ABSTRACT
In the Robert A. Kann Memorial Lecture, Allan Janik accused Austrian historical scholarship of methodological and theoretical deficiencies. Allan Janik stated that it lacks new hermeneutic strategies. These charges contain an element of truth, and, among other factors, this is most certainly connected with the powerful tradition of the Osterreichische Institut fur Geschichtsforschung. These deficiencies account for the success of two American historians, Carl Schorske and John Boyer. Boyer’s subject, the rise of Karl Lueger and the Christian Socials, was tainted with the stigma of anti-Semitism—the Christian Socials bore responsibility for the destruction of democracy, and Lueger was damned by the praise of Adolph Hitler. It may likewise be connected with the matter of style: Schorske’s elegant descriptions offer a stark contrast to Boyer’s plodding prose in which the discovery of occasional stylistic brilliancies is an arduous task indeed. Austria in the twentieth century is marked by the conspicuous absence of a strong, bourgeois, liberal, republican tradition.
