). The National Council was a political body with a programme of uniting the nation within the Empire and turning it into an independent and democratic state. Josip Horvat points out that there was a unified journalist front formed in the autumn of 1918 in Croatia shortly before the breakdown of the Yugoslav reign whose objective was to achieve full national independence based on the self-­ determination of the nation. The Yugoslav National Council was formed in 1918 as a result of the Slav Congress of the Monarchy and held in Ljubljana. On 25 November, when the new state was proclaimed (AT 1918v), the delegates of the National Council (AT 1918w) left for Belgrade, the new state’s capital, and declared Yugoslav independence. One can say that at this time “the age of formal empire is clearly dead” (Howe 2002, 114). Apart from emphatic celebration of the new states, the newspapers clearly indicated the signs of the post-war crisis, that is, the newspapers only had four to five pages and only a few advertisements. After the establishment of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes on 1 December 1918, there were firm declarations of setting free from “the atmosphere of Habsburg hatred towards the South Slavs” (“von der Atmosphäre des Habsburger-Südslawenhasses”) because of “prosecution of everything South-Slavic lead by blind hatred” (“alles Südslawische mit blindem Hasse verfolgte”; Vernić 1920, 5). This was an indication of emotional propagandistic discourses and their (over)accentuation was motivated by the abolishment of “the Habsburg stigma” (Newmann 2014, 13), that is, the fact that Croatian forces struggled for the Central Powers and, as losers, were marked with “the culture of defeat” 16  The members of council: Antun Korošec, president and leaders of Slovene Catolics ̵ Budisavljević. Anun Pavelić, Svetozar Pribićević and Srdan

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(Schievelbusch 2003). Thus, the lead article from 24 December 1918 mentioned “many centuries of hardship and slavery”, “decades of fierce fighting” and “joyful hopes” (“Jahrhunderten schwerer Knechtschaft, Dezennien harter Kämpfe und froher Hoffnungen”; AT 342) calling for “national and human consciousness” (“Volks- und Menschenbewußtsein”). In the setting of the new Slavic state, Tagblatt reported on Große Manifestationen in Zagreb “large manifestations in Zagreb” (AT 1918x), or the celebration of the unification with the procession passing from the University to the Cathedral. However, a day after, there was a brief report on “Events taking place in Zagreb yesterday” (“Die gestrigen Vorfälle in Zagreb”; AT 1918y) and conflicts between sailors and drunken soldiers. Historians will later on reconstruct the violent rebellion on 5 December 1918 concealed by the government as “conflicts among soldiers”17. Thus, these incidents were the result of antimonarchist demonstrations against the hegemony of Serbs and against the centralist unitarism (Klemenčič and Žagar 2004, 129) and recent historiography mentions the term “December victims”, which the official Yugoslav policy suppressed or kept silent. The Croatian language newspaper called Novosti only concluded that “peace and order have to be preserved” (“Mir i red moraju biti i bit će uzdržani”; Novosti 1918) and that the cover-up contained in celebratory discourses about the unification were only a manipulation aiming to foster the new supranational identity. At the time, the editor-in-chief and probable author of the leading article, Toni Schlegel, who went on to become the editor of Jugoštampa until 1929 and president of the journalist division of the National Council on 1 September 1919, became a trusted man of military circles and the court (Radauš 1991, 177). This provided him with the opportunity to pave the way for the Yugoslav dictatorship. That fact may serve to explain a highly teleological narrative, culminating in the “liberation and unification” of South Slaves in his lead articles. Later on, he was killed in front of his own apartment after the introduction of the dictatorship on 6 January 1929 by two young men affiliated to the radical Frankist and proto-Ustasha Party of Right, Mijo Babić and Vladimir Pospišil (Miljan and Šutej 2019). It offers one example for the “aggressive and destructive tendencies of East Central European nationalism from 1918 to the present” (Wank 1997, 54), partly as a result of the collapsed imperial order, that “interrupted, delayed and distorted the process of state 17  B. Krizman wrote about these events in his book (Krizman 1977). For the memories of the politician see Budisavljević 1958. For a new approach see Matijević 2010.

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formation and the development of nationalism in the region” (Wank 1997, 54).

Conclusion As Deák points out, it is important to remember that “Yugoslavia was no less a people´s mosaic than the Habsburg and Ottoman empires had been, despite the Yugoslav government’s spurious claim that Serbs, Slovenes, Croats, Muslims, and Macedonians were in reality one and the same nation” (Deák 1997, 133), which was fostered by the discourse of brotherhood and soon to be abandoned idea of “Yugoslav nation of three names”. There were different Yugoslav narratives in sharp contrast, ranging from federative to unitarian concepts, from monarchical to republican Yugoslavism and Serbian hegemonic discourse to exclusively Croatian national discourse, because of the overwhelming primacy of Serbian narrative18 in the post-war Yugoslav culture. Due to unresolved national, economic and social issues, the country was in a state of political dissatisfaction and tension. The development of this situation can be implicitly reconstructed from the articles published in Agramer Tagblatt because they do not indicate a single national discourse but rather, they are pervaded by ambivalences between the imperial and the national and between competing Croatian and Yugoslav concepts. If we are to look a single year during which the German-language newspaper Agramer Tagblatt was published, it is possible to trace back the extent to which the political framework and societal changes impacted various discourses represented in the newspaper. Equally we see various processes that took place in the shaping of identity patterns, the intermediation of historical events and problems related to collective memory. At the same time, the ideological formation of a Yugoslav nation was moving away from the former and failed monarchical identity and was led by the wish to introduce modernisation and democratisation. Because of this, the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy was depicted as “the prison of nations”. In the German-language newspaper Agramer Tagblatt it is possible to clearly 18  “While the Serbs considered that the new state was an extension of Serbia on the basis of its having been victorious in the 1914–1918 war, the others—primarily (and at that moment almost exclusively) the Croats and the Slovenes—considered it the unification of several nations on an entirely equal foundation and without anyone having a specially privileged status” (Goldstein 1999, 113).

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trace the abandonment of monarchical positions or how “in the Monarchy’s South Slav lands, political and social radicalization burgeoned as the war neared its end” (Markus 2010, 176). Of course, it is important to raise to the question whether the proclamation of self-determination and the creation of the new Yugoslav state arrived suddenly or whether it was a consequence of long-term and meticulously prepared processes and whether it is possible to discuss “the struggle for the survival of the nation” (Horvat 2003, 335) or the new phase in the development of Croatian and Yugoslav nation. It is equally interesting to consider the role that newspapers played in terms of integration and identity creation in parallel to political and territorial redistribution following World War I, which in many ways preserved the reflection of multiple loyalties. South-Slavic discourses started dominating only after October, when it became clear that the Monarchy could not be preserved. On the imaginary scale, marked with meandering between the imperial and the national, the national prevailed. However, the national issue was particularly complicated in Croatian territory due to the belated creation of the nation, which in many ways overlapped with the supranational Yugoslav identity. From the supra-regional perspective, Agramer Tagblatt witnessed the process of differentiation of journalism in the early twentieth century and it was marked with a very expressed political party affiliation. The paper addressed the pro-Yugoslav oriented audience and because of that, it was dominated by ideological discourses that were extremely quick to adapt to the changed geopolitical circumstance. It is particularly interesting to follow the confronted political options and the plurality of Yugoslav or exclusively Croatian conceptions during the year when the Monarchy dissolved. In the upcoming period and until the Second World War, the role of German-language newspapers became marginal and this fact indicates national mechanisms of elimination and gradual disappearance of the multilingual imperial culture within the first Yugoslav state that could be retrospectively perceived as a “Multi-National Experiment in Early Twentieth-Century Europe” (Cornwall 2002). The investigation of newspaper articles from 1918 provides an insight into a continued negotiation19 with national identity and the importance of national affiliations 19  It is best to think of the post-war transition and the impact of the war in Croatia not as a complete re-configuration or as a radical break with the past but as a continued negotiation over a contested and disintegrated national identity. This negotiation had taken place within the Habsburg monarchy and would now take place within Yugoslavia. In this sense, there is

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in the post-imperial era. Undoubtedly, the investigation of regional newspapers in the German language published in Zagreb provide yet another piece in the puzzle of various arguments in the debate about imperial collapse but also reflect different ways in which the Croatian question in multinational states can be conceptualised.

References Agramer Tagblatt. 1918a. Zagreb, 1. Jänner. 1 January, 1. 1. ———. 1918b. Das Regime der Boljseviki. 2 January, 2. 3. ———. 1918c. Zagreb, 4. Jänner. 4 January, 4. 1–2. ———. 1918d. Zagreb, 18. Jänner. 18 January, 14. 1. ———. 1918e. Aus dem österreichischen Abgeordnetenhause. 26 January, 22. 3. ———. 1918f. Österreich-Ungarn und der Völkerstreit. 29 January, 25. 1–2. ———. 1918g. Politische Situation. 3 March, 57. 4. ———. 1918h. Die Preradović-Feier in Zagreb. 20 March, 74. 1–2. ———. 1918i. Kroatischer Sabor. Die gestrige Sitzung. 22 March, 76. 1–3. ———. 1918j. Zagreb, 1. Mai. 1 May, 107. 1–2. ———. 1918k. Zagreb, 30. Mai. 30 May, 135. 1–2. ———. 1918l. Zagreb, 9. juni. 9 June, 145. 1. ———. 1918m. Zagreb, 21. juni. 21 June, 157. 1. ———. 1918n. Das “Agramer Tagblatt” und die kroatisch-serbische Koalition. 3 July, 168. 3. ———. 1918o. Zagreb, 1. August. 1 August, 197. 1. ———. 1918p. Die zweite Erklärung der kroatischen Delegation. 8 August, 204. 1–2. ———. 1918q. Zagreb, 10. August. 10 August, 206. 1. ———. 1918r. Der Geburtstag des Kaiser-Königs. 17 August, 213. 1. ———. 1918s. Die Umgestaltung der Monarchie. 19 October, 276. 1. ———. 1918t. Die heutigen Manifestationen. 22 October, 279. 1. ———. 1918u. Aus dem Nationalrat. Aufruf zum Sammeln für den Nationalrat. 26 October, 283. 1. ———. 1918v. Die Proklamierung des Einheitsstaates. 25 November, 313. 1. ———. 1918w. Die Delegierten des Nationalrates in Beograd. 2 December, 320. 1. ———. 1918x. Große Manifestationen in Zagreb. 5 December, 323. 1. ———. 1918y. Die gestrigen Vorfälle in Zagreb. Das Kommunique des Nationalrates. 6 December, 324. 1.

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PART V

Echoes from an Inner Void: The Post-­ Imperial Novel Between Melancholy and Memory

CHAPTER 14

Theory of Empire, Mythology and the Power of the Narrative Christine Magerski

Political theory plays a subordinate role in contemporary literary and cultural studies.1 This is in error, because it can contribute to a differentiated understanding of the correlation of literary and political order, particularly when it comes to empire. This chapter unfolds this thesis on the basis of the political theory of Herfried Münkler and its application to the Habsburg Empire. Münkler’s theory of empire, seen as a major contribution to the developing field of critical imperial studies, as well as his writings on the subject of political myths and narratives prove to be a complex and coherent theoretical tool that allows us to link main concepts such as form, myth and narrative thereby strengthening the crossroads between 1  Some passages included have been translated from an earlier work by the author: see Chap. 1 in Christine Magerski, Imperiale Welten. Literatur und politische Theorie am Beispiel Habsburg© Velbrück Wissenschaft 2018.

C. Magerski (*) Department for German Language and Literature, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Chovanec, O. Heilo (eds.), Narrated Empires, Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55199-5_14

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political, cultural and literary studies. They also illustrate significant relevance for a comprehension of literary and political orders of the twentieth century. In three consecutive steps, the political theory of Münkler can be grasped in ways that are relevant to literary and cultural studies: empire and imperial mission; imperial mission, form and myth; and myth building and demythologising through narration. In regards to the last this chapter goes beyond Münkler in order to emphasise the epistemological power of literature, especially in the form of the post-imperial novel.

Empire and Imperial Mission From what exactly is an empire constituted, and how can one imagine its function? For the political scientist Herfried Münkler, ontological definitions are not possible; they merely define by distinction. Understood in this way, empire is first defined by what it is not: it is not a nation-state, nor a hegemonic power. Münkler, however, acknowledges that problems of definition and classification remain, and that these problems are due to the subject itself. Although aiming for a typology of empires in the sense of Weber’s conception of ideal types, Münkler points out that most empires are hybrid formations. What is important to a fundamental understanding of Münkler’s theory of empire is that this observed hybridisation of ideal-­ type models sharpens the view of the respective imperial structure’s essence: namely, a historically concrete answer to specific tasks and challenges (Münkler 2010, 4). In other words, every imperial order is first a historical one. Münkler’s explicit historicisation not only separates his thought from theories of imperialism, but also from postcolonial studies2; for although the historicising perspective seems self-evident in the face of a world currently shaped by nation-states, it is largely the downfall rather than the long-term functioning of empires that binds the interests of scholars. To a certain extent, the present prevents us from realising what is decisive for Münkler’s theoretical architecture: for a long time, imperial orders were the general rule and their legitimacy was unchallenged as a political order. If this were not so, empires would not have lasted as long as they did. One might therefore say that empires are the more interesting as forms, that is, as a possible order (among others), because of their complexity.

2

 For a critique of the ahistorical perspective of postcolonial theory, see Kennedy 1996.

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This is clear when comparing the empire with the dominant contemporary form of the nation-state.3 If one follows Münkler’s argument, the nation-state is clearly demarcated from the outside and relatively homogeneous on the inside. Empire is different and because of its spatial expansion it has no clear borders, and is thus confronted with both a centre-periphery problem and a correlating tendency towards integration. The rising complexity in its centre corresponds with the complex form of the empire. It is here that an opposition of particularism and universalism must be functionally linked in order to establish a unity (Münkler 2005, 17).4 The implications of the centre-periphery problem for the political and literary order of the Habsburg Empire I have laid out in detail elsewhere (Magerski 2018a, b, 69–97). Here I want to show that Münkler’s theory provides a useful instrument that can enable a better understanding of the correlation between political, cultural and narrative forms of modernity. In order to do so, Münkler’s theory of empire is not only combined with his writings on the subject of political myths and narratives but also extended with relevant writings from the fields of cultural philosophy (Ernst Cassirer), literary studies (Claudio Magris) and literature itself (Robert Musil).The result is a complex but coherent theoretical tool that allows us to link concepts such as empire, form, myth and narration and therefore to draw a line from empire and its universal mission via form and myth building right to the (de)mythologising power of literature, especially in the form of the post-imperial novel. Let us start with empire and the imperial mission. Münkler introduces the concept of this mission to bridge the realms of politics and culture understanding. Somewhat literally it can be seen as the vocation or calling of the empire to foster and spread the faith in itself. As such, the imperial mission, like any mission, seeks to consolidate faith, that is, the belief in the empire. As we shall see later, it includes religious components and reaches an almost mythical status. The mission, or “missionising”, must be understood as an integral part of imperial theory: a component that 3  For the most recent discussion on the difference between empires and nation-states, see Malešević 2017. 4  Particularism is to be understood here as the striving of nations or regions to enforce their own special interests against general interests. On the other hand, universalism, which claims to protect general interests, denotes a mode of thinking or doctrine, which emphasises the primacy of the universal, of the whole, or in this particular case, of the empire over particular nations.

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enables Münkler to answer the question of how an empire harmonises the opposition between particularism and universalism in such a way that it creates a long-lasting and stable unity. Only the mission can accomplish the impossible, by producing what Niklas Luhmann describes in his negotiation of the centre-periphery problem as the paradox of “a particularly based universal semantics”; a semantics so powerful, that it makes us forget all the political, cultural and literary history behind it (Luhmann 1998, 667). And yet it is this very concept of mission that expands Münkler’s theory of empire into the sphere of cultural studies, since it allows for a universalisation of empire (as one possible form of political order within a variety of others), and therefore for an attribution of empire to the realm of symbolic forms. Within this realm we can find diverse forms such as religion, art, language, science and myth. Philosopher of culture Ernst Cassirer assembled these forms under the rubric of his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, placing myth at the top, and making it the unmistakable sign of a successful mission. From this point of view, the myth becomes the third aspect of empire (beside space and time/duration)—a cultural aspect crucial for anchoring the political form of empire in the consciousness of its residents. At the same time, it must be emphasised that Münkler does not establish this connection between imperial mission and myth. While the concept of mission is part of his theory of empire, Münkler discusses the notion of myth in Die Deutschen und ihre Mythen (The Germans and their Myths), and consequently in the context of the political order of the nation-state. Nevertheless, such a synopsis of Münkler’s writings is justified, especially in regard to the Danube Monarchy, not just because of Claudio Magris’ The Habsburg Myth, but also because it is only by combining the concepts of empire (politics), mission (culture) and myth (art and literature) that the potential of Münkler’s political theory can become visible, and thus contribute to a more general cultural understanding of all political forms and orders. To emphasise again, the most important aspect of Münkler’s (2010, 8) theory: “Empires shape cultures and spread civilization, and thus they are not just political orders, but also large-scale civilizations that shape ethical and aesthetic, legal and economic ideas”.5 They “see themselves as ­creators 5  On the topic of imperial expansion through assertion of “civilizing missions” see Münkler and Straßenberger (2017, 378).

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and guarantors of an order that ultimately depends on them” (Münkler 2010, 8).While nation-states stop at their borders, empires interfere with the borders of other political entities to fulfil their mission. In doing so, an imperial mission can ground itself in peace, civilisation, socialism or even order in general terms. The decisive factor is that the mission is the first to establish the demand of loyalty from an empire’s inhabitants, and it does so, although decreasingly, in the centre as well as on the periphery. Only cosmological justification and the validation of the salvific history spread by the mission establish the special position of an empire in time and space. “Wherever there is belief in this mission”, Münkler says unequivocally, “imperial orders can establish themselves for a long period of time” (Münkler 2010, 10). For the Habsburg Empire, which was said to have been “a great empire” and which lasted a long time, this can only mean that the imperial order of the Danube Monarchy was based on a profound belief in its mission. From this point of view, the so-called Habsburg myth as initially described by the literary scholar Claudio Magris would not just be a product of literary studies, but an ahistorical-historical structure of an exemplary format for cultural studies. The imperial mission, understood by Münkler as part of the “cultural power of an empire”, must be considered highly successful in the Habsburg case. Here, in the “interplay between imperial mission and imperial reason”, culture has—in addition to and in conjunction with politics, the military and the economy—demonstrated its power in an unmistakable manner (Münkler 2010, 10).6 When Münkler speaks in this context of a “mixture of factors of attraction and repression” he relativises a theory of imperialism based solely on repression. This happens partly because the demands for loyalty in the centre as well as on the periphery are justified by the imperial mission, and thus by the power of culture itself. The importance that Münkler attaches to cultural power is remarkable in literary and cultural studies, particularly because diverse interpretations of the imperial exist. One is that of Jürgen Osterhammel, who answers the question of what holds empires together with “coercive apparatus”, “symbolic politics” and the universalistic ideology of the imperial state and its elites. According to Osterhammel (2009, 616), there is no homogenous imperial society and no common imperial

6  According to Münkler, an imperial power develops a real portfolio of forms: alongside political power are cultural, military and economic ones.

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culture, only a “fundamental coercive character”, even if one can live well and safely within empires. Instead, Münkler focuses on cultural power and, in this special space of discourse, encounters problems and thoughts that move literature, especially in the form of the post-imperial novel. As I have defined the post-­ imperial novel in greater length elsewhere (Magerski 2018b, 30–49), I just want to summarise its crucial criteria: the narratological foundation of the post-imperial novel is the experience of contingency. Its narrative patterns are based on the witness of an extraordinary event: the disappearance of a political order of very long duration and a subsequent reformation of the political order. The literary-intellectual comprehension of “the order as made”, and that therefore it could be (done) differently, is the binding factor of those texts that are a part of post-imperial narratives. This does not mean that the decay of the order or the downfall of the imperial world is addressed. Rather, the experience of the contingency of the political motivates a reflexive examination of the question of order that touches on literary structure. One might say that Hegel’s prosaic conditions become, in the face of new political spatial arrangements, the engine of the novel and expand the variety of forms of a genre that is in any case most versatile. To clarify the chronotopos of the post-imperial narrative even further: the post-imperial novel is a specific and central expression of the crisis of the early twentieth century. The empty space of history in which the post-­ imperial novel was written marks an interval or even a period in which, because the course of history was no longer meaningful, time itself had been suspended and history seemed to have come to an end. This space can be thought of as a waiting room for the transition from the old to the new; a waiting room in which new possibilities are constantly emerging, but also the power of division, civil war and genocide. The “lack of history” that is bemoaned in Robert Musil’s famous novel The Man without Qualities is the basis of a literary form that could be traced all the way to J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians. As a narrative shaped by the apostasy of order, including the universal idea that sustains it, the form shatters both literary practice and the practice of literary studies trying to classify novels such as those of Musil, Joseph Roth or Gregor von Rezzoris patterns of national literature. Furthermore the post-imperial novel also blocks the classification of postcolonial theory, since its ways of dealing with questions of domination follow less of a critical interest than of an analytical one.

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From the point of view of empire theory, the attempt to understand the post-imperial constellation is prior to criticism, which in turn does not rule out that the post-imperial novel can be subjected to an analysis of power. Nevertheless, the post-imperial novel is to be distinguished from the Anglo-Saxon postcolonial novel as well as from the European novel of the nineteenth century because of its specific characteristics. First, although it is not a historical novel in the narrower sense, it negotiates a concrete event in a concrete time with the collapse of empire. Secondly, this decay is presented as a historical, but by no means, necessary event. Rather, the post-imperial novel is based on the historical-­philosophical assumption that the course of history is fundamentally not determinate and thus open. Third, the self-reflexive, even epistemological character of the post-imperial novel, recognisable by its narrative of the question of order that leads to the limits of literary form, results from this assumption. Last and not least, the post-imperial novel is a genre strongly influenced by autobiography as underlined by Maurice Blanchot in his analysis of Musil’s novel. What is important here is that both—the post-imperial novel and the theory of empire—circle around questions of how a specific semantics become universal, and, as I will now discuss, both comb through the instruments of creating meaningfulness, arriving at a connection between mission and myth.

Imperial Mission, Form and Myth Building A brief look at Münkler’s discussion of German political myths shows that he has become deeply involved in the subject of myth. His genealogy of myth research ranges from Lévi-Strauss to Barthes, Marx and Mannheim, and from Cassirer and Blumenberg to Assmann. In this context, Ernst Cassirer—understood with Enno Rudolph as the key figure in the cultural science turn, and founder of the historical theory of cultural symbolising processes—I will examine in more detail.7 Within his theory, that is, within the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, myth occupies a special position: according to Cassirer, all other symbolic forms can be historically derived, but that does not apply to myth. What we might call Cassirer’s mythologising of myth, Pierre Bourdieu in his Sociology of Symbolic Forms, has already relativised, as I have shown previously under the title “Reaching Beyond the Supra-Historical Sphere” (Magerski 2004, 21–29). Münkler follows 7

 On Ernst Cassirer as the key figure of the cultural turn, see Rudolph (2004, 39 and 42).

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that line and undertakes a comparable historisation and relativisation, when he outlines a political science of symbolic forms through the concept of narration. For a better understanding of the point of intersection between cultural and political theory, Cassirer’s concept of “orders of meaning” should be briefly explained in more detail. In 1930, thus in the inter-war period, Cassirer introduced this concept in a lecture entitled Mythical, Aesthetic and Theoretical Space (Cassirer 2006, 485–500), in which he defined space in the sense of Leibnitz, as the “possibility of being together”, and consequently as a part of a possible order (beside or below others); every spatial arrangement refers therefore to a diversity of spatial formation. In other words, Cassirer (2006, 491) assumes that “the foundation of truth lies in the relation”. Marked in this way within the history of ideas, the transition from the concept of being to the concept of form leaves in the theoretical space a theory of order, designated and distinguished by the moment of difference, by its inner variety. This means that the concept of myth, too, is only one possible form: a “unique way to penetrate, revive and lighten the chaos” (Cassirer 2006, 493). According to Cassirer (2006, 499), mythical form, like the aesthetic one, is no more than “the interlocking and interplay of forces that grasp one from the outside and overwhelm him by virtue of their affective power”. At the same time however, Cassirer (2006, 499) regards the mythical form as “an embodiment of possible modes of design, where to each one of them a new horizon of the world of objects opens up”. To precisely mark this crucial point: the search for a term with which the paradoxical nature of culture (claiming objective validity regardless of its historical nature) could be captured, led Cassirer to the concept of form. A symbolic form and thus a way of objectification, that is, a “way of raising an individual to a universally valid” constitutes myth (Cassirer 2006, 8). But unlike knowledge, language, art and religion, Cassirer cannot find any historical derivation. Like any symbolic form, myth is a worldview and a false image (Cassirer 2006, 39). The philosophy of symbolic forms seeks to break through this illusionary world: “to recognize the special nature of the various refracting media; it wants to see through each of them according to their nature and the laws of their structure” (Cassirer 1990, III: 3). Because the direction of such a philosophy aims at the externality of forms and symbols rather than that of things, and at thinking in symbolic forms, the “paradise of mysticism, the paradise of pure immediacy remains

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closed” (Cassirer 1987, I: 51). In this thinking, myth appears “now equal to cognition, equal to morality and art as an independent, self-contained ‘world’, […] which should be understood in its immanent structural law” (Cassirer 1987, II: 6). On the other hand, Cassirer persists in the treatment of mythical form and emphasises the difficulty in understanding the conditions around the emergence of myth itself. Standing before the “absolutely empty”, this philosophy fails as a “doctrine of essence” (Cassirer 1987, 7). The difficulty, according to Cassirer, lies in “recognizing the general, but nonetheless completely ‘subjective’ illusion”, to which myth “owes its existence” (Cassirer 1987, VIII). The “illusionism” thus proves to be the real challenge for such a philosophy: The real phenomenon to be understood here is not the mythical content of the idea as such, but the meaning it has for human consciousness and the spiritual power it exerts over it. The problem is not the material content of the mythology, but the intensity with which it experiences, with which it, like only some objectively existent and real thing, is being believed. (Cassirer 1987, 8)

At this point, what Rudolph (2004, 43) accurately called the problematic methodological orientation of Cassirer’s cultural morphology—a historical orientation that nevertheless can’t resist the question of anthropological origins—can be clearly seen. Political theory, which brings us back to Münkler, picks up on the problem of faith, but arrives at a different solution: Münkler revokes the difference Cassirer (1987, II: 6) makes between the forms of the absolutely empty, which seemingly cannot (such as with myth) be comprehended in “their inherent structural law”, with those that (such as language) have a structure. Although he explicitly attributes to mythical form a claim to objectivity, he grants it no lack of structure. On the contrary, the structure of the myth is narrative. The seemingly “pure” form owes itself to narration or even beyond Münkler to the master narrative. In Cassirer’s search for an external source of the consecrational power of myth, he does not find an immanent, systematically elaborated structural law. Consequently, he reactivates the question of origin to resolve his dilemma, explaining that mythology “in the true sense of the word develops through something independent of every invention”, through a process whose “origin gets lost in the supra-historical” (Cassirer 1987, 9).

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Conversely, Münkler uses the notion of narration to divert attention to the laws of the narrative structure, bringing myth back into the space of cultural forms that appear to be objective, but are dependent on invention and historical extrapolation. How should one imagine this relativisation of symbolic forms? Münkler (2009, 20) first assumes that “meaning is created through mythical narratives”. In this reading, political myths provide the narrative basis of the symbolic order of a polity. Moreover, Münkler (2009, 16) understands mythical narratives as the “most important line of defence of the symbolic order”. In the nineteenth century in particular, we would have had to have dealt with an upsurge of mythologisation, whose range would have gone far beyond Münkler’s theory to cover the formation of Germany as a nation-state as well as European empires, such as that of the Habsburgs (Münkler 2009, 16). Yet it is with the concept of form that Münkler delves into Cassirer’s cultural philosophy. The assertion of a primary function of the concept of form over that of being permits a renunciation of ontological thinking and opens up a cultural-scientific space in which the production of order and meaning can become the object of scientific investigation. But if, as Münkler claims, imperial orders can only establish themselves over time, and only where there is a belief in the imperial mission, empire research touches upon a central question of cultural studies: from what does belief derive, or how does the particular become universal?8 In search for an answer within the thematic field covering the Habsburg Empire, myth and narrative, one almost inevitably comes across references to the abovementioned Claudio Magris. Indeed, there is a certain overlap between the way literary and political studies access myth, but there are also significant differences. In order to emphasise the significance of Münkler’s theory in addressing the relationship between myth and 8  This question does not arise for the first time with the imperial mission; early cultural science research tried to support the power of the symbolic, systematizing the semantic space with the concept of symbolic forms. A brief reminder of the early days of formalistic cultural science may illuminate Münkler’s position between cultural and political sciences: as cultural sociologist Georg Simmel used the symbolic form of money to demonstrate the reciprocal effect that stands behind any process of cultural objectification, cultural philosopher Ernst Cassirer turned myth towards that symbolic form. Münkler picks this up, following the “turn from the general concept of the world to the general concept of culture” (Cassirer 1987, I: 11) in political science. But while Cassirer stops before myth, Münkler continues answering the question surrounding myth’s consecrating power with narration.

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narrative, Magris’ study The Habsburg Myth in Modern Austrian Literature (1966) must be considered and briefly summarised in the presentation of Münkler’s concept of narrative. In a new edition of his standard work about the aesthetic presence of the Habsburg Empire in especially inter-war Austrian literature, Magris (2000, VII) defines myth as a general “ambivalent expression, meaning either a being, a value beyond all historical fluctuations, or a positive idea of large historical power, or even a false consciousness”. At the same time, and pertaining to the Habsburg myth, it was the “way in which a culture endeavoured to unify the diversity of reality” (Magris 2000, VII). In this mythologisation, the chaos of the world and in particular the collapse of the empire is reduced to a single order with which “the historical-political contradictions were brought into harmony, which was able to solve these contradictions, if not to redeem them” (Magris 2000, VII). In his study, Magris reflects on his own approach that was primarily concerned with “a morphology or phenomenology of this myth”, but also with his story and “not least the connections, that his poetic formulations, his ideological superstructure made from case to case with the social reality” (Magris 2000, VII). In the spirit of Cassirer, Magris emphasises the meaningful power of myth: a force that “gives meaning to the vortex of events and phenomena” (Magris 2000, IX). The Habsburg myth then also stands for “the idea of ​​ harmony between political-social concept and literary utopia” (Magris 2000, XII). In this sense, Magris speaks of the “remarkable degree of diffusion and penetration” of the Habsburg myth, of a “myth that veiled the absence of a dynamic state nucleus” (Magris 2000, 10 and 24). According to Magris, the degree of diffusion can be explained through the three basic motifs of the myth: first, supra-nationality (Magris speaks of the “paternalistic myth of the people”); second, bureaucratism; and third, sensuous and pleasurable hedonism (Magris 2000, 13–18). Within this triad, Magris ascribes supreme importance to supranationalism. The supranational ideal was “the ideological foundation of the Danube Monarchy, the intellectual and propagandistic support in the struggle against the modern awakening of national forces, in short, a weapon of the Habsburg struggle against history” (Magris 2000, 12). Consequently, according to Magris, the Habsburg myth had a tripartite structure. But here the knowledge of both structure of myth and its supporting texture is carried by its discourse, including the forms of modern Austrian literature that permeate it.

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What emerges from this perspective in Austrian literature is a “worshipful circulation of order” (Magris 2000, 12), which, because one does not recognise its structures, can be named but cannot be understood functionally. In this context, it is important to note that Magris subsequently admits a shortfall in his confrontation of the Habsburg myth. “The Myth-­ book”, according to Magris, lacks a final chapter: one about a “truly important epistemological novel” (Magris 2000, 9) by Austrian writers Robert Musil or Hermann Broch (1886–1951). This is a specific form of novel, which almost automatically expands itself into the political, that is, the (post)imperial discourse because as Magris points out, it explores the disintegration of wholeness, and the dissolution of the world and the individual ego, while simultaneously aiming to construct a new model not only of the world, but also of knowledge and man. If this chapter existed, Magris might have encountered something that did not fit the concept of the Habsburg myth, and that went beyond exploring the disintegration of the order and the dissolution of the word: the narrative deconstruction of myth, including the imperial order discourse that carries it. In this sense, Musil’s epistemological novel The Man Without Qualities accepts the literary-intellectual challenge of the inter-­ war period. It also raises questions surrounding the function of politics, and the conceivability and possibility of political formability or formation (the subject of the parallel action) up to the limits of social constructivism.9 The achievement of the post-imperial epistemological narrative lies in the exposure of the imperial myth as a narrative one. As will now be shown, in Münkler this double achievement of the narrative—its constructive and deconstructive forces—can be theoretically grasped and transferred to the political.

Myth Building and Demythologising through Narration I will begin the final section with Peter Bürger’s reading of Robert Musil’s novel The Man without Qualities; a post-imperial narrative in every sense (Magerski 2018b, 30–68). It was written not only after the collapse of the 9  An analysis of Musil’s parallel action as one of collectively binding decision-making is pending. It would demand what Frank Nullmeier pretends for the analysis of politics as a whole: the methodically guided recording of relevant collectivities of intended or actual decisions, and of the types of liability creation and security in question. For further information, see Nullmeier (2004, 490).

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Habsburg Empire by an author who went through the downfall, but is negotiating the question of the functioning and decay of imperial order in its famous “parallel action” at a level of reflection that can compete with political philosophy and cognition theory alike. Bürger (1988, 423), however, focuses on the concept of form and emphasises that although Musil’s attitude towards reality is one of cognition, the will for cognition does not focus on the construction of systematic connections, but rather on “possibilities of thinking”. The result is a narrative that makes the creation of social (and therefore political) reality, the subject of an intellectual argument. In this process, Bürger (1988, 430 and 436) states that the “density of reality” in Musil’s novel is achieved not through the portrayal of events modelled on reality, but through the fragment of the novel or rather the novel as fragment with which the “interminability of the thought process” finds its form. It is difficult to disagree with this conclusion, especially given the relevance of Musil’s epistemological approach. Yet, Musil goes further, arriving at something completely different. Bürger (1988, 436) sees Musil’s “ingenious idea of form” in the latter’s search for a central idea through the operators of the parallel action.10 The “dilemma of the modern age”—Musil’s central narrative motive—is an explication of modernity that is no longer able to grasp itself as a unity. This search for central ideas seems more concretely motivated from the perspective of political theory, not as a narrative processing the lost unity of modernity, but rather as one of the decay of imperial unity. The political form of the Danube Monarchy had lost its unity in a political falling-outof-shape, to which the futile search for ideas of the parallel action (and thus Musil’s specifically modern idea of form) correspond. Seen in this light, the form of narrative triggered by the experience of the real downfall of the imperial form, and driven by the will to cognise, attest primarily to one fact: that there is an auto-correction at the interface between literature, politics and science, a “responsive structure” that can be traced back to the political-social (dis)order of the inter-war period.11 According to this understanding, Musil’s idea of form ​​ would be 10  The so-called parallel action is explained by Musil himself in 1926 in the famous interview with Oskar Maurus Fontana: “The year 1918 would have brought the 70th jubilee of the reign of Franz Joseph I and the 35-year-old Wilhelms II. From this future meeting a race of mutual patriots develops, which want to beat each other and the world, and end up in the Kladderadatsch of 1914”. The novel covers only the year of the turn from 1913 to 1914. 11  On the concept of the responsive structure and its manifestation in the field of science, see Kaldewey (2005).

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implemented through a specific structure of literature, which could in turn be taken as a sign of the continuing responsiveness of modern literature. Modern autonomous art and literature post-World War I (WWI) and the collapse of the great European empires could no longer avoid reflecting on external social problems and making them their own. In this reading, Musil turned the downfall of the imperial order into a literary subject that, albeit literature-specific, transgressed the borders of literature. This view is supported by Musil’s explicit interest in the internal structures and mechanisms involved in the narrative processing of external, that is, political and social problems. In Musil, the post-imperial narrative not only transcends the borders of literature, it denotes a difference within them. This is seen in reference to narration, which Johannes G. Pankau (1994, 1429) defines on one hand as “a basic pattern of all communication, a basic operation of the formation of meaning and anthropologically constant discourse form” and on the other as “a fundamental form of literary expression”. It is precisely this distinction that the epistemological novel avoids by discussing narrative as the fundamental pattern of all communication, and the essential operation of the formation of meaning. Auto-correction would then also be understood as the specific power of the narrative, which enables it to identify and dispose of the constructiveness of the realities it has (re)constructed. This force comes to bear, as previously stated, at the interface of literature, politics and science, where literature (and consequently the fictional narrative) exercises the critical or corrective function. Only through the fictionalisation and “the second space” does a possibility emerge to draw parallels and establish an analogy between fiction and reality.12 It is only fictional narratives that purposefully go beyond what really is or was. And in so far as they distance themselves from reality, they open a space of correction.13. It is this critical force of narrative that has recently been discovered and made productive by and for political science, especially by Münkler. When reading Cassirer, one could say that Münkler “disenchanted” the seemingly pure, empty, structureless form of the myth by not only attributing its narrative structure (and its accompanying terms and laws), but also by 12  On the difference between fictional and non-fictional narratives with regard to their argumentative function, see Olmos (2013). 13  This critical narrative space must be distinguished from those narratives, which, as Siniša Malešević (2017, 9) notes, “invoke the historical legacies of former empires in order to boost their national narratives”, even for a small nation-state such as Austria.

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steering the search for its historical origin in a concrete direction: a literature-historical one. To understand this movement of thought, we must take a closer look at Münkler’s myth model. In it, the political myth is certified as having a threefold, pyramid-like ascending structure: on the lowest (base)level, the “narrative variation” operates. On this level, “myths are not merely told further, but also continually told and retold” (Münkler 2009, 15). Above it is the “iconic condensation”: a pictorial level on which both visualisation and “statuarization” are used, and which, compared to the narrative base, have a greater capacity for persistence (Münkler 2009, 15). On the third level, at the top of the model, is ritual staging, with which the climax of sacralisation is reached. According to this, the narration has special significance in two respects: it lays the foundation for the formation of myths, and it has the sole potential for retelling, and consequently for demythologising. Consequently, both mythologisation and demythologisation emanate from their narrative foundation. To clarify the special meaning of the narrative (which lies in its ambivalence) in Münkler’s words, political myths are “the narrative basis of the symbolic order of a community” (Münkler 2009, 16). As such, mythical narratives represent “the most important line of defence of the symbolic order” (Münkler 2009, 16). On the other hand, narrations can do the opposite, as they form both the defensive line and the demythologising potential. As a “line of defense, they contribute to the creation of meaning through mythical narratives” and “depict alterity in order to consolidate identity” (Münkler 2009, 21). As a critical authority, they provide the “possibility of exploring perspectives that are not foreseen in myth”, i.e. the “possibility of critical examination of the myth in its very own terrain: the narrative” (Münkler 2009, 21). According to Münkler, a possible hypothesis is that narratives are more likely to promote change, while images and monuments have a predominantly preserving character: This is not surprising, as narratives are the most versatile and can be retold and modified, whereas the sacrality associated with iconization and ritualization makes individuals, events, and reports unavailable and puts variants under suspicion of heresy. In contrast, the renunciation of political sacralization enables increased flexibility and creates the opportunity to explore perspectives which are not provided in the myth. (Münkler 2009, 15)

Münkler, it turns out, understands myth as narrative with self-reflective power. This applies to national as well as imperial narratives. As Siniša

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Malešević (2017, 11) recently stated in a study of imperial and national forms of government, both require organisational and ideological forces, as they are not natural forms of social accumulation: “However, these large-scale structural forces are not automatically accepted as given and unproblematic. On the contrary, coercive-organizational control can and is often resisted while ideological discourses can be challenged and delegitimized”. By speaking of the creation of organisationally and discursively coherent large-scale political structures, the epistemological novel has, in a manner of speaking, contributed posthumously to the delegitimisation of the Danube Monarchy’s imperial discourse. The narrative form in which this happens is an open one because it is also incontrovertible, like the form of the ideological itself. This also applies to those post-imperial narratives that rise above the fragment, like Joseph Roth’s (1894–1939) Weights and Measures (1937). Roth’s description of the futile struggle of an inspector of weights and measures at the frontier of the empire, who seeks standardisation of his measurements, captures what empire research does to the empirically saturated narrative: “society-wide ideological discourses could only develop and spread with the substantial increase in the organizational capacities of states: standardized weights and measures, unified currencies […]” (Malešević 2017, 12).14 Referring to German myths, Münkler (2009, 29) states “that some of them may well be revived, others could be reshaped and that an increased attention for mythopoetic influenced staging of politics remains at least as appropriate as the question of whether politics can do without mythological founding narratives and future promises”. This can easily be applied to Habsburg myth, especially its multinational component. National and imperial myths “connect the past and the future, giving thereby clues for actions in the present” (Malešević 2017, 28); both are “grand narratives” from which an identity is derived, and both can be understood as “accumulations of symbolic capital”, with which one can live well as long as one cherishes and cares for them (Malešević 2017, 9 and 11). At this point it has to be mentioned that Münkler himself (2010, 12) clearly continues to write one of the great narratives when, contrary to the “imperial exhaustion of the Europeans”, he warns the EU against a “balkanization”, which he understands as the disintegration of the empire into nation-states. The  For more details, see Magerski (2018b).

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contemporary political touch which is added here to the subject of empire comes especially to the forehand when looking at Münkler’s major study on WWI; a study that can be read as a historical-philosophical lesson on the fall of the imperial (Magerski 2018b, 98–117). However, crucial to an interest in the relationship between narratology and political theory is Münkler’s appreciation of literature as a specific possibility for exploring perspectives not provided in political myth. The narrative variation as a possible tool for critical examination of myth on its own narrative terrain is the starting point of a perspective that grasps the relation between literary and political structures. It is no coincidence that Münkler emphasises in his study of German myths that mythical narratives were borne by the educated middle classes and thus by a readership that possessed a far-reaching knowledge of art and literature. This is particularly significant in the case of the Habsburg Empire, because within it— following Magris—mythical narration, including the critical examination of precisely this myth, was not only borne by the educated bourgeoisie, but was also (subsequently) produced by it. In the Habsburg example, it can therefore be shown that myth has an “ideological core”, which loses its power when it becomes visible (Münkler 2009, 14). With regard to the national, what Münkler (2009, 58) calls the “mythization thrust of the nineteenth century” must be confronted with the demythologisation of the imperial that began in 1918. Using Münkler as a basis, it can be argued that political myth, and hence the narrative basis of the symbolic order of the Danube Monarchy, was retold because the symbols were no longer self-explanatory and a critical debate became inevitable. The decline of the political order, understood from the literary perspective as an external problem, exposed the political myth and its symbols to attacks from both inside and outside. This was a problem in which mythical narration revealed itself in all its ambivalence, as a defensive line of the symbolic order and as its responsive-critical authority. From a genuinely literary-scientific perspective directed at the Habsburg Empire and at the epistemological novel, it should be noted that, beyond Münkler, political myths do not necessarily satisfy “a collective need for distinction” and “awaken ideas of superiority and claims to dominance” (Münkler 2009, 16). Rather, the Habsburg myth is, at this point explicitly emphasised with regard to further research on the subject, an example of the narrative’s reflective power: it is a force that does not stop at the description of (national) counter-myths, but reflexively catches up with the narrative basis of any political myth formation. The “meaningful

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function of narration” is not reflected in the novels of Robert Musil, Joseph Roth or even Hermann Broch primarily in the formation of meaning. Its claim to narrative coherence withdraws in favour of a notion of narrativity, which narrates and problematises the structuring of narration, as well as its function for the formation of coherence, and thus of meaning.15 Formulated in literary terms: in the field of narrative order, a weak narrative challenges its strongest form—the myth as a fable, and the epitome of coherent action—and thus transforms the movement of events (WWI and the decay of the European order) into a form.16 Initially, it was not possible to go further in the space of symbolic forms. The specific power of the narrative divested itself solely in its self-reflection and limitations and did not bind its meaning to the immediate penetration of the decision-making reality. As Peter Bürger (1988, 437) notes, Musil answers the uncertainty and lost strength of modernity—which also applies to the political situation after 1918—not with a desire for decisiveness, but with a “construction of reality, which makes the enduring of the undecidability of the last questions the foundation of ethics”.17 Restraint from a desire for decisiveness and the ethics emerging from the ability to endure undecidability of the last questions are symptomatic for the post-imperial novel, as I have pointed out taking Joseph Roth’s Weights and Measures as an example (Magerski 2018a). And it is precisely this narrative construction of reality, which only recently has become a fundamental pattern of communication. In this sense Daniel Fulda (2004, 263) states that in science and the prevailing “multidisciplinary constellation […] there is a border between meaningful and meaning-problematizing narrative”. This can be confirmed for part of political science and critical imperial studies. Here too, meaning (of specific political forms) is increasingly understood as relational, because it can simultaneously experience and design a construct. This can be seen in Krishan Kumar’s (2010, 119) suggestion that both major political forms—empire and nation-state—should be understood as “alternative political projects”, which can be tracked by the elites if the situation requires.18 Therefore, even the space of political forms has 15  On the “meaningful function of narration” and the “cultural achievement” of narration for each form of identity formation, see Fulda (2011). 16  On the strong and weak forms of narration, see Weber (1998, 20 and 64–70). 17  On the special nature of the narrative form from an ethical perspective, see Meuther (2004, 154). 18  On meaning as a relational construct, see Fulda (2004, 263).

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become a space of projection. At least part of political science has been grasped by Musil’s Möglichkeitssinn (the sense of possibility), and therefore extends the concept of narrativity as self-organization of meaning and time around the concept of space.19 But if that is so, and the space of political projection is currently as open as the space of the fictional, then we will have to undertake an enormous revaluation of the projective, of the design, and consequently of the narrative.

References Bürger, Peter. 1988. Literarische Form als Denkform: Musils ‘Mann ohne Eigenschaften’. In Prosa der Moderne, ed. Peter Bürger, 422–437. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Cassirer, Ernst. 1987/1988/1990. Die Philosophie der symbolischen Formen. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. ———. 2006. Mythischer, ästhetischer und theoretischer Raum. In Raumtheorie. Grundlagentexte aus Philosophie und Kulturwissenschaften, ed. Jörg Dünne and Stephan Günzel, 485–500. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Fulda, Daniel. 2004. Sinn und Erzählung—Narrative Kohärenzansprüche der Kulturen. In Handbuch der Kulturwissenschaften. Vol. 1: Grundlagen und Schlüsselbegriffe, ed. Friedrich Jäger, Burkhard Liebsch, Jörn Rüsen, and Jürgen Straub, 251–265. J. B. Metzler, Stuttgart. Kaldewey, David. 2005. Die responsive Struktur der Wissenschaft: ein Kommentar. In Die Responsivität der Wissenschaft. Wissenschaftliches Handeln in Zeiten neuer Wissenschaftspolitik, ed. Hildegard Matthies, Dagmar Simon, and Marc Torca, 209–230. Bielefeld: transcript. Kennedy, Dane. 1996. Imperial History and Post-Colonial Theory. The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 24: 345–363. Kumar, Krishan. 2010. Nation-States as Empires, Empires as Nation-States: Two Principles, One Practice? Theoretical Sociology 39: 119–143. Luhmann, Niklas. 1998. Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft. Vol. 2. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Magerski, Christine. 2004. Reaching Beyond the Supra-Historical Sphere. From Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms to Bourdieu’s Sociology of Symbolic Forms. In Pierre Bourdieu and the Field of Cultural Production, ed. Jeff Browitt and Brian Nelson, 112–127. Newark: University of Delaware Press.

19  On narrativity from a systems-theoretical perspective and its understanding as a “selforganization of meaning and time”, see Meuther (2004, 140). On constructivistic and deconstructivistic approaches within political science, see Maier et al (2003).

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———. 2018a. Writing Empire. An Approach to Joseph Roth by Using the Political Theory of Herfried Münkler. Journal of Austrian Studies 51 (2): 51–71. ———. 2018b. Imperiale Welten. Literatur und Politische Theorie am Beispiel Habsburg. Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft. Magris, Claudio. 2000. Der Habsburgische Mythos in der modernen österreichischen Literatur. Vienna: Zsolnay. Maier, Matthias Leonhard, Achim Hurrelmann, Frank Nullmeier, Tanja Pritzlaff, and Achim Wiesner, eds. 2003. Politik als Lernprozess? Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Malešević, Siniša. 2017. The Foundations of Statehood: Empires and Nation-­ States in the Long Durée. Thesis Eleven 139: 1–17. Meuther, Norbert. 2004. Geschichtenerzählen, Geschichtenanalysieren. Das narrativistische Paradigma in den Kulturwissenschaften. In Handbuch der Kulturwissenschaften. Vol. 2: Paradigmen und Disziplinen, ed. Friedrich Jäger, Burkhard Liebsch, Jörn Rüsen, and Jürgen Straub, 140–155. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler. Münkler, Herfried. 2005. Imperien. Die Logik der Weltherrschaft—vom Alten Rom bis zu den Vereinigten Staaten. Berlin: Rowohlt. ———. 2009. Die Deutschen und ihre Mythen. Berlin: Rowohlt. ———. 11 February 2010. Imperium und Imperialismus. Docupedia– Zeitgeschichte, https://doi.org/10.14765/zzf.dok.2.585.v1. Accessed 11 May 2017. Münkler, Herfried, and Grit Straßenberger. 2017. Politische Theorie und Ideengeschichte. Munich: Beck. Nullmeier, Frank. 2004. Methodenfragen einer kulturwissenschaftlichen Politologie. In Handbuch der Kulturwissenschaften. Vol. 2: Paradigmen und Disziplinen, ed. Friedrich Jäger, Burkhard Liebsch, Jörn Rüsen, and Jürgen Straub, 486–501. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler. Olmos, Paula. May 22, 2013. “Narration as Argument.” In OSSA Conference Archive. Paper 123. http://scholar.uwindsor.ca/ossaarchive/OSSA10/papersandcommentaries/123. Accessed 4 May 2017. Osterhammel, Jürgen. 2009. Die Verwandlung der Welt. Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts. Beck: Munich. Pankau, Johannes G. 1994. Erzähltheorie. In Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, ed. Gert Ueding, vol. 2, 1425–1432. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Rudolph, Enno. 2004. Vom Geschehen zur Form. In Handbuch der Kulturwissenschaften. Vol. 1: Grundlagen und Schlüsselbegriffe, ed. Friedrich Jäger, Burkhard Liebsch, Jörn Rüsen, and Jürgen Straub, 38–45. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler. Weber, Dietrich. 1998. Erzählliteratur. Schriftwerk, Kunstwerk, Erzählwerk. Göttingen: Wallstein.

CHAPTER 15

The Ottoman Myth in Turkish Literature Johanna Chovanec

Introduction: The Habsburg and the Ottoman Myth in Literature “Empire is back like never before” as a normative category and a lens of scholarly inquiry (Mikhail and Philliou 2012, 722). Against the backdrop of the imperial turn1 in the humanities, not only historiography but also cultural and literary studies have been increasingly engaged with the

I would like to thank Stephan Guth, Sebastian Haug and Petr Kučera and the co-editor of this volume Olof Heilo for their thorough readings of this text and their invaluable suggestions and remarks. 1  Antoinette Burton uses the term “imperial turn” to describe the “accelerated attention to the impact of histories of imperialism on metropolitan societies in the wake of decolonization, pre- and post-1968 racial struggle and feminism in the last quarter century” (2003, 2). In her work about turns in cultural studies, also Doris Bachmann-Medick speaks of the emerging “imperial turn” “taking place in a field of historiography that is no longer centered around national history and has a critical focus on empire and imperialism” (2016, 279 f.).

J. Chovanec (*) Department of Comparative Literature, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Chovanec, O. Heilo (eds.), Narrated Empires, Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55199-5_15

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analysis of how the collapse of empire has reverberated in cultural artefacts.2 Literature presents a particularly suitable way to trace the transformation from empire to nation-state and to extrapolate  how these fundamental changes were perceived and reflected upon. Late Habsburg and Ottoman literary traditions dealt with an anticipated change of cultural and societal patterns, as well as the possible disintegration of empire. National Austrian and Turkish literature captures the complexities of the new political, societal and cultural orders that were to be established. The narrative foundations of the so-called post-imperial novel are based on the aftereffects and cultural, social as well as political consequences of a farreaching event, namely the disappearance of a political order that had existed for centuries (see Magerski 2018).3 One common topos in the Austrian and Turkish post-­imperial novel is melancholy: the memory or the image of the empire as both a lost object and a lost past which becomes a frame of reference for retrospection and longing. What Claudio Magris (2000 [1963]) paradigmatically described as the Habsburg Myth in Austrian literature is a melancholic narrative built on three main themes: the multinational outlook of the monarchy, hedonism as a primary attitude in the late Habsburgian lifeworld, and a slow but functioning bureaucracy as the essential pillar of the imperial state. Whilst this melancholic retrospection on these three dimensions became the leitmotif of post-1918 Austrian literature, the beginnings of the Habsburg Myth can be traced back to the early nineteenth century when it was introduced by the governing elites as a political tool to counter separatist movements by means of a supranational ideology (Magris 2000, 35–39).4 In interwar Austrian literature, authors such as Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) or Joseph Roth (1894–1939)5 who had witnessed the imperial times and their gradual decline built on these already existent discourses by evoking 2  See for instance Bobinac et al. (2018) or the contributions on the imperial turn in literature in Sturm-Trigonakis et al. (2017). 3  See also Christine Magerski’s contribution in this volume. 4  This thesis has also been confirmed by more recent scholarship: Jörn Leonhard (2012) comparatively analyses the various legitimation techniques employed by the imperial elites of multi-ethnic empires in the nineteenth century. For the Habsburg Monarchy, national movements were perceived as one of the main threats to territorial integrity, prompting the political centre to counter these centrifugal trends with new identification strategies: All ethnic groups of the empire were to be included in the new symbolic order of the pluralistic monarchy and Kaiser Franz Joseph was stylised as the main symbol of a stable monarchical order that provided free development for all peoples (Leonhard 2012, 84). 5  See Jelena Spreicer’s contribution on Joseph Roth’s novel Hotel Savoy (1924) in this volume.

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the peaceful cohabitation of different peoples in their literary texts. In his memoir Die Welt von Gestern: Erinnerungen eines Europäers (1942) (The World of Yesterday: Memories of a European, 1947), written against the backdrop of his escape from the national socialists and his exile in Brazil, Zweig mourns the loss of order, stability and a pluralistic imperial society. The last decades of the monarchy were a “Golden Age of Security”, the “thousand-year-old Austrian monarchy seemed [to be] based on permanency”, and “the State itself was the chief guarantor of this stability” (Zweig 1947, 13).6 In Zweig’s memory, Vienna, the former imperial capital city, plays an important role in the localisation of this past glory. Previously a “two-thousand-year-old supernational metropolis”, Vienna is “degraded to a German provincial city” that has lost its multicultural character (Zweig 1947, 5).7 For Zweig  (1947, 6), the connection between past and present is cut and irretrievably lost; “all the bridges between our today and our yesterday and our yesteryears have been burnt”.8 Similarly, for Joseph Roth (2014 [1938], 45), the First World War led to the loss of a whole world, namely the Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy. In Roth’s literary oeuvre, such as his novel Die Kapuzinergruft (1938), the peripheries of the empire take centre stage. Against the background of the annexation (Anschluss) of Austria into Nazi Germany in 1938, Roth’s main protagonist Trotta narrates his life story that is interwoven with the downfall of his beloved monarchy. Retrospectively, Trotta is convinced that it is the former Crown lands (Kronländer) of the empire that shape the core of the imperial, typically Austrian character.9 This suggests that the loss of the Austrian Crown lands and their transformation to nation-­ states contributed to a more general loss of (Austrian) identity after 1918.10 As recent research has shown, melancholy continues to be a main 6  “es war das goldene Zeitalter der Sicherheit. Alles in unserer fast tausendjährigen österreichischen Monarchie schien auf Dauer gegründet und der Staat selbst der oberste Garant dieser Beständigkeit” (Zweig 2014 [1942], 15). 7  “Ich bin aufgewachsen in Wien, der zweitausendjährigen übernationalen Metropole, und habe sie wie ein Verbrecher verlassen müssen, ehe sie degradiert wurde zu einer deutschen Provinzstadt” (Zweig 2014 [1942], 8). 8  “zwischen unserem Heute, unserem Gestern und Vorgestern sind alle Brücken abgebrochen” (Zweig 2014 [1942], 9). 9  “Die österreichische Substanz wird genährt und immer wieder aufgefüllt von den Kronländern” (Roth 2014 [1938], 18), see also Roth (2014 [1938], 73). 10  “Ohne den Untergang der Monarchie wäre er gar nicht verrückt geworden” (Roth 2014 [1938], 177).

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topos in both Austrian and German literature11 and relates not only to the downfall of the old monarchical order, but also to historical events such as “the historical caesura of 1989” and “the enduring effects of both Nazi collaboration and GDR totalitarianism” (O’Driscoll 2013, 20–21). In comparison to the Habsburg Myth in Austrian literature, this chapter aims to show how the genesis of an Ottoman Myth evolved in Turkish Literature. What I call Ottoman Myth is a broad variety of retrospective narratives that are tied together by (post-)imperial melancholy as their main theme (Chovanec 2016, 2017, 2018). On the one hand, melancholy is a notion connected to the loss of a certain political, cultural and symbolic order that is retrospectively and literarily remembered or imagined as Ottoman lifeworlds. On the other hand, the “Empire”, or what is evoked as such, often functions as a prism through which authors or their narrators and protagonists outline what is perceived as the ills of today, such as modernity, westernisation or nationalism. Melancholy is thus, as we will see, intrinsically connected to what has been described as the East-West topic (Doğu-Batı Meselesi) in Turkish Literature and links to broader questions such as modernisation and progress, that are also raised in nineteenth and twentieth centuries Central European discourses.12 By means of exemplary literary texts written by Ahmet Midhat, Recaizade Mahmut Ekrem, Peyami Safa, Halide Edib Adıvar, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Orhan Pamuk, Elif Shafak and Sema Kaygusuz I show how the Ottoman Myth developed and changed throughout the history of modern Turkish literature.

11  A recent example is Hannes Stein’s novel Der Komet (2013) which is built upon the idea that the Habsburg successor to the throne, Franz Ferdinand, was not shot dead in Sarajevo in 1914. As a result, both world wars never took place and the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires still provide the political and cultural framework for a variety of different peoples and religions in our own time. 12  As discussed by O’Driscoll (2013, 21–28), intellectuals such as Oswald Spengler or Max Weber observed a transition from “an era marked by culture to one formed by civilization”. They connect civilisation with the mechanisation and capitalisation of life and melancholically evoke the loss of culture and the rise of posthistoire.

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Melancholy as a Main Feature of the Post-imperial Novel Melancholy is a theoretical concept with a long history, dating back to the antique doctrine of the body’s four humours. Since antiquity, melancholy is regarded as a feature of the individual; either as an illness related to depression, or as an indication for the melancholic’s genius of mind. According to the antique collection of medical works, Corpus Hippocraticum (fourth/fifth century BCE), the human body contains four humours, namely blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. The abundance of black bile (mélaina cholé) in the blood circulation leads to melancholy (Flashar 1956, 35; O’Driscoll 2013, 4), an illness characterised by “symptoms of mental change, ranging from fear, misanthropy and depression, to madness in its most frightful forms” (Klibansky et al. 1979, 14). However, melancholy was increasingly regarded not only as an illness, but also as a positively connoted disposition. As the Latin author “[Aulus] Gellius later ironically said, [it became] ‘a disease of heroes’” (Klibansky et al. 1979, 16). This tendency can be illustrated by means of one of the probably pseudo-Aristotelian13 Problemata: “Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy or politics or poetry or the arts are clearly melancholics, and some of them to such an extent as to be affected by diseases caused by black bile?” (quoted in Klibansky et al. 1979, 18). This discursive focus on melancholy as a disposition of the either sick or brilliant individual persisted until the theologian Robert Burton (1577–1640) extended the meaning of the term in his work The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). Burton (1883 [1621], 51–52) observes symptoms of melancholy not only in humans, but also in animals, plants and states : “Kingdoms, provinces, and politic bodies are likewise sensible and subject to this disease”. Tyrannical governments and oppression are among the reasons for the gloomy condition of states. With Burton, a shift in the discourse of history of melancholy becomes visible: Melancholia is neither only an individual illness nor the characteristic of a brilliant genius (Lepenies 1969, 28). Instead, the experience of loss leads to collective

13  The problem XXX 1 is one of the Problemata Physica, which were transmitted as part of the Corpus Aristotelicum. While most authors agree that the attribution to Aristotle is wrong (see Theunissen 1996, 3 ff.), most of the problemata can be linked to the Peripatetic philosophy and are thus considered as a Peripatetic compilation (see Bodnár 2015).

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melancholy. Burton’s melancholic states all have lost one thing: order. The resulting chaos leads to poverty and misfortune, triggering collective grief. But whereas you shall see many discontents, common grievances, complaints, poverty, barbarism, beggary, plagues, wars, rebellions, seditions, mutinies, contentions, idleness, riot, epicurism, the land lie[s] untilled, waste, full of bogs, fens, deserts, cities decayed, base and poor towns, villages depopulated, the people squalid, ugly, uncivil; that kingdom, that country, must needs be discontent, melancholy, hath a sick body, and had need to be reformed. (Burton 1883 [1621], 52)

The connection of loss and melancholy is revived in modern psychoanalysis: In Sigmund Freud’s essay “Mourning and Melancholia” (“Trauer und Melancholie”, 1917), the loss of a beloved person or an abstract ideal such as one’s homeland could lead to either mourning or melancholy (Freud 2001 [1917], 197). While mourning is defined as a psychologically healthy way of dealing with a traumatic experience, Freud describes melancholy as a pathological disposition as the libido is not withdrawn from the lost object and is related to the inability to resolve the grief. Revaluing melancholy, the philosopher Slavoj Žižek (2000, 658) claims that against Freud “one should assert the conceptual and ethical primacy of melancholy. […] Mourning is a kind of betrayal, the second killing of the (lost) object, while the melancholic subject remains faithful to the lost object, refusing to renounce his or her attachment to it”. Similar to Burton, Žižek emphasises melancholy as the collective disposition of certain groups. For Žižek, however, melancholy is valorised as the conscious and intended adherence to something lost, repressed or displaced. The inability to overcome the loss has an ethical component with regard to the necessity of memory, especially in societies undergoing radical transformation.14 Eng and Kazanjian (2003, 4) also emphasise the political aspects of melancholy: Whereas in mourning, the “past is declared resolved, finished, and dead, in melancholia the past remains steadfastly alive in the present”. Against this background, individual melancholia can stem from the resentment, grievance or trauma of the collective. While the concept of melancholy has experienced shifts in meaning over time, it “offers a capaciousness 14  For instance, when post-colonial societies enter “capitalist processes of modernization and are under the threat that their specific legacy will be swallowed up by the new global culture, they should not renounce their tradition through mourning, but retain the melancholic attachment to their roots” (Žižek 2000, 658).

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of meaning in relation to losses encompassing the individual and the collective, the spiritual and the material, the psychic and the social, the aesthetic and the political” (Eng and Kazanjian 2003, 3). Collective melancholy concerning a lost political and cultural entity as an underlying sentiment is the core of the Habsburg and Ottoman Myth as expressed in the post-imperial novel. According to Christine Magerski (2018, 30–31), the post-imperial novel is a literary form based on the experience of contingency. It reacts to the disappearance of political spaces that had existed for a long time and were replaced through a fundamental reorganisation of society. The experience of radical change motivates or provokes the question of order that is posed in the post-imperial novel. The loss of familiar forms of societal organisation and the uncertainty of the present give rise to post-imperial melancholy. Many of the melancholic Austrian authors, including Joseph Roth, Stefan Zweig and Franz Werfel were of Jewish descent. For them, the Habsburg Monarchy retrospectively and against the backdrop of the increasing anti-Semitism in the interwar period, became the epitome of a secure and safe Heimat for a multi-ethnic and multi-religious society. In contemporary Turkish literature, the connection between a lost multicultural society and melancholy is a more recent theme and coincides with what Nora Fisher-Onar (2018) has described as two different forms of political neo-Ottomanism, the Belle Époche and the Ottoman-Islamist nostalgia. The roots of the melancholic discourse, however, can be dated back to late Ottoman literature, when processes of Europeanisation as well as the perceived uncertainty of modernity initiated discussions about a looming transformation of society, which could lead to a loss of one’s own cultural values and lifestyles.

The Roots of the Melancholic Discourse: The East-­West Topic in Late Ottoman Literature Ahmet Midhat’s Felatun Bey ile Rakım Efendi (1875), one of the first Ottoman novels, deals with the questions of a European mode, alafranga, in comparison to an Ottoman or Turkish mode, alaturka.15 The 15  “The Turkish names for the two poles derive from the Italian alla franca, Frankish or European style, and alla turca, Turkish style. In alaturka time, the day began at the apparent setting of the sun, and the hours were counted in two cycles of twelve, ending with sunset at twelve o’clock the next day. Seasonal shifts in the length of the days meant that the start of the alaturka day had no fixed alafranga time. Guidebooks for Europeans traveling in the

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heterodiegetic narrator of the novel frequently uses the terms in order to describe the different lifestyles of two young men, Felatun and Rakım. Thanks to his wealthy father, Felatun does not have financial problems, which allows him to spend only a few hours per week in his office and other than that entertains himself with outings and other leisure activities considered as alafranga such as picnicking (Mithat 2013 [1875], 8). With an inclination towards European languages, Felatun prefers speaking French instead of Turkish in his daily life, ordering café au lait (“kafe ole”) instead of coffee with milk (“sütlü kahve”) (Mithat 2013 [1875], 10).16 With Felatun, Midhat introduced a new literary figure to late Ottoman literature, the so-called züppe.17 The züppe is a caricature of an overly westernised Ottoman dandy, who has lost the attachment to his own culture and instead superficially copies Western styles and languages (Çakmakcı 2014, 336). The frequent integration of this figure in novels illustrates the critical and cynical view of many intellectuals on the top-down reform processes and their negative effects on Ottoman society in the last decades of the empire. Guth (2020, 317), describes Midhat’s Felatun as the first “Euromaniac” in Ottoman-Turkish literature and suggests that given its prominence in literature we are probably not overinterpreting the textual evidence if we assume that these fictional characters were not simply products of their authors’ phantasies but reflected, to a certain degree at least, a type of people one had a good chance to meet in the streets of major Middle Eastern cities in the second half of the nineteenth century.

By means of the alafranga züppe/Euromaniac, Midhat satirically criticises his contemporaries’ uncritical adoption of Western styles, behaviours and manners and at the same time offers with Rakım a positive counterpart. In comparison to Felatun, Rakım is a hard-working young man, devoting all his time and energy to earn a living.18 He is fluent in both French and English and uses his language skills to do translations or help Ottoman Empire used to include tables showing how to convert alaturka to alafranga time the year around. As for calendars, the Ottomans commonly used both the lunar Islamic religious and a solar financial calendar” (Findley 1998, 26). 16  “[…] küçük bey Felatun Efendi Fransızcadan başka söz söylemiyor ki! Sütlü kahve isteyeceği zaman ‘kafe ole’ diyor […]” (Turkish “translation” of the Ottoman original text). 17 ̇  Further examples for novels employing the züppe are Namık Kemal’s Intibah, Nabizade Nazım’s Zehra and Recaizade Mahmut Ekrem’s Araba Sevdası. (see Moran 1991, 42). 18  “Fakat bu parayı kazanabilmek için de gece gündüz çalıştı” (Mithat 2013 [1875], 13).

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foreigners around Istanbul. As Şerif Mardin (1974, 406)  has argued, Rakım’s values “are a successful blend of Western cultural baggage and the views of the Ottoman lower middle classes among whom he continues to live even after successes”. By contrasting Felatun and Rakım, Midhat’s novel expresses a warning of losing one’s cultural self-connectedness and as such relates to questions of belated modernity with regard to Europe, the far-reaching reform activities in the Ottoman Empire and the political as well as economic dependency on the European Powers. The Tanzimat reforms in the nineteenth century “had introduced a rift in the Ottoman world by presenting Western culture as an ideal to be embraced” (Gürbilek 2003, 602). The notion of loss of an original, authentic self is connected to a state of in-­ betweenness that has left an imprint on Turkish literature up to this day. The fear of over-westernisation and cultural self-abandonment is part of the origin of East-West topic in (Ottoman) Turkish literature, that, as we will see, later on transforms into a melancholic narrative. Through the dual constellation of figures like Rakım and Felatun the “bipolar modern Self” emerges: It involves “both the state of drifting toward the foreign ideal and the effort to go back to an original self, that desire to be another and the fear of losing oneself in the other” (Gürbilek 2003, 621). Whilst Midhat’s novel does not express explicit melancholia regarding the Ottoman Empire, it points to some of the tensions that foreshadow fractures in the established order: Felatun’s “laziness, extravagance and life full of amusements” weaken the empire from within and thus strengthen Europe’s influence and possibilities of interference (Guth 2020, 325). A moderate combination of progress with tradition is instead presented as the desired goal, both politically and culturally. Midhat’s literary text and most other Tanzimat novels envisioned an Ottoman-Turkish identity to be born at the interface between East and West, between alaturka and alafranga. Despite the fact that they express anxiety regarding unpredictable outcomes of societal changes, narratives like Felatun Bey ile Rakım Efendi are still forward-looking, envisioning a synthesis of (Ottoman-­ Islamic) morality and family life with (Western) progress and technology (Kučera 2008, Ch. 1.4). Humour or satire, as expressed through the exaggeratedly westernised Felatun, is a literary technique that has the potential to subvert and critically examine processes of transformation. Towards the turn of the century, however, “a new paradigm in the perception and interpretation of West and East in Ottoman-Turkish

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literature” emerges (Kučera 2017, 21). In Recaizade Mahmut Ekrem’s novel Araba Sevdası (“The Carriage Affair”, written in 1889 and published in 1896), the ontological dilemma of not-belonging takes centre stage and thus transcends the synthesising and more optimistic premises of earlier Tanzimat novels. In the foreword to the novel, Recaizade Mahmut Ekrem notes that Araba Sevdası is supposed to be an entertaining read but, at the same time, saddening and sorrowful (Recaizade 2004 [1896], 2).19 And indeed, the novel’s main protagonist Bihruz is a tragic figure. In Ayşe Hemmat’s  (2019, 64)  words, Recaizade’s’s novel “is a comedy of errors where our romantic hero is constantly deceived, by chance and by people, into thinking of his beloved as what she is not—as a noble lady when she is in fact a divorced woman who befriends prostitutes and becomes one”. Bihruz is, similar to Midhat’s protagonist Felatun, a westernised dandy par excellence and lives his life alafranga. Whilst he is eager to include as many French words in his everyday language as possible, he fails to properly speak both Ottoman-Turkish and French, leading to a “barely understandable mélange of Turkish and French” as Orhan Pamuk  (2010, 133) describes it. Instead of bahçe (garden) he uses the French term “jarden” (jardin), instead of using the term mahalle with its social and traditional connotations, he speaks of the “kartiye” (quartier) (Recaizade 2004 [1896], 14). Bihruz aspires to appear like a “real European” but fails to understand French novels just as he does not succeed in writing or reading Ottoman-Turkish. In contrast to Felatun Bey ile Rakım Efendi, in Araba Sevdası “we do not find such contrasting cases of proper and improper westernisation, but rather the story of a young Ottoman who fails to profit from either the European or the Ottoman literature and values” (Hemmat 2019, 71). Whilst Midhat’s novel shows a way out of the East-West dilemma by providing an instruction of sorts for what (not) to adopt, Recaizade Mahmut Ekrem’s novel centres on the existential crisis of not-belonging. Bihruz is neither “Western” nor “Eastern”, and from this state of in-betweenness nothing positive emerges. As Jale Parla (2011, 129) noted, the main topic of the novel is nothingness (hiçlik). Or, as Petr Kučera (2017, 23) put it, the “peculiar interspace between alafranga (Eastern way of life) and alaturka (Western way of life) where one can place the Tanzimat novel disappears, and nothing meaningful takes its place”. What lies behind Bihruz’ obvious 19  “Fakkat dikkat olunursa bu ondan elbette daha ziyâde hazîn, elbette daha çok müellimdir” (Recaizade 2004 [1896], 2).

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ridiculousness is a loss of belonging which gives rise to melancholia. Recaizade Mahmut Ekrem’s narrative thus anticipates the triste impasse of modernity: The increasingly fragmented collective is replaced by isolated individuals who become detached from their natural embedding in society, including its language(s), traditions and values. The experience of a rapidly transforming societal order shatters the idea of an organic continuity of past, present and future. The speed of modernity isolates the individual from the past and gives rise to an anxiety about a quickly changing present and uncertain future. Against this background, I agree with Parla’s  (2011, 130) assessment of Araba Sevdası as the first “modern” novel in the Ottoman-Turkish context. This also becomes apparent on the narratological level: The “melancholic realist narrator” of the story is, in contrast to earlier narrators in Ottoman novels, an “individualized viewer, observing the world at a distance” (Ertürk 2011, 14 and 60). What has often been overlooked in secondary literature about the recurrent topos of the Ottoman züppe in novels like Felatun Bey and Araba Sevdası is the fact that the dilettante dandy is a cultural phenomenon20 present in fin de siècle literature across Europe.21 Whereas “dilettante” was initially a more positively connoted term for “connoisseur”, it becomes a central and more ambivalent topos in German, French and English literature towards the turn of the century, now vaguely synonymous to flâneur, décadent, beau, cosmopolis or dandy (see Theodorsen 2006). In line with Stephan Guth’s above quote, the dandy most probably was a type of person you could not only meet in novels but also in major Middle Eastern cities, just like, I would add, in London, Paris or Vienna. As one “of the most prominent dandies in nineteenth century French culture” (Hadlock 2001, 58), the poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) defined “dandysm” as as a “soleil couchant; comme l’astre qui décline, il est superbe, sans chaleur et plein de mélancolie” (Baudelaire 1863). For Baudelaire, the dandy is thus per definition a melancholic figure. Like the Ottoman züppe, the dandy is always imperfect but strives for perfection,22 notably 20  It goes without saying that the dandy has different characteristics in and even among different languages and literatures and is not a homogenous concept at all. However, many parallels can be observed without negating the various particularities and differences. 21  This impression is confirmed by Fieni (2020, 7): “The responses to both Europe and modernity in the nineteenth century in the so-called East remain largely underexplored in a truly comparative context, particularly given the striking coincidence of the idea of decadence in both literatures in the second half of the nineteenth century”. 22  Modern art and literature are increasingly occupied with the realisation that perfect and complete aesthetics can never be accomplished. The idea of necessary deficiency and imperfection elicits melancholia as its inevitable outcome (see Stein 2018, 227).

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regarding his appearance: “Le Dandy doit aspirer à être sublime sans interruption; il doit vivre et dormir devant un miroir” (Baudelaire cited in Hadlock 2001, 60). The mirror also plays an important role for the Ottoman dandies: Servet bey, for instance, the züppe in Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu’s novel Kiralık Konak (1995 [1922], 25), poses in front of the mirror when he is distressed or bored, trying on different hats.23 With his extravagant lifestyle, the figure of the dandy melancholically symbolises the emptiness of modernity and relates to a looming change in society and order. For Baudelaire, the dandy as cultural phenomenon tends to appear in transitory times when the formerly all-powerful aristocracy and the order it represents are only partially debased. In the confusion of epochs, as Baudelaire (1863) points out, dandyism arises when some disenchanted but rich individuals form a somewhat different kind of aristocracy as “le dernier éclat d’héroïsme dans les décadences”. In a similar vein, the melancholy given voice to in Araba Sevdası also arises against the backdrop of a disintegrating order (the possibility of the Ottoman Empire’s decline and final collapse) that is reflected allegorically24 in the figure of the dandy Bihruz. In contrast to French, English or Austrian dandies, however, the Ottoman züppe does not embody any positive features. The imperial melancholy embodied by the züppe stems from the anticipated loss of order and the turning away from one’s own historical and cultural heritage for the sake of modernisation as well as Europeanisation. In his discussion of Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholia, Giorgio Agamben (1993, 20) stresses the possibility of anticipated loss; “melancholia offers the paradox of an intention to mourn that precedes and anticipates the loss of the object”. The Ottoman Empire’s Lebenswelten had not yet been lost, but social transformations made their gradual decline perceptible.

23  “Bazı sıkıntılı saatlerinde bir aynanın karşısına geçip, bu kutudan çıkardığı şapkaları birer birer tecrübe ederdi ve başını bu serpuş ile örtülü görünce adeta kendinden geçerdi”. 24  For the Ottoman Empire as an allegory see Hemmat (2019, 64); for the importance of allegories in late Ottoman and Turkish literature see Gürel (2017, Ch. 2).

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Identity in Times of Nationalism: Post-imperial Melancholy in the Turkish Novel After the loss of empire, in post-imperial Turkish literature published after 1923, the question of (national) identity takes centre stage. We can find the first traces of a retrospective, post-imperial melancholia in novels of the early republican period in Turkey, when the initial enthusiasm regarding the new nation-building is dampened by doubts about Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s (1881–1938) understanding of progress that implied a radical break from the imperial past. The multinational narratives of Ottomanism (Osmanlıcılık) or Ottomanness (Osmanlılık),25 aiming at strengthening the loyalty among different peoples within the realms of the empire, are replaced by the ideology of Turkism (Türkçülük), as developed by thinkers like Ziya Gökalp (1875–1924) (see Mignon 2005, 30). Against the background of the nationalistic Kemalist agenda that attempts to cut not only political but also cultural ties with the past, the fear shared by many authors during the Tanzimat period seems to have come true, namely the abandonment of an “authentic” Ottoman way of life. Under the presidency of Atatürk (1923–1938), the adoption of Western notions of modernity and lifestyle was seen as a condition for economic, political and cultural progress that, in turn, was deemed necessary for the development of a modern Turkish civilisation (Günay 2012, 172). Creation of the new national self went hand in hand with the denial of war crimes and atrocities committed during World War I. In the late Ottoman Empire “the blame for the economic and political decline slowly shifted […] to internal specified minorities”, a development which resulted in the death of approximately one million Armenians in 1915–1916 (Holslag 2003, 257). After the war, the nationalisation of Turkey affected almost every aspect of the formerly multi-ethnic and multi-religious society (Aktar 1996, 264). Compulsory population exchanges between Greece and Turkey in 1923 were part of a strategy to engineer a largely homogenous nation. The forced migration of about one million Greeks and Turks “not only increased chaos and despair among the migrants, but also profoundly changed the social and political texture of both countries” (Aktar 2003, 79). 25  For analyses of narratives of multinationalism in the late Ottoman Empire, see the contributions of Salim Çevik, Madeleine Elfenbein, Stephan Guth and Isa Blumi in this volume. For a critical account of the different uses of Ottomanism (Osmanlıcılık) on the one hand, and Ottomanness (Osmanlılık) on the other hand, see Alp Eren Topal’s chapter in this volume.

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In an emerging era of secular modernity and following the establishment of Ankara as the new Turkish capital, Istanbul—the cosmopolitan capital of the formerly multi-ethnic empire—turned into the “neglected city” (Göknar 2014, 324). Ever since, the narrative construction of Istanbul in literary text has evolved around topics such as the city’s lost cultural heritage and radical urban transformation. The melancholic undercurrent in Istanbul’s literary portrayals is similar to the evocation of Vienna in texts such as Zweig’s The World of Yesterday. Just like the post-­ empire images of Vienna, Istanbul stands for the experience of imperial loss. Life in the Ottoman mahalle, or certain aspects of it, are melancholically evoked in early republican literature such as Halide Edib Adıvar’s (1884–1964) famous novel The Clown and His Daughter (1935) which she translated herself into Turkish as Sinekli Bakkal (1936). Halide Edib’s novel tells the story of the heroine Rabia, an artistically talented girl who grows up in a conservative district in late-nineteenth century Istanbul. In contrast to Halide Edib’s earlier texts, the historical setting of The Clown and His Daughter chooses the colourful Ottoman lifeworlds over the “reformist enthusiasm” of the Kemalists and thus reflects the increasing disillusionment regarding ideas of national awakening in the 1930s (Atsız 2010). Halide Edib’s protagonists favour aspects of Ottoman culture that are rejected or forbidden in early Republican times such as Turkish theatre (orta oyun) and the Dervish Orders. Rabia, who later in the novel marries an Italian foreigner, causes her husband to become a Muslim, change his name to “Osman” and live with her in the mahalle. In his novel Fatih-Harbiye (1931), Peyami Safa (1899–1961) metaphorically contrasts Istanbul’s conservative district Fatih with the modern, westernised quarter of Harbiye, both of which are located on Istanbul’s European side. Up until today, the contrast between these two areas located on opposite shores of the Golden Horn “is suggestive of an Islamist versus Westernist divide” in the eyes of many (Fisher-Onar 2018, 4). The main protagonist Neriman, a young woman from Fatih, is torn between the traditional lifestyles and values represented by her soon-to-be husband Şinasi, and the fancy, westernised lifeworlds of Macit who catches her romantic interest. The communitarian life in the mahalle and the restrictive rules of men-women-interactions are challenged by Neriman, who secretly sneaks away from her home to take the Fatih-Harbiye tram. Whereas Şinasi stays within the confines of the mahalle, Neriman partially bridges the gaps between old and new as well as East and West and partakes in more “modern” social events with Macit. Şinasi melancholically

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and lethargically ponders over how Neriman (and with her, their culture) has changed and thus can be said to stand for (men’s) individual and collective anxiety regarding the transformation of social order. Safa’s narrative is an allegory “of progress gone wrong, represented by the disconnect between the male and female characters, particularly the impotence of the former and the newfound mobility and autonomy of the latter” (Gürel 2017, 57). Neriman, who is depicted by the author as enchanted by the promises of materialism, finally finds her way back to the male-dominated circles and hierarchies of Fatih. The patriarchal order, symbolised by the solidarity between Şinasi and Neriman’s father Fais bey, wins over the potential mobility of the young woman. Interestingly, the TV series “Fatih Harbiye” (2013–2014) ends differently than its literary model: Despite all difficulties, Neriman eventually marries Macit and the couple symbolically overcomes the limitations of their social and family backgrounds. In the novel, the traditional male protagonists are representatives of a diminishing formerly Ottoman, patriarchal order that runs into the danger of being replaced by a new Europeanised, material culture and lifestyle as envisioned and advocated by Kemalists. The novel warns its readers to pay attention to young women who might be influenced by the temptations of modern lifestyle while Eastern music, tradition, and values are melancholically evoked as a positive but vanishing counter-model. Ottoman culture and the beauty of its music stand for harmony, for huzur, and social cohesion in the mahalle. It is the emptiness and shallowness of Western consumerism that is contrasted with Eastern superiority in questions of morality. Şinasi embodies a post-imperial melancholia that stems from the imminent loss of power, influence and control over women connected with the downfall of the old order. Or, as Neriman, who wants to escape the rules and limitations of the mahalle says in Episode 7 of the series: “Everyone [there] lives in the past” (“Herkes [mahallede] geçmişte yaşıyor”). The lost past plays also an important role in the literary works of the writer and literary scholar Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901–1962), who, like Peyami Safa and Halide Edib, experienced both imperial and national times. Tanpınar portrays Istanbul as a gate to the Ottoman past and as a necessary point of departure in the formation of a Turkish “nation” and thus national identity. One of the main questions Tanpınar addresses in his works focuses on the extent to which the legacies of the Ottoman Empire can or should be part of Turkey’s national self. In Tanpınar’s novel Huzur (1948) (A Mind at Peace,  2008), the main protagonist Mümtaz

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melancholically reflects upon the lost connection between the city’s imperial past and the national present when strolling through Istanbul’s streets and bazaars or taking the ferry to the islands (Chovanec forthcoming). Mümtaz is anxious about the present and gets lost in the past worlds of the Ottoman Empire. His melancholy not only concerns Istanbul’s imperial past but also extends to his lover Nuran, whom he is afraid to lose even when they are still together. Referring to Agamben’s (1993) concept of an anticipated loss, Žižek (2000, 661) claims that in a melancholic love relationship, the melancholic’s way to own an object they never had is to treat it as if it was already lost. In Mümtaz’s imagination, Nuran and Istanbul seem to be intertwined; both represent a reflection of the past, and a beauty he can never fully grasp or possess. In the novel Masumiyet Müzesi (2008) (The Museum of Innocence,  2009), Orhan Pamuk’s protagonist Kemal resembles Mümtaz in his melancholic outlook. Both Mümtaz and Kemal26 find peace (huzur) in the materialised cultures of lost worlds; for instance, when Mümtaz browses old Ottoman books in the stalls of Istanbul’s grand bazaar, or when Kemal starts to collect everyday objects related to his lost lover Füsun. For Mümtaz, knowing Istanbul and its history equals knowing one’s “self”. Maybe this is why Istanbul also takes centre stage in Tanpınar’s compilation of essays Beş Şehir (1946), (Five Cities, 2018), in which he devotes the most comprehensive text to the Ottoman capital. Many paragraphs begin with the words “Eski ̇ Istanbul’da” (in old Istanbul). Whereas Istanbul once was a pompous imperial capital city, Tanpınar has witnessed its transformation into a place of retrospection, memory and longing. He frequently uses the term dâüssıla27 (nostalgia, yearning), hasret (longing and yearning) and sıla hastalığı/hasreti (homesickness, Gm. Heimweh) to describe a gloomy mood connected with an Istanbul that has lost its original character. Interestingly, Tanpınar also speaks of being filled up with hüzün when looking at Istanbul’s landscape, the notion of collective melancholy that is ̇ central to Orhan Pamuk’s memoir Istanbul—Hatıralar ve Şehir (2003)  (Istanbul—Memories of a city, 2005).28 Istanbul’s melancholic atmosphere results from the loss of its balance: Similar to Vienna, Istanbul 26  The parallels between the two protagonists are further highlighted by their Arabic names, Mümtaz meaning “excellent” and Kemal meaning “perfection, completion”. 27 ̇  For example Tanpınar (1969 [1946], 141): “O kadar ki Istanbul’un bugün bizde yaşayan asıl çehresini bu dâüssıla verir, diyebiliriz”. 28 ̇  For example, Tanpınar (1969 [1946], 142): “Her Istanbullu Boğaziçi’nde sabahın başka semtlerinden büsbütün ayrı bir lezzet olduğunu, Çamlıca tepelerinden akşam saatlerinde

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is evoked as a “melting pot” of different cultures, or as Tanpınar puts it, a synthesis (terkip) of the dichotomies new and old (eski/yeni), natives and foreigners (yerli/yabancı) or beautiful and ugly (güzel/çirkin) (Tanpınar 1969 [1946], 150). Through references to phenomena such as diverging clothing practices of different ethnic groups (Tanpınar 1969 [1946], 147), Tanpınar implicitly refers to the lost multi-ethnic composition of Istanbul’s society that in imperial times had been a visible feature of everyday life.29 Critical references to Turkey’s immediate past and the reasons for the loss of the multicultural society are avoided in Tanpınar’s work; he implicitly mourns, however, the diversity that once was characteristic for Istanbul, concluding that the city has lost its identity or that its identity has been taken away. The ills of modernity and capitalism are not only discussed in Beş Şehir, where Tanpınar laments the formerly green city of Istanbul that has changed its face because of the construction boom (1969 [1946], 192),30 but also in his posthumously published novel Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü (1961) (The Time Regulation Institute, 2014). Similar to Midhat’s satirical portrayal of the overly westernised dandy Felatun, Tanpınar humorously criticises small-minded, superficial Kemalist reforms. Whereas Midhat’s novel still emphasises the necessity of progress, however, Tanpınar’s post-imperial novel satirically points to the useless dimensions of the modern project. The homodiegetic narrator of the story, Hayri Irdal, tells the story of his life and elaborates on his interest in clocks, which was initiated by his mentor Nuri Efendi, once hailed as Istanbul’s best watchmaker. The philosophic and wise Nuri Efendi shares his clock philosophy with Hayri through phrases such as “Regulation is chasing ̇ Istanbul’da ışıkların yanmasını seyretmenin insanın içini başka türlü bir hüzünle doldurduğunu bilir”. 29  “Bu çarşılarda çok değişik kıyafetlerinin aralarındaki mezhep, dil, ırk, hattâ kıt’a ayrılıklarını ilk bakışta kavranacak hale getirdiği rengârenk bir insan kalabalığı akardı” (Tanpınar 2015, 147). 30  “Bir ağacın ölümü, büyük bir mimarî eserinin kaybı gibi bir şeydir. Ne çare ki biz bir asırdanberi, hattâ biraz daha fazla, ikisine de alıştık. Gözümüzün önünde şaheserler birbiri ̇ ardınca suya düşmüş kaya tuzu gibi eriyor, kül, toprak yığını oluyor, Istanbul’un her semtinde sütunları devrilmiş, çatısı harap, içi süprüntü dolu medreseler, şirin, küçük semt camileri, yıkık çeşmeler var. Ufak bir himmetle günün emrine verilecek halde olan bu eserler her gün biraz daha bozuluyor. Âdeta bir salgının, artık kaldırmaya yaşayanların gücü yetmeyen ölüleri gibi oldukları yerde uzanmış yatıyorlar. Gerçek yapıcılığın, mevcudu muhafaza ile başladığım öğrendiğimiz gün mesut olacağız” (Tanpınar 1969, 192).

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down the seconds” (Tanpınar 2014, 33).31 As a grown-up, Hayri meets the charismatic Halit Ayarcı who is fascinated by his new friend’s interests in clocks. Upon Hayri’s stories about Nuri Efendi and his clock philosophy, Ayarcı decides to set up the “Time Regulation Institute” in Istanbul. Hayri remembers, “It had the logic of a fairy tale. […] a very important man missed the funeral of another very important man because the city’s clocks weren’t synchronized. Thereafter, in the space of ten days, a budget was earmarked to provide us with our reasonably well-furbished office space […]” (Tanpınar 2014, 239).32 The institute increases in size, provides jobs and continues to work for about a decade; the reader, however, never learns about its actual tasks or objectives. Nuri Efendi’s aphorisms are used as the institute’s advertising slogans but are attributed to the invented (Ottoman) personality Seyh Ahmet Zamani. The machinery of lies culminates in the publication of purely fictional, pseudo-scientific work about Seyh Ahmet Zamani. Whereas Tanpınar’s other novel Huzur envisioned a synthesis between the imperial past and national present, “the Ottoman past that Tanpınar once wished to retrieve for his project of synthesis appears in The Time Regulation Institute as a plaything of frauds and charlatans” (Mishra 2013). As Mishra (2013) points out, “the mood is nostalgic”: Hayri Irdal’s happy childhood, secluded from the premises of modern lifestyle is melancholically contrasted with the “individual liberations promised by the modern state”. The strict regulation and fragmentation of time point to the modern idea of efficiency and the dictum of not losing time. Tanpınar shows ironically that there are in fact no reasonable activities that can be performed in the “saved” time. What is irretrievably lost, however, are Ottoman lifeworlds, which fall prey to the Kemalist project’s cut with the allegedly backward Ottoman past to be replaced by invented traditions and personalities. Just like the new nation-building narratives in Turkey, Tanpınar’s Institute is in need of references to the past when creating a different kind of self in the present. Past phenomena that do not fit with this new conception of the self, such as Nuri Efendi, are excluded from the narration and provide space—or create the need—for invention (Kirchner  “Ayar, seniyenin peşinde koşmaktır’” (Tanpınar 2015 [1961], 35).  “Daha ziyade bir masala benziyordu. Ben Halit Bey’e bir şeyler anlatmıştım. […]. Bu esnada şehrin saatleri birbirini tutmadığı için büyük bir zata ait cenazede mühimce bir zat bulunamamıştı. Bu yüzden on günün içinde bize bir bina bulmuşlar, ücret ayırmışlar […]” (Tanpınar 2015 [1961], 232). 31 32

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2008, 423). Tanpınar’s novel thus centres on one of the main challenges for the young Republic of Turkey: In the absence of a critical and nuanced approach towards the past, history and historiography become instruments of political legitimisation that argue against any kind of continuity and instead promote a clear break from Ottoman legacies.

History: The Past in Postmodern Turkish Literature Since the early 1980s, Turkish literature has put an increasing focus on the past in general and Ottoman multiculturalism in particular (Dufft 2009). In the wake of the 1980 military coup, political and economic liberalisation went hand in hand with an increased fragmentation and differentiation of Turkish society—a development which made subcultures and minorities more visible and helped to question dominant historiography and identity narratives (Guth 2010, 29). A main feature of “postmodern”33 Turkish literature published since the 1980s has been its increased attentiveness towards history (“tarihe yöneliş”, Aytaç 1990, 107) and, in the words of Stephan Guth, its confrontation with “what can be metaphorically described as a ‘house’, which in former times has offered the security and warmth of a home, but is now lying in ruins”. Another recurrent characteristic is that protagonists in postmodern Turkish novels often find a “‘treasure’, which they detect among the ‘ruins’” of the past (Guth 2017, 26). The Ottoman Empire is often evoked as a lost safe harbour. Its vanishing traces in the present, such as decaying konaks34 are triggers for melancholic ruminations, and contemporary Turkish novels often include intertextual references to Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s work. This explicit engagement with the past has led to a “nostalgic trend in literature” (Aytaç 1990, 107) and to a growing number of postmodern novels set in Ottoman times, combing fictional with historic elements (Furrer 2005, 9). Orhan Pamuk’s novels Beyaz Kale (1985) (The White Castle, 1990), Kara Kitap (1990) (The Black Book, 1994) and Benim Adım Kırmızı (1998) (My Name is Red, 2001) have made him one of the main representatives of this development. Through a focus on the Ottoman past or Turkey’s swaying 33   In reference to Walter Falk, Guth (2017) uses the term “Malism” instead of “Postmodernism”. 34  By the late 1980s “this wooden or sometimes half-timbered house with its projecting upper floor [was] widely understood as a signifier of the lost beauty of the Turkish architectural past” (Bertram 2008, 17).

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between East and West, the return of history since has become an increasingly visible and publicly discussed feature of Turkish literature (Furrer 2005, 9). Against this backdrop, post-imperial melancholy has become an explicit literary discourse, notably through the publication of Orhan Pamuk’s ̇ Istanbul memoir (2003) (In this essayistic text, Pamuk evokes hüzün as a collective, melancholic feeling connected with the lost power, wealth, glory and independence of the Ottoman Empire which manifests itself in today’s Istanbul. As in novels discussed above, Istanbul as the former Ottoman capital transformed into a “neglected city” is the focal point of the perceived change and ensuing feelings of tristesse: After the Ottoman Empire collapsed, the world almost forgot that Istanbul existed. The city into which I was born was poorer, shabbier, and more isolated than it had ever been before in its two-thousand-year history. For me it has always been a city of ruins and of end-of-empire melancholy. I’ve spent my life either battling with this melancholy [orig. hüzün] or (like all ̇ Istanbullus) making it my own. (Pamuk 2017 [2003])35

Pamuk describes the fragmented and vanishing traces of a once autonomous and proud civilisation, arguably epitomised by Ottoman konaks that are left unattended or face demolition while shopping malls are being erected across the city. Pamuk’s hüzün includes many notions already captured by Tanpınar—whom he refers to as a melancholic author (Pamuk 2013 [2003], Ch. 11)—such as a critique of modernisation as inherently oblivious to history and tradition. He implicitly answers Tanpınar’s questions about the relationship between the Ottoman Empire and a new collective (Turkish) identity by suggesting that it is exactly the experience of contingency and the loss of order that provide a common point of reference for a community. As Pamuk (2017, xv) explains in his introduction to a recent English edition of his memoir, he “attempted to make visible the feeling of melancholy that the city exuded, especially during the first three quarters of the twentieth century”. Pamuk revives images of the transition period from empire to nation-state, a time he hadn’t 35 ̇  Ben doğduğumda Istanbul, dünyadaki görece yeri bakımından iki bin yıllık tarihinin en ̇ zayıf, en yoksul, en ücra ve en yalıtılmış günlerini yaşıyordu. Osmanlı Imparatorluğ u’nun yıkım duygusu, yoksulluk ve şehri kaplayan yıkıntıların verdiği hüzün, bütün hayatım ̇ boyunca, Istanbul’u belirleyen şeyler oldu. Hayatım bu hüzünle savaşarak ya da onu, bütün ̇ Istanbullular gibi en sonunda benimseyerek geçti (Pamuk 2013, 14).

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experienced himself, but which he approaches and revitalises through photographs, paintings, literature and travel reports. Black-and-white photographs are used to highlight the textually evoked melancholy: “But photographs and engravings continued to inspire me even when I moved on to discussing landscapes, melancholy, history […]” (Pamuk 2017, xvi). As Pamuk admits, “their real purpose was to evoke a particular feeling and atmosphere”, namely hüzün, the melancholic emotion that Pamuk attributes to the city of Istanbul in the twentieth century. Istanbul and how it embodies the disrupted link between past and present is a topos that has also been picked up by many other authors. For instance, the city is setting and context of the plot in Ahmet Ümit’s crime ̇ novel Istanbul Hatırası (2010) (A Memento for Istanbul, 2017). Ümit’s novel is organised in a didactic manner: Against the background of a planned construction project in Istanbul’s old Sultanahmet district, murderers place corpses at historically important sites in order to draw attention to how negatively the unsustainable economic and capitalistic practices would affect the historical urban landscape. In order to solve the crimes, the inspectors have to learn (and thus inform the readers of novel) about the city’s history. Attention is drawn not only to the Ottoman Empire, but also to Istanbul’s earlier imperial history. The homodiegetic narrator, a police inspector, ponders: We knew next to nothing about the history of our own city, our hometown. Forget the Greeks and Romans; we were just as clueless when it came to the Ottomans, and yet, despite knowing absolutely nothing about them or their history, we loved to brag and boast about the ‘heroic exploits’ of our forefathers. (Ümit 2017, 52)36

In the 2000s, literary works become increasingly critical not only of the missing presence of the Ottoman Empire in cultural memory but also of the missing confrontation with the history and fate of Armenians. In the preface to the German translation (2015) of her best-selling English novel The Bastard of Istanbul (2006), Elif Shafak laments Istanbul’s discontinuity, incoherence and diminishing open-mindedness. Shafak describes Turkish society as suffering from collective amnesia and attests a missing  “Ne diyebilirdim ki, bu kentin tarihi konusunda tam bir cahildik. Bırakın Yunan, Roma dönemini, Osmanlı dönemi hakkında bile hiçbir şey bilmiyorduk. Bütün bu bilgisizliğimize rağmen, lafa geldi mi, utanıp sıkılmadan, şanlı ceddimiz diye nutuk atmaya bayılıyorduk” (Ümit 2010, 49). 36

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historical awareness, reflected in a certain carelessness towards sites of urban memory (Shafak 2015, 5). It is against this backdrop, Shafak recounts, that she began to be interested in the “moments of silence” of official historiography (Shafak 2015, 7). This lack of engagement with the past is the starting point of The Bastard of Istanbul, which tells the story of two girls, Armanoush and Asya, and their tangled American-Armenian and Turkish family histories. This novel and other literary texts by Shafak are examples of what Elena Furlanetto (2015, 167)  describes as the “Ottoman utopia”, meaning a “romanticized representation of the Ottoman Empire as a period of harmonious multiculturalism, captured in a nostalgic, a-historical language where the tensions of the past are replaced by images of tolerance and peaceful coexistence”. The multicultural Ottoman past is evoked as a positive counter-model to the identity crises and ethnic conflicts of today’s Turkey. One example for the post-imperial melancholy in The Bastard of Istanbul is the online chat room “Café Constantiopolis”. There, Armanoush as well as other “young exponents of the non-Muslim minorities of the empire can celebrate their common ‘Ottoman’ identity […] in an imaginary city on the internet that nostalgically looks back at a time when Istanbul was the centre of a multicultural empire” (Furlanetto 2015, 175; see also Furlanetto 2017, 203–221). Authors like Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shafak have shaped (post)modern Turkish literature and are major proponents of the literary discourse of melancholia. In their narrations, they refer to the lost multinational heritage, Ottoman cultural plurality and multilingualism. Their melancholy can be contextualised and critically examined against the backdrop of contemporary political narratives described as “neo-Ottomanism” (see Yavuz 2016 and 2020). As mentioned earlier, this political glorification of the past splits into what Nora Fisher-Onar described as Belle Époque37 and Ottoman-Islamic nostalgia. The former is linked to Istanbul’s quarter of Beyoğlu and evokes the multinational composition of the Ottoman Empire as well as “the emergence of Ottoman non-Muslim communities as the empire’s first bourgeoisie” in the nineteenth century. The latter connects with “Istanbul’s Ottoman-Islamic glory days”, such as the reigns of Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror and Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent. However, despite their differences, the two strands share parallels, as both are “products of the late modern, neoliberal order” and their 37   For competing political narratives of Istanbul’s multicultural heritage see also Öncü (2007).

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“contestation overlaps in substance, intersection in motives, and alliance building” (Fisher-Onar 2018, 3). Thus, Belle Époque and Ottoman-Islamic imaginaries cannot be completely separated and authors such as Pamuk and Shafak inevitably relate to both of them when they evoke late Ottoman cosmopolitanism or the famous Ottoman-Islamic architecture by architect Sinan. Another feature that Pamuk and Shafak’s approaches share is the elitist nature of the melancholy they evoke. As Kader Konuk (2011, 252) points out, for Pamuk; the Istanbul view of life is closely bound to melancholy and the sense of failure felt at the thought of a glorious era past. The kind of hüzün Pamuk prioritizes in his memoirs is, I suggest, an affect that is not shared across the ethnic, political, and class lines that divide Istanbul’s residents.

This implies that Pamuk’s hüzün, a feeling he claims shared by all Istanbullus, can be linked to the “bourgeois habitus of the Westernized, urban elite” (Konuk 2011, 252). Hence, what he selects as lost aspects of empire feed into a narrative of diminished elitist power and wealth. As Eng and Kazanjian (2003, 2) emphasise, it is impossible to separate loss from what remains, “for what is lost is only known by what remains of it, by how these remains are produced, read, and sustained”. Pamuk answers the first question “What is lost?” by claiming, for instance, that the glorious, magnificent architecture of imperial Istanbul has gone forever. As soon as this question is established, it slips into the question “What remains?” For Pamuk, the remnants of imperial Istanbul are exemplified by run-down Ottoman konaks, the ruins of a great history. The first question is directed to the past, the second to the present. At a closer look, however, a gap lures between them as there are other questions that are not posed and thus remain unanswered: What exactly is lost? Why, how or in what sense?

Silence and Memory: New Approaches In her novels and essays, Sema Kaygusuz transcends the intertwinement of literature and politics alluded to above by addressing the silence that concerns a past that cannot be talked about. As Sabine Adatepe (2016, 5)  underlined in her laudation upon Kaygusuz’ reception of the 2016 Coburger Rückert price, the author has the courage to find words for the

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unspoken and untold.38 In her collection of short stories Karaduygun (2012), Kaygusuz approaches the “black feeling”, which could also be translated as “black bile” or simply melancholia. She argues that those suffering from the black bile have been called melancholics since Hippocrates and are referred to as karaduygulular in “this part of the world” (Kaygusuz 2016, 69).39 The collection includes 14 short contributions that are interwoven with each other, centring on melancholia and Kaygusuz’ female protagonist Birhan Keskin, a well-known Turkish poet. Kaygusuz herself is present as narrator and often recalls personal anecdotes about Birhan. The second paragraph of her first chapter, for instance, opens with the words: “The most sleepless person in my life is Birhan” (Kaygusuz 2016, 12).40 The narrator states that a long night’s sleep may give two presents, namely vitality and oblivion (Kaygusuz 2016, 12).41 Not being able to fall asleep is thus equated with remembering. At night, the sleepless individual walks around in an imaginary “konak” of remembrance, described as a historical adventure in darkness (Kaygusuz 2016, 12).42 Birhan is introduced as a melancholic person, a karaduygulu, who feels the roaring of the world (Kaygusuz 2016, 24).43 The main feature of a melancholic is sleeplessness, that is, the inability to close one’s eyes and forget. The meanings of melancholia and karaduygu are equated but elaborately distinguished from hüzün (Kaygusuz 2016, ch. V): Whereas hüzünlüler say things like “this and that doesn’t exist, this existed but now it doesn’t anymore, this was about to happen but didn’t happen”, people who feel karaduygu ask ontological questions such as “do I exist or not? In which time do I exist and in which body?” (Kaygusuz 2016, 69).44 Thus, hüzünlüler make statements, whereas melancholics ask questions. Despite the lack of an explicit reference to Pamuk, Kaygusuz (2016, 71)  seems to criticise 38  “Mein Lob gilt Sema Kaygusuz auch für ihren Mut, immer wieder nach einer Sprache für Unausgesprochenes, für unerzählbar Scheinendes zu suchen […]”. 39  “Ta Hippokrates’ten beri kara safranın hükmünde yaşayan insanlara nasıl melankolik demişlerse, buralarda da karaduygun demişler”. 40  “Hayatımdaki en uykusuz kişi Birhan’dır”. 41  “Uzun bir gece uykusunun olsa olsa iki hediyesi vardır: biri zindelik, öbürü unutuş”. 42  “Gece gezen herkes gibi, hatır, hatıra ve hafızanın harcıyla örülen hayali bir konakta, yapay ışıklar altında düşe kalka dolaşırken, tarihi bir serüven gibi yaşar karanlığı”. 43  “Birhan gibiler derken, dünyanın uğultusunu içinden duyan karaduygu insanlardan söz ediyorum”. 44  Wheras hüzünlüler say “o yok, bu yok, şu vardı ama şimdi eksik, olacaktı ama olmadı”, karaduygulular ask questions such as “ben var mıyım, yok muyum, hangi zamanda, kimin içindeyim”.

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Pamuk’s widely read and interpreted notion of a collective hüzün by claiming that it (too) easily arouses fascination or admiration.45 Instead, terms used by hüzünlüler such as loneliness, lack and deficiency become sticky phrases as they can easily be connected with grand narratives of the glorious past. Unmasked as a potentially politically opportunist discourse, Kaygusuz (2016, 71)  criticises the understanding of hüzün as a one-­ dimensional approach towards history that can easily be imitated.46 Similar to Konuk’s stance in her analysis of Pamuk’s Istanbul memoir, Kaygusuz (2016, 76)  connects hüzün to the belonging to a social class. Instead, karaduygu is introduced as a mode of remembrance and can be linked to Žižek’s ethical primacy of melancholy: The melancholic stays awake, does not forget and asks questions. Besides the melancholics who keep their eyes open, Kaygusuz also contrasts the hüzünlüler with the sorrowful (kederliler). Those embodying hüzün are described as egoistic and mainly worried about their own safety, whereas the group of the sorrowful consists of those marginalised in societies, such as survivors of massacres, transvestites, migrants or individuals openly living their homosexuality (Kaygusuz 2016, 70). Hüzünlüler celebrate heroes, whereas the kederliler support each other (Kaygusuz 2016, 71). Hüzün is connected with appearance instead of substance which is why, as Kaygusuz (2016, 80) ironically remarks, hüzünlüler are from the inside porn stars, whereas kederliler are fighters. In contrast to hüzün, melancholia and sorrow cannot be imitated. Kaygusuz’ melancholia stems from a critical approach towards the world, a certain fundamental attitude of questioning and inquiring; sorrow is the feeling accompanying one’s state of marginalisation in society, often being reduced to silence. Hüzün is portrayed as a mainstream programme, easily replicable and based on a biased understanding of history. Kaygusuz encourages her readers to ask questions, to break the silence about topics that are not part of official historiography. In Karaduygun as well as in other essays and short stories, she encourages readers to ask in detail what was lost and what remains, but also why and how it was lost. As Judith Butler (2003, 468) has pointed out, there is something that one cannot work through, and this is the deliberate act of violence against a group:  “Hüzün kolayca hayranlık uyandırır”.  “Yalnızlık, yoksunluk ve her türlü -sizlik onların ağzında ağdalı bir söyleyişe dönuşür. (…) Üstelik hüzün taklit edilebilir bir şeydir”. 45 46

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What results is a melancholic agency (…) who does not know who it is except as the survival. Places are lost—destroyed, vacated, barred—but then there is some new place (…). What is new, newness itself, is founded upon the loss of original place, and so it is a newness that has within a sense of belatedness, of coming after, and of being thus fundamentally determined by a past that continues to inform it.

In an essay published in German in the year of the centennial of the Great Catastrophe47 (2015), Kaygusuz addresses the loss of the Armenian cemetery once located in the Pangaltı quarter of Istanbul near Taksim Square. Against the background of the discriminatory laws of the 1930s, it was demolished and replaced with the Gezi Park and hotels. What remains from the cemetery are gravestones which were used to construct stairs now leading up to the park. Kaygusuz points out that the stones have not maintained their silence and instead raised their voices during the Gezi protests in 2013: “On the fundament of the memory emanating from these stones live the grandchildren”.48 And it is they who can now give a voice to the unheard stories of the past. The theme of a bond between granddaughter and grandmother is biographically inspired and a repeating topos in Kaygusuz’ work.49 In her translated short story “Esir Sözler Kuyusu” (“The Well of Trapped Words”), for instance, a young girl regularly visits her grandmother to bring her food. The old lady warns her granddaughter “If you are the only one who knows something, you’re in trouble!” (Kaygusuz 2015a, 50).50 Feeling something no one else can feel and knowing something no one else knows is “more painful than the most painful illness and worse than the darkest solitude”. The grandmother describes this situation as a curse, making people living under it sad and

47  As Thomas De Waal (2015, 92 and 139) points out, several Armenians wrote accounts of deportation in 1915. They referred to it as “Medz Yeghern” (Great Catastrophe). 48  “Auf dem Fundament des diesem Stein entströmenden Gedächtnisses aber leben die Enkel”. 49  Her second novel Yüzünde Bir Yer (2009, “A Place on your Face”) tells the tragic story of a woman who has survived the Dersim Massacre in 1938, a traumatic experience, which has silenced her forever. The past that is hidden behind her silence is very present for her granddaughter who goes to Dersim to learn about the history and give voice to her grandmother’s experience. In her novel Yere Düşen Dualar (2006, “Prayers Falling Down to the Earth”) it is the silent father who provokes the daughter’s search for truth and clarification. 50  “Başkaların bilmediğini bir tek sen biliyorsan yandın!” (Kaygusuz 2015c, 18).

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angry (Kaygusuz 2015a, 50).51 The girl does not exactly know what her grandmother refers to, but it transpires that Kaygusuz refers to the Dersim massacres of 1938, for a long time a neglected part of Turkish history. Like Kaygusuz’ own grandmother, the elderly woman appears to be one of the massacres’ survivors.52 In her short narration “Yıllar Önce Ben Bir Meydandaydım” (“Many Years Ago, I was Standing in a Meydan”), Kaygusuz tells the other side of the story, a story of guilt, through a soldier who killed a Kurdish boy in Dersim. As an old man, the former soldier talks about his trauma—not through his own eyes, however, but through those of the young boy he had shot (Kaygusuz 2012 and 2015b, 25). Kaygusuz builds a bridge from questions that refer to the past (what is lost and why) to a question that tackles the present (what remains) and concludes with a vision for the future: the necessity of memory, awareness and responsibility. She criticises nationalism and its interrelatedness with literature. In a 2013 speech on national literary production, Kaygusuz argues that during the late Ottoman period and the early Turkish Republic an “ideological literature” emerged that served the interests of the nation-­ state by associating people with their allegedly Turkic roots  (Kaygusuz 2013).53 She suggests that it should be the task of authors and the function of critical literature to go beyond these limiting, national frames of reference. As elaborated in her article “Buradan Bakmak” (2019), the Turkish postmodern discourse on multiculturalism, which often evokes the Ottoman realms as a counter-model to nationalist minority policies, is not an ideal but a form of sorrow. The underlying idea of “multiculturalism” is an understanding of culture based on difference (Kaygusuz 2009). For Kaygusuz, melancholia is intrinsically connected to memory and thus has political potential. Building on the long discursive history of melancholia dating back to Greek antiquity, Freud pathologised melancholia as an unhealthy disposition. According to Žižek and Agamben, however, melancholia means to not let go, to not forget, but remember the past, keeping it alive. As Judith Butler (2003, 467–468) notes, it is particularly the deliberate act of violence against a collectivity that one cannot “get 51  “Kimsenin duyamadığı birşeyi duymak, bilemediği bir şeyi bilmek en acılı hastalıktan daha ağrılı, en koyu yalnızlıktan çok daha betermiş. Böyle insanlar hep üzgün ve sinirli olurlarmış bu yüzden” (Kaygusuz 2015c, 18). 52  As Adatepe (2016, 6) claims, “Sema Kaygusuz brach literarisch das Schweigen der Großmutter”. 53  “Geç Osmanlı ve Türkiye Cumhuriyeti sırasında Milli Edebiyat ve Türkleri kökenleştirmeye hizmet eden ideolojik bir edebiyat türemiştir”.

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over”. On the one hand the “past is irrecoverable” and on the other hand, “the past is not past”. In the process of mourning as Freud understands it, the past is declared resolved and finished. Instead, melancholia as envisioned by Kaygusuz keeps the past alive in the present and generates sites for memory and breaking the silence, as well as different approaches towards history, for rewriting the past, for telling different stories that have not been part of national narratives.

Conclusion Tracing back the roots of the Ottoman Myth in Turkish literature has shown that the Ottoman Empire has been evoked and discursively construed as a melancholic object or point of reference in a wide range of literary texts since the late-nineteenth century. The genesis of the Ottoman Myth illustrates that the notion of empire stands for and expresses multiple loss. While the Ottoman Empire itself can be defined by its pluralism, the empire’s narrative constructions post mortem are no less diverse. The meanings ascribed to imperial history shift over time and from author to author and often serve different (political) purposes. What the novels discussed in this chapter have in common is that they capture or evoke lived experiences of demise connected to the dissolution of the Ottoman state. Melancholy about this (anticipated) downfall of an order—and along with it the loss of its societal as well as political particularities—is the defining feature of the post-imperial novel. The empire appears or is used as a surface for the projection of cultural identification and as a counter-­ model to today’s shortcomings. As cursory references to trends and examples from (other) European literatures have suggested, developments in (Ottoman) Turkish literature can often be linked to transnationally shared experiences of change such as processes of modernisation, without disregarding their specific historical and cultural conditions. In late Ottoman literature, it is the anxiety about modernity, the anticipated loss of one’s cultural authenticity and the presentiment of an imminent collapse of empire that can be regarded as the beginnings of a melancholic discourse in Turkish literature: Increasing levels of Europeanisation and modernisation merge with the looming demise of the Ottoman Empire. In early republican literature, questions of identity and belonging take centre stage. When the first enthusiasm about the national awakening and reformism abates, social aspects of the traditional communitarian life in the mahalle like patriarchal structures and social

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cohesion are emphasised against the background of increasing (male) anxiety. The loss of order and, along with it, the gradual loss of dominance, influence and control over women who experience new mobility and rights, give rise to post-empire melancholy. Moreover, cultural aspects of the diverse life in the Ottoman mahalle and its konaks (such as Sufi spiritualism and traditional theatre) are positively evoked. Certain aspects of the Ottoman Empire, like literature, music or the historical heritage of Istanbul, are suggested as a potential source for the creation of a national self that can be combined with new, allegedly modern aspects of identity. In the postmodern period after 1980, Empire reappears as a historical setting for novels and thus increasingly allows for a new understanding of history that goes beyond national historiographical narratives. In the 2000s multinationalism and the lost heritage of pluricultural Ottoman society are more and more critically examined. While melancholic narratives can be analysed against the backdrop of the socio-political conditions that support their emergence, it is especially in this period that authors actively and explicitly engage with the discursive history of melancholia and hüzün. Despite the different strands of the Ottoman Myth in Turkish literature, its melancholic outlook often serves as a vehicle to literarily criticise contemporaneous shortcomings such as state-imposed top-down reforms, radical modernisation, homogenising nationalism, unsustainable economic practices or urban change. Despite what may appear as its inherently critical ambition, however, Ottoman melancholy can also become mainstream itself, claiming general validity for a whole collective where instead a whole range of (also marginalised) perspectives and experiences would need to be taken into account. The Ottoman Myth is a set of narratives fluctuating and evolving over time, sometimes also feeding (and being fed by) political discourse. Beyond the literary realm, it is the “neo-­ Ottomanism” of Turkish foreign policy strategies in the 2000s that asks for a particularly critical engagement with evocations of Ottoman glory and power.

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CHAPTER 16

The Hotel as a Non-Place of Habsburg Multinationalism. Hotel Savoy (1924) by Joseph Roth Jelena Spreicer

Multinationalism in the Habsburg Monarchy More often than not the history of Europe and its empires has been written from the perspective of the nation states and therefore by definition limited to a very particular national and/or nationalist perspective. On the one hand, this approach is completely in line with the Hegelian idea of the nation state as the ultimate aim of history, which is supposed to replace empire as an obsolete form of polity. On the other hand, historiographic narratives grounded in national particularism necessarily lack the kind of breadth that is indispensable for the understanding of the supranational, which since antiquity has shaped the majority of European history. In fact, as will be shown, it was not until very recently that historiographic research into the Habsburg Monarchy started questioning the nation state as the end point of its retrospective synthesis and focusing instead on the J. Spreicer (*) Department for German Language and Literature, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Chovanec, O. Heilo (eds.), Narrated Empires, Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55199-5_16

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multinational processes of state building. In opposition to that, the previously analytically neglected Habsburg multinationalism was very prominent in literary portrayals of the Habsburg Monarchy written in the immediate aftermath of its dissolution in 1918 and by authors who had been both born in it and socialized by it.1 Among such authors is the Galician-born Joseph Roth (1884–1939), whose novel Hotel Savoy, published in 1924, is the main focus of this article and perhaps one of the best examples for the positively connoted Habsburg multinationalism as one of the main building blocks of a kind of nostalgia present in Austrian interwar literature that Claudio Magris calls “the Habsburg myth” (Magris 1966). By analysing how the eponymous hotel from Roth’s novel functions as a metonymy for the multinational Dual Monarchy, the article shows that Roth captures the precise moment when the multinationalism at the heart of the state built by Franz Joseph I ceases to be functional for imperial subjects who were driven away from each other by the inexorable forces of history that slowly, but surely, pushed them towards the post-imperial era that for Joseph Roth and his characters was always marked by an almost intolerable sense of displacement and homelessness. The kind of multinationalism both portrayed and mourned by Roth is an echo of systemic imperial state building strategies analysed in the aforementioned, newer historiographic studies that bring Habsburg multinationalism to the fore. In this respect, the first study that should be mentioned is Forging the Multinational State by John Deak (2015), who at the beginning of his work claims that from the nineteenth century onwards, historians have largely neglected the idea of the central imperial state or, to be more precise, have neglected its numerous advantages in favour of criticizing its apparent disadvantages for the cultural and social rights of particular nations that after 1848 were becoming increasingly vocal in their demands for a higher degree of political autonomy. Deak shows that the generally accepted idea of Habsburg anachronism that supposedly brought about the downfall of the Dual Monarchy is grounded in Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1837) and the belief that at the time of his writing, Prussia was the “pinnacle civilization” that was intended to unify German lands, while Austria was perceived as an out-­ dated, “medieval organization of formerly independent kingdoms and 1  For the influence of the notion of origin on the authors of the so-called “post-imperial novel” (primarily Joseph Roth and Robert Musil) see Magerski (2018).

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lands” (Deak 2015, 18).2 However, this line of thinking completely disregards the fact that the emperor Franz Joseph I had partially succeeded in the complex process of modern state building, defined by Deak as “a historically grounded concept, […] encompass[ing] the processes and features of building the apparatuses of the state as well as the formal and informal institutions that make up a state: building and organizing armies, taxing the populace, policing citizens, and controlling the food supply” (Deak 2015, 15). Even though Franz Joseph I was continuing a long tradition of enlightened absolutism which started with the reformation of the state apparatus under empress Maria Theresia, as the monarch he was perceived as the embodiment of this process, both in the late stages of the Monarchy as well as in its immediate aftermath, that is, at the time when Joseph Roth, who was, alongside with Robert Musil, one of the most famous authors of the so-called Habsburg myth in Austrian literature (Magris 1966), wrote the majority of his literary works, including Hotel Savoy (1924). According to Deak, it is bureaucracy that was the backbone of Habsburg imperial cohesion, “both the glue that held the state together and the lubricant which ameliorated its natural friction” (Deak 2015, 25). Another term for what Deak calls “bureaucracy” is the much more neutral term of “administration,” which throughout the Monarchy co-opted local elites into the imperial system of government that helped secure the compliance of various ethnic groups with common state goals. Just as with any other imperial project, the Habsburg version was also met with demands to unify a variety of ethnicities and religious affiliations into a single state. The loyalty of Habsburg subjects and their adherence to the imperial order was to be secured by the promise of extending both the administrative apparatus from the centre to the periphery, as well as their political rights in a continuous effort to diminish not only the geographic distance 2  In Hegel und wir (2015), Koschorke compares Prussia at the beginning of the nineteenth century to Europe at the beginning of the twenty-first century with respect to the problem of politically unifying different entities into a larger political structure. In so doing, Koschorke notes the biggest difference between Prussia in the nineteenth century and Europe nowadays: the absence of a powerful “European narrative” which would in its cohesive capacity be comparable to the Prussian narrative that relied heavily on German philosophers, historiographers and authors. In an attempt to explain this lack of a strong, European narrative, Koschorke turns to Hegel’s philosophy of history that he suggests played a crucial role in providing Prussia a justification for its claim to a central role in the political unification of separate entities into a single nation state (Koschorke 2015, 23–24).

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(e.g. by building railroads), but also the symbolic one. It was a plan that did not function without difficulty, but it was also a plan that from the eighteenth century up until the Great War showed a kind of adaptability and versatility which safeguarded the empire even from the rise of nationalist movements in the second half of the nineteenth century. As Deak points out, in the Great War, the Dual Monarchy was neither defeated in the field of battle, nor were any of its territories occupied by a foreign army (Deak 2015, 397). The question then arises why a previous and relatively successful model of state building came to a surprising and rather unexpected end in 1918. Deak suggests that this was because in its response to the assassination on Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, Vienna abandoned its multinational imperial mission and for the first time in a century and a half and sought a very specifically Austrian retribution that all other nations of the Monarchy were supposed to endorse. Whereas prior to the war the state had been concerned with achieving economic prosperity in the centre and developing infrastructure on the periphery, after the declaration of war it became focused exclusively on “military provisioning, control, censorship and retributive justice which would make Austria-Hungary one of the most repressive states on the European continent” (Deak 2015, 398). It is precisely at this moment, when the introduction of numerous emergency laws that required the population to put all of its resources at the state’s disposal, that the Monarchy lost its most salient feature: the multinational character best summarized in its motto: viribus unitis (with united forces). Once a vehicle for establishing an administrational and infrastructural standard for all groups inhabiting the Monarchy, the imperial rule now became a “tool of the military state, an anvil upon which military authority could hammer the population into obedience” (Deak 2015, 398). This, more than ever in its long history, paradoxically made it susceptible to defiance. The second historiographic approach to Habsburg multinationalism, which should be mentioned, is the widely acclaimed, new history of the Habsburg Empire, published in 2016 by Pieter Judson. Just as Deak, Judson abandons the idea that the narrative of the Monarchy could or should be told exclusively from specific perspectives of numerous ethnic and linguistic groups that in the second half of the nineteenth century consolidated into nationalist movements. Instead he focuses on strategies that the imperial state employed in order to “inspir[e] an emotional attachment among its peoples by encouraging them to link their individual or group interests to imperial interests” (Judson 2016, 20). Judson’s

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line of argument is highly reminiscent of Herfried Münkler’s study Empires (2007), in which it is argued that imperial subjects experience “pull and push factors” of empire that on the one hand demand certain sacrifices from different groups that it either conquers or annexes, but on the other hand and by virtue of promoting strong ideological narratives of inclusivity negotiate peace and favourable administrative standards in exchange for compliance to the imperial rule (Münkler 2007, Ch. 2). As will be shown, this compliance is always contingent upon a subtle balance of power between the centre and periphery that, if disturbed, can bring the whole imperial symbolic order into question. This means that imperial rulers always had to negotiate between their own state interests, the interests of local elites and those of the general population. For example, by reducing the forced labour of peasants, introducing and increasing taxes for the nobility in the eighteenth century, the state gained strong support from the peasants for their imperial project (Judson 2016, 21). According to Judson, the intended goal of these imperial policies was not social equality in its own right, but equal citizenship that was to be achieved by “promoting patriotic feelings for the state and respect for social order” that would bind the imperial subjects to allegiance (Judson 2016, 22). Moreover, Judson points out that nationalist movements in the Dual Monarchy revolved around cultural diversity rather than around political autonomy, and primarily around the question of the vernacular (Judson 2016, 25). It is therefore not surprising that national movements often sought an increase in their political autonomy within the imperial framework itself. After the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, the Slavic peoples advocated a restructuring of the Monarchy into a trialist state, which would enable them to become the third politically autonomous entity and equal to Hungary. According to Münkler’s study on the Great War, Franz Ferdinand prior to his death, and as the successor to the throne, was inclined to this solution: upon his future ascension to the throne, the Monarchy was to become even more multinational on its political scale than it had been ever before, an end that could have been achieved by means of political compromise and not war (Münkler 2013, Ch. 1).3 3  An interesting literary exercise in alternative history which could have taken place if Franz Ferdinand had not been assassinated in Sarajevo and proceeded in granting the Slavic peoples of the Monarchy the same political autonomy as Hungary was Hannes Stein’s novel Der Komet, published in 2014, on the centenary of the assassination. Among the far-reaching consequences of such a decision is the fact that in the fictitious world of the novel, the

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As shown by Deak, Judson and also Münkler, multinationalism, expressed through multilingualism, cultural diversity as well as the diversity of power dynamics in different areas of the empire, was much more than just a myth that came into being in the writings of authors such as Roth and Musil, who mourned the loss of their homeland in the interwar period. For the peoples of the Monarchy, it was a day-to-day reality and an arena of political struggle that in spite of its potentially destabilizing effects was firmly situated within the larger symbolic order of the empire, which on many occasions proved to be immune to the challenges of national diversity.

The Hotel as a Substitute for the Lost Homeland David Bronsen’s biography of Joseph Roth reveals in great detail the author’s stubbornness and an inclination towards fiction, which was made manifest not only in his literary works, but also in the systematic and persistent obscuring of his own biography as well as in his reluctance to take up permanent residence in any house, city or country. Born in 1894, Joseph Roth frequently made up stories about his origin and in his letters, essays and newspaper articles sometimes mentioned and sometimes concealed the fact that he was raised by his mother and her family in the small town of Brody. As Roth’s biographer, David Bronsen, points out, this may have been because his father, Nachum Roth, left on a business trip while his mother was pregnant and never returned (Bronsen 1993, 14–24). The overriding experience of Roth’s childhood was that of an absent father, who had travelled to Katowice, where he was informed that the person he put in charge of his firm’s storage facility had stolen some of the goods, he then proceeded to Hamburg in order to settle the matter with his company, but on his way back had to be removed from the train because of his unsettling behaviour that was disturbing other passengers. Nachum Roth was subsequently provisionally institutionalized in Germany and later released to the care of his relatives in Western Galicia. He never got to know his son and never saw his wife again, to whom he had only briefly been married prior to his departure.4 As frequently emphasized by Roth scholars (cf. Bronsen 1993; Müller-Funk 2012; Kabić 2018), the absence Habsburg Monarchy continues to exist uninterruptedly up until the contemporary age. For more information about this novel see Spreicer (2018). 4  For a detailed account of Joseph Roth’s family background see Bronsen (1993, Ch. 2).

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of a father figure spurned a crisis of identity that followed Roth throughout his entire life, in which he continuously refused to adhere to any single identity politics. Roth was neither truly Jewish nor Catholic. For most of his life, he had no permanent residence and refused to be subsumed under any national paradigm and insisted that Austria-Hungary was the only homeland he had ever had. This unorthodox behaviour was perhaps illustrated best immediately after his death in 1939, when even his family was unsure whether he should be buried according to Jewish or Catholic tradition, because in some letters he claimed that he had converted to Christianity, while in others he vigorously denied this. Such ambiguities followed him throughout his entire life and, as will be shown, to a certain extent also remain inherent in his literary work. It is therefore not surprising that the father in absentia was replaced by a symbolic one—Franz Joseph I, who became the central point of reference in Roth’s fiction that portrayed the Habsburg Monarchy in a mythical fashion which was deliberately anti-mimetic and evoked a lost world that could only be mourned. It is a world inhabited by protagonists whose tragedy consists in the fact that they have yet to realize what their author alongside with his readers had already painfully become aware of: that the homeland they so desperately clung to no longer existed. What is interesting in this respect is Roth’s peculiar choice of residence. Even though he often could not afford it, he stayed for extended periods of time at expensive hotels and wrote his texts in coffee houses in Vienna, Berlin, Frankfurt, Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, Nice and Marseilles (Bronsen 1993, 120). It was in such establishments bursting with life, tourists and cosmopolitanism, that is, with the kind of multinationalism that had been irretrievably lost since the collapse of the Monarchy, where Roth found a surrogate for his lost homeland. This was the place where “his inner loneliness necessitated an outward gregariousness” (Bronsen 1993, 120, translation mine). The paradox of Roth’s lifestyle lay not in the fact that he could rarely afford it, but in the futility of the attempt to make a home out of a place that by its very definition can only provide temporary shelter on a journey or the provisional place of residence at one’s destination. In order to appeal to a wide variety of guests, its interior must be neutral, that is, deprived of any individualism, which means that there is a certain standard of hotel service that can be counted upon when travelling. In this respect, the fine European hotels frequented by Joseph Roth on his prolonged stays in different cities symbolically represented the last remnants of Habsburg state building, which Deak and Judson pinpoint in a

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standardized pattern of administration and infrastructure. If we add cosmopolitanism inherent to every hotel into the mix, it becomes obvious why the “homeless” Joseph Roth often sought the atmosphere of hotels even when this indulgence came with the high price of insolvency. Within the framework of this article, I propose to read the social institution of a hotel as a modernist precursor of “non-places” of supermodernity as described by Marc Augé in his study Non-Places (1995): If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place. The hypothesis advanced here is that supermodernity produces non-places, meaning spaces which are not themselves anthropological places and which, unlike Baudelairean modernity, do not integrate the earlier places: instead these are listed, classified, promoted to the status of ‘places of memory’, and assigned to a circumscribed and specific position. […] Place and non-place are rather like opposed polarities: the first is never completely erased, the second never totally completed; they are like palimpsests on which the scrambled game of identity and relations is ceaselessly rewritten. (Augé 1995, 77–79)

In other words, what Augé registers for airports, fast-food restaurants, hotels, refugee camps, and so on—an absence of identity in the face of functionality that is in close correlation with a changing world order preferring nomads and travellers to those leading a sedentary lifestyle—is also at the heart of Roth’s homelessness, the same type of paradoxical conjunction of restlessness and passivity that is also characteristic of the protagonist and homodiegetic narrator of the novel Hotel Savoy. For Augé, a non-place comes into existence via the gaze of a specific type of people— travellers, “but not professional travellers or scientists, but […] travellers on impulse or for unexpected reasons” (Augé 1995, 87). It is in their gaze that “we are most likely to find prophetic evocations of spaces in which neither identity, nor relations, nor history really make any sense” (Augé 1995, 87). For Roth and his characters, which Hans Richard Brittnacher categorizes into “returnees, vagabonds and impostors” (Brittnacher 2012), history does not and cannot make sense because of a feeling of uprootedness or irreparable detachment from a place of origin. Although at first glance, places seem the same as they had been before the imperial collapse, the time in which they unravel is not, so that the day-to-day

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(imperial and multinational) reality Roth’s characters for the most part of their lives took for granted ultimately dissolves before their eyes.

Hotel Savoy: As Doomed as the Monarchy Itself Hotel Savoy is a short novel comprising of two parts. “Book I” introduces the narrator Gabriel Dan, a former soldier of the k.u.k. army (kaiserlich und königliche Armee—Austro-Hungarian Army), who is in 1919 returning from Russia, where he has been detained for three years as a prisoner of war. On his way to Vienna, the city where he was born, he arrives to an unnamed town in Eastern Europe, presumably somewhere in Poland. The majority of Roth scholars seem fairly confident that the hotel described in the novel corresponds to a hotel of the same name, situated in Łódź (cf. Müller-Funk 2012, 52; Kabić 2018, 76). Perhaps one of the most convincing contributions to the discussion about the exact location of Roth’s novel was made by Joanna Jabłkowska in 2012. Jabłkowska traces the origin of the thesis that the novel’s plot is situated in Łódź back to Roth’s Polish friend and writer, Joseph Wittlin, and proceeds to compare and contrast the imaginary geography of the novel to the authentic geography of Łódź in the immediate aftermath of the Great War. In order to explain my recent, but growing scepticism towards this hypothesis that is, in turn, in close correlation to the non-places announced in the title of the article, I will quote from the only authority on the scope of meaning which can be assigned to the novel—the literary text itself: I arrive at the Hotel Savoy at ten o’clock in the morning. I am determined to rest for a couple of days or a week. My relations live in this town—my parents were Russian Jews. I mean to raise enough money to continue my journey westwards. […] After five years, I stand again at the gates of Europe. The Hotel Savoy, with its seven storeys, its gilded coat of arms and its uniformed porter, seems to me more European than any other hotel in the east. It holds out the promise of water, soap, English lavatories, a lift, chambermaids in white caps, a chamberpot gleaming like some precious surprise […]. A lift bears me upwards, each of its sides a mirror. […] As I rise ever higher, I throw my bitterness, my wanderings, my homelessness, all my mendicant past down the liftshaft from which it can never reach me again. (Roth 2013, 9–11, emphasis added).5 5  In the original: “Ich komme um zehn Uhr vormittags im Hotel Savoy an. Ich war entschlossen, ein paar Tage oder eine Woche auszuruhen. In dieser Stadt leben meine

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Having arrived at the Hotel Savoy, Gabriel Dan feels as if the weight of his homelessness has been lifted from his shoulders. After two years in combat and three years in prison or altogether five years of physical and psychological detachment from his homeland,6 arriving at the hotel signifies finally reaching familiar ground and functions as a surrogate for a home far away, in spite of the fact that he has never been here before: “My room seemed friendly, as if I had lived there for a long time. The bell was familiar, and the doorhandle, the light switch, the green lampshade, the clothes cupboard and the washbasin. Everything was homely, like a room in which one has spent one’s childhood. Everything was consoling and warm, like returning again to someone beloved” (Roth 1924, 11).7 What Gabriel Dan recognizes as familiar is the hotel’s amenability with a very specific, cosmopolitan cultural code characteristic of his home town Vienna, that is, an amalgamation of different cultural influences ranging from infrastructure, in this case English plumbing to mentality or the stereotype of South-East-European hospitality. In other words, the town where Hotel Savoy is situated reminds Gabriel of his home and his childhood in Leopoldstadt, a traditionally Jewish district of Vienna. That a heavily Verwandten—meine Eltern waren russische Juden. Ich möchte Geldmittel bekommen, um meinen Weg nach dem Westen fortzusetzen. […] Europäischer als alle anderen Gasthöfe des Ostens scheint mir das Hotel Savoy mit seinen sieben Etagen, seinem goldenen Wappen und einem livrierten Portier. Es verspricht Wasser, Seife, englisches Klosett, Lift, Stubenmädchen in weißen Hauben, freundlich blinkende Nachtgeschirre, wie köstliche Überraschungen in braun getäfelten Kästchen […]. Ein Lift nimmt mich auf, Spiegel zieren seine Wände […] und [ich] werfe Bitterkeit, Armut, Wanderung, Heimatlosigkeit, Hunger, Vergangenheit des Bettlers hinunter—, tief, woher es mich, den Emporschwebenden, nimmermehr erreichen kann” (Roth 2013, 5–7, emphasis added). 6  By comparison, Joseph Roth was in military service from 1916 to 1918: He volunteered with his friend, Józef Wittlin, and both were initially rejected because of their weak constitutions. However, having persuaded the doctor to let them fight, the two opted for the 21. field fighter battalion (21. Feldjäger-Bataillon), and were first sent to Vienna for military training and then to the Eastern front. In 1917, Roth was assigned to the military press service in Lemberg. Since, as shown by Bronsen by comparing Roth’s autobiographical writing with known facts of his life, Roth was infamous for deliberately obscuring certain stations in his life, it cannot be ascertained whether he remained in the press service until the end of the war or whether he was a prisoner of war in Russia, as he claimed (Bronsen 1993, 89–108). 7  In the original: “Mein Zimmer schien mir vertraut, als hätte ich schon lange darin gewohnt, bekannt die Glocke, der Druckknopf, der elektrische Taster, der grüne Lampenschirm, der Kleiderkasten, die Waschschlüssel. Alles heimisch, wie in einer Stube, in der man eine Kindheit verbracht, alles beruhigend, Wärme verschüttend, wie nach einem lieben Wiedersehn” (Roth 2013, 8).

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industrialized town such as Łódź, which had since the Treaties of Tilsit signed by Napoleon I and emperor Alexander I of Russia in 1807 been incorporated into the territory of the Russian empire and which by 1897 became the fifth largest city in that empire, should engender such pleasant memories of one’s own home in Vienna is highly improbable, even less so after a three-year imprisonment in Russia. Travelling westwards alongside with the narrator and many other soldiers returning from Russia is the volatile notion of the revolution, principally irreconcilable with the kind of cosmopolitan, bourgeois lifestyle the narrator is quick to recognize as a reminder of the Austrian imperial centre. To claim that the memory of one imperial centre is awakened at the periphery of another empire one is currently trying to escape would postulate a similarity between Austria-­ Hungary and the Russian Empire, which had never existed, at least not in that form. In addition to this, literary scholarship should treat such geographic attributions of deliberately unnamed locations to authentic places as only marginally relevant because any unnamed place by very virtue of its intended anonymity assumes a distinctive symbolic character, especially in the case of Joseph Roth, who deliberately obscured geographical and biographical coordinates in his effort to create a mythical space of the Monarchy. So what is the peculiarity of Hotel Savoy that renders it so highly reminiscent of the Dual Monarchy, a state formation that Gabriel Dan interestingly never explicitly mentions? On the one hand, it is undoubtedly the hotel’s architecture evocative of Central European cities such as Vienna or Budapest. The hotel is fairly large, comprises seven floors and 864 rooms different both in style as well as status. While in most hotels more expensive rooms offering luxury on a grand scale are situated on the upper floors, in Roth’s Hotel Savoy the exact opposite is the case. The luxurious and expensive rooms are situated only on the first three floors and the higher the floor, the poorer the occupant of the room. Gabriel, who is in dire need of money that would enable him to continue his westward journey and who plans to get money from his rich uncle, who lives in town and frequents of the hotel’s salon, occupies room 703 on the sixth floor. However, the seemingly paradoxical inversion of power relations in the hotel can indeed make sense if read in the context of the dynamics between the centre and periphery largely at work both in the Dual Monarchy as well as in Hotel Savoy: the level of prestige can be considered inversely proportional to the distance from the centre, in this case the distance from

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the central venue of the plot and the town’s social life—the rich salon on the ground floor, where each night rich industrialists such as the German Neuner whose workers are about to go on strike, but also less affluent inhabitants of the hotel enjoy the spectacle of young naked girls dancing in front of them. On the other hand, another relic of the very recently deceased empire is the high ethnic diversity of the hotel’s clientele. The hotel is owned by a mysterious Greek, Kaleguropulos, who never appears but whose impending inspection is always looming on the horizon of the hotel’s poorer inhabitants. The hotel porter, Ignatz, embodies the stereotype of a bully from the Balkans: intimidating in stature and conduct, he confiscates the luggage of those hotel guests who can no longer afford to stay. Among other residents of the hotel are also: the exotic dancer Stasia, probably of Russian origin who is staying in the room directly above Gabriel; Anselm Schwadron, a Jewish industrialist; the above-mentioned Phillip Neuner, a German industrialist, Frau Jetti Kupfer, a madame soliciting young girls dancing naked every night; Henry Bloomfield, an American millionaire of Polish-Jewish descent, born in the town, Gabriel’s friend Zwonimir Pansin from Croatia, a young revolutionary who advocates the strike of workers in the town and numerous other characters whose sole connection to each other is their residence in the house enormous enough to provide shelter for everyone. As such, the hotel is a metonymy for the Dual Monarchy as a whole operating under the motto of viribus unitis—it is a large building simultaneously harbouring social stratification as well as cultural and political diversity; a building functioning against all odds. Members of different nationalities live in a kind of symbiosis, especially those guests of modest income, who help each other overcome financial and other difficulties of life. Given the utopian situation that is described at the beginning of the novel, we can see how and why Roth’s subsequent novels such as Radetzkymarch (1932) and The Emperor’s Tomb (1938) have become illustrative of the notion of the Habsburg myth: a positively connoted portrayal of the Habsburg Monarchy by authors of the interwar period, which was on the one hand undoubtedly grounded in salient features of the Monarchy, but on the other hand also a biased perspective on a lost empire by authors who had been socialized in it and felt that they had lost their frame of reference. In Magris’ words: “connected to the poignant memory of the world of yesterday is a partly conscious and partly unconscious process of sublimation of a specific society into a picturesque, safe

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and organized magical world” (Magris 1966, 9).8 According to Magris, inherent to Austrian literature is a kind of Habsburgian nostalgia9 which can be broken down into three major components, all of which undoubtedly apply to Roth’s Hotel Savoy: (1) state multinationalism as opposed to the idea of the nation state that emerged from the French Revolution, and connected to it, a specific strategy of maintaining that state, full of diversity and ethnic conflict, by continuously postponing political action that would resolve conflicts (Ger. Fortwursteln); (2) a positively connoted bureaucracy and other government-related occupations such as the military and (3) a hedonistic approach to life or a complete dedication to the riches of art and bodily pleasures (Magris 1966, 13–19). As will be shown, the hotel portrayed by Roth exhibits all of the elements of the Habsburg myth: it is a structure endowed with symbolic capital that maintains a fragile balance between many divergent factors by means of a single bureaucratic instance, while providing the ideal setting for the hedonist approach to life some of Roth’s characters shared with their author. In this capacity, Hotel Savoy is a metonymy of the Monarchy itself, but a metonymy that soon begins caving in on itself. Not long after his arrival to the hotel, it becomes apparent to Gabriel that people living in the hotel are more than just its guests—in time they have become permanent  inhabitants of the hotel because they cannot leave until they have paid the bill and cannot pay the bill because they cannot leave the hotel to earn money. Their passivity is one of the mysteries inherent to the exotic hotel Gabriel finds increasingly hard to understand. Every time one of the guests cannot pay their bill, the liftboy Ignatz confiscates another piece of their luggage, so that the guests of the hotel—or at least those above the third floor—are quite literally its prisoners. The representation of the hotel is therefore comprised of competing stereotypes about the Habsburg Monarchy: on the one hand, it is a celebration of a cosmopolitan semi-public space where someone who grew up in Vienna as the narrator can feel at home; on the other hand, as the novel progresses the guests as representatives of their respective nationalities find themselves in a prison of the peoples, that is, one of the most common 8  Since Magris’ study has not been translated into English, all translations are mine. In the original: “Mit der gefühlsmäßigen Erinnerung an die Welt von gestern verbindet sich so ein teils bewußter, teils unbewußter Prozeß der Sublimierung einer konkreten Gesellschaft in eine malerische, sichere und geordnete Märchenwelt.” 9  For a comparable case of an Ottoman myth in Turkish literature see Chovanec (2018).

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conceptualizations of the empire as a state subduing the autonomy of different nations (Ger. Völkerkerker). The hotel thus transforms from a warm place reminiscent of home into an ominous place emanating a sense of imminent danger: The hotel no longer appealed to me: neither the stifling laundry, nor the gruesomely benevolent lift-boy nor the three floors of prisoners. This Hotel Savoy was like the world. Brilliant light shone out of from it and splendour glittered from its seven storeys, but poverty made its home in its high places, and those who lived on high were in the depths, buried in airy graves, and the graves were layers above the comfortable rooms of the well nourished guests sitting down below, untroubled by the flimsy coffins overhead. (Roth 2013, 32–33)10

Having implicitly registered but explicitly avoided the loss of his homeland, Gabriel becomes increasingly unable to take any action whatsoever— it is a state of ultimate passivity best reflected in his inability to leave the hotel even after the inevitable realization that life in the hotel is no longer sustainable or that it is sustainable only for the wealthy capitalist elite that, unlike its poorer occupants, provisionally reside at the hotel (such as Bloomfield) or visit it for hedonistic evenings at the bar (such as Gabriel’s uncle) or to pursue romantic interests. What differentiates the local (economic) elite from the proletariat in one of the most socially involved novels by Roth is precisely their ability to leave the hotel if they choose to do so. As Gabriel’s cousin Alexander, in love with the dancer Stasia lodging in the room above Gabriel, offers him money to take over his room in order to be in closer to his libidinal investment, Gabriel declines  at the last moment even though this would be an excellent decision from a financial point of view because his money is running out. He can neither stay at the hotel nor move out because he does not have enough money to move on. He tries to find work, but fails. This situation of pathological indecisiveness marks the end of “Book 1”. 10  In the original: “Mir gefiel das Hotel nicht mehr: die Waschküche nicht, an der die Menschen erstickten, der grausam wohlwollende Liftknabe nicht, die drei Stockwerke Gefangener. Wie die Welt war dieses Hotel Savoy, mächtigen Glanz strahlte es nach außen, Pracht sprühte aus sieben Stockwerken, aber Armut wohnte drin in Gottesnähe, was oben stand, lag unten, begraben in lugtigen Gräbern, und die Gräber schichteten sich auf den behaglichen Zimmern der Satten, die unten saßen, in Ruhe und Wohligkeit, unbeschwert von den leicht gezimmerten Särgen” (Roth 2013, 31).

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At the end of “Book 1”, we have before us a spitting image of Freud’s melancholia, the sinister psychopathological counterpart of mourning, which is the natural process of grieving after experiencing a loss, and which in Freud’s theory refers both to the loss of a loved one as well as to the loss of an abstract idea, such as homeland in this case. While mourning and melancholia share the same symptoms—“a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches” (Freud 1917, 244)—the difference between them is twofold. Firstly, mourning has a limited duration, after which the subject is able to resume his or her everyday life whereas  melancholia is potentially endless. Secondly, as pointed out by Tatjana Jukić, these two processes employ two different economies of the ego: “While persons in mourning consider the world around them impoverished and therefore find it difficult to invest libidinally in relationships potentially profitable for the ego, in cases of melancholia the ego itself is impoverished and fails to sustain the self to begin with” (Jukić 2014, 88). The failure of the ego to sustain itself is an interesting choice of phrasing because apart from reflecting the ego’s emptiness it also connotes its inability to sustain itself in economic terms. We now see why Gabriel Dan is a perfect candidate for Habsburg-induced melancholia: after the loss of his homeland both in literal and in the symbolical sense, from being an active agent he has devolved into a passive observer of the inhabitants of the Hotel Savoy, permanently dissatisfied with his position, but ultimately unable to perform any kind of action that would contribute towards the bettering of his condition. He neither engages in a love relationship with Stasia, who clearly signals her interests, nor finds employment. At the end of “Book 1”, the novel’s anti-hero, protagonist and narrator is lost in a quasi-familiar space and time. However, the situation changes radically in “Book 2”. Crucial for this change is the arrival of Gabriel’s friend Zwonimir Pansin, his fellow soldier of Croatian origin who moves into his room and supplements Gabriel’s impoverished ego with everything he is lacking in. Zwonimir has money, quickly finds jobs for both of them in the textile industry, brings back to life the hotel’s stale salon evening, and most importantly, starts advocating a strike of the textile workers in accordance with his belief in the necessity of a revolution. A strike indeed does occur, the mob breaks into the hotel and sets fire to it, hence marking the final arrival of the postponed imperial decline to the novel, in which the dissolution of the Monarchy is never

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explicitly mentioned. In other words, the fire that destroys the hotel functions as a violent intrusion of history into a place that for some time was a safe haven of imperial patterns of multinationalism, bureaucracy and hedonism even after the downfall of the Monarchy. The last scene referring to the hotel reveals that the porter Ignatz, trapped in one of the prestigious floors of the hotel and shouting from the window, is none other than the mysterious owner Kaleguropulos. The intimidating servant diligently confiscating the assets of insolvent guests is thus revealed to be both a bureaucrat per excellence as well as the secret ruler of the metonymic substitute for the Monarchy—an ideal embodiment of the Habsburg myth indeed. However, it is not until Zwonimir disappears, presumably trampled underfoot by the mob, that Gabriel is able to make the transition from melancholia to mourning or, in other words, to let go of the abstract idea of a multinational Habsburg utopia. But the new identity he will assume is by no means a national, Austrian one or a Russian Jewish one. Quite the contrary: one dream of multinationalism turned into a nightmare will be replaced with another: America. The promised land from where the Jewish millionaire Bloomfield has come to pay last respects to his father buried in the town and the imaginary end point of history for Zwonimir who as a fighter for workers’ rights with clear socialist aspirations paradoxically hails America as an example for everything that is good, becomes the new point of orientation for the recently homeless narrator. The last sentence of the novel thus reads as follows: “I think to myself: America; that is what Zwonimir would have said, just America” (Roth 2003, 123).11 At this moment, the transition is finally concluded and the loss Gabriel refuses to admit becomes all too apparent: Hotel Savoy, initially a place clearly marked by its cosmopolitanism and easily recognizable in its specifically European imperial features, has finally reached the status of a non-­ place that is attributed to hotels in the post-imperial and postmodernist era analysed by Augé: it has become a place devoid of any sense of a shared communal experience. As such, it cannot be sustained in Roth’s nostalgic narrative of the lost home(land), so its destruction by fire is a logical consequence of the relentless advance of modernity and its violent intrusion into Roth’s imperial world. Unlike Robert Musil, whose novel The Man without Features is considered by Magris another representative of the 11  In the original: “Amerika, denke ich, hätte Zwonimir gesagt, nur: Amerika” (Roth 2013, 128).

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Habsburg myth, Joseph Roth or to be precise his literary technique cannot be described as modernist. As I hope the quoted examples have clearly shown, Roth uses a traditionalist style of narration. However, what is undoubtedly modernist is the unease of contemporary identity constructs, which he always portrays as pathologically attached to a past no longer in existence. This line of argument can also be found in Wolfgang Müller-­ Funk’s study on Joseph Roth, in which he speaks of the “diagnostic force of Roth’s oeuvre” that registers key elements of the modern: breaking down tradition, experiencing loneliness and alterity, homelessness, losing touch with reality and the social impotence of the individual. But to go back to Marc Augé and to the question of what differentiates modernity after World War I from the kind of present-day supermodernity that I see anticipated in Joseph Roth: Augé’s argument is that empire, considered as a totalitarian universe is never a non-place: “the image associated with it is that of a universe where nobody is ever alone, where everyone is under close control, where the past as such is rejected. Empire, like the world of Orwell or Kafka, is not pre-modern, but para-modern […]. Blind to the succession of history, it rewrites it; it protects its subjects from the feeling that space is shrinking by limiting freedom of movement and information […] it removes the individual reference from its ideology and takes the risk of projecting it outside its frontiers” (Augé 1995, 114). In the end, much like the Habsburg Monarchy, Hotel Savoy is literally overrun by the course of history, metamorphosing from a place of clearly discernible historical and cultural form into a burnt down non-place, disappearing altogether from the town’s geography. Just as the proactive and optimistic attitude towards life represented by Zwonimir Pansin, the Habsburg Monarchy perished in the tumult of history, precisely due to the fact that, as suggested by Deak in his study, it abandoned its multinational project of imperial state building in order to pursue a specifically national political goal of retribution for the assassination in Sarajevo.

References Augé, Marc. 1995. Non-Places. An Introduction to an Anthology of Supermodernity. Translated by John Howe. London and New York: Verso. Brittnacher, Hans Richard. 2012. Von Heimkehrern, Vagabunden und Hochstaplern. Glück und Fluch des improvisierten Lebens bei Joseph Roth. In Joseph Roth: Zur Modernität des melancholischen Blicks, ed. Wiebke Amthor and Hans Richard Brittnacher, 165–184. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter.

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Bronsen, David. 1993. Joseph Roth. Eine Biographie. Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch. Chovanec, Johanna. 2018. Istanbul. Eine melancholische Stadt im Kontext des Osmanischen Mythos. In Postimperiale Narrative im zentraleuropäischen Raum, ed. Marijan Bobinac, Johanna Chovanec, Wolfgang Müller-Funk, and Jelena Spreicer. Tübingen: Francke. Deak, John. 2015. Forging a Multinational State: State Making in the Imperial Austria from the Enlightenment to the First World War. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Freud, Sigmund. 1917. Mourning and Melancholia. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey and ed. Anna Freud, 243–259. London: The Hogarth Press. Jabłkowska, Joanna. 2012. Ein Grab der armen Leute. Hotel Savoy—Parabel für das Ende des alten Europas oder Łódź-Roman? In Joseph Roth: Zur Modernität des melancholischen Blicks, ed. Wiebke Amthor and Hans Richard Brittnacher, 103–116. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Judson, Pieter. 2016. The Habsburg Empire. A New History. Cambridge, MA and London (England): Belknap. Jukić, Tatjana. 2014. Garbo Laughs. Revolution and Melancholia in Lubitsch’s ‘Ninotchka’. In Lubitsch Can’t Wait. A Theoretical Examination, ed. Ivana Novsk, Jela Krečić, and Mladen Dolar, 83–110. Ljubljana: Slovenian Cinematheque. Kabić, Slavija. 2018. Habsburško naslijede̵ Josepha Rotha na primjeru djela Hotel Savoy i Bijeg bez kraja. Književna smotra 50/188 (2): 75–83. Koschorke, Albrecht. 2015. Hegel und wir. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Magerski, Christine. 2018. Imperiale Herkunft. Zur Ordnungsfunktion des Herkunfts-Begriffs in der modernen österreichischen Literatur. Limbus— Australian Yearbook of German Literary and Cultural Studies 11 (2): 75–94. Magris, Claudio. 1966. Der habsburgische Mythos in der österreichischen Literatur. Salzburg: Otto Müller Verlag. Müller-Funk, Wolfgang. 2012. Joseph Roth. Besichtigungen eines Werks. Wien: Sonderzahl. Münkler, Herfried. 2007. Empires. The Logic of World Domination from Ancient Rome to the United States. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 2013. Der Große Krieg. Die Welt 1914–1918. Berlin: Rowohlt. Roth, Joseph. 2003. Hotel Savoy. Translated by John Hoare. Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press. ———. 2013. Hotel Savoy. Köln: Anaconda. Original Publication: Roth, Joseph. 1924. Hotel Savoy. Berlin: Die Schmiede. Spreicer, Jelena. 2018. The Utopian Potential in Hannes Stein’s Novel Der Komet (2014). Umjetnost riječi 62 (3–4): 361–377. Stein, Hannes. 2014. Der Komet. Berlin: Galiani.

PART VI

Afterword

CHAPTER 17

Remembering Empires: Between Civilisational Nationalism and Post-National Pluralism Nora Fisher-Onar

In 1688, a medical scholar coined the term “nostalgia” to explain the homesickness of Swiss mercenaries stationed on the plains of Italy and France. Their painful (algia) longing to journey home (nostos) to the mountains was said to cause wide-ranging symptoms from melancholy to brain inflammation (hence why the nostalgia-ridden felt like their “heads were bursting” (Illbruck 2012). This macabre reading of nostalgia as a clinical condition contrasts with our view of it today as a vaguely pleasurable experience—that sense of longing which we purposefully activate by seeking sounds, smells, or sights that recall elapsed times. This pursuit of nostalgia as homage and rejuvenation nevertheless entails a certain amnesia, as we gloss over the darker dimensions of the past.

N. Fisher-Onar (*) Department of International Studies, University of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Chovanec, O. Heilo (eds.), Narrated Empires, Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55199-5_17

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By offering insights into the histories, memories, and identities generated by empires across a long contested geography,1 this volume offers a timely window onto the pathologies of imperial nostalgia, but also onto overly romanticized forms of remembrance. In both cases, after all, the recovery of imperial pasts is an exercise in selective memory. Imperial “memory work” (Nora 1989)—much like nationalists’ recovery of “invented traditions” (Hobsbawm and Ranger 2012)—invariably excludes some stories while celebrating others. Thus, depending on what is remembered and how, nostalgia can stimulate delusions (often of grandeur, but also of victimhood) which problematically shape perceptions of the present. If, however, excesses are corrected by revisiting the facts—the goal of this volume—nostalgia can be therapeutic. Curiosity about the past can help societies to confront and transcend traumatic histories. These include painful, often violent transitions from empire to nation-state, and the legacy of these experiences for inter-communal—and international—relations. The question thus arises: When does remembrance of (Habsburg or Ottoman) empire have morbid implications? And when does imperial nostalgia serve salutary re-invention? Recently, there has been much attention to the sinister side of the story. This is due to the surge of interest in empire—and especially in the Habsburgs and Ottomans—among right-wing populists and extremists. Their imperial nostalgia informs what could be called civilizational nationalism, a paradox I define as: a form of cultural nationalism which invokes an imagined imperial golden age of religious and racial purity.2 To recreate this utopia, civilizational nationalists call for the purging of difference from inside the nation, and the exclusion of religious and racial “others” who seek admission. Among Western civilizational nationalists the goal is to prevent entry from the east or the south—regions whose migrants are transforming Europe in an era of heightened anxiety over the West’s perceived eclipse in world affairs.3 Meanwhile, the civilizational dimension of 1  For an insightful discussion of overlapping Habsburg and Ottoman, but also Byzantine and Levantine traditions as constitutive of the region and “European” complexity more broadly, see Heilo and Nilsson (2017). 2  This generalized definition differs from the specific application of the concept to Russian exceptionalism as a “civilizational state” by Verkhovskii and Pain (2012) while drawing on Brubaker’s (2017) fruitful exploration of the space between “nationalism” and “civilizationalism” vis-à-vis the new, northern European populisms. 3  In the language of international relations, the West’s eclipse entails relative loss of power vis-à-vis the rise of actors like China, even as the US-led Western block retains primacy in

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the framework resonates across national borders, enabling the transnational alliance of civilizational nationalists we are watching coalesce in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Such platforms ignore, of course, the historically defining features of pre- and early modern empires, namely, their confessional and ethnic pluralism across fluid, territorial borders. The homogenous utopias of civilizational nationalists likewise deny the complex modalities of pluralism which characterized nineteenth century Habsburg and Ottoman modernities. Inaccuracy notwithstanding, civilizational nationalism has gained ground in diverse settings. Brubaker (2017) writes insightfully of its expressions in the new, northern and western European populisms. These platforms combine Christian civilizationalism and secular orientations with the claim to be rescuing liberal values from barbaric interlopers. Civilizational nationalism also informs the frames of eastern European and north American populists steeped in politically illiberal and socially conservative commitments.4 Such stances are evident in frequent statements from figures like Hungarian President Victor Orban whose draconian response to refugees moving through the country was rationalized on the grounds that the migrants “grew up in a different religion and represent a completely different culture” (cited in Tharoor 2015). Similarly, US President Donald Trump offered audiences in Warsaw a textbook articulation of civilizational nationalism, citing an existential threat to the organic (white, Christian) West from impure elements within and beyond.5 Such frames fail to recognize that the very notion of the “West” as a civilizational entity—gated by Vienna—is an invention of the nineteenth century. As O’Hagan (2002), Jackson (2006) and others have shown, by selectively assimilating empirical developments since the tenth century to a narrative of Western ascendance, geopolitical thinkers and practitioners absolute terms. For a comparative methodology with which to analyze the “family resemblances” across Eurasia’s former empires’ and their anti-Western revisionism see FisherOnar (2020). 4  Indeed, a distinctive feature of these socially conservative strands of populism in Russia, eastern Europe, Turkey, and the United States is their attack on gender diversity in general and feminism in particular, not least in the form of neo-natalist policies. 5  Trump’s words were: “The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive. We must work together to counter forces, whether they come from inside or out, from the south or the east, that threaten over time to undermine [our] values and to erase the bonds of culture, faith and tradition that make us who we are…” (cited in Davies et al. 2017).

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were able to imagine a unified West in perennial struggle with equally essentialized eastern (Russian/Orthodox) and southern (Ottoman/ Islamic) rivals. To be sure, such frames drew—and draw—on emic narratives of eastern European Christians’ heroic “last stands” at sites like Kosovo against Eurasian hordes. A cognate story is that of the Western knight as champion of Byzantium which, in fact, the Crusaders pillaged.6 (Conversely, in Erdoğan’s Turkey, the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople is often rendered in hyper-masculine terms as the heroic conquest of a feminized Byzantine “Other.”) Today, saviour narratives suggest that a now declining West must strike back against eastern and southern invaders. Curiously, this form of nostalgia has taken hold among extremists in distant, white settler dominated societies like the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. These increasingly visible fringe groups’ penchant for the symbols and pageantry of the Habsburg empire has caused havoc among medievalists whose scholarly gatherings often feature historical re-enactments. Radicals, it seems, are crashing the party in order to act out fantasies of strife (Shuessler 2019). Such play can have deadly consequences. The murder of 52 people by the Christchurch mosque shooter in 2019 was literally the culmination of “nostalgia”—the aggrieved journey he took through former Habsburg and Ottoman lands as he planned the attacks. White supremacists have no monopoly on civilizational nationalism, which is likewise employed by populist politicians and violent radicals in the former Ottoman space. Tellingly, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan repeatedly showed footage of the Christchurch killings to galvanize audiences at campaign rallies. Attesting to the passions thus unleashed, a young man of Turkish origin soon went on a retaliatory rampage in Rotterdam, killing three. Ethno-religious nationalism in Ottoman-Islamist idiom has gained traction in recent years. It is evident in hate campaigns in Turkey’s media and civil society, which themselves reflect populist demonization of religious and ethnic minorities. Such frames cast a shadow on more inclusive forms of neo-Ottomanism, which have been used to promote religious and ethnic pluralism (Borovali 1997; Yavuz 2016; Aktürk 2018). Yet, even the most strident renderings of Ottoman-Islamist civilizational populism in Turkey today pale in comparison to the nostalgia of jihadists. A mirror image of the imagined religious and racial utopias of 6

 For a critical survey of such narratives see Heilo and Nilsson (2017).

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Western extremists, the radical—and quasi-nationalist—aspiration of Daesh followers to (re-)create an “Islamic State” would have been fulfilled, according to the organization’s glossy propaganda, by capture of Istanbul and the extermination of non-Sunnis and non-Muslims across the region. These perturbing platforms stand in contrast to a very different form of imperial nostalgia: post-national pluralism. Invoking imperial multiculturalism and/or cosmopolitan modes of co-existence as inspiration for managing diversity today, post-national pluralism is often informed by serious scholarship. Historians, sociologists, and political theorists, among others, have probed features of Habsburg governance such as pragmatic accommodation of imperial peripheries, power-sharing institutions like the Dual Monarchy, and multicultural language policies among other forms of tolerance (e.g. Bagarić 2011; Feichtinger and Cohen 2014). On the Ottoman side, much attention has been paid to the “intricacies” of the millet system and the relative autonomy it afforded non-­ Muslim religious communities (e.g.  Barkey 2005, 5). There is growing interest, moreover, in post-millet iterations of nineteenth century Ottomanism (e.g. Taglia 2016) as patriotism to a state undergoing legal and functional centralization but which nonetheless endorsed cultural pluralism. Interest in pluralism also informs strands of “neo-Ottomanism” in Turkey today at the domestic level.7 A number of prominent Islamist thinkers, for example, have argued that the millet system constitutes an “authentic” normative resource with which to build a pluralistic—or more precisely, a multi-communitarian—polity which nevertheless challenges the homogenizing confines of national imaginaries (Bulaç 1992; Emre 2010). Neo-Ottomanism and its commodification in the cultural industries likewise shapes the attempts of citizens and civil society to affirm cultural identity in negotiation with neo-liberal, consumeristic modernity (e.g. Gökarıksel and Secor 2009; Walton 2017; Fisher-Onar 2018a). Remembrance of empire as post-national pluralism gained salience in the 1990s with the collapse of the communist bloc and the wars of Yugoslav succession. The impetus may have been recognition that the conflicts of the era were fuelled by ethno-(religious) nationalists who 7  For more on foreign policy iterations of neo-Ottomanism and comparisons with other former empires which invoke imperial pasts to rationalize foreign policy such as Russia and China see Fisher-Onar (2009, 2013, 2018b, 2020).

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blamed eclipsed empires for today’s problems. Across the region, the Habsburg project was cast as a “a quasi-German nation-state seeking to hinder the ‘national’ development of subject peoples’—a veritable ‘prison of nations’ (Völkerkerker)” (Sindbaek and Hartmuth 2011). Similarly, the “Turkish” yoke was said to have held back its Christian, among other, subjects from claiming their natural inheritance: economic and political development within the folds of an ascendant “Europe” (Milošević 2011).8 As a corrective, scholars across the region challenged the empirical veracity and exclusionary ethos of these claims. The result was an outpouring of work, including impressive transnational collaborations, aimed at pluralizing our memories of empire, and transcending the “otherizing” legacies of the nationalist projects which followed (see, e.g. Brown 1996; Daskalov and Vezenkov 2015; Bobinac et al. 2018; Walton 2019). For much of the 1990s and 2000s, such endeavours were aligned with the European Union (EU) project. This may have been due to the congruence between post-national recovery of imperial pluralism and debates over the nature and future of the EU as a cosmopolitan project (e.g. Habermas 2003). Thus, remembrance of the Pax Ottomana and Pax Habsburga, as it were, meshed with Union attempts to inspire loyalty to the Pax Europaea as a space of benign supranational governance which, as Zielonka (2007), Behr and Stivachtis (2015) and others have noted, displays imperial features.9 This reading of empire as enabling of pluralism is echoed in the EU slogan “Unity in Diversity” which likewise characterizes post-national nostalgia for the Habsburg and Ottoman projects. Yet, post-imperial readings of the EU entail a “virgin birth” narrative (Nicolaidis and Fisher Onar 2015), which erases the role of colonial legacies and neo-colonial ambitions in the Union’s genesis and evolution (e.g. Hansen and Jonsson 2014). Similar sanitization of the past may be found in the affectionate, albeit tongue-in-cheek, renderings of Habsburg pluralism by figures like Peter Esterhazy, or in Otto von Habsburg’s invocation of his forbearers’ governance as inspiration for European integration. Like hyperbolic portrayals of the Ottomans as the “last island of humanity” 8  Similarly, some blamed the Byzantine empire and Orthodox Christianity for the region’s developmental woes (Heilo and Nilsson 2017) 9  An antecedent of the attempts in the 1990s and 2000s to frame the EU as a peace project may be found in the work of Austrian-Japanese philosopher Richard Nikolaus CoudenhoveKalergi, author of the 1923 book Pan-Europa, who was a founding figure of the pan-Europe movement. See Chovanec’s and Spreicer’s contributions in this volume for post-imperial narratives of pluralism.

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(Armağan 2010), such frames overlook significant shortcomings in imperial pluralism. These include, but are far from confined to the inequalities associated with their conservative, communitarian, and patriarchal thrust and hence the limitations of, say, neo-Ottomanism today for dissenting individuals or women.

Remembering the Past as Corrective It is to the limitations of both forms of imperial nostalgia—civilizationalist nationalism to be sure, but also less than rigorous reductions of empire to pluralism that this volume speaks. By examining how the multinational realities of the Ottoman and Habsburg empires were narrated—both before and after their downfall—this book eschews an essentialist approach. Instead, Chovanec and Heilo’s concept of “Narrated Empires” allows us to approach stories about empire as polyphony: a chorus of past and present voices which capture a wide range of imperial realities and fantasies alike. In addition to each chapter’s contribution to its subfield within Ottoman and Habsburg intellectual, political, and economic history, as well as cultural and literary studies, the pieces here can be read as an ensemble. Taken together they offer timely correctives. In keeping with the etymology of “nost-algia,” this book takes the reader on a journey through time, yet demands that we critically scrutinize our “memory work.” Two key fallacies are revealed which must be confronted in any exercise of remembering empire: anachronism and reification. First, the volume challenges the anachronistic premises of both civilizationalist nationalism and overly rosy variants of post-national pluralism. Consider that both types of nostalgia display teleological reasoning: they assume a “pure” past (in the case of civilizationalist nationalism), or an unproblematic diverse past (in the case of post-national pluralism) even existed, much less is recoverable. Challenging the blithe reminiscence of imperial multiculturalism, for example, Chovanec probes the functions of the “Ottoman myth” in Turkish literature, while Spreicer examines the “Habsburg myth.” Noting the uses, but also the abuses of multiculturalism as a tool of governance during the late imperial period, the chapters examine the ways that writers in post-imperial Austria and Turkey began to confront the historical violence done to diversity with the transition to

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nation-states. Thus, literature enables a sort of “melancholic agency”10 via the fragmentary memory of lost pluralism and its tantalizing poetics of erasure and recovery. Yet, as Magerski observes, these more or less subtle subversions of nationalist amnesia vis-à-vis the imperial period also entail a troubled ethics of restraint. Falling short of atonement for the pluralism that was purged, anguish persists.11 A second and timely tool offered by this volume is its challenge to the reification which characterizes, above all, civilizationalist nationalism with its equation of states and societies, religion and culture, and its assignation of human beings into eternally sealed identity categories. At the same time, the authors confront romantic renderings of empire as cosmopolitan paradise. Instead, the chapters draw out the complex interplay of actors, ideas, and internal as well as systemic structures in driving Habsburg and Ottoman modernization.12 Thus, Blumi’s chapter explores the challenge but also the creative contributions to Ottomanism articulated by Albanian elites (of diverse sectarian orientation). This story of complex ideas and agencies accounts, moreover, for systemic pressures at the interstices of Ottoman and European spheres of geo-economic influence. Ozil maps how clerical and lay actors within the non-Muslim communities strategically responded to the reform of minority policies. In so doing, she uncovers, like Blumi, the major but far from determinant role played by Great Power politics. Çevik also assesses the interplay between internal and external impetus to the crystallization of Ottomanism as “imperial nationalism.” He attends not only to the influence of Western powers, with their presumptive copyright on political modernity, but to the Habsburg and Romanov models. Finally, Topal confronts the fallacies of anachronism and reification alike by offering a genealogy of the term “Ottomanism” which suggests that it was not a product of the nineteenth century at all, but instead coined by early twentieth century thinkers to frame commentary on earlier political platforms. That intellectual production was a messy affair involving multiple agencies and pressures is further attested to by the chapters that explore the  Butler quoted in Chovanec’s contribution in this volume. ̇  For more on the features of and problems with “cosmopolitanist nostalgia” see Ilay Örs (2018). 12  For a framework with which to assess the causal interplay of ideational, agential, and structural forces in shaping complex outcomes see Fisher-Onar (2021). 10 11

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effervescent role of journalism across the Habsburg and Ottoman spaces. Belying neat claims about centres and peripheries, Car’s and Seidler’s respective contributions trace how modernization and nationalization were envisaged by German-language newspapers in Croatia and Hungary. Similarly, Elfenbein recovers the role of the Ottoman’s “unruly” non-­ Muslim press in shaping debates, much as Guth untangles threads of loyalty and resistance in reformist Ottoman Arab publications. Across these chapters, a key theme emerges: allegiances are multi-­ layered. The very demands made of the centralizing Habsburg and Ottoman states by minority groups were paradoxically informed by these groups’ empowerment due to the modernization process (notably the German-speaking Habsburg bourgeoisie and their non-Muslim counterparts in the Ottoman empire). Thus, minority critique of imperial centres was motivated, at least in part, by a desire to strengthen these centres in the face of accelerating Magyarification and Turkification by the end of the long nineteenth century. In other words, criticism of the excesses of specific monarchs, bureaucrats, or policies can also be read as liberal re-­ imagination of the “fatherland” as inclusive of German or non-Muslim alterity (even as some German-speaking and non-Muslim minorities signed up for the new nationalisms). Complicating centre-periphery relations still further was the need to engage, as Guth shows, in a sort of discursive acrobatics in order to navigate the highly censored terrain. Ultimately, such projects did culminate in centrifugal movements as attested to by Bobinac’s insights into Croatian myth-making vis-à-vis the Habsburg centre, and Scheer’s fine-grained snapshot of western Balkan appropriation and resistance of institutions endorsed by the Habsburgs. Yet, even in the aftermath of empire, as Garstenauer reveals, the institutional legacies of imperial multiculturalism served both exclusionary and inclusionary functions in new national administrations. To conclude, the chapters in this volume show that actors, ideas, and the structures by which they are driven are never as straightforward as pundits nostalgic for empire might argue. In our era of anxious longing for imagined pasts, this book reveals that the realities of any age can be reduced neither to a clash of civilizations nor to multicultural paradise. The challenge then is to confront—and embrace—complexity.

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Fisher-Onar, Nora. 2009. Echoes of a Universalism Lost: Rival Representations of the Ottomans in Today’s Turkey. Middle Eastern Studies 4 (2): 229–241. ———. 2013. Historical Legacies in Rising Powers: Toward a (Eur) Asian approach. Critical Asian Studies 45 (3): 411–430. ———. 2018a. Between Neo-liberalism and Neo-Ottomanism. In Istanbul: Living with Difference in a Global City, ed. Nora Fisher-Onar, Susan Pearce, and Fuat Keyman. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. ———. 2018b. Former Empires, Rising Powers: Turkey’s Neo-Ottomanism and China’s New Silk Road. In Rethinking the Silk Road: China’s Belt and Road Initiative and Emerging Eurasian Relations, ed. Maximilian Mayer, 177–190. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2020. Making Sense of Multipolarity: Eurasia’s Former Empires, Family Resemblances, and Comparative Area Studies. Qualitative and Multi-Method Research 17/18 (1): 15–19. ———. 2021. Pluralism in Turkey: Islam, Liberalism, and Nationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gökarıksel, Banu, and Anna J.  Secor. 2009. New Transnational Geographies of Islamism, Capitalism and Subjectivity: The Veiling-Fashion Industry in Turkey. Area 41 (1): 6–18. Habermas, Jürgen. 2003. Making Sense of the EU: Toward a Cosmopolitan Europe. Journal of Democracy 14 (4): 86–100. Hansen, Peo, and Stefan Jonsson. 2014. Another Colonialism: Africa in the History of European Integration. Journal of Historical Sociology 27 (3): 442–461. Heilo, Olof, and Ingela Nilsson. 2017. Back to Byzantium: Rethinking the Borders of Europe. In Refugees, Migrants and Citizenship in Europe, ed. Alexander Stagnell, Louise Schou Therkildsen, and Mats Rosengren, vol. 2017, 43–52. Upsala, Sweden. Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds. 2012. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge University Press. Illbruck, Helmut. 2012. Nostalgia: Origins and Ends of an Unenlightened Disease. Chicago: Northwestern University Press. Jackson, Patrick Thaddeus. 2006. Civilizing the Enemy: German Reconstruction and the Invention of the West. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Milošević, Srdjan. 2011. Arrested Development: Mythical Characteristics of the ‘Five Hundred Years of Turkish Yoke. In Images of Imperial Legacy: Modern Discourses on the Social and Cultural Impact of Ottoman and Habsburg Rule in Southeastern Europe, ed. Tea Sindbaek and Maximilian Hartmuth, vol. 10, 69–77. Münster: LIT Verlag. Nicolaidis, Kalypso, and Nora Fisher Onar. 2015. Europe’s Post-Imperial Condition. In Revisiting the European Union as Empire, ed. Hartmut Behr and Yannis Stivachtis. New York: Routledge.

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Name Index1

A Abbas II, khedive (ʿAbbās II), 195 Abdülaziz (ʿAbd al-Azı̄z), 99, 100n1, 101, 101n4, 106, 109 Abdülhamid II (ʿAbd al-Ḥ amı̄d II), 14, 15, 21, 22, 68, 72, 72n19, 78, 85, 86, 110–112, 114n11, 128, 131n25, 137n36, 196, 197 Abdülmecid I (ʿAbd al-Majı̄d I), 125, 169 Abrami, Thoma, 204n20 Abū Māḍı̄, Īliyyā, 124, 138, 138n38, 138n39, 139 Adıvar, Halide Edib, 19, 334, 344 Agamben, Giorgio, 342, 346, 357 Ahmed Fuad Pasha, see Fuad I Ahmet Mithat, Efendi, 86, 111, 198 Ahmet Rıza Bey, 68, 113 Akçura, Yusuf, 82–84, 83n4, 85n6, 86 Alexander I (Russian emperor), 377 Alfieri, Vittorio, 135

1

Ali (Mehmed Emin) Paşa (Âli Paşa, ʿAlı̄ Pasha), 47, 84, 87, 109, 111, 125 Amı̄n Mukhliṣ Pasha, 126 Andrássy, Gyula, 243 Anesti (journalist), 108n8 Ant ̣ūn, Faraḥ, 124, 127, 127n17, 136 Arnold, Franz, 292 Aulus Gellius, 335 ʿAwwād, Tawfı̄q Yūsuf, 143 B Bach, Alexander von, 241 Badalić, Hugo, 152, 156–161, 166, 294 Bahattin Şakir, 114, 114n11, 115 Baltić, Mojsije, 287 Baudelaire, Charles de, 341, 342 Berzewiczy, Albert, 250, 253 Beust, Friedrich von, 153

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Chovanec, O. Heilo (eds.), Narrated Empires, Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55199-5

399

400 

NAME INDEX

Brandi, Thimi, 203 Broch, Hermann, 322, 328 Brođanin, Stjepan Marjanović, 160 Bukovac, Vlaho, 294 Burton, Robert, 335, 336 Al-Bustānı̄, Butrus, 104–106, 115, 124, 125 C Çajupi, Anton, 203 Campitelli, Matteo, 268 Cassirer, Ernst, 313, 314, 317–321, 317n7, 320n8, 324 Cemil Paşa (Jamı̄l Pāshā), 133 Cevdet Paşa, 65, 88, 183 Coudenhove-Kalergi, Richard Nikolaus, 392n9 Courths-Mahler, Hedwig, 296 Crispi, Francesco, 203n16 Czepl, Alois, 227 D De Valmy, Duc (François Christophe Kellermann), 90 Deák, Ferenc, 243, 248 Dine, Spiro, 203 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 253 Drašković, Ivan, 293 Duçi, Milo, 204, 204n20, 208, 208n30, 210 Dux, Adolf, 244 E Ebüzziya Tevfik Bey, 102, 108n8, 111, 112 Ekrem, Racaizade, 334, 340, 341 Elisabeth (empress), 243 Emich, Gusztáv, 241 Endre, Ady, 255 Engels, Friedrich, 216

Eötvös, Jószef, 248 Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip, 390 Esterházy, Peter, 392 F Falk, Max (Miksa), 242–244, 246, 247 Ferdinand, Franz, 296, 334n11, 370, 371, 371n3 Filip Efendi (pen name), 100, 106, 108, 111–113 Fleischer, Alois-Anton, 292 Fontana, Oskar Maurus, 323n10 Frank, Jakob, 292 Frank, Josip, 164 Frank, Vincenz, 293 Frankopan, Fran Krsto, 161–166 Franz Joseph I, 216, 258, 323n10, 368, 369, 373 Frashëri, Abdyl, 193–199, 193n2, 199n9, 200n11, 201–203, 205, 205n22 Frashëri, Naim, 193–199, 193n2, 199n9, 201–203, 205, 205n22 Frashëri, Sami (Şemseddin), 193–201, 193n2, 203–205 Freud, Sigmund, 336, 342, 357, 358, 381 Friedländer, Max, 241 Friedrich III, 4 Fuad I (khedive), 84, 87, 90, 91, 183–185, 195 Fuad Paşa, 84, 87, 90, 91, 183–185, 195 G Gaj, Ljudevit, 290 Gavella, Branko, 294 Gökalp, Ziya, 82, 84, 343 Gołuchowski, Agenor, 206n26, 207n28, 267

  NAME INDEX 

Gorjan, Zlatko, 292 Gorky, Maksim, 254 Gramsci, Antonio, 192, 203n16 H Haydn, Joseph, 45, 159 Hegel, Friedrich, 316, 368, 369n2 Herczeg, Ferenc, 251–253, 251n17, 252n18, 255 Hevesi, Ludwig, 244 Hima (Ibrahim Mehmet Naxhi, dervish), 205–207, 205n22, 206n27, 207n29 Hinković, Hinko, 292 Horányszky, Viktor, 241 Horthy, Miklós, 244, 253 Hreljanović, Guido, 296 Ḥ usayn (Sharı̄f of Mecca), 143, 144 Ḥ usayn al-Kāmil (khedive), 144 Ḥ usayn al-Rushdı̄ Pasha, 144 Ḥ usayn ibn ʿAlı̄, 201n13 Al-Ḥ uṣrı̄, Sātị ʿ, 124, 128n19, 139, 140 I Ismāʿı̄l (khedive), 129, 129n23 J Jauk, Franz (clerk), 224, 224n17 Jelačić, ban Joseph von Bužim, 161 John Paul II, 257 Joseph II (emperor), 46, 216, 247 K Karavangjelis (metropolitan), 207 Karl V, 4 Kasap, Teodor, 100–102, 100n3 Al-Kawākibı̄, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, 124, 133–137

401

Kaygusuz, Sema, 19, 334, 353–358, 354n38 Kelekian, Diran, 113–115 Kern, Jakob, 240 Khuen-Hédérvary, ban Károly, 164, 293 Kleinwächter, Friedrich, 219, 219n8 Kolea, Sotir, 204n21 Koloman, 151 Konitza, Faik, 194, 202 Körner, Theodor, 156–161, 158n3 Korošec, Anton, 295 Kotaranin, Spiro Dimitrović, 160, 160n9 Kralj, Ivan, 292 Krei, Thimi, 203 Kropotkin, Pyotr A., 295 Kršnjavi, Izidor, 294 Kumičić, Eugen, 152, 156, 162–166 Kveder, Zofka, 294 L Lehár, Franz, 230 Lenau, Nikolaus, 249 Leo XIII (pope), 18, 259 Leopold I, 162 Logoreci, Mati, 205, 205n24, 206, 206n25 Logori, Loni (Toni), 203, 210 Lord Cromer (Evelyn Baring), 203 Louis XIV, 162 Luarasi, Petro Nini, 208, 208n30 Lucerna, Camilla, 294 M Magris, Claudio, 6, 313–315, 320–322, 327, 332, 368, 369, 378, 379, 379n8, 382 Mahmud (Maḥmūd) II, 47, 61, 62n5, 78, 79, 83, 86, 88, 89 Maḥmūd Sāmı̄ al-Bārūdı̄, 128 Maria Theresia (empress), 369

402 

NAME INDEX

Al-Marṣafı̄, Ḥ usayn, 132n26 Marx, Karl, 216, 216n5, 317 Mažuranić, Ivan, 290 Mehmed II, 4 Mehmed Ali Paşa (Muḥammad ʿAlı̄ Pasha), 125, 127n15, 201 Metternich, Clemens von, 46, 48, 49, 69 Midhat Paşa, 82, 84, 85 Mithat, Ahmet, 86, 111, 198, 338 Mitko, Thimi, 203, 203n17 Mohorovičić, Andrija, 294 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), 125 Musil, Robert, 19, 50, 313, 316, 317, 322–324, 322n9, 323n10, 328, 329, 368n1, 369, 372, 382 Mustafa Fazıl Paşa, 89, 91 Mustafa Kemal Paşa (Atatürk), 22, 38, 343 Mustafa Reşid Paşa, 87 Muṭrān, Khalı̄l, 124, 136 Al-Muwayliḥı,̄ Ibrāhı̄m, 124, 129–134, 132n27, 138, 139 N Nabizade Ekrem, 338n17 Naço, Nikolla, 206n26 Nakkashian, Mihran, 111–113 Namık Kemal, 89, 90n7, 91n9, 93, 94, 102, 104n5, 108, 109, 109n9, 338n17 Napoleon I, 377 Napoleon III (Napoléon), 15, 136 Al-Naqqāsh, Mārūn, 124–126, 125n11, 126n13 Nordau, Max, 244 Nožička, Alois, 226, 227, 230 O Orban, Victor, 389 Orhan Bey, 206n28

P Pamuk, Orhan, 6, 6n2, 19, 334, 340, 346, 349–355, 350n35 Pazman, Josip, 265–267, 271, 273, 273n23, 276, 276n31 Politeo, Danko, 294 Preradović, Peter Jr, 292, 298 Prevezeli Abidin Pasha Dino, 201 Pribićević, Svetozar, 294, 295, 300n16 Q Al-Qabbānı̄, Abū Khalı̄l, 124, 126, 126n13, 136 Qemali, Ismail, 201 R Al-Rashı̄d, Hārūn, 126 Recaizade Ekrem, 338n17, 340 Redlich, Josef, 219, 220 Reşid Paşa, see Mustafa Reşid Paşa Rezzori, Gregor von, 316 Roth, Joseph, 19, 316, 326, 328, 332, 332n5, 333, 333n9, 333n10, 337, 367–383 Rothauser, Emil, 244, 252 Rothfeld, Samuel, 241 Al-Ruṣāfı̄, Maʿrūf, 124, 139, 141, 144 Ružička-Strozzi, Marija, 295 S Safa, Peyami, 334, 344, 345 Said Paşa, 85 Salandra, Friedrich Count Revertera von, 262 Sarafian, Alexan, 108–111 Sawāyā, Labı̄bah Mı̄khāʾı̄l, 124, 137, 137n37 Al-Ṣayyādı̄, Abū l-Hudà, 124, 128 Schade Haedicke, Josephine, 296

  NAME INDEX 

Schlegel, Anton (Toni), 294, 295, 301 Schlegel, Josip, 292, 292n10, 293 Sedlnitzky, Sigmund (Bezirkshauptmann), 227 Shafak, Elif, 334, 351–353 Silberstein, Adolf, 244, 251, 252 Sina, Athanas, 206n28 Souvan, Ivan, 295 Spengler, Oswald, 334n12 Spinčić, Vjekoslav, 298 Stadler, Josip, 266, 267, 271, 271n21 Starčević, Ante, 155, 156, 161, 163, 164, 166, 295 Stefan Zurani (pen name), 204 Stratford Canning (1. Viscount Stratford de Redcliffe), 181n16, 181n18, 183, 185n28, 186n35 Strossmayer, Josip Juraj, 154, 155, 264, 267, 271 Suavi, Ali (Âli Suavi), 89, 100, 102, 104n5, 106, 108 Šulek, Bogoslav, 287 Süleyman (Sulaymān) I, 4, 157, 352 Supilo, Frano, 285 Széchenyi, István (Stefan), 242, 242–243n6, 243n7 Széll, Kálmán, 261, 262, 266, 267, 267n16, 267n17, 269n18, 276n32, 276n34, 277, 277n38 T Tanpınar, Ahmet Hamdi, 6, 19, 78, 334, 345–350, 346n27, 346n28, 347n29, 347n30, 348n32 Ṭ anyūs Shāhı̄n, 126n12 Tashko, Thanas, 204n21, 205n21 Temo, Ibrahim, 205n22, 206n27 Thouvenel, Édouard, 88 Tisza, Kálmán, 246, 248 Tolstoy, Leo, 253

403

Trumbić, Ante, 285 Trump, Donald, 389, 389n5 U ʿUrabi, Ahmad (Aḥmad ʿUrābı̄), 110, 130 ʿUthmān (caliph), 134, 134n31 V Velić (Austrian consul in Cairo), 208 Vernić, Zdenko, 292, 297, 300 Vruto, Jani, 204 W Weber, Max, 312, 328n16, 334n12 Weisskirchner, Karl, 241 Weisz, Johann, 241 Werfel, Franz, 337 Wesselényi, Ferenc, 162 Y Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu, 342 Yusuf, Ali (ʿAlı̄ Yūsuf), 135n34 Z Zajc, Ivan, 152, 156, 159–161, 166 Zaydān, Jurjı̄, 110, 124, 127n17, 137, 141–143, 142n43 Ziya Paşa (Abdulhamid Ziyaeddin), 89, 90n7 Žižek, Slavoj, 336, 336n14, 346, 355, 357 Zrinski, Nikola Šubić (Miklós Zrínyi), 16, 152, 156, 157, 157n2, 159–166 Zrinski, Petar (Péter Zrínyi), 152, 156, 157n2, 161–166 Zweig, Stefan, 6, 332, 333, 333n6, 333n7, 333n8, 337, 344

Subject Index1

A Adriatic Sea, 298 Agramer Deutschen Zeitung, 289 Agramer Tagblatt, 18, 273, 283–304 Agramer Zeitung, 273–276, 276n30, 293, 297 Alafranga, 337–340, 337–338n15 See also Züppe Alaturka, 337, 337–338n15, 339, 340 Albania (newspaper), 206 Albania, Albanians, 16, 22, 73n21, 94, 124, 191–211, 274, 394 Alexandria, 110, 144n46, 203n17, 204 Alvanike Melissa, 203n17 America, 127n15, 192, 382 See also United States (US) American Mission Press (Beirut), 105 Amsterdam, 373

1

Anatoli (newspaper), 103 Anatolia, 71n17 Ankara, 5, 344 Araba Sevdası (The Carriage Affair), 338n17, 340–342 Arabic, 9, 15, 105, 110, 122n2, 123n7, 123n8, 124n9, 125, 127n17, 129n23, 131n26, 134n31, 135, 140, 195, 346n26 Arabs, Arab nationalism, 5, 9, 15, 68, 71n17, 73n21, 94n11, 95, 105, 121–145, 193, 202, 206, 395 Arbëresh, 205 Arbrëshë, 203n16 Arkadi monastery (Crete), 107 Armenians, 5n1, 22, 43, 72n18, 84, 94, 95, 100, 101, 103, 103–104n5, 104, 106, 108–115, 114n11, 145n46, 172, 343, 351, 356, 356n47

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Chovanec, O. Heilo (eds.), Narrated Empires, Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55199-5

405

406 

SUBJECT INDEX

Armenian genocide, see Genocide Association for Writing in Albanian, 204 Athens, 203n17, 208, 209 Ausgleich, 15, 24, 67, 67n13, 68, 243–247, 254, 258 Australia, 390 Al-Azhar, 140 B Balkan wars 1876–78, 72 1912–13, 16, 22, 72, 115, 140–142 Banjaluka, 267 Bar, 267, 380 The Bastard of Istanbul, 351, 352 Bektashism, Bektashis, 201 Belgrade, 43, 300 Belle époque, 6, 352, 353 Beni Souef (Bini Suif), 203, 210 Berlin, 295, 373 Treaty of Berlin, 109 Beş Şehir (Five Cities), 346, 347 Beyoğlu, 177, 352 See also Pera Bisedimet (journal), 204n20 Bohemia (Böhmen), 220, 228, 240n2, 265 Bombs, 114n11 Bosnia (Bosnia-Herzegovina), 8, 16, 21, 22, 153, 164, 198, 259, 261, 276 Boston, 208, 211 Brazil, 333 Britain, British Empire, 8, 14, 21, 22, 37, 44, 45, 49, 110, 171, 171n6, 182, 186n35, 191, 194, 204 Brussels, 183, 194, 202n14, 210, 373

Bucharest, 205–207, 206n26, 207n29, 210 Budapest, 17, 202, 239–255, 240n2, 260n1, 261, 271–273, 285, 377 Bulgaria, Bulgarians, 6, 16, 21, 22, 68, 180, 196, 247n10, 263 Bulgarian church, 207 Bureaucracy, 9, 45, 61n3, 66, 68, 131, 192, 217, 222, 223, 259, 332, 369, 379, 382 Byzantine Empire, 38, 42, 392n8 C Café au lait, 338 Caliph, caliphate (khalı̄fah), 37, 38, 41, 42, 126, 134, 134n31, 135, 137, 201n13, 203 Carinthia (Kärnten), Carinthians, 220, 224, 224n17, 224n19, 225, 225n21, 263 Carniolans, 263 Cemiyet-i ilmiyye-i arnavudiyye (the Society of Learned Albanians), 200 Censorship, 15, 17, 44, 127, 127n14, 136, 139, 241, 242, 285, 286n6, 298, 299, 370 Central powers, 4, 17 Centre-Left Party (Hungary), 245 Ceride-i Havadis, 106 Č eski Svaz, 296 China, 45, 194, 388n3, 391n7 Christchurch, 390 Cilli (Celje), 221, 221n10, 221n11 Cisleithania, 24, 217, 220 Civilisationalism, 20, 125n11, 387–395, 388n2 The Clown and His daughter (Sinekli Bakkal), 344

  SUBJECT INDEX 

Collegium Hieronymianum pro Chroatica Gente, see San Girolamo (college), 267 Collegium Teutonicum di Santa Maria dell’Anima, 265 Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), 68, 69, 71n17, 73, 74, 84, 137–143, 200, 205n22, 206n27 See also Young Turks Constantinople (Istanbul), 4, 6, 16, 22, 43, 46, 47, 70, 88, 92, 99, 103, 106, 107n7, 109, 111, 113–115, 113n10, 128–131, 133, 135, 139, 140, 142, 173, 175, 177, 178, 178n13, 180, 183, 192, 194, 197, 198, 200, 203, 207, 210, 259, 339, 344–348, 350–353, 352n37, 355, 356, 359, 390, 391 Constitution (dustūr), 106, 136, 138n38, 138n39, 141n42 Coptic Church, Copts, 208 Cotton, 48n12, 194, 210 Crete, Cretan revolt, 91, 94, 106–108, 128, 129n20 Crimea, Crimean War, 16, 21, 87, 102, 109n9, 123, 132n28, 180–183, 187 Croatia, 15, 16, 70n16, 151, 152, 154–158, 161–166, 216, 221, 263, 266, 268, 270n20, 272, 283, 285–289, 293, 293n11, 300, 303n19, 378, 395 See also Kingdom of Croatia and Slavonia Croatian, 15, 16, 18, 151–167, 151n1, 157n2, 158n3, 158n5, 158n6, 213n1, 220, 247n10,

407

257–279, 284–304, 284n2, 289n7, 381, 395 Crusaders, 390 Csatád, 249 Cyrenaica, 121n1 Czechoslovakia, Czechoslovaks, 213n1, 214, 228 Czechs, 157, 158n3, 213, 217, 220, 223, 226–228, 230, 265, 296 D Daily Chronicle, 297 Dalmatia, Dalmatians (not dogs), 16, 45, 153, 164, 259–264, 266, 267, 269–276, 270n20, 276n31, 278, 288, 294 Dandy, 340–342, 341n20, 347 See also Züppe Danicza horvatska, 290 Danube, 181n15, 240, 314, 315, 321, 323, 326, 327 Dārülmuʿallimı̄n (Teachers’ Training College), 140 Deák Party, 243, 245 Decadence, 39n4, 341n21 Dersim, Dersim massacres, 356n49, 357 Despotism (istibdād), 133, 135–137 Deutsch-Österreich, 17, 213n1, 224, 225n22 Dhimmi, 62, 62n7 Dibër, 199 Dik el-Şark (newspaper), 110 Diyarbakır, 100n3 Djakovo, 264 Döbling, 243, 243n6 Doğu-batı meselesi (East-West-topic in Turkish literature), 334

408 

SUBJECT INDEX

Drita (Albanian activist group in Bucharest), 206n26, 207 Dual Monarchy, 15–19, 21, 67n13, 68, 153, 154, 217, 283, 368, 370, 371, 377, 378, 391 Dynastic patriotism, 4, 8, 15 E Ecnebi, 62 Effendiyya, 196, 197, 200 Encümen-i dānış (Academy of Science, Istanbul), 130 Ephemerides Zagrabienses, 289 Europeanisation, 337, 342, 358 European Union, 7, 38, 38n1, 392 F Fatih, 344, 345 Fatih-Harbiye, 344, 345 Felatun Bey ile Rakım Efendi (Felatun Bey and Rakım Efendi), 337, 339, 340 Ferlach, 225, 225n21 Ferman (fırman), 129n23, 172, 186 Fiamuri Arbërit (journal), 203n17 Film, 7 See also Television First World War (Great War), 11, 15, 18, 19, 22, 38, 269, 276n30, 333, 370, 371, 375 France, 14, 21, 37, 44, 45, 104n6, 114, 123, 123n7, 126n12, 130, 131, 160, 162, 171, 181, 182, 186, 191, 387 Frankfurt, 373 Freie Stimmen, 221 Freimüthige, 242 Fremdenblatt, 296 French Revolution, French Revolutionary Wars, 79, 122, 379

G Galatasaray school, 79, 177 Galicia (Galizien), 240n2 Genocide, 50, 102, 103, 115, 316 German, 295 Germanisation, 69 Germany, Germans, 5, 15, 17, 18, 21, 22, 38, 38n1, 46, 48, 49, 60, 69, 122n2, 123n7, 132, 136, 153, 156–158, 157n2, 158n4, 158n5, 160, 161, 164–166, 191, 213n1, 214, 214n2, 215, 217, 219–230, 240, 242, 243, 243n6, 247, 247n10, 248, 251, 253, 254, 260n1, 265, 274, 276n30, 284, 286, 287, 289–295, 297, 298, 304, 317, 320, 326, 327, 333, 334, 341, 351, 356, 368, 369n2, 372, 378, 395 Gezi Park, 356 Ghegs, 202, 204–206, 206n27 Gjirokastër (Ergiri/Argyrokastro), 199 Golden age, 48, 252, 388 See also Belle époque Golden Horn, 344 Gračac, 298 Great Powers (Britain, France, Russia), 78, 171, 171n6, 180–183, 185, 187, 394 Great War, see First World War (Great War) Greece, Greeks, 5, 6, 16, 22, 43, 63, 64n9, 87, 88, 94, 95, 100, 100n3, 101, 103, 103–104n5, 104, 106, 107, 108n8, 111, 112, 145n46, 169–188, 193, 195, 196, 198, 199, 201–203, 203n17, 207–210, 247n10, 343, 351, 357, 378 Greek Christians, see Orthodox (Rum) Church, Orthodox Christians Greek War of Independence, 47, 48, 123, 175, 182

  SUBJECT INDEX 

Gülhane rescript (1839), 79, 80, 82, 86, 91, 93n11 Gutenstein (Guštanj), 221, 221n11 H Der Habsburgische Mythos in der modernen österreichischen Literatur (The Habsburg Myth in Modern Austrian Literature), 321 Hamidian era (1876–1909), 72n18, 108, 111 Harbiye, 344 Hebrew, 103, 131n26 Hellenism, 202 Hijaz (Ḥ idjāz), 134, 135 Hofburg (Vienna), 264 Holy Roman Empire, 38, 38n1, 44, 45 Holy See, 259, 261, 262, 265–267, 270–272, 276, 278, 279 Holy Synod, 179 Hotel Savoy, 19, 332n5, 367–383 Hrvatska Riječ, 295 Hrvatska stranka prava (Croatian Party of Rights), 155 Hunchakian Party, 113 Hungarian, 15, 17, 18, 132, 151–154, 151n1, 157, 157n2, 158n3, 160, 162, 167, 215, 217, 229, 239n1, 240, 242–245, 242–243n6, 247–255, 247n10, 250n13, 251n15, 259, 261, 262, 264–266, 269–273, 277–279, 283, 290, 293n11, 389 Hungary, 7, 15, 17, 18, 24, 42, 43, 46, 151–153, 155, 157, 162, 164, 216, 229, 239–255, 258, 261, 273, 277, 290, 293n11, 371, 371n3, 395 Hürriyet, 82, 84, 86, 90, 90n7, 92, 104, 109

409

Hüzün, hüzünlü, 350, 350n35, 351, 353–355, 355n46, 359 See also Karaduygu, karaduygulu; Melancholy (melancholia), post-imperial melancholy Huzur (A Mind at Peace), 345, 346, 348 Hvar, 267 I ̇ Ibret (or Kevkeb-i Şarkî, journal), 86, 104, 109, 109n9 Identity, 6, 7, 9–12, 12n9, 15, 16, 18, 42, 45, 46, 48, 59, 60, 63–65, 67, 70, 71, 73, 78, 81, 82, 84, 86–90, 94, 100, 104–106, 122, 124, 125, 131n25, 136, 145n46, 155, 201–202, 206n25, 208, 209, 217, 247–250, 258–261, 263, 270, 285, 288, 292, 297, 301–303, 303n19, 325, 326, 328n15, 333, 339, 343–350, 352, 358, 359, 373, 374, 382, 383, 388, 391, 394 narrative identity, 349 Ijekavian, see Shtokavian Illyria, Illyrism, 260, 264, 270 India, 43, 194 Intellectuals, 13, 14, 18, 22, 78, 81, 82, 86, 100, 101, 105, 115, 124, 124n9, 127, 129, 136, 139, 174, 193, 195, 198, 201, 202, 290, 294, 321, 323, 334n12, 338, 393, 394 Iraq, 5, 121n1, 128, 139, 201n13 Iron Curtain, 8 Islahat Edict (Hatt-ı hümayun), 16, 21, 62n5, 66, 66n11, 169–180, 170n3, 170n4, 182, 184–188 Greek General Regulations, 16, 169–188

410 

SUBJECT INDEX

Islamism, pan-Islamism, 14, 72n19, 78, 82–84, 85n6 Istanbul, 6, 70, 88, 92, 99, 103, 106, 109, 111, 113–115, 113n10, 128–131, 133, 135, 139, 140, 142, 173, 175, 177, 178, 178n13, 180, 183, 192, 194, 197, 198, 200, 203, 210, 339, 344–348, 350–353, 352n37, 355, 356, 359, 391 See also Constantinople (Istanbul) ̇ Istanbul: Hatıralar ve Şehir (Istanbul: Memories and the City), 346, 350 ̇ Istanbul Hatırası (A Memento for Istanbul), 351 ̇ Istikbâl (newspaper), 86, 99–101, 101n4, 103, 200n11 Istria, 153, 259, 267, 268, 273, 274 Italy, Kingdom of Italy, 5, 16, 17, 21, 22, 129, 153, 191, 202, 203n16, 204–206, 207n29, 208, 210, 213n1, 215, 229, 261, 272, 273, 276n30, 387 Al-Ittiḥād (newspaper), 130 ̇ ād ve Teraḳḳı̄ Cemʿı̄yeti (ITC), ̇ Ittiḥ see Young Turks Izmir, 103 J Al-Jāmiʿah al-ʿUthmāniyyah (journal), 127, 127n17, 131, 142 Janissaries, 47, 48, 93n11 Jews, 41, 42, 46, 61, 65, 101, 114, 132, 172, 182, 184, 245, 247n10, 248, 375 Jihad, jihadists, 88, 390 Josephinism, 46 Jugoštampa, 292, 301 K Kajkavian, 287 Die Kapuzinergruft, 333

Karadjordjevic Dynasty, 297 Karaduygu, karaduygulu, 354, 355 See also Hüzün, hüzünlü; Melancholy (melancholia) Karaduygun (Melancholia), 354, 355 Karamanli, 103n5, 104 Karlowitz, 43 Kerbela, 201 ̇ Kevkeb-i Şarkî, see Ibret (or Kevkeb-i Şarkî, journal) Khārijiyyah (early Islamic sect), 134n31 Khedive, 15, 89, 110, 129, 129n23, 144, 194, 209, 210 Kikeriki, 220 Kingdom of Croatia and Slavonia, 283, 288 Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, 16, 213n1, 220, 228, 229, 300 Kisfaludy Society, 250, 250n13 Konak, 349, 350, 353, 354, 359 Konya, 112 Koran, 131n26, 135n33 Korçë (Kortça, Kortscha), 203n17, 206n28, 210 Kosovo, 140, 206n27, 390 Kotor, 267 Krbava, 164 Kremsmünster, 227, 227n25 Krk, 267 Kroatischer Korrespondent, 289 Ḳuraysh family, 134 Kurds, 94, 94n11 L Laibach (Ljubljana), 300 Lapac, 298 Latin, 40n5, 60, 104n5, 181n16, 217, 247, 287, 335 Lebanon, 5, 123, 132n28 Lebanese civil war of 1860–61, 126 Leopoldstadt, 376

  SUBJECT INDEX 

Levant, 26, 48, 121n1, 123 Liberal Party (Hungary), 246 Lika, 164 Linz, 213, 214, 214n2 Linzer Tagespost, 226 Literature Arabic, 105, 123n8 Austrian, 6, 39, 195n6, 321, 322, 332, 334, 369, 379 Turkish, 6, 13, 19, 195n6, 379n9, 393 Łódź, 375, 377 London, 108, 130, 341 M Macedonia, Macedonians, 40n6, 302 Madı̄ḥ, 125 Magyarisation, 229, 239–255, 395 Majlis, 136, 137 Mahalle, 340, 344, 345, 358, 359 Mamluks, 46, 47, 122n2, 143n45 Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man without Qualities), 19, 316, 322 Manzume-i Efkâr (Armeno-Turkish newspaper), 113 Marburg (Maribor), 221, 221n10 Maronites, 104, 104n6, 123, 126n12 Marseilles, 113, 113n10, 373 Masumiyet Müzesi (The Museum of Innocence), 346 Mecca, 133–135, 137, 143, 144 Melancholy (melancholia), 19, 39, 332–337, 342, 346, 350–353, 355, 359, 387 post-imperial melancholy, 19, 334, 337, 343–350, 352 See also Hüzün, hüzünlü; Karaduygu, karaduygulu Memory culture, 6, 351

411

See also Remembering, remembering empire Middle East, 3–5, 8, 9, 12, 38, 41, 49, 125n11 Mieß (Č rna), 221, 221n10, 221n11 Millet, 42, 61, 66, 67, 74, 80, 88, 131n26, 391 Mittelpartei, 227 Modernity, modernisation, 4, 9, 10, 13, 14, 19, 37–51, 58, 88, 123, 124, 169, 171, 172, 178, 183, 192, 196, 198, 239n1, 243n7, 255, 283–304, 313, 323, 328, 334, 336n14, 337, 339, 341–344, 341n21, 347, 350, 358, 359, 374, 382, 383, 389, 391, 394, 395 Moldavia, 175 Monasteries, 107, 175, 179, 180 Moravia, 216, 223, 228, 240n2 Moravian Compromise (1905), 223 Morgenblatt (Zagreb), 292 Morgenposten (Copenhagen), 296 Morgenstern (Zagreb), 295 Mostar-Trebinje, 267 Mourning, 336, 336n14, 342, 358, 381, 382 Müdâfaa-i Milliye Cemiyeti (National Defense League), 115 Muhbir (journal), 86, 104, 106–108, 112 Multiculturalism, 41, 349, 352, 357, 391, 393, 395 Multilinguality, 217 Al-Muqatṭ ̣am (newspaper), 130, 131 N Nagodba, 154, 293, 293n11 Nahdah, 73n21, 124, 131n26 Napoleonic wars, 43, 45, 46

412 

SUBJECT INDEX

Narodna stranka (Nationalist Party, Croatia), 155 Narodne novine, 295 Narrated Empire, 11–13, 393 Narrative, 5, 6, 10–13, 12n9, 15–17, 19, 37–51, 78, 81, 84, 86, 90, 91, 94, 102, 151–167, 199, 211, 215, 216, 258, 276, 283–304, 311, 313, 316, 317, 319–329, 324n12, 324n13, 328n17, 332, 334, 339, 341, 343–345, 343n25, 348, 349, 352, 352n37, 353, 355, 358, 359, 367, 369n2, 370, 371, 382, 389, 390, 390n6, 392 Nation, nationalism, 3–5, 13–20, 38, 45, 46, 48, 50, 57–74, 83–86, 99, 100, 102, 103, 109n9, 114, 122, 125, 128, 131n26, 132, 133, 135, 141n41, 143, 145, 155–157, 160, 163, 165, 166, 171, 179, 188, 192, 193, 196, 201, 208–210, 214–217, 216n6, 220, 223, 224, 224n18, 226, 245, 249, 250, 251n14, 255, 257–261, 263, 266, 266n11, 273, 273n23, 284, 285, 287, 290, 293n11, 298–303, 334, 343–349, 357, 359, 367, 369n2, 379, 387–395 Nemzet, 245 Neo-Ottomanism, 6, 6n3, 7, 337, 352, 359, 390, 391, 391n7, 393 Neue Freie Presse, 254, 271–273, 275, 276, 297 Neues Agramer Journal, 295 New Zealand, 390 Nezavisna narodna stranka (Independent Peoples, Party, Croatia), 293 Nice, 373 Northern Africa, 204

Nostalgia, 6, 18, 20, 144n46, 337, 346, 352, 368, 379, 387, 388, 390–393 Novel Austrian novel, 322, 332 Turkish novel, 332, 337, 343–349 Novine, 295 Novine horvatzke, 290 Nyugat, 255 O October Revolution, 287 Oghuz (pejorative), 143, 143n45 Opera, 125n11, 152, 156, 159–161, 166 Order (imperial), 11, 12, 19, 174, 301, 312, 315, 320, 322–324, 369 Orthodox (Rum) Church, Orthodox Christians, 16, 50, 108n8, 171, 173, 178, 178n13, 180–182, 201, 203, 204n20, 205, 207–209 See also Greece, Greeks Osijek, 264, 291 Ottoman Myth, 6, 19, 379n9, 393 Ottomanism (osmanlıcılık), 4, 7, 14, 57–74, 77–96, 99–116, 122–124, 122n5, 125n10, 127, 128, 128n19, 136, 140, 195–197, 343, 343n25, 391, 394 Ottomanness (osmanlılık), 78, 79, 81, 84, 86, 88, 90, 95 P Palestine, 181 Panagia Eisodion church, 177 Pangaltı, 356 Pan-Islamism, see Islamism, pan-Islamism Panslavism, 153

  SUBJECT INDEX 

Panturkism, see Turkism Paris, 100, 113, 114, 136, 141, 182, 211, 297, 341, 373 Paris Peace Treaty (1856), 180–182 Patriarchs, patriarchate, 43, 66, 87, 93, 172–174, 176, 179, 180, 184 Patriarchal Commissions (1868, 1873), 177 Pellagorio, 207n29 Peloponnese, 48 Pera, 177 See also Beyoğlu Persian Empire, Persians, 38, 39, 40n6, 129n23 Pest, see Budapest Pester Lloyd, 17, 239–255, 272–274 Pester Zeitung, 241 Pesti Hírlap, 240n2 Pesti Napló, 242 Phanariotes, 43, 47 Poland, 7, 215, 228, 375 Popes, papacy, 259, 264, 265, 267, 270, 273, 277 Poreč, 267 Post-imperial narrative, 11, 13, 316, 322, 324, 326, 392n9 Pozor, 287 Preßburg/Pozsony, 240 Preradović, Petar, 292, 298 Presse (Neue Freie Presse), 241 Prussia, 153, 368, 369n2 Public opinion, 100 Q Qurʿān, see Koran R Radetzkymarch, 378 Railways, 213, 219, 229, 240 Reform infrastructural, 4

413

legal, 4, 15, 16, 172 social, 4, 111 Reichsgesetzblätter, 217 Reichspost, 260, 268–273, 275, 276 Rekas, 250 Remembering, remembering empire, 13–20, 354, 387–395 Republic of German-Austria, see Deutsch-Österreich Rijeka (Fiume), Rijeka resolution, 259, 291, 293, 294 Roman Empire, Romans, 39–41, 40n6, 40n7, 41n9, 145n46, 263, 272, 274, 351 Romania, Romanians, 17, 175, 196, 198, 207, 217, 227, 228, 247n10, 248 Romanov dynasty, Romanov Empire, 9, 50, 60, 67–73, 68n14, 71n17, 72n18, 125, 141n41, 191, 394 Rome, 4, 18, 199n9, 205–207, 206n27, 207n29, 257, 259–261, 263–265, 268, 270–276, 278 Rotterdam, 390 Rum, see Orthodox (Rum) Church, Orthodox Christians Ruritania, 60n2 Russia, Russians, 6n3, 8n7, 14, 21, 22, 43–45, 48, 68, 69, 94, 106, 132n28, 138, 171, 175, 181–183, 185, 186, 197, 198, 202, 202n14, 208, 220, 253, 263, 297, 375, 376n6, 377, 378, 388n2, 389n4, 390, 391n7 S Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü (The Time Regulation Institute), 347 Sabah (newspaper), 112, 113, 115 Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Treaty of, 213n1, 228 Salzburger Chronik, 214

414 

SUBJECT INDEX

Ṣanʿāʾ (Sanaa), 140 San Girolamo (college), 257, 267 Sanjak (Serbia), 198 Sarajevo, 266, 334n11, 370, 371n3, 383 Satan, 128 Schlesien, 227, 227n25 Schwarzenbach (Mežica), 221, 221n11 Second World War, 253, 291, 303 Senj, 267 Serbia, Serbians, 63, 123, 180, 207, 221, 247n10, 248, 284, 285, 294, 296–299, 302, 302n18 Serbian war of independence, 47 Al-Shahbāʾ (journal), 133 Shia (Shı̄ʿah) Islam, 134n31 Shkodër, 204, 206 Shoqëria botonjëse shqiptare (Société albanaise d’éditions), 204n20, 208n30 Shtokavian, 287, 290 Šibenik, 267 Sidon, 126 Slavonia, 15, 164, 259, 261, 265, 283, 288, 291, 293n11 See also Kingdom of Croatia and Slavonia Slavs, 153, 154, 157, 263, 266, 270, 274, 275, 299 Slovenian, 225 Smyrna, see Izmir Sofia, 205, 207n29 Soviet Union, 8 Split, 40, 68, 68n15, 69, 164, 352 Staatsbeamte, Der, 221, 222 Studenten-Courier, 242 Styria (Steiermark) Styrians, 263 Šubić family, see Zrinski family Sublime Porte, 81, 82, 87, 88, 90–95, 91n9, 173

Südslavische Rundschau, 298 Sunni Islam, 200 Swabians, 249, 250 Syria (Shām), 6, 104, 104n6, 105, 109, 125, 126, 128, 134, 138, 140, 143 Syrmia, 267, 291 Szigetvár, 16, 152, 156, 157n2, 159, 161, 162, 166 T Taksim, 101n4, 356 Tanzimat, 9, 13, 14, 16, 58, 61, 62, 62n5, 65, 66, 68–73, 78–82, 87, 89, 90, 93n11, 101, 102, 105, 169, 170, 172, 196, 339, 340, 343 Tarik (newspaper), 112, 113 Television, 7, 8, 345 See also Film Tercüman-ı Ahvâl, 103 Theatre, 109n9, 125, 125n11, 126, 126n13, 156, 158, 158n4, 158n5, 158n6, 159, 165, 165n13, 166, 193–195, 254, 294, 296, 344, 359 Third Reich, 38 Thrace, 6 Tilsit, 377 Treaty of Tilsit, 377 Tiroler Soldatenzeitung, 295 Töplitz (Teplitz), 220 Toskalık Cemiyet-ı Ittihadiyye (Unionist Committees in Tosk Regions), 198 Tosks, 16, 192–197, 192n1, 195n5, 199–211, 203n16, 203n17, 204n20, 204n21, 205n22 Transleithania, 154 Trieste, 267, 268 Tripolitania, 121n1

  SUBJECT INDEX 

Troppau, 227, 227n25 Tunis, 109 Turkey, Turks, 5–9, 11, 18, 68, 129, 141–144, 169, 181n16, 186, 202, 343, 345, 347–349, 352, 389n4, 390, 391, 393 Turkification, 68, 71n17, 114, 141–143, 395 Turkish, 6, 8, 8n7, 9, 13, 18, 19, 39, 43, 68, 69, 81, 83, 84, 102–104, 103–104n5, 106, 107, 108n8, 110, 113, 113n10, 114, 122n5, 123n8, 126, 131–132n26, 134n31, 135, 137, 139–143, 143n45, 157, 160, 164, 195, 195n6, 379n9, 390, 392, 393 Turkism, 14, 78, 82–84, 343 U Udbina, 298 Ukraine, 228 Ümid (newspaper), 110 Ungarischer Lloyd, 242 United States (US), 8, 107, 389n4, 390 Unterdrauburg (Dravograd), 221, 221n11 Upper Austria (Oberösterreich), 224, 226, 227 V Vakit (journal), 100, 100n2, 103, 112 Vasvár, 162, 164 Vatan (watan), 88, 105, 109n9, 116, 124, 136 Vëllazëria e Shqipëtarëve (Albanian Brotherhood), 204 Vienna, 5, 7, 7n4, 19, 22, 42, 43, 48, 152, 153, 157, 159, 164, 202, 205–207, 205n24, 217, 218,

415

227, 240, 242, 243, 243n6, 254, 260n1, 261, 262n2, 262n3, 264, 266, 273, 277, 279, 285, 289, 290, 297, 333, 341, 344, 346, 370, 373, 375–377, 376n6, 379, 389 Völkerkerker, 380, 392 Vorwärts (Vienna), 297 Vossische Zeitung, 297 Vrhbosna, 267 W Waḥḥabı̄ sect, 47 wālı̄, 133 Wallachia, 175 Wanderer, 242 Warsaw, 389 Die Welt von Gestern (The World of Yesterday), 333 Wenzel (pejorative), 213, 220 Wiener Moderne, 10 Wiener Montags-Post, 220 Windisch-Feistritz (Slovenska Bistrica), 221, 221n11 Windish, see Slovenian Y Yanya, 207n29 Yemen, 121n1, 140, 143, 196 Yîldîz Palace, 114n11 Young Ottomans, 14, 15, 80–82, 84, 86, 89–95, 102, 104, 108, 108n8, 109, 109n9, 340 Young Turks, 14, 15, 22, 50, 68n15, 69, 72, 73, 78, 80, 84, 101, 113–115, 114n11, 137–143 Yugoslavia, 5, 154, 221, 302, 303n19 Yugoslavism, 154, 295, 302

416 

SUBJECT INDEX

Z Zadar, 266, 267, 272, 276 Zadar Resolution, 294 Zagreb, 13, 18, 156, 158, 158n4, 158n5, 158n6, 159, 260n1, 265, 267, 273, 275, 283–289, 291–295, 292n10, 297, 298, 301, 304 Zagreber Tagblatt, 292

Al-Zaman (newspaper), 110 Zenbur (satirical journal), 108n8 Zëri i Shqiptarërisë (journal), 203n17 Znaimer Tagblatt, 220 Zrinski family, 16, 152, 156 Zrinski Myth, 16, 151–167 Zsombolya, 249 Züppe, 338, 338n17, 341, 342