Vienna's Dreams of Europe

Vienna''s Dreams of Europe puts forward a convincing counter-narrative to the prevailing story of Austria''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 Europe''s nation-states, Austria appears only as an afterthought, no matter that its precursor states-the Holy Roman Empire, the Austrian Empire, and Austria Hungary-represented a globalized European cultural space outside the dominant paradigm of nationalist colonialism. Austrian writers today confront reunited Europe in full acknowledgment of Austro-Hungary''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, Vienna''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 today''s theorist-critics of the hegemonic West, Katherine Arens posits a political identity resisting two hundred years of European nationalism.