Multicultural Cities of the Habsburg Empire, 1880–1914: Imagined Communities and Conflictual Encounters

Catherine Horel has analyzed societal, ethnic, and cultural diversity in the Habsburg Monarchy's last decades, focusing on twelve cities to counter disproportionate attention to larger cities. The book explores everyday life, associations, schools, economy, and municipal politics, avoiding idealization or exaggeration of conflicts. Modernization brought vitality, emulation, and conflict, with old structures dissolving and mobility, education, associative life, and cultural offerings growing.

Format: Hardback
Length: 574 pages
Publication date: 30 September 2023
Publisher: Central European University Press

Catherine Horel has conducted a comprehensive comparative analysis of societal, ethnic, and cultural diversity in the final decades of the Habsburg Monarchy, encompassing twelve cities: Arad, Bratislava, Brno, Chernivtsi, Lviv, Oradea, Rijeka, Sarajevo, Subotica, Timișoara, Trieste, and Zagreb. By deliberately selecting these cities, the author seeks to address the disproportionate focus on the largest cities within the empire. The book delves into the everyday lives of city inhabitants, including associations, schools, the economy, and municipal politics, while avoiding idealization of the monarchy as a utopian paradise of harmonious multiculturalism. At the same time, it refrains from exaggerating conflicts. The author asserts that the Habsburg cities were vibrant spaces characterized by the coexistence of multiple models, fostering vitality, emulation, and conflict. The modernization period witnessed the dissolution of old structures, accompanied by mobility, educational progress, the flourishing of associative life, and a continuous expansion of cultural offerings.

Weight: 974g
Dimension: 160 x 239 x 143 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9789633862896