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378 Matthew Rampley Existenz. Diese Lebensmaxime […] hat nichts zu thun mit dem engherzigen Particularismus und nichts zu thun mit den Leidenschaften des Egoismus.41 In its place, Eitelberger espoused a notion of civil society that transcended national differences, one which enabled individual development as well as broader social and cultural progress. It was, he contended, the enlightened rule of the Emperor that had facilitated this. Thanks, in part, to his acquaintance with Henszlmann and others from Hungary Eitelberger came to see himself as part of a liberal intelligentsia that spanned the Empire. For Eitelberger, Henszlmann and Pulszky saw themselves as members of a civilizing culture that was open to all who sought it, and which could bind the disparate parts of the Empire together. National identity was far from being a matter of indiffer- ence to them ; their political and cultural activities indicated that they were all highly patriotic individuals. However, the key issue rested on how one defined national identity. As Pieter Judson has argued, for German-Austrian Liberals it was axiomatic that their identity as Austrians rested on their adherence to liberal values and on their member- ship of a (German) culture that was open to people of any background.42 They greeted the idea of a national identity based on ethnic or linguistic difference with bafflement and regarded it as having little or no political significance. In the mid-nineteenth cen- tury Hungarian Liberals espoused similar views and this informed their more general cultural and social attitudes.43 The National Museum in Budapest, for example, of which Ferenc Pulszky would later be long-term director, was “national” not because it cele- brated the unique identity of Hungarian national culture, but because it displayed the contribution of Hungarians to world culture and learning.44 Despite Eitelberger’s optimistic sentiments, from the late 1850s onwards the social and political order on which he based his vision experienced a series of existential cri- ses. The loss of Lombardy in 1859 brought into question the prestige of the Austrian 41 “Every cultivated person wishes to stand on their own two feet, intellectually ; every cultivated na- tion regards intellectual and economic self-sufficiency as a basic condition of its existence. This life maxim has nothing to do with narrow minded particularism and nothing to do with egotistical passions.” Eitelberger, Die Kunstbestrebungen Oesterreichs (cit. n.  38), p.  177. 42 P. Judson, Exclusive Revolutionaries : Liberal Politics, Social Experience and National Identity in the Austrian Empire, 1848–1914, Ann Arbor 1996, pp.  58 f. 43 E. Kiss, Nation und Ethnizität in der politischen Gedankenwelt des dualistischen Ungarn, in : B. Rupp-Eisenreich/J. Stagl (eds.), Kulturwissenschaft im Vielvölkerstaat : Zur Geschichte der Ethnologie und verwandter Gebiete in Österreich ca. 1780–1918, Vienna 1995, pp.  208–216. 44 G. Ébli, Universal Culture and National Identity : The configuration of national museums in nine- teenth-century Hungary, in : Great Narratives of the Past. Traditions and Revisions in National Mu- seums (eds. D. Poulot/F. bodenstein/J. M. Lanzarote Guiral), Linköping 2011, S. 373–386. Open Access © 2019 by BÖHLAU VERLAG GMBH & CO.KG, WIEN