University of Texas at Austin
While there is little debate that German departments are changing, in part because of declining enrollments in basic language studies, less consensus exists about what form those changes should take. Worries about the "integrity" of the German curriculum are growing, a set of concerns about students' declining mastery of the language, and about how the traditional palette of major courses can still be taught in German. In order to counter this insistence on language first, the idea of "German across the curriculum" (GAC) has emerged to direct possible curricular innovations1--the idea that language competence must be integrated into more places in the undergraduate curriculum: "While foreign language teaching, by its very `foreignness,' often occupies the margins of a college curriculum, less commonly taught languages (LCTLs) are likely to be isolated even from the mainstream of the foreign language enterprise."2 The hope is that, if language studies are integrated with other studies, they will become more relevant, which can spur students to set higher goals of language achievement.
What is often absent from these suggestions, however, is an alternative view of what language departments would have to offer the average college-level curriculum. Even in the extant GAC model, it is primarily language-teaching that instructors of German import into the more general curriculum, often as ancillary instructors for content courses that instructors of other disciplines offer (for instance, extra credit hours attached to a course in modern European history, where students read documents in the original, for instance).
In what follows, I detail a course entitled "The Habsburg Myth" in order to suggest a new role for the teacher of German or "Austrian studies" in the curriculum. While the content of the course may itself attract students, I will focus instead on how this course teaches students how to think about cultural and disciplinary discourses--that is, about how language functions in cultural contexts and according to the needs of particular disciplines, and how "facts" and "meaning" are dependent upon these two contexts.
Curricular and Intellectual Redefinitions: A New Need
My point of departure in designing the course on the "Habsburg Myth" was, as noted, current debates in GAC/WAC. My rationale for describing it here is to argue that we need to define GAC/WAC initiatives more broadly than has been done heretofore. Namely, GAC or WAC teachers have more than their expertise in a particular language skill (German or writing) or in a particular content area to offer students: the GAC/WAC teacher is also an expert in the conventions for problem-solving and thinking, and in the conventions of writing about issues various disciplines use. GAC and WAC projects have to this point provided innovative ways for the teacher to implement the first two kinds of expertise (content and language skills, written narrowly) into the undergraduate curriculum, and they have concomitantly made great strides in justifying the existence of language departments as area studies departments and cultural studies departments rather than simply as language-teaching departments. However, I believe that the future of language departments as central to humanistic education lies in exploiting a third initiative--in teaching how to think and articulate themselves according to the discourse norms of particular disciplines, as each discipline prefers to formulate problems, construct arguments, and formulate essays. In fact, unless "language learning" and "writing" are tied to such broader curricular concerns, the language curriculum cannot continue to claim to be a full partner in the post-secondary institution.
An alternate vision of what it means to implement studies of "German" into the curriculum is therefore necessary. My discussions in the following sections of this essay will center around a course that I designed to foster the study of German in another way: by fulfilling one institution's requirements for a course in writing across the curriculum (WAC).3 Many undergraduate curricula have such requirements, where students must take a certain number of courses designed to foster critical writing and thinking skills. Often, these critical skills are practiced in the context of individual disciplines' requirements for writing. As such, WAC represents an initiative to integrate English composition training into various points in the undergraduate curriculum--an initiative equivalent to GAC in many ways. The teacher of "Austrian/German studies" who can offer a course like this will create a new kind of market for language and literary/cultural studies that have been the backbones of German departments to this date. Moreover, by redefining GAC and WAC courses as parallel ways to teach cultural literacy rather than simply skills, both language and writing courses can justify their existence as equal partners in the undergraduate curriculum.
First and foremost, the existence of such courses makes a strong case to students (even those with few or no foreign-language skills) for the need to deal with cultures in the languages of those cultures, because crossing language boundaries means crossing conceptual boundaries. Just as any text providing a "history of a foreign country in translation" outlines a different vision of history than that written for a "native" culture, so, too, does any area of enterprise. Students must learn how to negotiate that conceptual gap, just as much as they do a language gap--to be "literate" in any discipline as it moves across cultures means that a professional must understand these conceptual differences in order to reach conclusions with as little ethnocentric bias as possible. Therefore, business people who want to work in Germany need German--not because the vast majority of German business people do not speak English (they do), but because Germans analyze business situations differently, even in a purportedly value-neutral fiscal analysis. Learning to read how texts reflect that bias (in German or English) is thus critical in establishing a professional's credibility as an "expert," even if their foreign language skills in speaking or writing never become near-native.
Second, such courses make the case for humanistic education as practice in types of critical thinking that are not present in the sciences (or, unfortunately, in the social sciences). Textuality and the conventions of reading in a culture affect the meaning of the text, whether that text is a business report or a novel. For example, until very recently, the German managerial class probably had a classical education, while its US equivalent probably learned economics, law, or business, instead. This education gap will create differences in the business people's analytical skills--e.g., a tendency on the part of Germans to think metaphorically, whereas U.S. businesspeople tend to think fiscally or in terms of litigation. When reading reports from these two cultural milieus, then, the reader will not understand the significance of messages unless they can weight these communicative strategies. Similarly, to evaluate the credibility of the writer, readers must register the subtext against which "the numbers" are intended to be read. If a German businessman refers to a particular deal as a trip to Canossa (Canossagang), for instance, the irony may well be lost on an outsider who does not realize that Canossa is the mountain pass where the emperor had to submit to the pope's authority after crawling up to the top of the pass on his knees in the snow. And that irony may be an intended part of future negotiations--more than a simple point-of-information joke, such a reference may set the tone for the whole further discourse in which the negotiations take place by designating the partners as pope and emperor.
When humanities teachers point out such items in the context of a writing course, it can seem like the teacher is proposing a political agenda or overreading single points of information on the basis of impossible levels of insider expertise. Yet the irony signaled by the Canossa metaphor will pervade the rest of the text of the negotiations, which the student can recover as part of that cultural setting ("Germans construe negotiations as if they reflected great moments in history"), not as the teacher's bias or as cultural trivia. A course highlighting how discourse and content markers in language work in this way thus has the potential of importing the humanities into non-humanistic contexts: our humanities courses develop skills in critical reading and analysis on which other departments rely on, not just "foreign language" and vague "knowledge of foreign cultures." In many ways, students can learn this kind of critical reading more easily using comparisons across cultures or historical eras than within their own discipline: it is often easier to acknowledge that "Germans are not Irish" in comparing the roles played by political parties and religion in the two countries than to analyze where class or party biases run through a text on party politics from their own country.
Third, by crossing disciplines and the thought conventions of disciplines in this way, a course like "The Habsburg Myth" opens up possibilities for GAC that will increase the preparedness of our own majors, and of majors in related humanistic disciplines. We will not be delaying content until "students' language abilities are up to snuff," but rather teaching our students the higher-levels of critical language use in general (such as biasing narratives through acts of foregrounding or backgrounding certain material). This will sensitize them to more complex language use, even if that language is, for the present, simply comprehended rather than actively controlled (comprehension facilitates later production). We may thus offer our students early visions of why humanistic disciplines can be interesting specializiations. More than just mastery of a language or a literature, they contain a microcosm of a whole spectrum of life problems, negotiated through language in historical context.
To move toward fulfilling at least some of these goals, I designed this course as an introduction to an area of Austrian studies that is very attractive to students: nineteenth-century Habsburg history. A "German professor" could add this subject to the curriculum outside the narrow parameters of the German department, for instance as a supplemental history-area course for a campus lacking more than basic courses resources on Central Europe. However, this course most emphatically does not represent simply a history course, even while using history (and historiography) as a major content focus. Instead, it highlights a distinctive problem in the humanities, one that is central to literary studies but which influences many neighboring disciplines: the status of the "text" and how "historical facts" change their faces in a narrative constitutes a problem crucial to much current thought in historiography, as well.
Therefore, I will describe the composition of the course as defined by disciplinary thinking (not simply by the content), and explain how I taught that content and discourse area to upper-division undergraduate students as a WAC course. After that, I will turn to how one could modify this course for more specific contexts, including GAC initiatives. My hope is that this exposition will open a new space not only for Austria in the "German" curriculum, but also for teachers of small languages to assume more central roles as part of humanities education in the colleges and universities.
The Habsburg Myth: The Course
In my institution, the "Habsburg Myth: Politics and Family Drama" fulfilled the requirements for a so-called "significant writing component" course.4 It was thus designed for a general public of junior/senior students who were interested in filling their graduation writing requirements--students accustomed to college-level reading, but who had not necessarily had any earlier exposure to Austro-Hungarian culture. Because there is a comparative dearth of European history courses on my campus (which focuses heavily on US and British history, and on post-Soviet studies in Eastern Europe), I hoped to capitalize on current media interest in the Balkans to introduce a new course on Austria, as the heart of Central Europe and the origin of the Bosnian/Croatian conflicts being played out today. This hope also explains the rather melodramatic course description (see Appendix), which I wrote to be eye-catching, and to overcome both the unfamiliarity of the materials and the competition with any number of other courses that fulfill the same requirement.
The organization of the course materials is strictly chronological, starting with a brief introduction on Metternich's Austrian Empire after 1812, but concentrating on the reign of the Emperor Franz Joseph (1848-1916), and ending with the breakup of Austria-Hungary after World War I. However, I organized the sequences of readings and student assignments to highlight critical thinking and writing about history as story-telling. The historical "facts" emerged as students compared and contrasted points of view in readings; I held my lectures to an absolute minimum (mostly in the first week, and at transitions between historical epochs), so that students would argue out the points of view in history texts in class discussions instead. The students therefore always focused on a task of critical reading rather than on any definitive collection of dates or facts.
1. Readings and Critical Reading Skills
Most daily assignments on the course syllabus (see Appendix) contain readings from more than one source so that students confront the issue of perspective in history-writing. To introduce a particular period or moment in Austro-Hungarian history, pairs of readings first focused on the predominant kind of history-writing: on political and economic histories. I instructed students to read for the similarities and differences between two or more accounts of the evolution of an era. In class, students helped assemble those differences and comparisons in parallel columns of facts on the board (parallel time lines, with the teacher as recorder), and to speculate about the points of view underlying these time lines.
For example, A.J.P. Taylor's classic The Habsburg Monarchy, 1809-1918 offers mainly a political account of the empire and its peoples, highlighting differences between German-Austrian and Hungarian points of view on the evolution of the Dual Monarchy. Alan Sked's much more recent The Decline and Fall of the Habsburg Empire 1815-1918 incorporates much more economic data, to throw more light on everyday life in the empire.5 The classic history by A.J.P. Taylor is thus more consistent in including Hungarian reactions to political events than is Sked's more recent entry. In consequence, Taylor generally evaluates events (like the 1867 Compromise [Ausgleich]) that enhance Hungarian power as increases in democracy within the empire, while Sked will treat it as a centripetal development that threatens the political unity and power of the Empire as a whole. Such perspectives emerge clearly in titles, charts, and lists of significant dates, as much as they do in the prose of the narrative and the data mustered for the reader.
Students become familiar with the idea of history as story-telling and with critical reading in a more formal way as well in a lecture at the start of the course, backed up by an optional essay on historiography by the French historian Michel de Certeau.6 The point of this lecture/reading was that history is actually history-writing, that all historical narratives are actually interpretations of the facts presented therein, assembled in that form to serve particular ends, to privilege certain points of view. Working through the similar but conflicting narratives in a pair of histories like Sked and Taylor allows students to realize the practical consequences of point of view for writing.
To bring this point home in a different way, I added another set of "historical" texts to the mix. After the students were familiar with the general outlines of historical development over a decade or two, they were directed to read about major figures in those developments: to readings from biographies of the actors in the Habsburg "family drama." Biographies present additional problems in critical reading, because they often connect documentation with historical context in ways that overarching national histories do not.
The typical biography of Franz Joseph will, for instance, contain excerpts from his letters to his family and to his ministers, as well as the texts of legislation he sponsored. Historians do use such material in their narratives about nations, but in different ways. In these texts, an historian will use a letter from Franz Joseph to Elisabeth to substantiate her interest in the Hungarian cause (or to prove that his reasons for marrying her were unsuitable). Yet such a use of a letter does not exhaust its contents as discourse. A letter also reveals much about the social status of its writer, social expectations and protocol, norms of behavior or values, and personal motivation. One can easily address a central issue of historiography by helping students recognize how historical "facts" have a different status in a letter than in government statistics. Each has its own style, its own credibility, its own claims to validity. In this case, students must reconcile, for example, Franz Joseph's letters with his image as a leader that the official histories present. Again by comparing how the facts are presented and shaded, students become sensitive to the communicative strategies inherent in genres, much as in literary texts.
The whole syllabus functions to undercut the seemingly "natural" presentation of facts in any one type of historical narrative. Through these juxtapositions and through daily comparisons of their reading experiences, students learned how texts work as discourse, identifying what biases, assumptions, priorities, models of nationhood and ethnicity, legal systems, underlie the writing of each account. Some of their conclusions point to ways in which authors write for different audiences (Taylor wrote when Hungary was behind the Iron Curtain, and so he was arguing for its legitimacy as a historical culture of Europe in a way different than Sked did). Other conclusions point to the fact that familiar genres may have had different communicative functions in the nineteenth century than in the twentieth: "personal" letters then were as worth intercepting as media events and cellular phone calls are today, and so our assumption that they are "private" communication may well not be the case in an Austria-Hungary with an active secret police (as is evident in the Mayerling situation). The simple task of answering whom each account addressed, and why it included or excluded certain information (as a "natural" consequence of the audience), familiarizes students both with historicized forms of discourse, as well as with the facts about Austria-Hungary. After a very few attempts, students become very adept at spotting the discrepancies of each text, and of understanding how each text has chosen to tell its story.
As an additional move in this direction, the course included other materials not normally treated as part of official history, but in frequent use by students of popular culture: tell-all or "as told to" memoirs, historically-adequate "docudramas" (like Morton's A Nervous Splendour, which approaches 1888/89 as a kind of historical travelogue), fiction (novels like Joseph Roth's Radetzky March, which re-approaches history with fictional characters), and films (as alternative biographies, like Mayerling or Szabo's Oberst Redl7). Beyond the comparative critical reading assignments described above, students have a further assignment when they read these texts: to ascertain what whole regions of facts are included or excluded from a narrative like Morton's, by comparing it to formal historical accounts like Sked's or Taylor's.
Each of these texts was well-received as expressing a certain kind of "historical truth," but what kind of truth this is can remain somewhat unclear unless readers become sensitive to the role of argumentation in writing, just as they have with issues of literary discourse or genre. Each plausible historical narrative relies on a different kind of argumentation strategy than does the overarching national narrative, which is usually causal in its argument. Finding out what regions of data support which points of view is also an exercise in critical thinking. In addressing these issues, students practice the kind of problem-solving that professional historians need to do everyday, when they enter archives or look to government documents.
For instance, Habsburg biographies are particularly interesting in terms of historical evidence-gathering because much official (but personal) material is still in family hands, or has been released in segments, under circumstances heavily involved with political issues that do not appear in the text at all. Can we know "the truth" about Mayerling before the deathbed letters purportedly in the hand of the family are released, or not? Is the "historical truth" reported about Crown Prince Rudolf's death in Judtman an account of the facts, or of a carefully wrought cover-up (a question that often arises when one considers how certain classes of information have been expunged from the record--including the exact layout of the hunting lodge, which could be used to invalidate the credibility of certain ear-witnesses). On another level, a tell-all memoir by an anonymous "R" who purports to be a Habsburg, He Did Not Die at Mayerling, offers another problem of documentation. It is probably total fiction (an account written by someone "hidden in the death chamber"), but it reflected a prevalent suspicion about a government cover-up. Add the fact that it was a tell-all book written in the 1930s for a US audience, and other kinds of facts about the Habsburgs emerge: it was written for profit, but it could also have been written to stir up resistance against Hitler by suggesting the possibility of a Habsburg restoration (the family is officially silent on that possibility, but since it was deposed, it has remained active in European politics, making such a restoration plausible up to this day).
In approaching more marginal historical facts like those in this book, students must apply their knowledge of contemporary popular culture to be critical of formal history-writing as it typically presents incomplete arguments. Trading in "insider information" and reporting tell-all memoirs seems to be characteristic of almost any political figure in the media age--and Austria-Hungary was thickly populated with newspapers and with journalists trying to scoop each other as the West is today with telejournalists and paparazzi. When these issues are put on the table when students read such texts, they explore new ways of calling official histories into question. For example, most histories of all sorts concur that Emperor Franz Joseph went out of his way to portray himself as "first bureaucrat of the state" instead of autocratic monarch (with the latter being a better description of any monarch who decides to be his own prime minister, as Franz Joseph was). Yet what if the monarch was consciously trading in this image--if he were using it to manipulate the media in ways that his contemporaries recognized as fiction instead of fact?
This type of question may originate in popular history or culture, but it potentially creates problems in official historiography as well. For example, Franz Joseph's emphasis on his role as bureaucrat has made many remember him as such, and attribute a purely reactive quality to all his political decisions--a bureaucrat, after all, doesn't make policy so much as react to situations. Is that true, or merely media spin imposed on generally unpopular political decisions by a ruler who went out of his way to underscore his benevolence? Fiction, tell-all memoirs, and docudramas may thus have limited "true history" claims, while making great claims of authenticity about how they represent the experiences of the age.8
To foster critical thinking, then, it becomes important for students to work through the credibility status of texts and arguments from the standpoint of evidence, just as it was for them to work through issues of discourse. The syllabus for "The Habsburg Myth" was thus constructed to foster two different kinds of critical analysis: the discourses of history (how history is told) and historical analyses (how historical data is used in argumentation). These assignments in critical reading, however, also needed to be integrated into the course by parallel writing assignments, and in the evaluation strategies applied to student work: comprehension leads to production, and student success must be evaluated in appropriate terms.
2. Writing about Reading: WAC and GAC
As noted above, this course was designed to fulfill a university's requirements for a "significant writing component, which presented an automatic framework for assignments and evaluation that I adapted to the course goals. To do so, I required two extended (5-7 pp.) book reviews (the first with a rewrite) as counting for 70% of the course grade (again, see the course description in the Appendix).
The two book reviews were constructed as two different variants of a straightforward task in expository prose writing, and as representative of a genre historians use--as part of the professional discourse of history. On the formal end, then, each had to conform to these professional standards, with formal notes and bibliography (University of Chicago style, or any other useful one for students in related disciplines).
The first paper was a simple book review (students were sent to a selection of magazines to see how they are constructed), assessing one of the texts read as it would appeal to a particular audience. Students had a compulsory rewrite to improve their prose, and their final grade on this assignment was an average of the two attempts. The assignment was evaluated not only on standard technical criteria, but also on the student's ability to uncover and convey the importance of the specific book's point of view. A retelling of the contents ("it did x, y, and z"), however competent, would never receive higher than a "B" grade, since such a retelling would not live up to the critical standards I have been suggesting for reading assignments. The retelling would need to explain perspective and bias by referring to how the text presents its issues (its discourse) and to problems or idiosyncrasies in data and argument (its argumentation strategies). Concomitantly, a critical personal reaction to the book reviewed ("I find it inadequate because . . .") would also achieve at best a "B" grade because the norm against which the writer's judgment was made was not clarified and woven into evaluation criteria ("An economic historian would like it because... , but a sociologist would object because...").
The second paper offered students practice in a more difficult variant of this task because it required students to compare two texts, one from history and one not, in order to show how one supports or contradicts the other's argument. This task requires the student to assess the validity or credibility of historical evidence, to construct a case with historical evidence, and to suggest gaps in the picture of the situation that could bear further research. In this sense, the goal of the assignment was a "state of the field" analysis which points to further work to uncover or do.
The final 30% of the grade was for a final examination representing another kind of writing that checked students' mastery of the two analytical strategies they had practiced during the semester (see the Appendix for the exact examination; it could easily be adapted to a three-hour, in-class final). The first question, evaluating Franz Joseph as a monarch, required the student to replicate the kind of argumentation that a historian would practice in writing a formal history. While it tested student mastery of central facts in Habsburg history, it also required a specific type of expository writing. Note that the successful completion of the assignment would depend as much on argumentation as on the mastery of historical facts--all facts had to be inserted into a coherent context, before they were given full credit as meaningful. The second question responded directly to the gap between genres in history-writing, especially to the differences in biography and histories. By asking students to critique the differing images of two historical figures (one female, and one male), this question tested their ability to negotiate the various kinds of historical knowledge, and to use data from popular culture to question official history (and the reverse). Finally, the third question inverted the first in many ways: it required students to tell a non-official history of Austro-Hungary from the point of view of a Hungarian--a task which required a student to change the list of "most important moments" in Franz Joseph's reign in very distinctive ways, stressing the different points of view held by various cultures, and probably with an eye toward everyday life as opposed to high or elite culture.
All three of these questions thus tested students in critical writing and critical thinking in ways that echoed the daily reading assignments. Moreover, by setting questions with explicit discourse requirements (speak as a Hungarian, as a female, as an historian) rather than the more conventional "discuss the reign of Franz Joseph," evaluation of the students' answers rested both on students' ability to hold a critical point of view (a discourse criterion) and on their knowledge of the historical facts and their significance as historical debates (an argumentation criterion). It was definitely an essay test appropriate to a writing class, but also went beyond what would ordinarily be included in a beginning or intermediate history class, by directing students towards the kind of analytic writing skills they need in their upper-division history classes.
If my institutional situation had been different, the "Habsburg Myth" could easily be a GAC course instead of a WAC one, opening other options for assignments that would help students negotiate the gaps between cultures in more ways than I have already suggested. Each deserves a brief special note as a kind of analytic assignment.
For example:
A review or an essay assignment could ask the student to contrast how a German, an Austrian, and an Anglo-American historical narrative treat the same issue. This task could highlight how either discourse norms or analytic habits between cultures vary. It would in any case reveal national biases.
Students could also compare other types of primary texts in a foreign language to official accounts of a situation, stressing how specific discourses are weighted in the original context, as opposed to how we or a particular historian evaluate them. For example, the Empress Elisabeth wrote poetry, which some scholars consider evidence of her madness. Yet (except for minor beginnings by the biographer Brigitte Hamann) no one has examined that poetry as it relates to the tradition of Heine and the Young Germans, from where she drew her inspiration. Those intellectual links may, in turn, be a key to how the English-inspired Wittelsbach family differed from the Habsburgs, despite their intermarriage.
A student could compare the translation of a history book with its original (as in the case of Robert Kann's seminal book), to uncover what changes have been made to accommodate national spins or audience identification.
Students with even limited competence in the foreign language could work through the dialogue and subtitles of a film, or the sets, sociology, clothing, and rooms portrayed in them--as exercises in how the "authentic" semiotics of two cultures differ.
Students could view the French and US filmic takes on Mayerling to show what they say about the various audiences' sense of historical appropriateness (not just as different versions of the plots).
Such assignments again would stress the students' ability to negotiate differences that exist between cultures. They are exercises in various cultural literacies (of discourse, of analytical strategies, or even of disciplinary standards as they vary across language borders), each of which underscores the practical implications of meanings as they are anchored in specific cultural contexts. By basing such exercises on a bilingual or bicultural set of materials, however, the teacher adds an additional element of cultural literacy to the assignments (one that again can help convince the students that learning the foreign language may be useful for other pursuits). In these exercises, student-readers are confronted in graphic ways with various cognitive and organizational approaches that different cultures use to frame their own histories. In this way, courses with "language components" become exercises in critical thinking that supplement the learning in other disciplines in central ways.
Conclusion
What I have hoped to highlight about this course is that it is interdisciplinary in traditional terms, in that it includes texts from history, film, literature, and popular culture, i.e. its content is interdisciplinary. However, it is also interdisciplinary in a more crucial way: it is an interdisciplinary approach to cultural literacy.
If "The Habsburg Myth" had been a course in literature or general cultural history, the historical documentation would most likely have provided as a framework in which to discuss the cultural production of the Habsburg Empire. The course would have highlighted themes that characterize the culture in that epoch. For an intellectual history approach, the students would have learned how to recover these themes out of that framework in political and cultural history and to characterize how various groups were affected by events in history. (Note that this approach is very much the tack taken in Morton's work, which tells the story of "everything" that happened in and around Vienna in 1888/89.) In such a framing, for instance, Roth's Radetzky March would appear as a document of how a multi-ethnic nation causes confusions of identities for individuals within it.
In contrast, if these materials represented part of a more traditional history course, the political and economic narratives would be primary (especially as represented in the prevailing canons of Austro-Hungarian history). The other materials would be used to clarify how economic, political, and social situations interacted and were mutually-determining. In this case, the Radetzky March would be a source for explanations of the military hierarchy, and for the economics of the far end of the empire.
As the kind of course, however, that exports analytic strategies as well as content areas into the general curricula, as I have described it here, "The Habsburg Myth" uses literary/textual concerns in historical context (a part of the literary curriculum at least since the initial publication of Hayden White's Metahistory), in order to have students practice at least two particular kinds of critical thinking, a set of concerns about textuality that may have originated in literary studies, but which have also animated the vanguard of historiographic thinking. The course teaches students the implications of narratives ([hi]story-telling), texts, and various culturally-based systems of meaning. It shows how cultures represent and articulate themselves, perpetuate their value and power systems by making certain accounts of history seem "natural," despite how constructed they are.
More critically, a course like "The Habsburg Myth" makes a strong case for language-learning as a type of learning central to any humanities curriculum. The "language teacher" or "writing teacher" turns into a resource person in cultural semiotics and culturally-bound norms for communication; she builds bridges between literacy, cultural literacy, and various historical and cultural studies (including the humanities and social sciences) instead of pleading on the single and imprecise note that "writing/language is important." GAC/WAC thus can point the way to a whole new role for the "language arts" in the undergraduate curriculum: for teaching and learning critical writing and thinking about texts in cultural contexts.
SECTION 4: To the Compromise: Elisabeth and Hungary
SECTION 6: Dualism vs. Trialism: Rudolf, Hungary, and Slavic Separatism
Books: Ordered (* = optional, available in excerpt as copy)
*Johnston, William M. The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History 1848-1938. Berkeley: U of California P, 1972.
Morton, Frederic. A Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888/1889. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1979.
---. Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1989.
*Roth, Joseph. The Radetzky March. Trans. Eva Tucker and Geoffrey Dunlop. Woodstock, NY: Overlook P, 1974.
Sked, Alan. The Decline and Fall of the Habsburg Empire 1815-1918. London: Longman, 1989.
Taylor, A.J.P. The Habsburg Monarchy, 1809-1918: A History of the Austrian Empire and Austria-Hungary. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1974 [1948].
Berkhofer, Robert F., Jr. Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1995.
Burke, Peter, ed. New Perspectives on Historical Writing. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991.
*Asprey, Robert B. The Panther's Feast. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1959; Carroll & Graff, 1986.
*Barkeley, Richard. The Road to Mayerling: Life and Death of Crown Prince Rudolph of Austria. London/New York: Macmillan & Co., 1958.
*Brook-Shepherd, Gordon. Archduke of Sarajevo: The Romance and Tragedy of Franz Ferdinand of Austria. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1984.
---. Victims at Sarajevo: The Romance and Tragedy of Franz Ferdinand and Sophie. London: Harvill Press, 1984. (British edition.)
*---. The Last Habsburg [Emperor Charles I]. New York: Weybright and Talley, 1968.
*Crankshaw, Edward. The Fall of the House of Habsburg. New York: Viking, 1963; Penguin, 1983.
*Certeau, Michel de. Heterologies. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.
*Gainham, Sarah. The Habsburg Twilight: Tales from Vienna. New York: Athenaeum, 1979.
*Hamann, Brigitte. The Reluctant Empress. Trans. Ruth Hein. New York: Knopf, 1986.
*Haslip, Joan. The Crown of Mexico: Maximilian and His Empress Carlota. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971.
*---. The Emperor and the Actress: The Love Story of Emperor Franz Josef and Katharina Schratt. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1982.
*---. The Lonely Empress: A Biography of Elizabeth of Austria. Cleveland and New York: World Publishing Co., 1965.
*Jászi, Oscar. The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1971 [1929].
*Judtmann, Fritz. Mayerling: The Facts behind the Legend. Trans. Ewald Osers. London: George G. Harrap & Co., 1971.
*Kraus, Karl. In These Great Times: A Karl Kraus Reader. Ed. Harry Zohn. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990 [1976].
*May, Arthur J. The Hapsburg Monarchy 1867-1914. New York: W.W. Norton, 1951.
*"R.," written in collaboration with Henry Wysham Lanier. He Did Not Die at Meyerling: The Autobiography of "R," A Habsburg Who Becomes an American. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1937.
Roth, Joseph. The Emperor's Tomb. Trans. John Hoare. Woodstock, NY: Overlook P, 1984.
*Sugar, Peter F., and Péter Hanák, eds. A History of Hungary. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990.
Corti, Egon Caesar Count. Maximilian and Charlotte of Mexico. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1928.
Dor, Milo. Die Schüsse von Sarajewo (= Der letzte Sonntag: Bericht über das Attentat von Sarajewo). München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1989 [1982].
Jelavich, Barbara. Modern Austria: Empire and Republic, 1815-1986. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.
Kann, Robert A. A History of the Habsburg Empire 1526-1918. Berkeley: U of California P, 1977.
Magris, Claudio. Danube. Trans. Patrick Creagh. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1989.
Osborne, John. A Patriot for Me. London: Faber & Faber, 1965 [play about Redl].
Palmer, Alan. The Twilight of the Habsburgs: The Life and Times of the Emperor Francis Joseph. New York: Grove P, 1994.
Pauley, Bruce F. The Habsburg Legacy 1867-1939. Malabar, FL: Robert E. Krieger, 1972.
Wheatcroft, Andrew. The Habsburg: Embodying Empire. New York: Viking, 1995.
Johnston, William M. Vienna Vienna: The Golden Age 1815-1914. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1981.
Spiel, Hilde. Vienna's Golden Autumn 1866-1938. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987.
Films
On the days feature-length movies are shown in class, class will begin at 9:00 instead of 9:30; arrive when you can, if you have an earlier class. If you want to see parts you missed, or would like to see them again to use them for your papers, both films are available for individual viewing at the Batts Hall Language Laboratory on the second floor; check them out by title and by my class name, "Habsburg Myth."
Mayerling (1936, d. Anatole Litvak): in French with English subtitles, 90 min.
Colonel Redl (1987, d. István Szabó): in German with English subtitles, 144 min.
Mayerling (MGM, 1969, d. Terence Young): with Omar Sharif and Catherine Deneuve, James Mason and Ava Gardner, in English, 127 minutes.
Habsburg Myth Final: Timed Take-Home
1. Write an essay evaluating Franz Joseph's tenure as the Emperor of Austria-Hungary, from 1848-1916. In this essay, be sure you mention both political incidents and personal incidents; the goal of the essay is to decide, on the whole, if he was a benefit or a curse for his country.
Prepare as long as you want, but write for only one hour after you sit down. Handwritten essays are acceptable, if legible; otherwise try writing into a computer or typewriter (typos accepted).
2. Pick one person from Group A below, and one person from Group B. For each of your choices, write an essay explaining this person's public image, and then showing what political problems are covered up when a biographer or historian stresses the image rather than the historical realities of their lives and times.
Again, prepare as long as you want, but write for only 30 minutes on each of your choices (for a total of 1 hour for this question).
GROUP A
GROUP B
3. It is 1919. Imagine you are a Hungarian who has witnessed the whole of Franz Joseph's reign. Tell your son or daughter what the big political moments were in the history of Hungary between 1848 and World War I. Explain why each event was important, and helped Hungary become an independent sovereign nation after 1918. Here you will be telling a story, but get names and dates right!
Think for as long as you want, but write for only 30 minutes.
1 The classic collection on content-based instruction in the foreign-language curriculum (which includes "language across the curriculum"), see Merle Krueger and Frank Ryan, eds., Language and Content: Discipline- and Content-Based Approaches to Language Study (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Company, 1993). It includes reports from the marquis German across the curriculum programs in the US: Richard Jurasek on the Earlham College Project (85-102); Keith O. Anderson, Wendy Allen, and León Narváez on St. Olaf's College (103-13); Michael F. Metcalf on the Minnesota Project (114-19); John M. Grandin on the University of Rhode Island's International Engineering Program (130-37); and Benjamin W. Palmer on Eastern Michigan University's International Business program (138-47).
2 Elizabeth B. Welles, "From the Editor," ADFL Bulletin 27, 2 (Winter 1996): 1.
3 For a classic set of discussions about WAC, see Anne Herrington and Charles Moran, Writing, Teaching, and Learning in the Disciplines, Research and Scholarship in Composition 1 (New York: Modern Language Association, 1992).
4 In the Spring of 1993. This designation at the University of Texas at Austin means that there is a total of 16 pages of writing activities that must be spaced throughout the semester (15 weeks in length) rather than in a single end-semester writing assignment, so that regular feedback be provided. The type of writing activity is not specified, since it is supposed to reflect the type of writing practiced in the individual disciplines. Each student receiving a bachelor's degree must pass two three-hour (-credit) courses as part of graduation requirements. The courses that fulfill these requirements are approved by a separate college-wide curriculum committee.
5 For complete information on these and other texts used in the course, see the Appendix.
6 A more recent set of essays collected by Peter Burke, New Perspectives on Historical Writing, may be an even better substitute. The essays are more diverse, and could be scattered throughout the semester rather than being clustered. Or if one prefers a detailed, readable, and consistent account, another choice is Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse.
7 For the complete list of films, see the end of the book list in the Appendix. When the course was originally given, the Deneuve/Sharif Mayerling was not available on tape. It now is, opening the option of comparing two film versions of the same biography, as an additional exercise in narrative/historical bias.
8 The parallel case can be made for the inclusion of fiction that I just made for pseudo-history. Roth's novels, for example, present the lived experience of individuals who participated in Habsburg history--people who could have existed, even if they did not. A fiction like Roth's initially seems less challenging of the official narratives than is biography, but both can point to the lacunae in official history, just as a popular culture perspective can. Roth's novels present at least two generations of the same non-German family making a career as part of the official bureaucracies of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Their experiences and interactions point to sociological, economic, and political facts of life that were familiar to the inhabitants of the monarchy's non-German peripheries, but which may seem insignificant to later historians who recognize that the German-Austrians were the hegemonic class. In this way, the reports of real people ("little people") question official history. Moreover, such views below the level of official scrutiny can also lead readers to different avenues of research. Students will understand the fundamental problem of historiography when they realize that totally other kinds of history could be written off a single set of facts. Alternate approaches to history, such as the history of everyday life or the history of technology, all use "just the facts" while actually (and sometimes covertly) arguing various points of view or supporting particular agendas.
Note, too, that for students who can read German, Milo Dor's Schüsse von Sarajevo offers a Serbian perspective on the era, an interesting variant of Roth's more German-Austrian point of view.
The Habsburg Myth--Politics and Family Drama
Syllabus, Spring 1993
Week 1: January 19, 21 Tues: Introduction to the Course Thur: Historiography: de Certeau, Heterologies, "History: Science and Fiction," 99-221 SECTION 1: From Napoleon through Metternich: Sophie and Habsburg Hegemony
Week 2: January 26, 28 Tues: Taylor, Habsburg Monarchy, "The Dynasty," 9-21 "The Peoples," 22-32 "Old Absolutism," 33-46 "Pre-March," 47-56 Sked, Decline, "Metternich and his System," 8-40 Thur: Haslip, Crown of Mexico, Chap. 1,("The Family"), 1-17; Chap. 2 ("Revolution of 1848"), 18-35 Haslip, Lonely Empress, Chap. 2 ("The Only Man in the Hofburg"), 21-30; Chap. 3 ("Supreme Autocrat"), 31-40 SECTION 2: Revolution and Habsburg Restoration: Franz Joseph
Week 3: February 2, 4 Tues: Taylor, Habsburg Monarchy, "Radical Outbreak," 57-70 "Liberal Episode," 71-82 Sked, Decline, "1848: The Causes," 41-88 "Failure of the Revolutions of 1848," 89-136 Sugar, ed., History, Chap. 12 ("Revolution and the War of Independence"), 209-34 Chap. 13 ("Age of Neoabsolutism"), 235-51 Thur: Johnston, Austrian Mind, Chap. 2("Emperor and his Court"), 30-44 Crankshaw, Fall, Chap. 6 ("I Command"),78-98; Chap. 7 ("Heavenly Empress"),99-109 Hamann, Reluctant Empress, Chaps. 1& 2 ("Engagement" and "Wedding"), 3-65 SECTION 3: Habsburg Retrenchment: Maximilian and the Decline of Catholic Empires
Week 4: February 9, 11 Tues: Taylor, Habsburg Monarchy, "New Absolutism," 83-94 "Struggle between Federalism and Centralism," 95-108 "Constitutional Absolutism," 109-22 "End of Old Austria," 123-29 Thur: Sked, Decline, "From the Counter-Revolution to the Compromise," 137-86 Johnston, Austrian Mind, Chap. 3 ("An Empire of Bureaucrats"), 45-75 Roth, Radetzky March, Chaps. 1-3, 1-46 (esp. 1) Week 5: February 16, 18 Tues: Max in Italy Haslip, Crown of Mexico, Chap. 5("Admiral of the Fleet"), 56-74 Chap. 7 ("Princess Charlotte"), 75-85 Chap. 8 ("New Responsibilities"), 86-106 Chap. 9 ("End of Venetia-Lombardy"), 107-21 Thur: Max in Mexico
Haslip, Crown of Mexico, Chaps. 11-14,140-202 Chap. 17 ("Emperor of Mexico"), 242-53 Week 6: February 23, 25 Tues: Max and Juarez Haslip, Crown of Mexico, Chaps. 28-32,414-98 **Paper 1 due
Thur: Taylor, Habsburg Monarchy, "Making of Dualism," 130-40 "Hungary after 1867," 185-95 Sked, Decline, "Dual Monarchy," 187-238 Sugar, ed., History, Chap. 14 ("Hungary and the Dual Monarchy"), 252-66 Week 7: March 2, 4 Tues: Jászi, Dissolution, Part V ("Dynamics of Centrifugal Forces"), 271-375 Crankshaw, Fall, Chap. 10 ("Autocracy"),169-86 Hamann, The Reluctant Empress, Chapter 6 ("Hungary"), 143-82 SECTION 5: Reorientation and Isolation in Europe: Imperial Personal Lives
Thur: Taylor, Habsburg Monarchy, "Liberal Failure," 141-55 "Habsburg Recovery," 156-68 Crankshaw, Fall, Chap. 11 ("Prussia Takes All"), 187-230 Week 8: March 9, 11 Tues: Hamann, The Reluctant Empress, Chaps. 7 ("Burdens of Public Appearance") and Chap. 8 ("Queen Rides to Hounds"), 183-246 Chap. 12 ("Katharina Schratt"), 306-20 Thur: Gainham, Habsburg Twilight, "KatharinaSchratt," 117-41 Haslip, Emperor and the Actress, "Number Nine Gloriettengasse," 119-29 "Empress Relies on Katharina," 183-94 "End of an Epoch," 262-72 **March 13-21, Spring Break
Week 9: March 23, 25 Tues: Taylor, Habsburg Monarchy, "Years of Confusion," 169-84 Johnston, Austrian Mind, Chap. 18 ("Marcionists at Prague"), 265-73 Chap. 24 ("Institutions and Intellectuals inHungary"), 335-56 **Paper One rewrite due (resubmit original, too)
Thur: Jászi, Dissolution, Part VI ("The Danger of Irredenta"), 379-429 May, Hapsburg Monarchy, Chap. 10 ("Royal Hungary"), 227-51 Chap. 11 ("Coloman Tisza"), 252-69 Chap. 12 ("Triple Alliance"), 270-304 Chap. 16 ("Magyar Culture"), 362-85 Chap. 20 ("Hungary Militant"), 439-49 Week 10: March 30, April 1 Tues: Hamann, The Reluctant Empress, Chap. 13 ("Rudolf and Valerie"), 321-49 Gainham, Habsburg Twilight, "Mayerling," 11-64 Judtmann, Mayerling, Chap. 1, "Sinister Silence," 13-36 Thur: Morton, Nervous Splendor, passim Mayerling (movie, d. A. Litvak, 1936) Week 11: April 6, 8 Tues: Mayerling Schlock: The Myth Barkeley, Mayerling, Chaps. 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 73-204 "R," He Did Not Die, Chap. 8, 85-118, & Chap. 21, 358-71 SECTION 7: Rot from within: Redl
Thur: Taylor, Habsburg Monarchy, "Democratic Pretense," 196-213 Gainham, Habsburg Twilight, "Caught in his own Trap--Alfred Redl," 142-60 Asprey, Panther's Feast, 11-14, 180-294 (=Part 2, Chap. 8-Part 3) Morton, Thunder at Twilight, 63-108 Week 12: April 13, 15 Tues: Colonel Redl (movie, d. Istvan Szabo) SECTION 8: Danger in the Balkans: Franz Ferdinand and Slavic Separatism
Thur: Taylor, Habsburg Monarchy, "Solution by Violence," 214-32 "Violence Rewarded," 233-51 Sked, Decline, "Road to Disaster," 239-72 Crankshaw, Fall, Chap. 15 ("Germans, Slavs and Magyars"), 294-320 Week 13: April 20, 22 Tues: Morton, Thunder at Twilight, 1-62, 109-264 (to end, passim, for war outbreak) Sugar, ed., History, Chap. 15 ("Hungary through World War I"), 267-94 Thur: Brook-Shepherd, Victims at Sarajevo, "Sophie," 39-59 "Scandal," 61-83; "The Monarchy," 125-51 "Climbing Up," 183-210 "Two Paths," 211-37 "Two Pistol Shots," 239-52 SECTION 9: Last Act: Emperor Karl
Week 14: April 27, 29 Tues: Taylor, Habsburg Monarchy, "Peoples without the Dynasty," 252-61 Kraus, "The Last Days of Mankind," In These Great Times, Prologue & Act I excerpts, 159-86 Act 3 excerpts, 245-58 **Paper 2 due
Thur: Brook-Shepherd, Last Habsburg, "Crippling Legacy," 28-40 "The Throne," 41-47 "Young Emperor," 48-61 "Schönbrunn," 191-216 "Madeira," 315-30 Week 15: May 4, 6 Tues: Roth, Radetzky March or Emperor's Tomb Thur: Closing Discussion
APPENDIX D. Sample Final Examination
Archduchess Sophie, mother of Franz Joseph
Empress Elisabeth
Charlotte/Carlota of Mexico, wife of Maximilian
The Mistresses: Katharina Schratt and Mary Vetsera (treat as a pair)
Prince Metternich
Crown Prince Rudolf
Colonel Alfred Redl
Archduke Franz Ferdinand
