Habsburg legacy in Austria and Kipling in India

The abandoned Imperial Crypt beneath the city of Vienna
The Imperial Crypt, 10 metres (33ft) beneath the city of Vienna, is the burial site of the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I (1640-1705) and of 146 of his Habsburg relatives. However, the site has been largely abandoned by the Austrian government, which still appears to be struggling to deal with the legacy of its Habsburg past. In April 1919, the Austrian government enacted the Habsburg Law. In the words of Walter Mayr in Der Spiegel, ‘the Habsburgs were dispossessed of private property held in family funds, denied the right to run for election, and forbidden to remain in Austria, unless they renounced in writing their claims to the throne and their affiliation with the deposed dynasty’. Today, the Austrian government is still ignoring pleas to preserve the site.
Read the full report.
In In the Blood - The Secret History of the Habsburgs Andrew Wheatcroft examines how an 18th-century succession crisis unlocked a tale of dynastic obsession and myth-history in Austria's first family.

Kipling’s legacy in India
Rudyard Kipling was born in the Dean’s Bungalow in the grounds of the Sir JJ School of Arts in Mumbai in 1865. Plans to turn the house into a museum have sparked considerable protest and have recently been suspended. Andrew Walker discusses the author’s controversial legacy in both Britain and India on the BBC’s Today programme.
In Kipling, Kim and Imperialism Fred Reist and David Washbrook explain how Kipling's view of imperialism was more complex than is usually supposed.
The author also pointed to cracks in the imperial facade at Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897. Denis Judd explains in Diamonds are Forever? Kipling's Imperialism .

1938 comic book sells for £1million
Yesterday, a 1938 edition of Action Comics No 1, the first comic to feature Superman, was sold for $1 million (£646,000) on the US auction website Comic Connect. The sale was over three times higher than the previous record price for a comic book, which was sold for $317,200 (£205,000) in 2009.

Sir Trevor Lloyd-Hughes: press secretary to Harold Wilson
Trevor Lloyd-Hughes died last week, aged 87. He was press secretary to Wilson in Downing Street from 1964 to 1969. Prior to his position in the press office, he was the political correspondent of the Liverpool Daily Post. In 1961 he also became the paper’s first wine correspondent. Following Labour’s defeat in 1970, he was knighted and founded his own lobbying company specialised in government-industry relations.
His obituary is published on the website of The Times.

Israel’s plans to add West Bank shrines to heritage list may halt peace negotiations
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently told his cabinet that two major religious sites in the West Bank would be added to the country’s heritage list and included in a £103 million restoration plan. In the Bible, the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron is where Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were buried; Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem is the traditional gravesite of the Matriarch Rachel and is one of the holiest sites in Judaism. The announcement has sparked protest from the Palestinian Authority. The BBC reports.

Madness & Modernity

by Derry Nairn

A fantastic new exhibition at London's Wellcome Collection charts the sometimes blurred line between artistic genius and insanity. Madness & Modernity focuses on how the issue of mental illness was broached in fin de siécle Vienna. This was a period of artistic flux in Austria's imperial capital, with radical departures from tradition felt across the arts.

Prominent artists of the day crossed paths with mental illness. The first room opens, for example, with a trio of spookily deranged busts by the sculptor Messerschmidt. Next the viewer can observe the grandiose Steinhof sanatorium, 'the city on a hill', built by one of the most celebrated modernist architects of his day, Otto Wagner.

Portraitists such as Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka broke from the norm by depicting their subjects in contorted, often spasmodic positions. Not least of these subjects was Schiele himself who, in a series of famous self-portraits, portrayed his own body in a range of painfully angular poses.

The curators of Madness & Modernity have chosen to display Schiele's work alongside photos of sanatoria inmates. These are taken from contemporary psychological journals which were widely circulating among Viennese artists as source material at the time. The hint is of a canny rather than an unhinged artist, choosing to portray himself in such a fashion, and in the process tapping into an general fascination with mental illness among his peers.

Other rooms boast a Kokoschka portrait, a set of spellbindingly colourful minature paintings by a sanatorium inmate, and studies by Freud - which contrast his mind-centred approach to the 'bodily whole' cures of the original electrotherapy equipment sitting nearby.

It was the penultimate room which captivated me the most, however. Here, two lesser heroes of Vienna's early 20th century artistic renaissance are remembered: Max Oppenheimer and Peter Altenberg. Oppenheimer's works are studies in the disturbed mind, in spite of their subjects' perfect sanity. The caricature of Peter Altenberg (see above), cap in hand with wild eyes and wringing hands, shows an artist who not only insisted on such depiction, but cultivated it. He had spells in sanatoria, slept through freezing winters with windows wide open, and maintained a permanent table at Vienna's famous Cafe Central, receiving both post and visitors there like a private office.

Madness, then, became a central tenet for this set of artists. This fascinating show at the Wellcome Collection suggests that mental faults of one type or another - addiction, obsessiveness, insomnia - continue to mascarade as self-identity. This has been the enduring contribution to contemporary culture of an extraordinary time and place.

The Management of the Viennese Court

by Kathryn Hadley

The Austrian Science Fund (FWF) announced, today, its latest project to research and make public information about the management of the Imperial Court in Vienna. The project, entitled ‘At Your Majesty’s Service!’, is based on the study of the ‘instruction manuals’ of the Viennese court by Institute for Austrian Historical Research at the University of Vienna. The manuals notably provided the court staff with details about the manner in which specific tasks were to be carried out and by whom. They were used for over 200 years and were kept up to date by the staff of the Obersthofmeister, who held the highest administrative office at the court. The manuals constitute four volumes, with a total of 1,400 handwritten pages.

An edition of the manuscripts is currently being prepared and the study of the volumes has provided both a fascinating insight into the organisational structures of the court and a detailed picture of the way in which it operated. In the 17th century, the court employed approximately 1,000 staff; by the 19th century, its numbers had risen to over 3,000 employees, who were each responsible for various aspects of daily life at the court, such as food, washing and the care of its horses. References to the ‘greatness’ of the Viennese court at the time thus related primarily to its size, rather than to its significance as one of the major political centres in Europe. Its organisation, on such a large scale, bore considerable similarities with that of a modern company. The manuscripts also bear witness to a form of corporate identity within the court, with repeated calls for order, efficiency and frugality, an emphasis on the importance of rank and title and, in terms of religion, a clear fear of Protestantism.

Professor Martin Scheutz, the project leader, described the content of the manauls:

‘These manuals record instructions for 80 different offices held by staff at the
Viennese Court. They instructed staff in how to carry out their duties properly
and in accordance with the customs and conventions of the Court. They also
detailed how the servants were to be supervised, the hierarchy of command and
the overall organisational structure in place at the Court.’

It is hoped that the publication of the edited volumes will further the study of the court and also enable comparisons with other courts.

In the words of Scheutz, the aim of the project is to:

‘do more than produce just a static description of the organisational structures
- we want to create a living, breathing representation of practical operations
within the Viennese Court. We plan to take a detailed look at the organisational
hierarchies, procedures, interactions and interdependencies and describe them in
depth in order to represent organisation at the Viennese Court as a dynamic
process.’

For an insight into the contemporary relevance of court history, read our article Why Court History Matters.

To understand the recent revival in the history of courts, read our article Court History

Above picture: one of the pages from the manuals (Austrian State Archives)