Empire and Identity takes a novel approach to the critical last decades of the Habsburg Empire. The study uses biography to examine questions of identity and self-understanding in six lives and careers from the Austrian intellectual and political elite. The focus in the six biographies is on the problem of the Austrian state in an age of nationalist strife and constitutional conflict, on the different perceptions of this problem, and on the solutions proposed through the political engagements of these individuals. The book is organized around three dual political biographies: author and dramatist Hugo von Hofmannsthal is compared and contrasted to the parallel development of Leopold von Andrian; Karl Renner's political theories are examined in their temporal context and juxtaposed to the historical scholarship and political career of Josef Redlich; and the historical works of Heinrich Friedjung and the bureaucratic carer of Ernest von Koerber are analyzed as parallel and partly complementing preoccupations with the crisis of the Austrian state around 1900. Each of the dual biographies focuses on a distinct problem in the development of the Imperial Austrian state in the early twentieth century. The biographical approach also throws new light on the six examined individuals, whose scholarly, artistic and bureaucratic careers are placed in a political context. Straddling several spheres normally treated separately, Lindström's work integrates analyses of historical scholarship, political theory and literature in a broad political framework dealing with questions of the identity and viability of the crisis-ridden Habsburg Empire. (from the back cover of the book)

Artikeln undersöker sambanden mellan personlig och kollektiv identitet, intellektuellt arbete och elitformation och statsutveckling i det övernationella Habsburgimperiet. Mot en allmän bakgrund av statsutveckling och formering av eliter diskuterar artikeln författaren Robert Musil och juridikprofessorn och forskaren Hans Kelsen. Boken som artikeln ingår i handlar om "imperial biographies", dvs biografiska studier av medlemmar av eliterna i Österrike-Ungern, Tsarryssland och det Osmanska imperiet.

Recension av Robert Kriechbaumer, Zwischen Österreich und Grossdeutschland: Eine politische Geschichte der Salzburger Festspiele 1933-1944. Vienna: Böhlau, 2013.

The article examines Simon Wiesenthal’s life-long preoccupation with the Holocaust, by using Paul Ricoeur’s discussion of the two modes of dealing with the past – those of ‘memory’ and ‘history’ respectively – as a point of departure. Nevertheless, the article aims to approach the varying forms and expressions of this preoccupation in an integrated fashion, analyzing it as different means of achieving one and the same purpose: giving a public ‘collective testimony’ of the Holocaust. Departing from Wiesenthal’s own experiences, as well as testimonies of how the events of the Holocaust affected his own larger family, and testimonies of events taking place in his original Heimat – the area of Eastern Galicia that he stemmed from – Wiesenthal’s work in collecting testimonies of Nazi crimes gradually aggregated into a special form of ‘collective testimony’ of the Holocaust.

Bokrecension av Franz Joseph I, Kaiser von Österreich und König von Ungarn, 1830-1916: Eine Biographie, Michaela Vocelka & Karl Vocelka, München: C.H. Beck, 2015.

Recension av första delen av Solomon Wanks biografi över den österrikisk-ungerske utrikesministern Alois Lexa von Aehrenthal (1854-1912).