Page - 379 - in Rudolf Eitelberger von Edelberg - Netzwerker der Kunstwelt

Across the Leitha 379 Empire as the major power of central Europe, while, even more gravely, defeat at the Battle of Königgrätz in 1866 cast into doubt the automatic self-identification of Aus- trians such as Eitelberger as “German”. In economic terms the Austrian government had sought to create a central European customs union (“Zollverein”) that would con- firm its position as the major power between Russia and France, but instead, in 1862, Prussia had entered into a separate trade agreement with France which other German states then joined, thereby isolating the Habsburg state.45 Furthermore, the Ausgleich of 1867 put into question Eitelberger’s belief in an imagined community encompassing the whole of the Empire, and the stock market collapse in 1873 brought about a crisis in the legitimacy of the liberal ideology of the free market. Eventually, in 1879, the Liberal government was replaced by the “Iron Ring”, the Conservative coalition led by Count Edward Taaffe that stayed in power until the early 1890s. These might be regarded as extrinsic contingent events, except that they went to the heart of Eitelberger’s engagement with cultural politics. If, in 1871, he could confidently declare that Austrian cosmopolitan unity ruled the day, he spent much of the rest of the decade criticising the exponents of various kinds of federalism and nationalism. As early as 1866, even before the Ausgleich institutionalised the separation of Hungary and Austria, Eitelberger was expressing anxiety over the fact that different groups in the Empire no longer seemed to hold to the idea of Austria as a common cultural, social and political space. In the arts, for example, he noted : Wie die böhmischen Künstler immer mehr der tschechoslavischen Richtung sich hingeben, die ungarischen seit mehr als einem Jahrzehnt den Standpunkt des nationalen Separatismus vertreten, so hat sich in dem Künstlerkreise des österreichischen Polen eine grosse Gleichgil- tigkeit gegen Oesterreich, eine entschiedene Sympathie für das gezeigt, was man in politischen Kreisen als die Zukunfts-Idee Polens bezeichnet. In Prag hat es nur Eine [sic] Periode gege- ben, wo man die Idee der Zusammenhörigkeit mit Oesterreich mit Begeisterung auch auf dem Felde der Kunst vertrat […].46 45 H. Matis, Leitlinien der österreichischen Wirtschaftspolitik, in : Die Habsburgermonarchie 1848– 1918. I : Die Wirtschaftliche Entwicklung (ed. A. Brusatti), Vienna 1973, pp.  29–67. 46 “Just as artists in Bohemia place themselves ever more in the direction of Czechoslavism, and Hun- garians have been standing up for national separatism for more than a decade, so in artistic circles in Austrian Poland a great indifference towards Austria has become evident, a decided sympathy for what in political circles is termed the idea of a Polish future. In Prague there was only one period when the idea of being part of Austria was adopted with any enthusiasm in the field of art […].” R. Eitelberger von Edelberg, Eine österreichische Geschichtsgalerie [1866], in : idem, Gesam- melte kunsthistorische Schriften, vol.  2 (cit. n.  4), pp.  53–80, esp. p.  73.