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John Deak
University of Notre Dame, History, Faculty Member
- Central European history, Central and Eastern Europe, Austrian History, Austria (European History), Hungarian Studies, Habsburg Studies, and 27 moreHabsburg Monarchy in the 18th century, First World War, World War I, Military and Politics, Administrative Law and Bureaucratic Legalism, Bureaucracy, Bureaucracies & Bureaucratic Workers, Constitutional Politics, Modern Europe, Nationalism And State Building, European History, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Habsburg Monarchy, East Central Europe, Central Europe, History, Cultural History, Social History, Military History, Historiography, European Studies, Slovenian History, Modern Hungarian History, Militarism, Austria-Hungary, and The League of Nationsedit
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On June 28, 1914, Count Harrach’s Gräf and Stift Double Phaeton, a sporty thirty-two horsepower convertible, almost took a wrong turn from the Appel Quay along the river Miljacka. It was the third automobile in a motorcade, transporting... more
On June 28, 1914, Count Harrach’s Gräf and Stift Double Phaeton, a sporty thirty-two horsepower convertible, almost took a wrong turn from the Appel Quay along the river Miljacka. It was the third automobile in a motorcade, transporting Archduke Franz Ferdinand through the streets of Sarajevo. As the General Inspector of the Combined Armed Forces of Austria-Hungary, he had been observing field maneuvers in Bosnia-Herzegovina; a few public appearances in Sarajevo would finish off his trip. His wife Duchess Sophie accompanied him— June 28 was their fourteenth wedding anniversary. She sat in the car beside him, along with the military governor of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Feldzeugmarschall Oskar Potiorek, as the car came to a halt. The first two cars in the motorcade had turned right from the quay onto Franz Josef Street, following their original itinerary. But the itinerary had been changed after a failed assassination attempt against the presumptive heir earlier that morning. No one told the drivers. As the first two cars turned onto Franz Josef Street, Franz Ferdinand’s driver made to do likewise. Potiorek ordered him to stop and continue down the Appel Quay, the fastest route to their new destination. The car came to a halt at the corner, right in front of Schiller’s Delicatessen, where a member of the assassination team, Gavrilo Princip, was milling about, ruminating on his group’s failed attempt in the morning. Now was Princip’s chance: as the archduke’s car moved slowly back onto the Appel Quay, Princip could not believe his eyes. His prey was directly in front of him, a sitting duck. Princip had no time, or space, to break the percussion cap on his bomb. He stepped out onto the pavement, drew his pistol, and fired two shots toward the
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Habsburg studies stand at a crossroads. We have come a long way since C. A. Macartney published his magisterial history, The Habsburg Empire, in 1968. He began his story with the death of Joseph II in 1790—and thus, for him and his... more
Habsburg studies stand at a crossroads. We have come a long way since C. A. Macartney published his magisterial history, The Habsburg Empire, in 1968. He began his story with the death of Joseph II in 1790—and thus, for him and his narrative, with the beginning of the end of the monarchy. Macartney's narrative represented the best and most complete traditional story of decline and fall, according to which the ever-present push of modernity put the Habsburg Monarchy in the larger story of modern Europe as an entity doomed to dissolution. Moreover, its leaders, embodied in the clever Prince Clemens von Metternich, foresaw the decline of the empire and did their best to resist change and forestall the future.
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The Habsburg Empire’s final years and its experience in the First World War have traditionally been a story of dysfunction and national disintegration. This article, by contrast, stresses that the prewar Habsburg state was far from... more
The Habsburg Empire’s final years and its experience in the First World War have traditionally been a story of dysfunction and national disintegration. This article, by contrast, stresses that the prewar Habsburg state was far from dysfunctional and in many ways approximated its other nineteenth-century constitutionalist counterparts within Europe and across the world. Yet the war and the stresses surrounding it, especially along the seam of civil-military relations, tore that constitutionalist state apart as the Habsburg Army declared its own internal war against the Habsburg civilian state. The army focused its ire on the rule of law within that state, which it viewed as contributing to the state’s weaknesses, and ultimately its initial failures, in the first year and a half of the war. Thus, the Habsburg Empire descended into a state of exception as the army took advantage of an array of legal tools designed to accompany initial mobilizations to make deep and lasting incursions into the practice of managing civilians. These incursions caused widespread dismay among broad sections of the Habsburg populace, while simultaneously undermining the practices and procedures of the Habsburg administration. Yet in plunging into a state of legal exception, the Habsburg Empire was hardly an anomaly in the twentieth century. Rather, it was a harbinger of what was to come as the nineteenth-century constitutionalist state came under assault in emergency situations in Europe during the First World War and beyond.
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Schicksalsjahre Österreichs: Die Erinnerungen und Tagebücher Josef Redlichs 1869–1936. Volume 1: Erinnerungen und Tagebücher 1869–1914. Volume 2: Tagebücher Josef Redlichs 1915–1936. Volume 3: Biographische Daten und Register. Edited by Fritz Fellner and Doris A. Corradini . Veröffentlichungen de...more