Workshop “Memories of Empire: Continuities and Discontinuities of the ’s Transnational and Multilingual Legacy” 17-18 September 2018, University of Oslo

Abstracts

Pamela Ballinger (University of Michigan): On the Shores of Habsburg Memory: A Tale of Two Cities.

This talk examines both memories (particularly literary memories) and legacies of the Habsburg Empire in two coastal areas: the Austrian Littoral and Venice (formerly part of the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia). Given the image of the Habsburg Empire as a continental or terrestrial power indelibly associated with a notion of Mitteleuropa, how do memories of the Austrian era resonate in Adriatic/Mediterranean sites? What continuities and differences in practices of remembrance do we see across the upper Adriatic, a sea defined by Predrag Matvejević as one of intimacy? In addressing these questions, I explore to what degree and in what ways self-conscious invocations of the Habsburg past map onto its enduring literary, linguistic, architectonic, and maritime legacies.

The talk focuses on the relationship between Venice and , historic rivals and typically described in the late 19th and 20th century as opposites (decaying versus modern). In the 21st century, by contrast, both cities are often depicted through elegiac modes associated with imperial nostalgia. The Habsburg past is not only visible but dominates the memoryscape in Trieste, in contrast to Venice (where the Habsburgs are remembered for having helped extinguish Venice’s own empire). Yet while Trieste is often twinned in memory to Vienna or , its literary and architectonic scapes also refract the enduring influence of Venice, typifying the “ambivalent” memories of the Habsburg era in its principal cities in general and the complex intersections of Italian nationalism/cultural identity and Mitteleuropean horizons that characterize the Adriatic in particular.

In this presentation, I also consider questions of memory alongside those of legacy, drawing upon concepts such as the tidemark to consider visible and enduring traces of empire which may nonetheless provoke indifference within discourses of public and literary memory.

Pieter M. Judson (European University Institute, Florence): Escaping the Nation

Both depictions and memories of social life in Habsburg Central Europe are commonly refracted through the still hegemonic category of nationhood. In order for historians to gain access to that pre-1918 world (and to imagine social and cultural life in less-national ways), historians and anthropologists have developed situational strategies to analyze how people perceived their place in that world, strategies such as “national indifference.” These strategies sought to relativize the importance of national categories and ideas in daily life experience. Nevertheless, as some of us have acknowledged, strategies like national indifference define themselves in relation to nationalist assumptions, even as they seek to combat them.

1 Workshop “Memories of Empire: Continuities and Discontinuities of the Habsburg Monarchy’s Transnational and Multilingual Legacy” 17-18 September 2018, University of Oslo

Our ability to recapture that earlier world demands constant reference to the experience of individuals and local communities as a way to undermine the tyranny of national groupism, even as we often use the categories offered us by groupism to do so. One way to do this is to approach linguistic diversity more as a socially produced phenomenon (the product of specific kinds of social demands) rather than as an indicator of individual or group identification. Another way is to recognize the ongoing power of regional identifications to complement, counter, or complicate the authority of the national narrative. Yet a third is to examine the many ways in which local people engaged on their own terms with state institutions. It may then become clearer that entities like the Habsburg Monarchy (or perhaps the EU) never in fact functioned as top-down institutions as their nationalist detractors claim.

Marija Mandić (Humboldt University) & Stijn Vervaet (UiO): The Language Ideology of the Bunyevs in the Dual Monarchy: A Case Study of the Journals Bunjevačke i šokačke novine, Bunjevac, and Neven

Since the democratic changes in and Hungary, Bunyev activists have fought for the recognition of the Bunyev national community and its language, an Ikavian variety of the Štokavian dialect that served as the basis for standard Serbo-Croatian. On the one hand, the present Bunyev language ideology is motivated by the proliferation of four national standards – Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian – out of Serbo-Croatian. On the other hand, however, Bunyev seems to present a somewhat different case in the former Serbo-Croatian speaking area, because there is no state in which the Bunyevs constitute the majority. Furthermore, the Bunyev language ideology establishes a continuity with the Habsburg Monarchy, when the Bunyev language was recognized (e.g. in the census of 1910) and used in public domains.

Drawing on contemporary theories of language ideology and critical discourse analysis, we will examine the development and internal tensions of linguistic ideology in the Bunyev journals Bunjevačke i šokačke novine (1870), Bunjevac (1882), and Neven (1884-1941) published in Kalocsa, Sombor and Baja/Subotica respectively. What views of language and language use are presented? What traces of multilingualism can we discover by re-reading the Bunyev press of that time (e.g. contact with Hungarian, German; multilingualism of editors/readership; views and debates about multilingualism)? How is the Bunyev language presented (as separate from Croatian or Serbian?)? And, most importantly, what is the nature of the language demands that 19th c. Bunyev activists put towards the Hungarian Kingdom?

With this analysis we hope to understand better the nature of language ideology debates in the Habsburg Monarchy and to illustrate how practices of multilingualism of that time continue to inform and shape the sociolinguistic situation and debates about minority rights in Serbia, , and Hungary today.

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Krisztina Rácz (UiO): Learning the Language, Learning the Nation

In my presentation, I will describe the initial premises of my prospective research on second language teaching and learning in Vojvodina and Transylvania. My project will include a synchronic exploration of ethno-linguistic belonging and interethnic communication in the former Habsburg Monarchy and a diachronic perspective from 1918 until today. My main research aim is to unpack the “hidden curriculum” of the instruction of the state language and the minority language in Vojvodina and Transylvania: to examine the construction and representation of national communities and the nature of the boundaries between them, and to get a better understanding of continuities and ruptures in language policy, interethnic relations and language education in the two regions.

I will explore second language acquisition both top-down and bottom-up. In terms of the former, I will tackle methods of teaching and analyze textbooks and documents of language and education policy related to second language learning, such as supranational and national charters and guidelines, laws and regulations, curricula and textbooks, talk with policy- makers, curriculum-makers, publishers and authors of textbooks, professors of future teachers of Serbian, Hungarian and Romanian as second language and teachers, etc. The bottom-up end of second language teaching will be dealing with past and present practices of the second language acquisition and look into how individuals receive and perceive the instruction of the second language.

I will draw on literature on ethnic identification, interactions and minority-majority relations in multicultural contexts; on studies about the role of language and education in nation- building processes and on European multilingualism; as well as on works specifically dealing with Serbian-Hungarian and Romanian-Hungarian bilingualism in Vojvodina and Transylvania respectively.

Tamara Scheer (University of Vienna): The Unintended Babel-Identity: Language Diversity and the Habsburg Imperial Army

When reading newspapers, parliamentary debates, diaries, letters, political pamphlets and administrative sources between 1867 and 1918 one might come to the conclusion that it was the language diversity (and multilingualism) in the context of the nationality conflict which majorly destabilized the Habsburg monarchy. Post war reflections too upheld critics on the Habsburg language policy. All sources indicate that languages had a huge impact - usually negatively - on the most important multiethnic institution in the late Habsburg monarchy: the joint army. Before 1914, almost no day passed without a public discussion somewhere in the monarchy on language issues. It was criticized that the soldiers' constitutional right to use their language during service was not properly carried out. Most critic was based on the nationalistic conviction that this mismanagement violated the most important cultural property of a nation/nationality: its language. Therefore, it seems likely that the bulk of army members (mostly ordinary soldiers) could have never positively identified with the army. In fact, after six years of research on the Habsburg army's language diversity, I argue that it was exactly the contrary.

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I will discuss sources from before 1914, the wartime and post war, to show that it was exactly the language diversity which offered a factor to identify with (probably even stronger than the state, the monarch, or the uniform, the so-called emperor's coat). Even in cases where Habsburg citizens criticized the language diversity of the army – this behavior indicates that exactly this facet has become the most important characteristic of this monarchy-wide operating institution. Diversity and language confusion became the major momentum for creating a esprit de corps, a joint identity, although this was never intended by army authorities, nor ever brought up in the public discussion before 1918. The same is the case for the numerous publications on the Habsburg army which were issued following the monarchy's dissolution in 1918. Regardless of the language, in most publications the Army's language diversity was given plenty of space which indicates that it was still seen as its most important characteristic.

Johan Schimanski (UiO) & Ulrike Spring (UiO): Arctic Southerners: Ethnonyms, Languages and Qualities in the Reception of the Austro-Hungarian Polar Expedition in the 1870s and Today

While the Austro-Hungarian Polar Expedition of 1872-1874 has often been eclipsed by the expeditions of Franklin, Nansen, Amundsen and Scott within the global imagination, it was widely reported in the newspapers and popular press of the time and has later been the subject of numerous accounts, polar histories, scientific publications, paintings, novels etc. The expedition thus constitutes a major discursive event, lying at the epicentre of an extended media complex spreading out across history and through different forms, genres and planes of discourse. Scenes, characters and narratives have been repeated in different contexts and are thus subject to what Foucault has called “material repeatability”: the ability of the same material signifier to appear in different discourses, often signifying quite different things in each case.

The negotiation of cultural identities is an important element in the discourse of Arctic expeditions, as it is in many other types of discourse. The Austro-Hungarian Polar Expedition media complex involves very many cultural identities, along with identities of class, gender, etc. This mirrors the multicultural make-up of both the expedition and of the producers of discourse on the expedition. Here we concentrate on aspects of one part of the complicated structure of cultural identities, namely that involving the seamen, who are various described as coming mostly from a geographical space stretching over part of the NE coast of the Adriatic, including Trieste, the Istrian peninsula, the islands of Kvarner Bay, and the Dalmatian coast and islands. On the return of the expedition in 1874, their identities were articulated through ethnonyms, languages and the ascription of specific qualities; we argue that the medial discourse of the time can be related to negotiations of national identity and changes in language policies within the Austro-Hungarian double monarchy. In the latter half of the 20th Century and the early 21st Century, quite disparate notions of the seamen’s identities have developed in representations of the expedition in book and web media, again within the context of transformed perceptions of national identity.

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