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Vienna's Dreams of Europe: Culture and Identity Beyond the Nation-State

By (author) Professor Katherine Arens

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Viennaâ€™s Dreams of Europe puts forward a convincing counter-narrative to the prevailing story of Austriaâ€™s place in Europe since the Enlightenment. For a millennium, Austrian writers have used images of Europe and its hegemonic culture as their political and cultural reference points. Yet in discussions of Europeâ€™s nation-states, Austria appears only as an afterthought, no matter that its precursor statesâ€”the Holy Roman Empire, the Austrian Empire, and Austria Hungaryâ€”represented a globalized European cultural space outside the dominant paradigm of nationalist colonialism. Austrian writers today confront reunited Europe in full acknowledgment of Austro-Hungaryâ€™s multicultural heritage, which mixes various nationalities, ethnicities, and cultural forms, including ancestors from the Balkans and beyond. Challenging standard accounts of 18th- through 20th-century European imperial identity construction, Viennaâ€™s Dreams of Europe introduces a group of Austrian public intellectuals and authors who have since the 18th century construed their own public as European. Working in different terms than todayâ€™s theorist-critics of the hegemonic West, Katherine Arens posits a political identity resisting two hundred years of European nationalism.