Sabrina K. Rahman, University of California, Berkeley

Austria on Parade: The Staging of Ethnicity in the 1908 Imperial Jubilee

The Imperial Jubilee of 1908 featured a series of events designed to legitimate the rapidly declining House of Habsburg and colonial rule over its southern and eastern territories. One festivity proves to be especially intriguing in this regard, namely the parade that took place on the Viennese Ringstraße on June 12, 1908. The organizers behind the parade intended for it to showcase the success of Austria in promoting a harmonious multiethnic empire. In reality, however, the program resulted in an increase in nationalist tensions, as ethnic Germans received more favorable representation than the Bohemians, Galicians, Ruthenians, Croats and Slovenes in the stage pageant serving as the event’s focal point. What was intended to be a celebration of supranationalism under the liberal and modern figure of Franz Joseph turned out to display the superiority of pan-Germanism over other nationalities crucial to the cultural life of the empire. Anticipation for the parade was high, as one sees in the daily column “Der Festzug,” published in Die Neue Freie Presse in the months leading up to the parade. The Viennese critic Karl Kraus went on to parody the press coverage of the event in his essays “Der Festzug” (March 1908) and “Jubel und Jammer” (December 1908), in which he critically responds to the preparations made for and the consequences of the Imperial Jubilee, highlighting the nationalist antagonisms inherent in the year’s events from their very inception, as well as the financial ruin it brought upon the city of Vienna. In addition to these texts, the program booklet and postcards made exclusively for the parade offer a look at the monarchist vision of Austria-Hungary as a vibrant multiethnic utopia, as opposed to the actual photographs from the event, which emphasize its staged, rigid nature. This paper discusses the parade for the Imperial Jubilee in the Late Imperial context, looking particularly at how the staging of ethnicity within the parade served as an indicator of ethnic strife in pre-World War I Central Europe and sought to engage with Habsburg myths of a supranational empire.