Internationale Tagung
Istituto Storico Austriaco a Roma

Austrian Negatives
In the Darkroom of the Habsburg Empire
Maria Giovanna Campobasso, Flavia Di Battista, Matteo Zupancic
7-8 October 2026
Deadline: 10th May, 2026

The identity of the Austro-Hungarian Empire is deeply intertwined with its literature, an entanglement made evident by the rich and nuanced theoretical frameworks developed over the past sixty years to navigate its complexity. Claudio Magris’s morphology of the Habsburg Myth – an artificial, supranational koiné both shaped by and expressed through literature – has played a central role in shaping academic discourse well into the 1990s. His model has undergone phases of enthusiastic endorsement as well as critical scrutiny. More recently, the project Kakanien Revisited sought to draw attention to the mythic dimension of Magris’s formula, warning scholars against its uncritical application. Influenced by Anglo-American postcolonial theory, the researchers involved re-examined the Habsburg era and its aftermath through the lens of cultural, political, and symbolic power. Their focus shifted to questions concerning the relationship between centers and peripheries, and to the discursive strategies through which imperial authority legitimized itself. This approach illuminated previously overlooked case studies and contributed to a more nuanced understanding of the internal dynamics of the Habsburg world. Yet, two decades later, even these scholars acknowledged the limits of the postcolonial framework. Lacking any overseas or extra-continental colony, the profile of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was unique: it was both centralized and diffuse, with no specific center claiming absolute supremacy, at least on paper. Instead, multiple and often contradictory discourses of legitimacy coexisted, deeply entangled with one another.
Although the Magrisian and postcolonial paradigms might seem to diverge, each struggling to find a wholly adequate analytical category for the Austro-Hungarian context, they actually share a common ground, which can help reframing the debate in an integrated and productive fashion. This shared core was already sharply identified by Robert Musil in his 1912 essay Politik und Österreich, where he articulates the idea of a negativer Idealismus (‘negative idealism’) as a key force underlying the Empire’s ideological structure:
Es muss irgendwo in diesem Staat ein Geheimnis stecken, eine Idee. Aber sie ist nicht festzustellen. Es ist nicht die Idee des Staates, nicht die dynastische Idee, nicht die einer kulturellen Symbiose verschiedener Völker (Österreich könnte ein Weltexperiment sein), – wahrscheinlich ist das Ganze wirklich nur Bewegung zufolge Mangels einer treibenden Idee, wie das Torkeln eines Radfahrers, der nicht vorwärtstritt. (GW 8 993)

At the core of this unsteady empire, Musil perceived not a unifying idea but a void – a negation so profound it generated restless motion. This “negative idealism,” likened to the wobbling of a cyclist no longer pedaling forward, haunts nearly every major interpretation of Habsburg literature, albeit in different forms. Claudio Magris, for instance, described his own interpretive stance as an “adhesion through a negative path,” suggesting that Austrian literature itself is “the expression of a negativity perceived as the only possible form of authenticity.” This ex negativo approach allowed Magris to maintain a critical distance from his subject – a distance made necessary by his personal and cultural entanglement as a native of Trieste, the Empire’s former free port, and an Italian-speaking heir to its cultural legacy. While Magris successfully identified the mythopoietic, thus “ideal” mechanisms at work in Habsburg literature and helped canonize its aesthetic devices, he arguably underplayed the radical negativity Musil had foregrounded. In doing so, he became not only a critic but also, paradoxically, a post-Habsburg contributor to the very myth he set out to dismantle. As Magris himself admitted, the Habsburg Myth functions as a kind of academic Mitteleuropean Epos, whose literary continuation finds its fullest expression in his later novel Danube.
In contrast, the approach of Kakanien Revisited engages more directly with the negative core of the Habsburg literary project, devoting particular attention to processes of othering. Following Tahra Zahra’s argument that people who lived in the Habsburg Empire were, in their day-to-day life, for the most part blind to national differences, Pieter Judson’s recent re-narration of the entire history of the Habsburg Empire has shown how alterity construction took many shapes in the Habsburg Empire, an entity which can be described as a space crossed by all kinds of borders, defined by class, sex, census, political ideas etc. These kinds of processes were a way of dealing with modernity that was hardly more pervasive in the Habsburg Empire than anywhere else. What was likely unique in the Habsburg case was that the construction of alterity served a distinct purpose: it was instrumental in reaffirming the authority of a larger entity – the empire itself. This imperial supra-identity could sustain its internal diversity only by either defining and subsuming all manifestations of alterity, or by dissolving them through a culturally violent act of synthesis.
In other words, a central trope of Habsburg rhetoric was that the Empire derived its unity precisely from the accumulation of internal acts of negation. This dynamic is especially evident in the Austrian context, which was, both before and after the fall of the Empire, a primary site for the production of discourses on alterity within the Habsburg imaginary. Austria, in its effort to define and legitimize itself, increasingly portrayed itself as a Kulturreich (as Leopold von Andrian called it) rather than as an economic-commercial superpower like Britain or an industrial-military one like Prussia. This rhetorical stance was particularly subject to critique during World War I, when German-speaking Austrian writers actively undermined the legitimacy of the official Verteidigungskrieg (defensive war) narrative. They did so by subverting the tropes of propagandistic literature, draining them of meaning and recasting them as symptoms of a broader psychological malaise, a kind of spiritual pathology embedded in the imperial condition.
In sum, Claudio Magris identified the mythic dimension of Austro-Hungarian self-definition but overlooked the micro- and macro-level acts of negation that were instrumental in constructing it. Kakanien Revisited, on the other hand, brought these mechanisms of negation to light. Yet, due in part to the epistemological framework of postcolonial studies, it tended to distance itself from the mythopoietic processes that were deeply embedded in the sociocultural fabric of the Empire’s internal communities. Each approach, then, may be seen as the negative image of the other. Taken together, they give form to what Robert Musil termed “negative idealism”: a hollow ideological structure composed of countless acts of othering, aimed at projecting a fictive cultural koiné – a vision of aristocratic grandeur and spiritual sovereignty superimposed on an empire marked by radical heterogeneity, nationalist tensions, silenced identities, and profound historical discontinuities.
The ‘negatives’ of Austrian identity – both internal (e.g., the Balkans, the eastern provinces) and external (e.g., other European empires, overseas nations) – help reveal what Austria aspired to become. These exclusions and contrasts offer a key to understanding the cultural strategies Austria employed to construct its own imperial subjectivity.
Accordingly, this conference will focus primarily on Austrian and on German-speaking authors. We will welcome submissions along the following lines:

1. National Negatives (e.g., suppressed Balkan-Slavic cultural identities; the emergence of a supranational and ahistorical Habsburg Myth; attempts to define a multicultural Austrian literary canon);
2. European Negatives (e.g., Austria’s self-definition through contrast with other European empires such as Britain or Prussia; the topoi of homo austriacus vs. homo teutonicus);
3. Global Afterimages (e.g., mythical and phantom representations of the fallen empire – such as in the writings of exiles in South America; Musil’s “Österreich als Weltexperiment” and the idea of ‘spiritual imperialism’ through a resurrection of the Habsburg model: Andrian’s Österreich im Prisma der Ideen, Hofmannsthal’s Die österreichische Idee, Kalergi’s ‘Paneuropeanism’).

Confirmed keynote speakers: Endre Hárs (University of Szeged), Steffen Höhne (Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena / University of Music Franz Liszt, Weimar), Birgit Nübel (Hannover University).
We encourage submissions that engage with a broad range of methodologies – such as contrapuntal reading, imagology, histoire croisée, transimperial studies, critical empire studies, and cultural mythology – to explore how each framework potentially enlightens one or more of the themes outlined above.
To submit your abstracts (250 words) please email us at austriannegatives@gmail.com by May 10th. Candidates will be notified of the selection results by May 20th.
Please note that, at present, we can only grant meals and coffe breaks, which will be kindly offered by the Institute. Pending additional funding, we shall try to provide the speakers with accommodation. Should the final budget not be sufficient to cover accommodation for all the speakers, we will base the selection of the invited guests on financial considerations. Travel expenses will not be reimbursed.