Introduction: Interdisciplinarity and Diversity in Austrian Studies

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• IntroductionInterdisciplinarity and Diversity in Austrian Studies
• Tim Corbett (bio)

"An das Lugeck kham ich ongfer / Do tratten Kauffleüt hin und her / All Nation mit ir klaydung / Da wirdt gehört manch sprach und zung / Ich dacht ich wer gen Babl khommen / Wo all sprach ein anfang gnommen / Und hört ein seltzams dräsch und gschray / Von schönen sprachen mancherlay / Hebreisch, Griechisch und Lateynisch / Teütsch, Frantzösisch, Türckisch, Hispanisch / Behaimisch, Windisch, Italianisch / Hungerisch, gut Niderländisch / Natürlich Syrisch, Crabatisch / Rätzisch, Polnisch und Chaldeisch / Des volcks auch war ein grosse meng."

[I came to the vicinity of the Lugeck, where merchants moved to and fro, all nations in their own attire. One could hear various languages and tongues, such that I thought I had arrived in Babel, whence all languages originated. And I heard a curious commotion and the clamor of various beautiful languages, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, German, French, Turkish, Hispanic, Bohemian, Wendish, Italian, Hungarian, good Dutch, and naturally Syrian, Croatian, Rhaetian, Polish, and Chaldean. And the people were very numerous.]

—Wolfgang Schmältzl

This depiction of the Lugeck quarter in the heart of Vienna was penned in 1547 by the pedagogue and poet Wolfgang Schmältzl, who had moved to the Austrian residential capital from the Upper Palatinate some years previously. His account is striking for several reasons: Above all else, the manifest diversity of the city's Renaissance-era population confounds the notion, still prevalent in some academic and political circles today, that Vienna was traditionally a [End Page xiii] "German" city. The gamut of vernaculars enumerated here includes not only the regional tongues spoken in the territories already then under Habsburg control (German, Hungarian, and Rhaetian, as well as "Bohemian" or Czech, "Wendish" or Slovenian, and "Crabatish" or Croatian) and of lands further afield (Italian, Dutch, and Polish); not only the languages of the burgeoning European empires of the day (such as French, "Hispanic" or Spanish, as well as notably Turkish, the official language of Austria's archrival, the Ottoman Empire); and not only the liturgical languages of the various denominations then present in the city (the Hebrew of the Jews, the Greek of the Eastern Orthodox, and the Latin of the Catholics). Vienna was also "naturally" home to speakers of "Syrian" (Arabic) and "Chaldean" (Aramaic).

The at first seemingly innocuous terminology ascribed to the presence of Hebrew, Turkish, and Arabic speakers in particular reveals another striking characteristic of this contemporary account of Renaissance Vienna, namely that this astounding and (by today's preconceptions) unexpected cultural diversity was regarded not only as a "natural" condition but also as something "beautiful." (Protestants, who are addressed as the "tyrants and archnemeses of Christ" in the title of this volume, are the sole exception here, the arch-Catholic Schmältzl having authored this work at the height of the Reformation.) Today, in an age when vocal segments of the Austrian population, including many elected representatives, shun Syrian refugees as alien to "European culture" and dismiss Austrians born to immigrants from Turkey as not truly belonging to some imagined "national" collective, when antisemitism remains prevalent throughout Austrian society (not only on the right) and migration to the city of Vienna is demonized (not only by radicals) as an assault on the Austrian capital's apparently pure demographic pedigree, the above-cited passage, now almost half a millennium old, might seem like a liberal fiction.

In reality, as this historical record reveals, it is the tenacious xenophobic narratives proliferating in Central Europe today that are fictitious and counterfactual. When a Lower Austrian right-wing extremist—recently appointed to a senior position of the regional parliament in coalition with the governing Austrian People's Party—lambasted a class of Viennese high school pupils with his dreams of a "pure" Vienna in early 2023, commentators were quick to point to "Wien 1900" as a paradigm of demographic and cultural diversity. Evidently, this perspective can be extended much further back into European history. The above-cited passage substantiates a finding professed by migration [End Page xiv] and cultural studies for some time now: that migration and diversity were historically not the exception but the norm, both in Europe and...