Fredrick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis, Orientalism, and the Austrian Militärgrenze Author(S): William O'reilly Source: Journal of Austrian-American History, Vol

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This content downloaded from 131.111.184.102 on Fri, 11 Jan 2019 12:15:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Fredrick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis, Orientalism, and the Austrian Militärgrenze William O’Reilly University of Cambridge

Abstract | Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” is seen as seminal in signaling a new chapter in United States history, at one and the same time seeking to define the process of Americanization while also championing a new American identity, both distinct and distinctive. Turner’s “frontier thesis” was presented little over ten years after another frontier, the Habsburg Militärgrenze, or military frontier, was dissolved after over 350 years of existence. Yet the dissolution of the Habsburg frontier did not result in any such claims of significance for the longest military frontier in Europe. What did appear was a body of commentary and literature influenced by Romanticism and orientalism. This article reflects on the nineteenth- century popular and literary understanding of the Militärgrenze and calls for further investigation into the significance of the Habsburg frontier in central European history. Keywords | Frederick Jackson Turner, frontier thesis, frontiers, borderlands, borders, Austria, Habsburg, military frontier, Militärgrenze, orientalism

Introduction

In his 1929 work on the dissolution of the Habsburg monarchy, Oszkár Jászi rejected arguments claiming the monarchy was wrenched apart by the vic- torious Allied powers in 1918, instead claiming that its inherent national and

Journal of Austrian-American History, Vol. 2, No. 1, 2018 This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY-NC-ND

This content downloaded from 131.111.184.102 on Fri, 11 Jan 2019 12:15:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 2 | Journal of Austrian-American History ethnic diversity had slowly dissolved it from within for centuries.1 Though not without its merits, Jászi’s deterministic perspective has long dogged histories of both the Habsburg monarchy and the neighboring Ottoman Empire: a linear trajectory of decline, disintegration, and the eventual triumph of nation-states. Though recent historiography has systematically challenged such narratives, they remain a looming presence, which historical overviews of the monarchy continue to use as their frames of reference.2 One important way to challenge the determinist paradigm is for historians to shift their focus away from Vienna and instead look to how the Habsburg and later Austrian polity was produced and then re-produced at the territorial peripheries. By emphasizing the inherent paucity of political boundaries, more recent scholarship in the area of “borderlands studies” and the resulting historiography emerging from that field has drawn attention to the running battle that sovereign states and empires were forced to engage in at their boundaries throughout the early modern period and into the modern, in the drive to claim and delimit their territory. It is in this context that a closer examination of two late nineteenth-century events—the dissolution of the Habsburg military frontier in southeastern Europe between 1871 and 1881, and Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History”—is warranted. The post-Ausgleich Austro-Hungarian Empire (1867) and the postbellum United States (1865) were connected in a number of ways, most particularly in that some 3.7 million emigrants from the Austro-Hungarian Empire arrived in the United States between 1848 and 1920. Both polities also strove to define and redefine their frontiers in the pre-1914 period.3 In their own way, both the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the United States sought to define a national identity by considering the significance of the frontier—the United States, as presented by Frederick Jackson Turner, holding that American identity was formed in the frontier, which was a hotbed of nationalism, and Austria-Hungary by dissolving the longest military frontier in Europe, where it enjoyed the greatest levels of traditional dynastic loyalism and where nationalism was for most of the nineteenth century near absent. Frontiers and borderlands needed to

1. Oszkár Jászi, The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929), 6–13. 2. See Charles W. Ingrao, The Habsburg Monarchy, 1618–1815, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Daniel Goffman,The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Pieter M. Judson, The Habsburg Empire: A New History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). 3. Duško Vrban, “Borders as an Interdisciplinary Problem: Territoriality and Identity – Past and Present,” Pravni Vjesnik God 34 BR., no. 1 (2018): 9–50, see especially 16–17. On the word “frontier,” see Lucien Fèbvre, “Frontière: Le mot et la notion,” in Lucien Fèbvre, Pour une histoire à part entière (Paris: Sevpen, 1962), 11–24.

This content downloaded from 131.111.184.102 on Fri, 11 Jan 2019 12:15:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Turner’s Frontier and the Austrian Militärgrenze | 3 give way to borders, to fine lines on fine maps that confirmedpolitical authority both over land and over the people inhabiting it. Nowhere else in the late nineteenth century did the frontier mean as much as it did in North America and central Europe: two federations recovering from civil war and unrest, seeking to exert complete control over their territories.4 Studying the last decades of the Habsburg military frontier, the Militärgrenze, in the context of Frederick Jackson Turner’s contemporary frontier thesis can help free the historian from older teleological straightjackets by drawing attention to the diversity of political structures that existed within and between the Habsburg monarchy, and later the Austrian and Austro-Hungarian Empires, and how life on the frontier, at the borderland, consistently helped produce a discourse of identity politics. This in turn allows for a more sympathetic, accurate, and nuanced perspective that moves away from older debates over the successes and failures of “state-formation” from the center. Borderlands historiography ought to be deployed with caution, however, as the Habsburg military frontier is unlike the vast majority of other “borderlands” studied by earlier scholars.5 Although there were earlier discussions of the concept, borderlands first became a topic of significant inquiry among historians and social scientists after Frederick Jackson Turner read his paper “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” at the meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago on July 12, 1893, during the World’s Columbian Exposition.6

4. The idea of the Habsburg land as a federation lived on in the American political imagination; see Géza Jeszenszky, “The Idea of a Danubian Federation in American Thought during World War I,” Acta Historica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, 34, no. 2/3 (1988): 271–78. 5. See, among others, Halil Inalcik, “Ottoman Methods of Conquest,” Studia Islamica 2 (1954): 104–29, for the first discussion of “Ottoman borderlands”; Michiel Baud and Willem van Schendel, “Towards a Comparative History of Borderlands,” Journal of World History 8 (1997): 211–42, for a discussion of “quiet borderlands”; Kemal Karpat and Robert W. Zens, Ottoman Borderlands: Issues, Personalities and Political Changes (Madison: Center of Turkish Studies, University of Wisconsin, 2003); William O’Reilly, “Border, Buffer and Bulwark: The Historiography of the Military Frontier, 1521–1881,” inFrontiers and the Writing of History: 1500–1850, ed. Steven G. Ellis and Raingard Eßer (Hannover-Latzen: Wehrhahn Verlag, 2006), 244. 6. Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt, 1920), 1–38. For earlier consider- ation of the topic, see, inter alia, Larry E. Ivers, British Drums on the Southern Frontier: The Military Colonization of Georgia, 1733–1749 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1974); Douglas E. Leach, The Northern Colonial Frontier, 1607–1763 (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1966); Kevin Collins, “An Earlier Frontier Thesis: Simms as an Intellectual Precursors to Frederick Jackson Turner,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 42,

This content downloaded from 131.111.184.102 on Fri, 11 Jan 2019 12:15:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 4 | Journal of Austrian-American History

For Turner, the American frontier constituted a “zone” at the outermost limit of white American settler expansion. The frontier is conceived of as a line, focus- ing on the differences between the two opposing sides, of their opposition or enmity; it acts as a “consolidating agent” on the society behind it, reducing its diversity and creating what Turner called a “nationalizing tendency.”7

Fredrick Jackson Turner’s “Frontier Thesis” Already as a student at the University of Wisconsin, the young Turner was exposed to Darwinian and Spencerian social philosophy and was impressed by the ideas of certain German philosophers, including Johann Gottfried von Herder’s dictum of social growth and Friedrich List’s concept of stages.8 Turner had also been introduced to the writings of the Italian economist Achille Loria, who espoused a deterministic economic interpretation of history, holding that man’s relationship to the amount of “free land” available “reveals luminously the mystery of universal history.”9 In an age of Romanticism and of orientalist gaze at the close of the nineteenth century, Turner sought a way of distinguish- ing American identity from the European migrants by whom it was constituted. He found that American identity in the frontier—a barely habitable tract of land between “civilization” and the vast expanse of empty land to the west. The determination and resourcefulness demanded by the frontier’s harsh conditions overcame the differences between the various groups of Europeans set- tlers, integrating them through common experience into America and making them “Americans.” After Tocqueville, many nineteenth-century European vis- itors to the United States reinforced this frontier thesis, and had done so even earlier in the century. English naval officer Frederick Marryat’s 1839A Diary no. 1 (Spring 2009): 33–58; William H. McNeill, The Great Frontier: Freedom and Hierarchy in Modern Times (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983); Wilbur R. Jacobs, “National Frontiers, Great World Frontiers, and the Shadow of Frederick Jackson Turner,” The International History Review 7, no. 2 (May 1985): 261–70; William M. Tuttle Jr., “Forerunners of Frederick Jackson Turner: Nineteenth-Century British Conservatives and the Frontier Thesis,”Agricultural History 4, no. 3 (July 1967): 219–27; Lee Benson, “The Historical Background of Turner’s Frontier Essay,” Agricultural History 25, no. 2 (April 1951): 59–82, especially 78–79. For more on Turner, see James D. Bennett, Frederick Jackson Turner (Boston: Twayne, 1975); Wilbur R. Jacobs, The Historical World of Frederick Jackson Turner: With Selections from His Correspondences (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968). 7. Turner, “Frontier in American History,” 2, 7, 14. 8. Martin Ridge, “The Life of an Idea: The Significance of Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis,”Montana: The Magazine of Western History 41, no. 1 (Winter 1991): 2–13. 9. Lee Benson, Turner and Beard: American Historical Writing Reconsidered (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960), 39–41; Achille Loria, Analisi della propietà capitalista (Turin: Fratelli Bocca, 1889).

This content downloaded from 131.111.184.102 on Fri, 11 Jan 2019 12:15:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Turner’s Frontier and the Austrian Militärgrenze | 5 in America remarked that, unique among nations, America “commenced with unbounded territory—a vast field for ambition and enterprize, that has acted as a safety-valve to carry off the excess of disappointed ambition, which, like steam, is continually generating.”10 The Earl of Shaftesbury remarked in a very similar way, in 1852, that Providence had given to the United States “territory . . . nearly boundless, and so close as to furnish a ready safety-valve to all their discon- tented spirits.”11 Understandably, Turner’s frontier thesis has, and most especially since the centenary of the delivery of his address, come in for legitimate criticism, not least for its abject failure to discuss Native Americans and Native American land rights, and for its orientalist and orientalizing bent.12 And while white men featured prominently, women were absent: “English-speaking white men were the stars of his story; Indians, Hispanics, French Canadians, and Asians were at best supporting actors and at worst invisible. Nearly as invisible were women, of all ethnicities.”13 Nevertheless, following Turner’s initial intervention and the swell of debate and literature that has emerged in support of, and as a challenge to, that thesis, variation emerged in conceptualization of the “frontier” between European and American historical writing, with each producing understandings that helped explain the “frontier” based on their own continent’s historical experience.14 While American historians maintained an analytical frame directly derived from Turner, European writers were more likely to emphasize the internal homogeneity of a given community—for which “nation” could be substituted—and the consequent necessity of its production of “frontiers” as clear “borders” between itself and the next similar social organism, a perspective better suited to providing teleological explanations of the

10. Frederick Marryat, A Diary in America, with Remarks on Its Institutions (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1839), 246–48. 11. Edwin Hodder, The Life and Work of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, K. G. (London: Cassell, 1888), vol. 2, 383–84, diary entry for July 20, 1852. 12. Steven Crum, “Making Indians Disappear: A Native American Historian’s View Regarding the Treatment of Indians in American History,” Tribal College: Journal of American Indian Higher Education 4, no. 3 (Winter 1993): 28–35; Thomas C. McClintock, “The Turner Thesis: After Ninety Years it Still ‘Lives On,’”The Journal of the American West 25 (July 1986): 75–82. 13. Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), 21. Turner never mentions women in his essay. Martin Ridge, “Frederick Jackson Turner and His Ghost: The Writing of Western History,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 101, no. 1 (April 1991): 74. See also Alan Taylor’s review of Richard Kluger’s Seizing Destiny: How America Grew from Sea to Shining Sea (New York: Knopf, 2007) in “The Old Frontiers,” The New Republic, May 6, 2008. 14. Daniel Power, “Frontiers: Terms, Concepts and the Historians of Mediaeval and Early Modern Europe,” in Frontiers in Question: Eurasian Borderlands, 700–1700, ed. Daniel Power and Naomi Standen (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), 2–3.

This content downloaded from 131.111.184.102 on Fri, 11 Jan 2019 12:15:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 6 | Journal of Austrian-American History origins of a continent of multiple nation-states.15 As a result, the historical field has come to inherit two distinct understandings of the frontier since Turner introduced the concept. Other writers working on the border in North America, like Oscar Martinez, argue that residents of contiguous borderlands become interconnected as “active participants in transnational economic and social systems.” Their open environment “exposes borderlanders to foreign values, ideas, customs, traditions, institutions, tastes, and behavior.” For that reason, “people of the border regions are more likely to live in heterogeneous environments because of greater ethnic mixing and more extensive migration.” They may also experience intergroup tensions and ethnic strife, especially when their respective states try to eliminate diversity by force. Residents of the borderland live and function in several different worlds; “versatility is required along with the abil- ity to be multilingual and multicultural.” Tolerance of difference is typically high in the borderland; at the same time, feelings of difference may exacerbate borderlanders’ already ambiguous identity.16 The paradigm highlights the border’s connective functions, the similarities between people on either side who live close to the border, the interactions among them, and the social diversity those interactions generate. In her work, Mary Louise Pratt defines the contact zone as a social space “where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power.”17 This idea of the frontier as “space” was held to be an intrinsic aspect of American life: “I take space to be the central fact to man born in America”; “Denn ‘space’ ist die zentrale Kategorie der Anschauung in Amerika.”18 Pratt contrasts this with the concept of a “national culture” operating within political and linguistic communities. “In a contact perspective, borders are places at the center of

15. See Owen Lattimore, “The Frontier in History,” inStudies in Frontier History: Collected Papers, 1928–1958 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 469–91; Anssi Paasi, “Boundaries as Social Processes: Territoriality in the World of Flows,” Geopolitics 3, no. 1 (2007): 69–88; Hastings Donnan and Thomas M. Wilson, eds.,Borders: Frontiers of Identity, Nation and State (Oxford: Berg, 1999); Chris Rumford, “Introduction: Theorizing borders,” European Journal of Social Theory 9, no. 2 (2006): 155–69. 16. Oscar J. Martinez, Border People: Life and Society in the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994), 10, 14, 17, 18–19, 20. 17. Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession (1991), 34. See also Cengiz Günay and Nina Witjes, eds.,Border Politics: Defining Spaces of Governance and Forms of Transgressions (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2017). 18. Charles Olson, Call Me Ishmael (San Francisco: City Lights, 1947), 11; Gerhard Hoffmann,Raum, Situation, erzählte Wirklichkeit: Poetologische und historische Studien zum englischen und amerikanischen Roman (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1978), 642. See also “American Space,” in Joshua Parker, Tales of Berlin in American Literature up to the 21st Century (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 28–39.

This content downloaded from 131.111.184.102 on Fri, 11 Jan 2019 12:15:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Turner’s Frontier and the Austrian Militärgrenze | 7 concern while homogenous centers move to the margins.”19 Pratt’s contact zone is the cultural expression of a wider concept, that of the borderland, which encompasses political, economic, and social relations as well as cultural ones. And when considering southeast Europe, Mario Apostolov applied the idea more broadly to the “civilizational frontier” between Christian-Muslim societies that operated historically and even today.20 Apostolov advanced the concept of the “zone” to challenge Samuel P. Huntington’s “civilizational walls,” the idea behind Huntington’s renowned thesis on the “clash of Civilizations,” the perpetual war between Christendom and Islam that Apostolov called “a fiction.” The borderland paradigm then provides a way to go beyond Huntington’s reductionism.21 In the nineteenth-century United States, the frontier was also held aloft as the edge of civilization, the place where civilized society confronted the wilderness, the savage, and the unknown.22 What lay on the other side of the frontier was conceptualized in predominately negative terms, as the absence of the things that made civilized life good, or even possible: government, agriculture, cities, literacy, the rule of law.23 It is for these reasons that we might reflect on nineteenth-century American interest in the Austrian and Austro-Hungarian Empire and most especially in the Habsburg military frontier in the decades leading up to Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis and consider how both states came to “orientalize” their frontier lands, making them spaces of lawless- ness, exhibiting them as crude and unruly, as naïve and “in process,” and how this found expression in the literature of the time.24 Just as “we ought to speak

19. Mary Louise Pratt, “Criticism in the Contact Zone: Decentering Community and Nation,” in Critical Theory, Cultural Politics and Latin American Narrative, ed. Steven Bell and Leonard Orr, (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), 88. 20. Mario Apostolov, The Christian-Muslim Frontier: A Zone of Contact, Conflict or Cooperation (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004). 21. Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations,”Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993, 22–49. 22. Niles M. Hansen, The Border Economy: Regional Development in the Southwest (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991). 23. Christian Windler, “Grenzen vor Ort,” Rechtsgeschichte 1 (2002): 122–45; Waltraud Heindl and Edith Saurer, eds., Grenze und Staat: Passwesen, Staatsbürgerschaft, Heimatrecht und Fremdgesetzgebung in der österreichischen Monarchie 1750–1867 (Vienna: Böhlau, 2000). 24. “In a sense, ‘America as process’ is the paradigm of every social organism conscious of its evolutionary nature, and ‘America the paradigm’ can be true to itself only by further, incessant Americanization”; Tiziano Bonazzi, “Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis and the Self-Consciousness of America,” Journal of American Studies 27, no. 2 (August 1993): 154. See also Claire Gantet, “Die äußeren Grenzen des Heiligen Römischen Reichs: Wahrnehmungen und Repräsentationen in der zweiten Hälfte des 17. Jahrhunderts,” inDie Grenze als Raum, Erfahrung und Konstruktion: Deutschland, Frankreich und Polen vom 17.

This content downloaded from 131.111.184.102 on Fri, 11 Jan 2019 12:15:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 8 | Journal of Austrian-American History of ‘Americanization’ as the true description of what America is” in the process of becoming in the late nineteenth century, we can reflect on how no such process of “Austrianization” was taking place in Habsburg Europe, where another frontier was being dissolved. If, in a sense, “America is process,” then why too was Austria not process as it forged a new chapter in late nineteenth-century central Europe? The borderland paradigm encourages questions about the border’s integra- tive functions, moving on from a reductive view of the Militärgrenze as nothing more than a frontier between Christian and Muslim societies, the historic dividing line separating two groups conceived of as opposites. The influence of cultural history and the new imperial history in the final decades of the twentieth century had a profound impact on the conceptualization of frontier or borderlands historiography. With their introduction of theories derived from Gramsci, Foucault, and Bourdieu into the historical lexicon, these movements sought to break down a priori assumptions regarding absolute state and imperial power and the view that “national” identity was somehow inherent within a particular group,25 emphasizing how limited state and imperial power actually was and how porous national identities were and continue to be.26 “Negotiation” has become the watchword of such histories; C. A. Bayly and others have demonstrated how state and imperial bureaucracies were grafted onto existing systems, the policies and group identities they produced conse- quently being the product of continuous interactions.27 Thus, borderlands have assumed a new historiographical significance as the most obvious locations for these complex negotiations over political power and culture: being the locations where central power was often weakest de facto—because of the distance of the periphery from the center and the presence of alternative sociopolitical forces across the political demarcation that continued to exert a considerable

bis zum 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Etienne François, Jörg Seifarth, and Bernhard Struck (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2007), 53–76. 25. Peter Burke, What Is Cultural History? (Oxford: Polity Press, 2004), 54–99; Peter Weichhart, “Grenzen, Territorien und Identitäten,” in Grenzen: Theoretische, konzeptionelle und praxisbezogene Fragestellungen zu Grenzen und deren Überschreitungen, ed. Martin Heintel, Robert Musil, and Norbert Weixlbaumer (Wiesbaden: Springer VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2018), 43–63. 26. Gabriel Popsecu, “The Conflicting Logics of Cross-Border Reterritorialization: Geopolitics of Euroregions in Eastern Europe,” Political Geography 27, no. 4 (2008): 431; Erella Grassiani and Michiel Swinkels, “Introduction: Engaging with Borders,” Etnofoor 26, no. 1 (2014): 7–12; Henk Van Houtum, “The Geopolitics of Borders and Boundaries,” Geopolitics 10 (2005): 672–79. 27. Christopher A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780-1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

This content downloaded from 131.111.184.102 on Fri, 11 Jan 2019 12:15:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Turner’s Frontier and the Austrian Militärgrenze | 9 influence—yet often sought to project the greatest level of de jure legitimacy to assert its right to govern those territories.28 In light of such limitations of mediaeval and early modern governmental power, historians have come to emphasize that the borderland is a far more effective and relevant historical tool for dealing with the demarcations of political power in those periods than the border itself,29 and it is one that has relevance thereafter. Hence, as an evolution of Turner’s original understanding, the borderland is now conceived as a “zone” of mutual interaction and cultural and political creation.30 The transformation of “borderlands” into “borders” and the coterminous rise of the nation-state as a cultural and political category was thus not predetermined, nor was it the “design” of one individual or inherently homogeneous group; instead, it was the cumulative product of a complex set of negotiations between center and periphery and across boundary demarcations.31

TheMilitärgrenze From 1766 until 1881, the Austro-Hungarian Militärgrenze was economically, socially, and militarily the most important frontier in Europe.32 Stretching some

28. One interesting study in this area is Josef Koestlbauer, “The Struggle for Control of the Peripheries: Comparing Imperial Borderlands in 18th-Century America,” in From the Habsburgs to Central Europe: Europa Orientalis 6, ed. Arnold Suppan and Richard Lein (Vienna: LIT Verlag, 2008), 77–99. 29. Günter Vogler, “Borders and Boundaries in Early Modern Europe: Problems and Possibilities,” in Ellis and Eßer, Frontiers and the Writing of History, 38. 30. Leonard Thompson and Howard Lamar, “Comparative Frontier History,” inThe Frontier in History: North America and Southern Africa Compared, ed. Leonard Thompson and Howard Lamar (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 7. 31. See Nathan J. Citino, “The Global Frontier: Comparative History and the Frontier- Borderlands Approach in American Foreign Relations,” Diplomatic History 25, no. 4 (Fall 2001): 677–93; Silviu Stoian, “The Establishment and Demarcation of Borders in Europe, in the Early Modern Age,” Research and Science Today Supplement 2 (2014): 6–15; Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History,” American Historical Review 104, no. 3 (1999): 814-41; and Thompson and Lamar,Frontier in History, 7–12; Jorge Cañizares–Esguerra, “Entangled Histories: Borderland Historiographies in New Clothes?” American Historical Review (June 2007): 787–99; Pekka Hämäläinen and Samuel Truett, “On Borderlands,” The Journal of American History 98 (2011): 338–61; David J. Weber, “Turner, the Boltonians, and the Borderlands,” The American Historical Review 91, no. 1 (February 1986): 66–81. 32. The “Ukrainian Line” is often seen as a comparable frontier area, but there is a general historical consensus that it was less effective in preventing military attacks or incur- sions of epidemics. For a comparison of the military characteristics of both frontier zones, see Alan Ferguson, “Russian Landmilitia and the Austrian Militärgrenze,” Südostdeutsche

This content downloaded from 131.111.184.102 on Fri, 11 Jan 2019 12:15:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 10 | Journal of Austrian-American History nineteen hundred kilometers from Senj (Italian Segna; German Zengg) on the Adriatic to Cluj-Napoca (Hungarian Kolozsvár; German Klausenburg) in Transylvania, the military frontier between the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires was vital to the survival of Austria, and of Europe as a whole, against the relentless threats of both Turkish invasion and the bubonic plague.33 The Militärgrenze was, however, more than just a thin strip of land separating the two great powerhouses of central and southeastern Europe.34 Instead, the 33,422 square kilometers of land that comprised the military frontier metamorphosed into a complex region with different law codes, privileges, and customary duties when compared with other areas in the empire. Essentially a military institution from its creation in the early 1520s, the area never shed its overwhelmingly military character and was administered almost exclusively by the Hofkriegsrat rather than by civil authority.35 Indeed, so great was the militarization of the frontier zone that by 1799, the local authorities claimed to be able to provide one hundred thousand troops out of a population of just over eight hundred thousand.36 However, to suggest that the Militärgrenze was solely an institution of military defense is to overlook the other crucial roles that this region played in the Austrian state. Not only did the border serve as one of the most effective quarantine zones in Europe during the eighteenth and earlly nineteenth centuries, it also provided an increasingly large settlement area for thousands

Forschungen (1954): 138–58. For a balanced assessment of defence against disease, see Daniel Panzac, Quarantines et Lazarets. L’Europe et la peste d’Orient (XVIIe –XXe siècles) (Aix-en- Provence: Édisud, 1986), 87, 88. For a general review of borders in Europe, see Eberhard Bort, ed., Borders and Borderlands in Europe (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1998). 33. Carl Göllner, Die Siebenbürgische Militärgrenze: Ein Beitrag zur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 1762–1851. Buchreihe der Südostdeutschen Historischen Kommission 28 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1974), 14, 30–34; Kurt Wessely, Die österreichische Militärgrenze: Der deutsche Beitrag zur Verteidigung des Abendlandes gegen die Türken. Göttinger Arbeitskreis Schriftenreihe 43 (Kitzingen am Main: Holzner Verlag, 1954), 14–15. 34. Milovan Gavazzi, “Die kulturgeographische Gliederung Südosteuropas,” Suödost Forschungen 15 (1956): 5–21; Vilim Matić and Ivan Stražemanac, “Utvrđivanje granica poč- etkom 18. stoljeća,” Glasnik Arhiva Slavonije i Baranje 5 (1999): 241–56; Peter Haslinger, ed., Grenze im Kopf: Beiträge zur Geschichte der Grenze in Ostmitteleuropa. Wiener Osteuropa- Studien 11 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1999); Colin Heywood, “The Frontier in Ottoman History: Old Ideas and new Myths,” in Power and Standen, Frontiers in Question, 228–50. 35. TheHofkriegsrat , in English the “Aulic War Council” or the “Imperial War Council,” was established in 1556 in Vienna and was directly subordinated to the emperor. 36. Ekkehard Völkl, “Die Militärgrenze und ‘Statuta Valachorum,’” in Die Österreichische Militärgrenze: Geschichte und Auswirkungen, ed. Gerhard Ernst (Regensburg: Verlag Lassleben, 1982), 22; O’Reilly, “Border, Buffer and Bulwark,” 238.

This content downloaded from 131.111.184.102 on Fri, 11 Jan 2019 12:15:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Turner’s Frontier and the Austrian Militärgrenze | 11 of Christian refugees fleeing from Ottoman lands.37 The ethniccomposition of the border areas reflected the number of migrants that had settled there: in the three main frontier regions in 1851 there were 1.25 million inhabitants, of which 83.5% were Slavs, 12% Romanians, and only 4% Germans.38 The historiography of theMilitärgrenze has frequently highlighted the ethnic difference and relative freedom from the control of the Habsburg crown that the “Grenzer” or frontier soldiers enjoyed.39 The “racialization” of theMilitärgrenze was something that has its roots in the late nineteenth- and twentieth-century German narratives of the Habsburg border regions: Rupert von Schumacher’s 1942 work Des Reiches Hofzaun (The empire’s courtly fence) is a typically pan-German Nationalistic piece that praises “die Leistung der Deutschen Führung” (the achievement of German leadership) and emphasizes the concept of the Germans as “Kulturträger,” claiming that “behind every decisive moment and in every decisive place there were always German names.”40 Most studies of the frontier avoid such rampant nationalism, but the majority do have a tendency to overemphasize the military aspect of the frontier society while neither paying great attention to the social, cultural, and economic impact of the border on the whole area of central Europe nor recognizing the other motives for which the Habsburgs sought to use the border.41 Such an excessive focus on

37. For refugees, see Raimund Kaindl, “Die K. K. Militärgrenze – zur Einführung in Ihre Geschichte,” in Heeresgeschichtliches Museum, Die K. K. Militärgrenze: Beiträge zu ihrer Geschichte (Vienna: Österreichischer Bundesverlag für Unterricht, Wissenschaft und Kunst, 1973), 20–21, and also Völkl, “Militärgrenze und ‘Statuta Valachorum,’”17–19. 38. The Slavic population was mostly Croat (51% of total population) or Serb (23%). From Kaindl, “Die K. K. Militärgrenze,” 20. 39. See Karl Kaser, Freier, Bauer und Soldat: Die Militarisierung der agrarischen Gesellschaft an der kroatisch-slawonischen Militärgrenze (1535–1881) (Vienna: Böhlau, 1997); Jakob Amstadt, “Die k. k. Militärgrenze 1522–1881 (mit einer Gesamtbibliographie)” (PhD diss., Wurzburg, 1969), xii; Göllner, Siebenbürgische Militärgrenze, 8; Kaser describes elements of the identity as “pränational” in Kaser, Freier, Bauer und Soldat, 599; Walker Connor, “When Is a Nation?” Ethnic and Racial Studies 13, no. 1 (1990): 92–103; Gerasimos Augustinos, ed., The National Idea in Eastern Europe: The Politics of Ethnic and Civic Community (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1996); O’Reilly, “Border, Buffer and Bulwark, 229. 40. “Kulturträger,” literally someone or something that transmits cultural ideals, especially from generation to generation, is a term of art that was popular in National Socialist Germany. “Immer wird man gerade an den entscheidenden Stellen und in den entscheidenden Zeiten auf den Detuschen Namen stoßen, der den Dingen an der Konfin seine Prägung gibt”; in Rupert von Schumacher, Des Reiches Hofzaun: Geschichte der Deutschen Militärgrenze im Südosten (Darmstadt: L. Kichler, 1942), 289. An example of this type of literature is Hugo Kerchnawe, Die alte K. K. Militärgrenze: Ein Schutzwall Europas (Vienna: Wiener Verlag, 1943). 41. For example, Johann H. Schwicker, Geschichte der österreichischen Militärgrenze (Vienna: Brochasta, 1883); Erik Roth, Die planmäßig angelegten Siedlungen im

This content downloaded from 131.111.184.102 on Fri, 11 Jan 2019 12:15:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 12 | Journal of Austrian-American History the “military and administrative aspects of the Military Border” has been true of the few English language works that have dominated British and American scholarship on the area in the postwar era.42 However, since the 1970s, general studies into the disappearance of plague in Europe have reemphasized the importance of the contagionist and anticontagionist debates that dominated European medical debate in the nineteenth century, and these have given rise to a number of important studies on the role of the Militärgrenze as a “Pestfront” or “Cordon Sanitaire.” 43 In order to fully understand the role of the Militärgrenze and its importance in both European history and in a global understanding of frontier societies, not only is it essential to uncover why the Militärgrenze was created, but it is also equally important to ask why it was dissolved. Frederick Jackson Turner’s concept of the American frontier shared much in common with the Militärgrenze. The notion of a frontier as something that defines a nationality rather than a simple line of demarcation is something Turner thought was essential: “First we note that the frontier promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people,” he wrote.44 In many senses the Militärgrenze fits neatly into the Jackson Turner frontier thesis: the military frontier was a region that was quite isolated from the rest of the empire and had its own unique laws, tendencies, and duties, much like Turner saw the “isolation of the [frontier] region” as increasing “its peculiarly American tendencies.”45 The importance of Hauskommunion [Zadruga] in the

Deutsch-Banater Militärgrenzbezirk 1765–1721 (Munich: Oldenbourg 1988); Rudolf Gräf, “Die wirtschaftliche und soziale Auswirkung der Organisierung der Banater Militärgrenze im ländlichen und urbanen Raum,” Romanian Journal of Population Studies 5 (2011): 37; Günther Probszt-Ohstorff,Die Windisch-Kroatische Militärgrenze und Ihre Vorläufer (Graz: Historischen Vereines für Steiermark, 1967). 42. Most notably Gunther Rothernberg, The Austrian Military Border in Croatia, 1522–1747 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1960). For criticism of the book’s overly administrative and military focus, see the review by Peter Sugar in Slavic Review 20, no. 3 (October 1961): 527. 43. Erna Lesky, “Die Österreichische Pestfront an der k. k. Militärgrenze,” Saeculum 8 (1995): 82–106; Gunther Rothenberg, “The Austrian Sanitary Cordon and the Control of the Bubonic Plague: 1710–1871,” The Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 28 (1973): 15–23. For the different perspectives on the disappearance of plague in Europe, see Andrew Appleby, “The Disappearance of Plague: A Continuing Puzzle,” The Economic History Review 33 (1980): 161–73. For an alternative viewpoint, see Paul Slack, “The Disappearance of Plague: An Alternative View,” The Economic History Review 34 (1981): 469–76; Daniel Panzac, La Peste dans L’Empire Ottoman 1700–1850 (Leuven: Éditions Peeters, 1985); Panzac, Quarantines et Lazarets: L’Europe et la peste d’Orient (XVIIe –XXe siècles) (Aix-en-Provence: Édisud, 1986); Jean-Noël Biraben, Les hommes et le peste en France et dans les pays européens et mediterranéens (Paris: Mouton, 1975), vol. I. 44. Turner, “Frontier in American History,” 22. 45. Ibid., 6.

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Militärgrenze was a concept introduced by the Walachian and Serbian refugees to the area, and it became commonplace throughout the border regions.46 The unique position of the Hauskommunion and the key role it played in society along the Militärgrenze is an example of Turner’s “individualism” along the American frontier, whereby “complex society is precipitated by the wilderness into a kind of primitive organisation based on family.”47 Yet Turner’s frontier individualism was a triumph of Protestant ethic and virtue, standing in sharp contrast to the Catholic and Orthodox collectivist society along the military frontier that, by the time of dissolution of the Militärgrenze, was seen as a challenge to urban and industrial development.48 Divisions within the Militärgrenze still remained well defined, however, and the Orthodox and Catholic divisions were “not superseded by common regimental service” while the village, family, and church remained decisive for the identity of the frontier residents.49 In this sense the Militärgrenze did not act as the “melting pot” in the way that Turner viewed the American frontier, but equally the Habsburg military frontier was more than just an arbitrary political border between Ottoman and Habsburg subjects, as it had its own distinct structure, administration, and roles.50 The most important idea that can be gained from Turner’s thesis is the concept that the frontier must be treated as a distinct social, political, and cultural space. At the time of its dissolution in the decade between 1871 and 1881, the Militärgrenze between the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman Empires was around 1,750 kilometers in length and consisted of several frontiers, namely the Croatian, Hungarian, Slovenian, and Transylvanian frontiers.51 The dissolution of the military frontier took place over several decades: the process of demilitarization began in 1869, but it was not until August 1881 that Vienna formally ceded political control and the territory was divided between

46. For the importance of the “zadruga” in central Europe and its origins, see Maria Todorova, Balkan Family Structure and the European Pattern: Demographic Developments in Ottoman Bulgaria (Washington, DC: American University Press, 1993). See also Amstadt, “Die K. K. Militärgrenze,” xi. 47. Turner, “Frontier in American History,” 22. 48. Stewart R. Clegg, “Max Weber and Contemporary Sociology of Organizations,” in Organizing Modernity: New Weberian Perspectives on Work, Organization and Society, ed. Larry J. Ray and Michael Reed (London: Routledge, 1994), 46–80. 49. This point is made by several writers, including Kaser,Freier, Bauer und Soldat. 50. Steven G. Ellis and Raingard Eßer, “Early Modern Frontiers in Comparative Context,” in Ellis and Eßer, Frontiers and the Writing of History, 16; Jean Nouzille, Histoire de frontières: L’Autriche et l’empire ottoman (Paris: Berg, 1991). 51. Xenia Havadi, “Die österreichische Militärgrenze: Staatliche Kontrolle der Grenze im absolutischen Zeitalter,” Geographia napocensis 3, no. 2 (2009): 72–75.

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Hungary and Croatia-Slavonia.52 Even after the territory had ceased to exist, the Militärgrenze continued to fascinate both contemporary Austrian commentators and the international community. Before the reasons for this interest in the frontier can be examined, it is necessary to unpack the implications of the term “the frontier” in this context.

Interest in the Military Frontier Already in the eighteenth century, Europeans and Americans expressed interest in the Militärgrenze and its residents. The best explanation for the interest in the military frontier derives from Maria Todorova’s concept of “Balkanism” as proposed in her book Imagining the Balkans.53 Balkanism was built on Edward Said’s concept of orientalism in order to claim that a fictitious sociocultural understanding of the Balkans was “imagined” by people in western Europe.54 The space was considered a site of transition between East and West, Europe and Asia, Christian and Muslim, civilization and barbarism.55 What is more, this process was a symbiotic one in which the inhabitants of southeast and central Europe had come to internalize their status as a Balkan “other” and contrib- uted to its persistence. As Wendy Bracewell put it, “much recent research has encouraged us to think of . . . the inhabitants of the east of Europe as the passive objects of Western discursive construction—more mapped than mapping . . . the invention of Europe and of its constituent parts was hardly one sided,” much as the American West was in nineteenth-century fiction.56 When it came to perceptions of the military frontier, this Balkanist discursive construction— by both those who lived in its vicinity, in the West and in North America—was

52. Catherine Horel, Soldaten zwischen Nationalen Fronten: Die Auflösung der Militärgrenze und die Entwicklung der königlich-ungarischen Landwehr (Honved) in Kroatien-Slawonien 1868–1914. Studien zur Geschichte der österreichisch-ungarischen Monarchie 31 (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2009), 22–25. Croatia-Slavonia was created in 1868, following the creation of the dual monarchy in 1867. 53. Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 3–20. 54. Ibid., 57. 55. See ibid., or Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilisation on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994); Barbara Segaert and Raymond Detrez, Europe and the Historical Legacies in the Balkans (Brussels: PIE Peter Lang, 2008), 9. 56. Wendy Bracewell, “The Limits of Europe in East European Travel Writing,” inUnder Eastern Eyes: A Comparative Introduction to East European Travel Writing in Europe, ed. Wendy Bracewell and Alex Drake-Francis (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008), 62–63; Ridge, “Frederick Jackson Turner and His Ghost,” 65–76.

This content downloaded from 131.111.184.102 on Fri, 11 Jan 2019 12:15:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Turner’s Frontier and the Austrian Militärgrenze | 15 exacerbated by the unique nature of its political, legal, and social organization and by its position at the periphery of the Habsburg territories. The military frontier was perceived as an entirely unique space of chaos and disorder at the very fringes of Europe and “understood” civilization, and the huge amount of interest in it is thus unsurprising. The notion of the military frontier as both a geographical and civilizational fringe is attested to by the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. “I ought bid adieu to my friends as if I was going to mount a breach,” she said, as she was about to cross into the military frontier in January 1717, “at least, if I am to believe the information of the people here, who denounce all sorts of terrors to me.”57 In line with Bracewell’s conception of a symbiotic Balkanism, both Lady Montagu and locals from the early eighteenth century presented the military frontier as a place simultaneously forbiddingly unknown and desirably exotic, hostile and romantic. The space of the frontier itself was characterized as “desert woods,” and Philadelphia’s The Evening Telegraph later claimed that “in the Croatian and Slavonian ‘military frontier’ the woods are still very thick only a few miles from the coast.”58 This imagery, creating a type of literary frontier, is also a thematic element of the narrative of Frederick Jackson Turner’s “Significance of the Frontier in American History.”59 For the Balkanist imagination, the frontier was a wooded space dominated not by people but by nature; a dark, impenetrable forest in both a literal and figurative sense; just as it was for Turner, who described “the seeds of American democracy” as having “first germinated in the communal life of the primitive forests of Germany.”60 The space of the frontier was seen as one of complete social disorder. Lady Montagu’s “forest” was described as “the common refuge of thieves, who rob fifty in a company.”61 The association of the region’s social practices with crim- inality is a common theme of her letters, in which she writes of the residents of the frontier as “rather plunderers than soldiers; having no pay, and being obliged to furnish their own arms and horses.”62 This perception was common to those from the West writing about the military frontier, though writers in

57. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Lord Wharncliffe ed.,The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1837), 270. 58. Ibid., 281; “Foreign Items,” The Evening Telegraph (Philadelphia), May 10, 1869, http:// chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83025925/1869-05-10/ed-1/seq-8. 59. William Huber, “The Literary Frontier – Frederick Jackson Turner’s ‘Frontier Thesis’ as a Thematic Element of Narrative,”Antipodes 13, no. 1 (June 1999): 25–29, especially 26. 60. Thomas Bender, “Historians, the Nation, and the Plenitude of Narratives,” in Rethinking American History in a Global Age, ed. Thomas Bender (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 3–4. 61. Montagu, Letters and Works, 281. 62. Ibid., 282.

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London were a little more precise in detailing the social system imparted to the region. “The whole of this district is governed by martial law,” wrote a political economist in a letter to The Times, “and the inhabitants are bound to a most oppressive routine of military duty, and land cannot be bought or sold but under special conditions.”63 The same letter claimed that the specific rights and responsibilities given to the people of the military frontier “kept Hungary back- wards for centuries.”64 Similarly, The Times’ correspondent in Vienna declared that the Grenzer (the frontier militia and soldiers) were “little more than military slaves” in April 1861, having earlier in April 1852 claimed “the Grenzer is at once a peasant and a soldier, and his feelings and actions appear to depend in some measure on the kind of dress he may chance to wear.”65 The frontier militia and soldiers enjoyed many privileges in lieu of formal pay, which simply went unremarked on by western commentators, lest it nuance the narrative of the Croat or Serb “warrior-serf” they were so interested in.66 Fantastical inter- pretations of life on the military frontier were not only facilitated but encouraged by a lack of available information about life there. The New York Herald went so far as to claim that “the communistic system, which visionaries in Paris and Berlin have mediated has indeed been carried into execution, for many generations . . . in the military frontier.”67 The article’s author was attempting to make the point that communism as advocated by Marx and his contemporaries had rendered “this district indisputably the most wretched in all the Austrian dominions” via “military despotism.”68 There was no attempt to understand the intricacies of frontier life, and The London Examiner’s argument amounted to little more than a lazy straw man. Western perceptions of the Austrian military frontier were not particularly accurate or coherent but simply posited that it was a place of “backwardness” and “emptiness.” Perhaps the epitome of this attitude was John Wilkinson’s description of the frontier. Wilkinson wrote that the peasantry “are left in entire ignorance of any system of agriculture, and know as little about the advantages or improvement of land, as their ancestors in the

63. A Political Economist, “Our Recent Commercial Treaties with Foreign Powers,” Letter to The Times (London), August 6, 1841, 5. 64. Ibid., 5. 65. “Austria—From Our Own Correspondent,” The Times (London), April 2, 1861, 8; “Austria—From Our Own Correspondent,” The Times (London), December 6, 1853, 7. 66. István Deák, Beyond Nationalism: A Social and Political History of the Habsburg Officer Corps 1848–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 26. 67. Quoted in The New York Herald, June 19, 1849, http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/ lccn/sn83030313/1849-06-19/ed-1/seq-3/. 68. Ibid.

This content downloaded from 131.111.184.102 on Fri, 11 Jan 2019 12:15:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Turner’s Frontier and the Austrian Militärgrenze | 17 days of medieval darkness.”69 As well as being agriculturally undeveloped, for Wilkinson this was a place unexploited by industry: “Iron too, though found in Dalmatia, is imported from Turkey; and the people appear to be indiffer- ent to the productions, and capabilities of their country,” he wrote.70 He noted with a condescending tone how there were no mills “in the strong streams of this country, except those for grinding corn” and that Dalmatia did not have any “manufactures really deserving that name.”71 The military frontier in the Western imagination was a preindustrial region frozen in time, stuck in an agrarian and military past that was readily romanticized and criticized in the same moment. The peculiarities of its social system and incongruity with western European social structures rendered it a site of great interest in both Britain and America. The Balkanism that typified the Western interest in the military frontier often employed a lexis that was explicitly imperial in tone. John Wilkinson, for example, juxtaposed the “darkness” of the peasant population with the enlightened ideals of the Austrian government and their “encouragement of schools” for which, he said, it “deserves credit.”72 A book on commerce in Europe published in London referred to the military frontier as a series of “agricultural and grazing colonies upon the system of military settlements,” and The Examiner called the German population of the military frontier “colonists” who had to face “almost unparalleled barbarity.”73 The military frontier was referred to as a “collection of different tribes organised under a peculiar system” by the Washington news- paper The Republic in 1849, the word “tribe” suggesting that the writer saw the frontier as somehow archaic, oriental, or both.74 Similarly, The Times’ Vienna correspondent condemned the frontier system as “neither in keeping with the march of civilisation nor with the necessities of the people” and argued that “it would certainly be good policy on the part of the Imperial government to place the Borderers on the same level with the other inhabitants of the empire.”75 The Habsburg monarchy was already seen, in part, as less modern than its French

69. John Wilkinson, Dalmatia and Montenegro: With a Journey to Mostar in Herzegovina, and Remarks on the Slavonic Nations (London: J. Murray, 1848), 215. 70. Ibid., 217. 71. Ibid., 216–17. 72. Ibid., 215. 73. John MacGregor, Commercial Tariffs and Regulations of the Several States of Europe and America (London: Charles Whiting, 1841), 1:29; Leigh Hunt, Albany William Fonblanque, John Forster, “The Men Who Take Part in the Hungarian War,”The Examiner (London), June 16, 1849, 371. 74. The Republic (Washington, DC), June 15, 1849, http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/ lccn/sn82014434/1849-06-15/ed-1/seq-1/. 75. “Austria – From Our Own Correspondent,” The Times (London), March 13, 1860, 10.

This content downloaded from 131.111.184.102 on Fri, 11 Jan 2019 12:15:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 18 | Journal of Austrian-American History and British counterparts by Western observers, and the military frontier was seen as an example of both the failure and ineptitude of Habsburg imperial ambition.76 Having a territory that resembled a colonial periphery adjacent to the metropolis—and worse one seen as “backward” and “uncivilized”—only furthered this sentiment. This imperialist lexicon was also applied, often in racial terms, as a means of Balkanizing the inhabitants of the military frontier themselves. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu can be accused of a kind of orientalism in the extreme when she referred to the men of the frontiers as looking “rather like vagabond gypsies, or stout beggars,” called them a “race of creatures” and claimed that “these fellows, letting their hair and beard grow inviolate, make exactly the figure of the Indian Bramins.”77 Interestingly, this is not the only comparison made between the occupants of the military frontier and the subjects of the British Empire in India: one writer in The New York Herald referred to the frontier populations as an “Indo-Germanic race,” choosing to highlight both their subalternity and intrinsically European identity.78 The New York Herald similarly claimed that “the inhabitants of Serbia are distinguished for bodily strength and beauty; ardent, poetical minds, peculiar manners and customs,” calling them “one of the most gifted and promising branches of the Slave[sic] race.”79 In all of these instances, the language employed was one both of praise and colonial subjec- tion, of a writer trying to emphasize frontier identity as both European and Asiatic, colonizer and colonized. This orientalizing attitude was also present within the Austrian military, which were responsible for administering the frontier. In his account of life in the Habsburg military frontier, published in Philadelphia in 1850, an officer referred to frontier residents as brave, but also as “wild fellows” and “subalterns” who were “nothing but sinew and muscle,” and remarked on the tendency of frontier women to join skirmishes with the Ottomans, calling them a “corps of Amazons.”80 It was not merely the space of the frontier that was seen as exotic, dangerous and barbaric, but its inhabitants too. Observers saw the residents of the borderland and the military frontier’s occupants both as outsiders to European civilization and its most important

76. Stefan Berger and Alexei Miller, eds., Nationalizing Empires (Budapest: Central European Press, 2015), 12. 77. Montagu, Letters and Works, 270–72. 78. The New York Herald, August 31, 1875, http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/ sn83030313/1875-08-31/ed-1/seq-3. 79. Ibid. 80. Baron W., “Letter from an Austrian Officer in Hungary, 1848–1849,” inScenes of the Civil War in Hungary, in 1848 and 1849 with Personal Adventures of an Austrian Officer, trans. Frederic Shoberl (Philadelphia: E. H. Butler, 1850), 24–38.

This content downloaded from 131.111.184.102 on Fri, 11 Jan 2019 12:15:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Turner’s Frontier and the Austrian Militärgrenze | 19 vanguard against Ottoman incursion. It is this contradictory position that required that these people be both othered and romanticized in a way that appeared classically orientalist. There was also a more pragmatic reason than can be offered through a reading of orientalism and Balkanism for interest in the military frontier. It represented something of a political experiment, in whose outcome the rest of Europe and the United States were greatly interested. At various points in its history the United States had its own military frontiers: first with indige- nous Americans to the west and with Canada to the north, then with Mexico to the south. An interest in the Habsburg military frontier was driven both by its similarity to the situation in the United States, and by what the United States thought it could learn from the Habsburg example. The British, too, were interested in the military frontier for this reason. In November 1856, The Times reported that “the British government is endeavouring to obtain a complete insight into the military frontier system of Austria; and it is said a similar institution is to be introduced at the Cape.”81 British observers saw the military frontier not merely as a colonial enterprise but as a colonial enterprise that could be mimicked in southern Africa and elsewhere in empire. Interest in the Habsburg military frontier was thus inspired by the unique nature of its place within Europe in a spatial and political sense. Its place right at the political, social, military, and geographical peripheries of the continent inspired a strand of Balkanism specific to the military frontier through which it could be orientalized. It was at once Germanic, Slavic, Turkic, and even Indian. Its people were barbarous, but also the defenders of Christian civilization. It was territorially European, but culturally foreign. If people in western Europe and the United States were guilty of Balkanism in their attitudes to southern Europe, as Maria Todorova has claimed, they were guilty of Balkanism in the extreme when it came to their attitudes to the military frontier. It was romanticized, exoticized, and demonized almost to the point of farce by writers who had never once visited it. The orientalist undertone to much of what was written about the military frontier—particularly in the nineteenth century—often cascaded into an outlook that was outright imperialist in nature. It is unsurprising, therefore, that the military frontier became a site of extensive enquiry by writers from elsewhere; their essentialized and imagined understanding of the region, though fictitious, resonated with a public greatly interested in the “oriental.”

81. “Foreign Items,” The Times (London), November 8, 1856.

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The Frontier Myth and Orientalism While it is true that western Europe sought to define itself in opposition to the East by “inventing” the latter, the Balkans also underwent a process of “Orientalization,” coming to be viewed as a transitory zone between the rational, modern West and the backward and exotic East.82 Wendy Bracewell traces this development back to the eighteenth century, in which a new vision of an “enlightened” Europe emerged.83 This fomented an exclusive form of Eurocentrism, revising the universal ideas of enlightened civilization in spatial and hierarchical terms, placing the majority of eastern and central European somewhere between the two poles of West and East. This is exemplified by a schoolbook produced by Georg Christian Raff in 1778. The engravings within Naturgeschichte für Kinder communicate a certain hierarchical order of world cultures to the reader, containing representations of non-western European peoples that epitomize the aforementioned “spectrum of Europeanness.”84 Various writers at various times speculated on the possibility of reforming central and eastern European regions in line with Western criteria but, for the most part, the West jealously defended its status as the pinnacle of rational modernity.85 The process of “Orientalization” provides a key explanation for why the military frontier attracted such interest in the nineteenth century. It was the transitory space par excellence, becoming a site of the exotic within the bounds of Europe itself. Hence, the military frontier became an object of difference against which a “domestic” Austrian identity could be forged. Although historical consensus has concluded that the Habsburg dynasty was not a colonial power in the conventional sense, contemporary depictions of the relationship between the Germanophone population and various “subject peoples” frequently imply assumptions of ethnic and cultural superiority, and that in the manner of a colonial power. Such assumptions clearly underpinned Karl Emil Franzos’s writings on the province of Bukovina. Throughout his writing, Franzos continually justified the Habsburg presence in the East as a necessary vehicle for cultural uplift, leading the historian Valentina Glajar to label his travelogues “colonizing narratives.”86 In a similar vein, Moritz Csáky argues that daily

82. Todorova, Imagining the Balkans. 83. Bracewell, “Limits of Europe,” 92. 84. Dagnoslaw Demski, Ildikó Sz. Kristóf, and Kamila Baraniecka-Olszewska, eds., Competing Eyes: Visual Encounters with Alterity in Central and Eastern Europe (Budapest: L’Harmattan, 2013), 48. 85. Neval Berber, Unveiling Bosnia-Herzegovina in British Travel Literature (1844–1912) (Pisa: Edizioni Press, 2010), especially chapter 3. 86. Valentina Glajar, “From Halb-Asien to Europe: Contrasting Representations of Austrian Bukovina,” Modern Austrian Literature 34, no. 1/2 (2001): 16.

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contact with different ethnicities and cultures in the Austrian Empire’s cities led to a compensatory desire to exaggerate distinctions.87 This is illustrated by the case of Gregor von Rezzori, whose “Portrait of Kassandra” presents an insur- mountable gulf between the “superior” values of the Habsburg Empire and the local population of Bukovina.88 These examples demonstrate that those at the center of the Austrian Empire imagined the population of the borderland to be outside of modernity, invoking the absence of the conventional pillars of civilization such as the nation-state, literacy, and the rule of law. Austrian assessments of the borderland were not always so self-confident. Robert Lemon challenges the assumptions of scholars such as J. P. Stern and Ritchie Robertson that literary depictions of relationships between Austro- Germans and various “subject peoples” (in this case, the Czechs) are automatic representations of cultural hegemony.89 In his examination of Robert Musil’s Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß (The Confusion of Count Törleß) from 1906, Lemon demonstrates that Musil’s depictions actually undermine the colonial narrative of Austro-German supremacy through critical and ironic depictions of the Austrian protagonist’s struggles for self-identity. Similarly, Franz Kafka’s In der Strafkolonie (In the Penal Colony) from 1919 explores the fragil- ity of Western claims to civilization by subverting the traditional opposition between the civilized colonizer and the primitive native.90 However, regardless of whether the frontier was used to promote or denigrate Austrian imperialism, the overall point is that the sense of “otherness” with which the military frontier and its inhabitants were regarded was used by literary scholars as a site for the exploration of what it meant to be Austrian in an age of national separatism. This does not, however, necessarily explain the international attention that the Austrian military frontier attracted in the late nineteenth century. In the case of the United States, the attachment to the concept of the frontier hinged on North America’s own historical experience. The myth of the frontier was central to the American self-image, “as the American West was imagined as a space in which physical mobility, social mobility and political liberty con- verged.”91 However, by the late nineteenth century, the process of “American Progress” (as depicted, for example, by the painter John Gast in 1872) could no

87. Robert Lemon, “Imperial Mystique and Empiricist Mysticism: Inner Colonialism and Exoticism in Musil’s Törleß,” Modern Austrian Literature 42, no. 1 (2009): 1. 88. Glajar, “From Halb-Asien to Europe,” 27. 89. Lemon, “Imperial Mystique and Empiricist Mysticism,” 3. 90. Robert Lemon, “Cargo Colonies and Penal Cults: Ethnology and Ethnocentrism in Kafka’s ‘In der Strafkolonie,’”Colloquia Germanica 40, no. 3/4 (2007): 280. 91. Tara Zahra, “Travel Agents on Trial: Policing Mobility in East Central Europe, 1889–1989,” Past & Present 223, no. 1 (May 2014): 5.

This content downloaded from 131.111.184.102 on Fri, 11 Jan 2019 12:15:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 22 | Journal of Austrian-American History longer be replicated: the frontier had all but disappeared from the continent, the realization of which served as the provocation for Turner to pen his essay. The process of “American Progress” motivated a desire to seize on the concept of the frontier in other contexts. In other words, the American identification with the Austrian military frontier was an acknowledgement of both societies being engaged in parallel processes of civilizing, where frontiersmen (“cow- boys”) were replaced with citizens. Extracts from the contemporary American press suggests that American sensibilities were particularly drawn to the (imagined) hypermasculinity of frontier soldiers. For example, in August 1870, the New York Herald lamented the imminent dissolution of the Austrian military frontier, stating,

All these men are well-armed and splendid fighters. Under the command of the Ban of Croatia, Yelitchich [Jelacić], the men of the frontier saved Vienna from the Hungarians in 1848. Now, Austria has given them up to Hungary, who is trying to arrange their affairs without their voice or consent.92

American interest in frontier life on the Austrian military frontier was tied up in the romanticization of their own past, hence the outrage at Austria’s decision to dismiss the demands of the inhabitants of the Militärgrenze. However, while expressing admiration for the military prowess of the population of the frontier, American journalists continued to orientalize those residents. For example, in May 1877, the New Orleans Daily Democrat simultaneously praised and exoticized Austria’s frontiersmen. On the one hand, the author describes the population as “really a finely formed race of men, physically” and yet attributes this to their adoption of the Turkish custom of “purchasing wives.”93 This encapsulates the inherent contradiction at the heart of the American fascination with the frontier, at once insisting on familiarity and commonality with neighboring regions and yet falling back on the trope of the noble savage. These growing concerns with, and interest in, the frontier found greatest voice in a body of literature in the late nineteenth century. Kafka and other writers in the monarchy did not seek to locate the orient at a far remove, in distant Asia or Africa, but rather drew on the exoticized frontier within Europe, to the east and to the south of Vienna. “He was drudging uselessly in a foreign country, a full exotic beard poorly concealing the face,” wrote Franz Kafka at the start of his 1912 quasi-autobiographical short story Das Urteil, “having no real ties with the local colony of his compatriots and almost no social dealings with

92. New York Herald, August 24, 1870. 93. The New Orleans Daily Democrat, May 28, 1877.

This content downloaded from 131.111.184.102 on Fri, 11 Jan 2019 12:15:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Turner’s Frontier and the Austrian Militärgrenze | 23 native families.”94 In just a few lines, Kafka spoke to a number of the themes with which post-Ausgleich Austrian society had become increasingly obsessed, namely, orientalism, colonialism, national identity, and a sense of “otherness.” The colonial tropes used in this opening description were remarkably similar to those being used across Europe, not least in Britain by the likes of Rudyard Kipling or A. E. W. Mason; at one point in Kim, for instance, Kipling delineated an Afghan man as exotic on account of “his beard dyed scarlet with lime.”95 However, while the likes of Kim, The Man Who Would Be King, and The Four Feathers were all almost exclusively centered on imperial settings in Asia and Africa, the emigrant described at the beginning of Das Urteil lives in Europe, more specifically St. Petersburg.96 The notion of a Habsburg intra-European colonial project, then, is certainly not limited to fiction. Johannes Feichtinger, Stephan Steiner, Katherine Verdery, and others argue that ideas of innere Kolonisierung or “internal colonialism” explain Habsburg imperial expansion in Europe.97 Other debates have proliferated since the 1970s about the applicability of postcolonial thought in a wider sense: whether “internal colonialism” can be meaningfully compared to other European overseas empires; whether the Habsburg administration’s conviction in German cultural and linguistic superiority translated into a “civilising mission”; or indeed the extent to which the Habsburgs were “col- onisers without colonies.”98 However, even critics of the use of postcolonial

94. Franz Kafka, “The Judgement,” inThe Metamorphosis, In The Penal Colony and Other Stories, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (London: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 119. 95. Rudyard Kipling, Kim (London: Wordsworth Classics, 1999), 29. 96. See Magdalena Żakowska, “The Bear and His Protégés: Life in the Balkan Kettle According to the German-Language Caricatures of the Belle Époque,” in Demski, Sz. Kristóf, and Baraniecka-Olszewska, Competing Eyes, 304–29. For a thesis on Kafka’s own view of the frontier, see Sander L. Gilman, “A Dream of Jewishness on the Frontier: Kafka’s Tumor and ‘A Country Doctor,’” in Jewish Frontiers (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 129–47. 97. Johannes Feichtinger, “Habsburg (Post)-Colonial: Anmerkungen zur Inneren Kolonisierung in Zentraleuropa,” in Habsburg Postcolonial: Machtstrukturen und Kollektives Gespräch, ed. Johannes Feichtinger, Ursula Prutsch, and Moritz Csáky (Innsbruck: Studien Verlag, 2003), 19; Katherine Verdery, “Internal Colonialism in Austria-Hungary,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 2, no. 3 (1979): 378–99; Stephan Steiner, “Austria’s Penal Colonies,” in Transnational Penal Colonies: New Perspectives on Discipline, Punishment and Desistance (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2015), 115–26; Stephan Steiner, “‘An Austrian Cayenne’: Convict Labour and Deportation in the Habsburg Empire of the Early Modern Period,” Global Convict Labour: Studies in Global Social History, 19 (2015), 126–43; Stephan Steiner, Rückkehr Unerwünscht: Deportationen in der Habsburgermonarchie der Frühen Neuzeit und ihr europäischer Kontext (Vienna: Böhlau, 2014). 98. Valentina Glajar, The German Legacy in East-Central Europe as Recorded in Recent German Language Literature (London: Camden House, 2004), 16.

This content downloaded from 131.111.184.102 on Fri, 11 Jan 2019 12:15:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 24 | Journal of Austrian-American History theory to describe the Habsburg Empire agree that there was a relationship between the Germanophone populations and its “subject peoples” that implied “assumptions of ethnic and cultural superiority in the manner of a colonial p ow e r.” 99 Clemens Ruthner argued that the Habsburg Empire was not a “colonial” power, but claiming nonetheless it did have a kulturelle Bilderwelten or “cultural imagination” that resembled those of other European colonial powers.100 In other words, Habsburg practices, which historians sometimes interpret as colonial, were driven by an orientalist imagination grounded in a European experience. The orientalist views of Habsburg literature were often fixated with notions of “periphery” and “metropole,” and how the literal spatial ordering of a region correlated with ideas of “civilisation” and “barbarism.” Take, for example, Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Der Kaiser von China spricht. The use of China as a satir- ical metaphor for the dual monarchy was a common motif of late nineteenth- century Austrian writing, employed by the likes of Kafka, Ludwig Börne, and Franz Grillparzer.101 As Robert Lemon has demonstrated, Hofmannsthal used the Chinese emperor as an allegory for Franz Joseph, in an attempt to show the “despotism, dishonesty, backwardness and torpor of Europe’s ‘middle kingdom.’”102 The emperor is one clearly in the grip of an intense paranoia when it comes to his relative control of his realm; when he speaks in the poem, it is to list his ownership of everything alive in his dominions, using the possessive pronoun “meine,” and to emphasize how the kingdom “live[s] in [his] orbit.”103 For Hofmannsthal, Franz Joseph’s conception of his own power was one that radiated from metropole to periphery, from Vienna to the outer reaches of the Habsburg lands. As Lemon has pointed out, the persistent references to “walls” in Der Kaiser is likely a reference to the 1857 Ringstrasse development in Vienna, the physical manifestation of Franz Joseph’s mistrust of those living beyond the frontier, in his outer kingdom, or even in the outer reaches of his own cap- ital.104 The course of the poem traces a journey from imperial metropole to periphery, so that by its end the emperor’s paranoia of the unknown reaches of his empire, of “dark walls, dense forests and the faces of many peoples,” is at

99. Lemon, “Imperial Mystique and Empiricist Mysticism,” 1. 100. Clemens Ruthner, “K. u. K. Kolonialismus als Befund, Befindlichkeit und Metapher: Versuch einer weiteren Klärung,” in Feichtinger, Prutsch, and Csáky, Habsburg Postcolonial, 111. 101. Weiyan Meng, Kafka und China (Innsbruck: Studien Verlag, 1986), 17; Robert Lemon, Imperial Messages: Orientalism as Self-Critique in the Habsburg Fin de Siècle (London: Camden House, 2011), 38. 102. Lemon, Imperial Messages, 38. 103. Quoted in ibid., 39. 104. Ibid., 43.

This content downloaded from 131.111.184.102 on Fri, 11 Jan 2019 12:15:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Turner’s Frontier and the Austrian Militärgrenze | 25 its most extreme.105 Given the growing association of parts of the empire (dual monarchy) with woodland, ethnic heterogeneity, and military fortification (the turn toward “Transylvania”), it is not too great a cognitive leap to assume this was the region to which Hofmannsthal was alluding: the idealized type of a “frontier” or edge of empire, onto which all difference and deviance could be mapped.106 Travel literature, fiction, and nonfiction alike came to cast “the Balkans” as a place of untamed nature and untamed people. If, then, we take this lens and read Der Kaiser as a journey from Vienna to the edges of the empire, it becomes apparent that the closer to the frontier Hofmannsthal takes us, the more he increases the overtones of ethnic anxiety and colonialism more gener- ally. He referred to “warrior peoples” and their need to conquer the “subjugated peoples” who were “of ever more torpid blood” in the periphery.107 This was how Habsburg orientalist imperialism operated; as Hugo von Hofmannsthal wrote in his own diary, “in Vienna we might be the last thinking, whole, and inspired people, that afterward there may be a great barbarism, a Slavic-Jewish, sensual world.”108 Habsburg orientalism was constructed to portray the frontier as barbaric, and it formed a crucial part of the “cultural imagination” that was such a key legitimizing strategy of the Germanophone “civilizing mission.” For Turner, the “dark glades” must be tamed and civilized if the descent toward barbarism that marked the outer fringes of the frontier zone were to be avoid- ed.109 As a writer in the Western Review remarked on life on the American frontier, “Should the time ever come when Latin and Greek should be banished . . . we should regard mankind as fast sinking into absolute barbarism, and the gloom of mental darkness as likely to increase until it should become univer- s a l .” 110 Ironic that, at a time when Latin and Greek was seen as a marker of civility and civilization along the American frontier, Romance-speaking and

105. Ibid., 41. 106. Carmen Maria Andras, The Image of Transylvania in English Literature, https:// kutztownenglish.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/jds_v1_1999_andras.pdf; Vesna Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Gábor Ágoston, “Where Environmental and Frontier Studies Meet: Rivers, Forests, Marshes and Forts along the Habsburg-Ottoman Frontier in Hungary,” in The Frontiers of the Ottoman World, ed. A. C. S. Peacock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 57–80; Andreas Rüther, “Flüsse als Grenzen und Bindeglieder: Zur Wiederentdeckung des Raumes in der Geschichtswissenschaft,”Jahrbuch für Regionalgeschichte 25 (2007): 29–44. 107. Lemon, Imperial Messages, 38. 108. Ibid., 45. 109. Ray Allen Billington, “The West of Frederick Jackson Turner,”Nebraska History 41 (1960): 271; Ray Allen Billington, “Frederick Jackson Turner: The Image and the Man,” Western Historical Quarterly 3, no. 2 (April 1972): 137–52. 110. The Western Review and Miscellaneous Magazine 3 (October 1820): 145.

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Greek-Orthodox residents of the Austrian frontier were struggling against the Germanizing, centralizing efforts of the Austrian Empire. The efforts of the Habsburg monarchy to Germanize, homogenize, and ulti- mately to “civilize” regions of the Habsburg-ruled lands were referred to nos- talgically by the journalist Joseph Roth in his 1938 novel Die Kapuzinergruft: “landscapes, fields, nations, races, huts, and coffeehouses of various kinds and origins must be subject to the very natural law of a strong mind capable of bringing forth the emptiness, of foreignness to leave and unite the seemingly divergent.”111 Karl Emil Franzos’s 1875 travelogue Kulturbilder aus Galizien, Südrußland, der Bukowina und Rumänien mirrored Hofmannsthal’s Der Kaiser von China spricht by telling the story of a journey into Bukovina in which the progress of the book sees the clichés of barbarism increase in frequency and intensity as the protagonist gets closer to Bukovina; filth, lack of hygiene, lack of hospitality and manners, lack of taste, and even lack of white tablecloths are all emphasized.112 The narrator even specifically designates those areas of the Habsburg territories in which German is not spoken as Halb-Asien instead of “Asian” or “European”; designation as “oriental” was determined not by geography but rather by relative levels of German-ness or “civilization.”113 Administrative efforts to make the Hungarians, in the infamous words of Leopold Kollonich, “first beggars, then Catholics, and finally Germans” were predicated on a cultural attitude that saw the non-Germanophone peripheries of empire as “barbaric.”114 The relationship between Habsburg orientalism and views of the military frontier was thus a symbiotic one. The Habsburgs needed to orientalize in order to push a civilizing agenda onto the military frontier; the more they encountered the “barbarity” of the frontier, the greater the impetus for their “civilizing mission.” As with the overseas colonialism of other empires, even the notion of a “civilizing mission” was little more than a byword for wholesale exploitation, something explored at length by Oszkár Jászi in the interwar period in The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy. Jászi saw the south and eastern Habsburg Empire as “nothing else than colonies of an agrarian character which bought industrial products of the Austro-German regions.”115 Administrative officials also applied their own racial hierarchies to simultaneously other what they saw as the “barbarity” of the military frontier and to emphasize the civilizational

111. Joseph Roth, in Glajar, “From ‘Halb-Asien’ to Europe,” 18. 112. Ibid., 23. 113. Ibid., 22. 114. G. C. Paikert, The Danube Swabians: German Populations in Hungary, Rumania and Yugoslavia and Hitler’s Impact on their Patterns (London: Springer, 1967), 18. 115. Jászi, Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy, 202.

This content downloaded from 131.111.184.102 on Fri, 11 Jan 2019 12:15:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Turner’s Frontier and the Austrian Militärgrenze | 27 virtue of the Germanophone population. The eighteenth-century Styrian Völkertafel was modeled after the SpanishCasta paintings and classified people according to racial stereotypes as “with reason” and “without reason.”116 Similarly, Georg C. Raff’sNaturgeschichte für Kinder, published in both German and Hungarian, depicted a linear and “stadial” view of history; non-Europeans are depicted as “altogether or nearly savage,” “ugly,” and “repulsive,” though not beyond redemption.117 The most widely distributed schoolbook in Europe at the time, and used in teaching in the military frontier, concluded that all people will “necessarily progress to civilisation like the rest of the world.”118 The inclu- sion of different European nations in depictions of racist hierarchies demonstrated that the administration looked to orientalize those who lived within the confines, and usually at the limits, of their empire. Again, this process of othering was one that took place first in the Habsburg imagination, and only then would it translate into Habsburg policy. The deliberate “othering” and dislocation of the non-Germanophone “subject peoples” of the empire was at the crux of this style of Habsburg rule. This is perhaps why the most vocal critics of the Habsburg orientalist imagination came from the minorities they sought to Germanize, both directly and indirectly through programs of education, agricultural reform, inward invest- ment, and political control.119 Kafka wrote of how “the Czechs [who had been] weakened by a long policy of Germanisation by the Habsburgs, cannot be more attached to a nation than the Jews.”120 For many writers at the

116. William O’Reilly, “Lost Chances of the House of Habsburg,” Austrian History Yearbook 40 (2009): 65. 117. Ildikó Sz. Kristóf, “The Uses of Natural History: Georg C. Raff’s Naturgeschichte für Kinder (1778) in Its Multiple Translations and Multiple Receptions,” in Le livre demeure. Studies in Book History in Honour of Alison Saunders, ed. Alison Adams and Philip Ford (Geneva: Livres Droz S. A., 2011), 309–36; Ildikó Sz. Kristóf, “Domesticating Nature, Appropriating Hierarchy: The Representation of European and Non-European Peoples in an Early-Nineteenth Century Schoolbook of Natural History,” in Demski, Sz. Kristóf, and Baraniecka-Olszewska, Competing Eyes, 53. 118. Sz. Kristóf, “Domesticating Nature,” 54. 119. Anton Pelinka and Dov Ronen, eds., The Challenge of Ethnic Conflict, Democracy and Self-Determination in Central Europe, (London: Routledge, 2013), 35–43. Viennese administrative interest in the frontier regions in fact went beyond the borders of the empire; influence was also exerted indirectly in regions including Albania. See Krisztián Csaplár-Degovics, “Lajos von Thallóczy und die Historiographie Albaniens,”Südost- Forschungen 68 (2009): 205–46; Krisztián Csaplár-Degovics, “Österreichisch-ungarische Interessendurchsetzung im Kaza von Tirana,” Südost-Forschungen 71 (2012): 129–82. 120. “Les Tcheques, affaiblis par la longue politique de germanisation des Habsbourg, ne peuvent pas plus que les juifs se rattacher a une nation.” In Marie-Odile Thirouin, “Franz Kafka als Schutzpatron der minoritären Literaturen,” inFranz Kafka: Wirkung und

This content downloaded from 131.111.184.102 on Fri, 11 Jan 2019 12:15:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 28 | Journal of Austrian-American History time, the fundamental irreconcilability of the Habsburgs’ self-styling as both a multiethnic empire and a homogenizing force had led to long-term struc- tural and political problems. What is more, his work Das Schloss was one that depicted the dislocation, alienation, and general vagueness of rural minorities within a bureaucratic state.121 All the inhabitants of an unnamed rural village —not unlike those along the Militärgrenze— encounter governmental authority only in the form of the eponymous castle whose authority is never articulated, explained, or given legitimacy. The bureaucratic imposition of the castle on a rural periphery is one that constantly reminds Kafka’s protagonist of “the disproportionate balance of power between the authorities and himself.”122 Das Schloss could be seen very straightforwardly as a depiction of Habsburg power as experienced by those living at the periphery; one that saw the position of non-Germanophone peoples weakened by an authority that appeared to them confused, arbitrary, and unexplained. Kafka’s text is one that could have been set only in a politically, culturally, and geographically isolated setting like that of the military frontier. Habsburg orientalism thus both informed, and was informed by, Habsburg approaches to the limits of its own empire, or to the limits of its imperial limits. Orientalism, literature, art, and education could all serve as “empire’s proxy,” and they did along the Austrian monarchy’s and the American republic’s frontier, on land and at sea. The Habsburg monarchy gained Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1878 and began to exert influence in Albania, too; the United States, too, pushed the limits of its empire.123 Themes of periphery, of isolation, dislocation, and ethnic anxiety appeared over and over again in literature written from within the monarchy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in ways that both drew on and subverted the wider European tradition of imperial writing. The crucial difference, of course, was that the Habsburgs lacked overseas colonies of any real significance. When the “colonizers without colonies” for whom imperialism lived and flourished in thekulturelle Bilderwelten sought the prestige and control of a traditional colonial power, it is unsurprising that

Wirkungsverhinderung, ed. Steffen Höhne and Ludger Udolph (Hamburg: Böhlau-Verlag, 2014), 338. 121. Franz Kafka, The Castle, trans. Anthea Bell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 122. Ibid., 147. 123. Meg Wesling, Empire’s Proxy: American Literature and U.S. Imperialism in the Philippines (New York: New York University Press, 2011), especially “Conclusion: ‘An Empire of Letters’: Literary Tradition, National Sovereignty, and Neocolonialism,” 163–76; A. G. Hopkins, American Empire: A Global History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), especially chapter 8, “Acquiring an Unexceptional Empire,” 337–82; Krisztián Csaplár- Degovics, “Österreichisch-ungarische Interessendurchsetzung im Kaza von Tirana,” Südost- Forschungen 71 (2012): 129–82.

This content downloaded from 131.111.184.102 on Fri, 11 Jan 2019 12:15:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Turner’s Frontier and the Austrian Militärgrenze | 29 they turned to the border regions of the Habsburg lands. Habsburg orientalism looked to the frontier, to the limits of Europe to project its imperialist discourse, and non-Germanophone Europeans became the subjects of a power that desperately sought—but could not have—a colonial empire.

Conclusion The idea of the “contact zone” as a social space “where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power” has given rise to the concept of the “borderland,” requiring a reorienta- tion of historical concern away from homogenous centers to the periphery.124 Rejecting Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis in favor of a “borderlands” perspective is essential in order to examine the reasons for both domestic and international interest in this territory, and it is necessary to understand the broader cultural processes at work in the military frontier. In essence, it is the cross-cultural contact inherent to the borderland that underpins the nineteenth-century interest in the military frontier. Their geographical position required borderland peoples to be complicit in transnational social, economic, and cultural systems, which rendered residents of the frontier neither fully “us” nor fully “them” in the eyes of the imperial center—be that in British and American universities and newspapers, in Washington D.C. and in Vienna. In conclusion, the Austrian-Ottoman military frontier provoked both domestic and international interest for a variety of reasons. The fundamental cause was the prevailing creation of literary and imaginary sites of exoticism as a means of self-definition: the discourse of the East/West binary had important implications for the ways in which contemporaries in the United States and in the Austro-Hungarian Empire perceived both “the other” and themselves. Of course, the image of frontier populations produced by this imagination was far from accurate: far from being outside of modernity, frontier residents argu- ably encountered modernity through constant interaction with difference. The American interest in the Austrian frontier was also influenced by the exoticization of the borderland but was primarily grounded in the recent political history of the United States. In the decades after the American Civil War, it was expedient for the political elite of the United States to support Balkan nationalist movements as a means of legitimizing their own nationalist rheto- ric.125 The United States was keen to present itself as the champion of European nationalist movements not only because of the sentimental commonalities

124. Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession 91 (1990): 34. 125. The Indiana State Sentinel greatly romanticized the Serbian independence move- ment, stating, “Abandoned by all, the Serbians will erect themselves into a strong people

This content downloaded from 131.111.184.102 on Fri, 11 Jan 2019 12:15:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 30 | Journal of Austrian-American History between the image of the American frontiersman and the people who lived in the military frontier, but also because of the wider message that this parallel carried for American self-identity as a guardian and defender of national self-determination and republicanism.126 The “borderland” is thus vital to understanding the Habsburg Empire, yet it cannot provide an account in and of itself. The military frontier serves as a case study emphasizing, as Kenneth Pomeranz argued in his lecture to the American Historical Association 121 years after Turner’s lecture at the AHA, the constant importance for historians to be able to relate multiple perspectives to one another in order to provide a satis- factory “total” picture.127

William O’Reilly, DPhil, teaches European and comparative History at the University of Cambridge and is a permanent fellow of the Central European University’s Institute for Advanced Study. He has worked on a range of topics in early modern European and Atlantic history and is particularly interested in the history of European migration, colonialism, and imperialism. He is currently writing a biography of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI.

by the indomitable force of their character and the unspeakable virtue of their national patriotism” (February 7, 1876). 126. Hilda Sabado, Republics of the New World: The Revolutionary Political Experiment in 19th-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), especially chapter 1, “New Republics at Play,” 22–45; Hopkins, American Empire, 254. 127. Kenneth Pomeranz, “Histories for a Less National Age,” Presidential Address to the American Historical Association, The American Historical Review 119, no. 1 (February 2014): 1–22.

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