Přednáška Marka Cornwalla
Collegium Carolinum, the German Historical Institute Warsaw, and the Leibniz-Institute for History and Culture in Eastern Europe in collaboration with the Masarykův ústav a archiv AV ČR cordially invite you to the lecture
PROF. MARK CORNWALL (SOUTHAMPTON)
Hunting and Punishing Traitors in Peacetime Austria-Hungary
Tuesday, March 4 2025, 5 p.m.
Valentinská 91/1, 3rd Floor
The lecture will be streamed via Zoom as well, please contact florian.ruttner@collegium-carolinum.de
In 1909, in a speech to the Austrian parliament, Tomáš Masaryk warned that treason (Hochverrat) was an anachronistic word from a bygone age. Yet it was a crime which in the late Habsburg empire was regularly investigated and prosecuted, not only during years of war and revolution but also in peacetime when there was relative domestic stability. This lecture explores why this was the case, and where the ‘traitors’ were most prevalent during the dualist era of the Habsburg Monarchy. It argues that the authorities’ obsession with Hochverräter can be explained in terms of the evolving security threats to the regime. But it also reflected the mindset of those who governed different regions, as well as the character of the penal codes and legal structures, much of which was inherited from the neo-absolutist decade of the 1850s.
The lecture illustrates these points with official crime statistics from both Austria and Hungary. It also supplies vivid case studies from Vienna, Prague and Zagreb, showing how the law was manipulated for political ends with very harmful results. In short, the public labelling of ‘traitors’, for example in the Czech Omladina trial of 1894, undermined the notion of a Habsburg Rechtsstaat and alienated a generation of young idealists.
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Mark Cornwall is Emeritus Professor of Modern European History at the University of Southampton. His books include The Undermining of Austria-Hungary (2000) and The Devil’s Wall: The Nationalist Youth Mission of Heinz Rutha (2012) which was turned into a play (Wandervogel) in Prague in 2024. In 2017 he was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, and in 2022 was awarded the Palacký Medal for Merit in the Historical Sciences by the Czech Academy of Sciences. He is writing a history of treason in the late Habsburg Monarchy for Oxford University Press.
