MULTIETHNIC EMPIRE (PROTOTYPE)

On the eve of World War I, the Habsburg Empire (the “Österreichisch-Ungarische Monarchie”) was “the only real prototype of a multiethnic empire”^[1] – a conglomerate of territorial dominions each governed by its own legal system. Each of these dominions displayed a particular political, economic and cultural development.^[2] Although none of the national or ethnic groups could claim numerical superiority in the monarchy, some had ethnic or other ties to nation states outside of the imperial borders, be it to small countries like Serbia or powerful empires like the German Reich. The k.u.k. political leaders had refrained from policies of internal assimilation or ethno-cultural homogenization for a long time.^[3] Nevertheless, it remains a matter of discussion if the Habsburg Empire’s entrance into World War I paralleled the empire’s overall decline. Even during World War I, it seemed as if the “Habsburg myth” of the harmonic coexistence of different national or ethnic groups could indeed provide sufficient cohesion against centripetal forces.^[4]
This mythical deformation of reality was a compound of various elements. Feudal universalism was transferred into liberal modernity, while medieval and early modern German colonization in Eastern Europe became a Kulturmission.” The true (but vain) wish for trans-national harmony was based on a religious mystification of a static landscape of diverse but peaceful people. While this politically intended and enhanced narrative demonized the dynamic of national states, at the same time it had a paralyzing effect on the Habsburg polity.
The paternalistic rule of the aged emperor and his bureaucracy could temporarily subdue the emerging national movements among the Czechs, Romanians, Southern Slavs, Italians and Poles, while the German-Hungarian Kulturmission could provide a resilient ideological framework for the “dominant” nationalities. But the encroaching demise of the monarchy, along with its own inflexibility and blind spots, increasingly endangered the cohesion of the empire, perhaps even more than the ruinous outcome of the War itself.^[5]
For the late Habsburg Empire, the Western Balkans were of great relevance, as the unsolved southern Slavic question was directly attached to internal questions of the imperial polity. Different political forces more or less openly pursued plans of consolidating the state by adding a third, Slavic column to its present German-Hungarian double structure. Such triple-structure plans, which could count individuals like the heir to the imperial throne, Franz Ferdinand, among supporters, gave momentum to the south-eastern direction of imperial expansion.^[6] The colonization of South-Eastern Europe was given priority over extra-European colonial endeavours, largely because of a lack of opportunities for the latter, rather than due to any strategic plan.^[7] Bosnia-Herzegovina was the first quasi-colonial project for the k.u.k. empire. The country was placed under the Habsburg rule by the Congress of Berlin after the Russo-Turkish war of 1887-1878. The occupation of Bosnia was met with resistance by the local population, and gave the Habsburg forces their most serious fighting experience prior to World War I. Bosnia remained under formal Ottoman rule until 1908, when the Habsburg Empire annexed it, causing a diplomatic crisis. Ruled by the joint imperial ministry of finance and double political bodies of the Empire (i.e., Austrian and Hungarian), the multi-ethnic territory of Bosnia became a field of experience for the k.u.k. army, administration and scholars.^[8]

FRONTIER SCIENCE

One can easily discern the interaction of ideological complicity and the seeking of profit and power in the mixture of imperialist and colonialist policies and scholarly exploration. This is plainly demonstrated by the concept of “Orientalism,” which describes the discursive subjection of the “Other” to European dominance.^[9] As Johannes Fabian has convincingly demonstrated, distancing the observed from the observer is a basic strategy of colonial ethnographic discourse, often evident in the work of anthropologists during this time. The referent of anthropology is placed in a time different from the present, where the producer of the anthropological discourse situates himself. By separating and distinguishing the explored Other, the latter is turned into a scientific object, which can be described, classified, and integrated into a universal frame of evolutionary natural history. Humanity was thereby organized into a concentric sphere with Europe as its center, which stood for progress, development and modernity; while the negative corollaries of stagnation, underdevelopment, and tradition were ascribed to the periphery, and thus were subjected to research as objects. This ethnographic “chronopolitics” goes hand in hand with colonial power’s “geopolitics.”^[10]
In the case of the Habsburg Empire, however, the notion of colonial regions subject to imperial rule but separated from the metropole by great distances and oceans is not applicable. The “colonial” possessions of the Habsburgs – and the areas of interest to its anthropological scholarship – were not far from the imperial center, and could be more or less easily accessed by overland travel.
So in the case of Habsburg anthropology, it is important to consider strategies of discursive separation inside Europe. Larry Wolf has worked on the mapping of Eastern Europe by Western European Enlightenment. In his account, the process of construing the division of Europe into East and West was a relatively late invention of the eighteenth century, superposed upon the older North/South division. The invention of the European East as the barbaric, uncivilized and undeveloped opposite to the civilized and developed West, performed by the latter, was characterized by a paradox of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion.^[11] In a process of entering, possessing, imagining, and peopling, the European East was fabricated as Europe but not fully Europe, giving Western Europe its first model of underdevelopment.^[12] Wolff’s account is closely connected to Maria Todorova’s concept of “Balkanism,” which she poses vis-á-vis Said’s “Orientalism” by referring to the historical and geographical “reality” of the Balkans against the intangible nature of the “Orient.”^[13] While Orientalism subdues very different subjects under one essentialising discourse, the Balkans share a common feature: the legacy of Ottoman imperial rule. The perception of this legacy as imprints of a non-European power on a European ground is the most decisive element of Western Balkanism.
The Balkans’ ethnic heterogeneity was especially perceived as negative by commentators from Western European national states. But what frames of perception were active in a multinational context of the Habsburg empire, which moreover was at least partly geographically situated in the east and south-east of Europe itself?
The cultural anthropologist Andre Gingrich identifies a certain “frontier Orientalism” as the central structure of the Habsburg imperial meta-narrative: expansion into South-Eastern Europe was the outcome and the prize of the successful defence against the Ottoman armies, which had advanced up to Vienna by the late seventeenth century. This fighting back of an Islamic threat marked the starting point of the Habsburgs’ own “Golden Age.” As a consequence, the image of the Muslim Other became two-sided: on the one hand, the Turkish soldier was a formidable enemy and a severe antagonist. He was neither primitive nor savage, but cultured, literate and urbane in character. On the other hand, the Bosnian Muslim was transformed by the Habsburgs into a loyal defender of the crown. This dual structure of the “Other” was and still is applied to different groups.^[14] Hence, the Habsburg’s “frontier mission” on the Balkans was to raise the Balkans’ culture which was suppressed or, as was often stated, neglected by the Ottoman colonial rule. Gingrich sees the structures of “frontier orientalism” operational in everyday life and high politics alike, and exerting influence upon the arts, historiography, collective self-conceptions, gender roles and imaginations of the “Self” and the “Other.”^[15] It seems plausible to infer that it had had an impact on the ethnological sciences of the Habsburg Empire, too.
Two perspectives can be fruitfully distinguished in the ethnological scholarship: an emic view of one’s own culture, and an etic view of other cultures. This division was institutionalized in the German-speaking scholarly world in the separation between Volkskunde and Völkerkunde. In the nation states of Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, Volkskunde-disciplines were developed relatively well, providing views and constructions of a homogenous national culture “from inside”. In contrast, in the classic imperial Western powers “etic” disciplines prevailed, aiming at the incorporation of the “primitive Other” into a universalist framework by means of comparison. In this dichotomous setting, the South-Eastern countries held an exceptional position by having been the object of both foreign-etic and (pre-) national-emic description.^[16] But how did ethnological disciplines develop in the multiethnic Habsburg Empire, and what role did they play in the incorporation of Balkan territories into the diversification of the imperial polity? How did the anthropological/ethnological methodology, fieldwork, and discourse take place, and how did it contribute to an imperial language of diversity?

TRAVELLING IN DISGUISE

The first institutionalization of Austrian ethnography took place in the situation of the k.u.k. “colonial experience” in Bosnia and Herzegovina. While the Imperial Academy of Sciences’ Balkankommission, constituted in 1897, had a geographically defined focus and promoted primarily philological-ethnographical and historical-archaeological research projects,^[17] the Viennese Anthropological society established a special institution with a methodologically more narrowly defined mandate. In 1884 the Society created an “Ethnographic Commission.” From the beginning, the main goals of the Commission were “to effectively stimulate and support the study of the ethnography of the Balkan countries besides the ethnography of Austria-Hungaria.”^[18]
One of the first individuals to explore this newly acquired territory on behalf of the Commission was the learned classic philologist, Friedrich Salomon Krauss,^[19] who toured Bosnia in 1884-1885. Krauss travelled Bosnia on foot and by horse; he dressed in rags, disguised as a beggar to protect himself from robbers.^[20] After only one and a half day of the trip by train away from Vienna, the explorer had to face hardships.

“…not much lesser than if he had taken a trip to the inner of the Dark Continent. Not everybody can face the challenge of not washing himself for 6 weeks or swallowing down rotting Sauerkraut with death defiance, while the bullets of besieging brigands’ smack through the caves windows.”^[21]

Here, the explorer is shown as a hero, performing science in the face of mortal dangers by recording what he hears and sees. His scientific mission is his sole guiding reason in that dangerous place; scientific reason is what shields him from distress and infection. This topos of self-representation works for the exploration of Africa and Bosnia alike, and it is closely tied to the act of travelling uncharted landscapes.^[22] In the case of Krauss, the hero wears a mask. He is more similar to the homecoming Ulysses in disguise than a triumphant colonizer.

PRECIOUS FINDINGS

Krauss travelled along the rivers of Bosnia and Hercegovina, encountering there a more vibrant folk-life than he did among the shepards of the mountains. The material Krauss collected from Muslim folksingers was vast: he jotted down more than sixty thousand verses. In Krauss’ opinion, these folksongs were comparable to Homer’s epics or the Nibelungenlied and deserved the recognition of academic philologists.^[23] As ethnographic material, the vernacular poetry gave Krauss an insight into the life and thought of the three religious groups in Bosnia, and allowed him to identify an ethnic hierarchy. While he classified the folksongs of Catholic Bosnians as rudimentary due to the harsh paternalism of their clergy, he judged the Orthodox Serbs’ folk life to be freer in comparison to the Catholics’ but still the product of the oppressed and desperate. The songs were formalistic, full of exaggeration and hatred directed against Muslims. The Muslims in Krauss’ account possessed the richest poetry, free and filled with irony and even recognition for the other groups.
This evaluation of Muslim culture against the other “Sects” (as Krauss labelled Catholic and Orthodox Christians), could be interpreted as an intellectual contribution by the Austrian pacifying colonial mission. The cultural high/low structure paralleled and legitimized the Bosnian religious-social stratification, and provided an alternate cultural identity for the country besides Serbian and Croatian national aspirations and ties.
Krauss estimated the knowledge he produced as instrumental for a soft version of colonial domination:

“In the time of the occupation, the country and people of Bosnia were less known to the Austrians than Tongking. One can conquer and temporarily dominate a country by the force of arms’; to possess it permanently one has to make the interests of the new fellow citizens one’s own.”^[24]

But these contributions brought Krauss neither the aspired academic recognition, nor a lasting career as an ethnographer studying and publishing the collected songs.^[25] Krauss became an active and productive promoter of international folkloric scholarship, but anti-Semitism in Vienna’s academic circles played a role in his expulsion from the Anthropological Society. Thus, despite his heroic anthropological explorations and his will to establish an ethnographic discourse supportive of the Habsburg multiethnic empire, Krauss failed to fashion an academic career, due to his own ethnic stigmatization. His increasingly militant polemics against the Croats, and later in the First World War against the Serbs,^[26] demonstrated that his own personality was no less belligerent than that of his opponents. Still, scientifically he always argued against racial notions of nationality and the division between “Kultur- und primitiven Völkern.”
When his academic career aspirations scattered, he moved further to the margins of the established science. Besides the heroic material of Balkan folklore, from his youth onward he had collected vast amounts of erotic folklore. He used it to start the journal Anthropophyteia, which dealt exclusively with sexual folklore. The journal which gathered highly recognized scientists as collaborators, brought him some international recognition. Yet, this “negative assimilation” had harmful personal effects in the long run. While Krauss became a prolific source for the emerging psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud, he became entangled by ruinous lawsuits after indictments of pornography.^[27]

MULTIETHNIC SCIENCE

In the wake of the military occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, some military and admi-nistrative officials began to literally dig into the Bosnian soil to unearth the underlying pre-Ottoman layers of the past. The archaeologist Moritz Hoernes and the anthropologist Felix von Luschan both came to the country in military service and began to investigate its Roman and pre-historic past. As a military doctor von Luschan exhumed and collected skulls. Hoernes saw Bosnia-Hercegovina as a conscripted officer in 1878, and travelled it in charge of the k.k. ministry of education in order to inspect roman antiquities in the following two years.^[28] In contrast to Krauss, Hoernes’ sympathy was clearly with the Catholic population.
In addition to Krauss and Hoernes’ work on Bosnian culture, in Sarajevo a regionally-based scientific community emerged around the Bosnian national museum founded in 1888. These local scholars followed a rather pacifistic or pacifying agenda regarding the representation of different folk cultures, stressing the peaceful aspects of multiethnic urban life.^[29]
The relative terra incognita of Bosnia and Herzegovina played an important role in the development and differentiation of the Habsburgs’ anthropological scholarship. The Empire was the birthplace of diverse ethnological approaches. The Austrian ethnology of non-European cultures had its inception in the Anthropological-Ethnographic Department of the Imperial Royal Natural History Museum founded in 1876.^[30] However, the objects of ethnological research for the Habsburg anthropologists were not situated oversees, but within the empire’s own borders. No other country in the world could match the potential for ethnological research of Austria-Hungary, the art-historian Alois Riegl stated in 1894, for the Empire included North and South, East and West, the modern and the modernized, and could display all stages of economic development.^[31] The empire was seen as a model of Europe, encompassing within its borders numerous national, religious, cultural and “civilizational” differences. At the end of the nineteenth century, various national volkskunde disciplines emerged in the Empire. Among the earliest of these were the Czecho-slavic with the journal “Cesky Lid,” founded 1892 by Cenek Zibrt and Lubor Niederle; a “Cecho-slavic Assossiation,” founded the year after; and a successful Ethnographic Exhibition in Prague in 1895.^[32]
At the same time, two Vienna-based participants in the museum’s Anthropological-Ethnographic Department engaged in developing Volkskunde scholarship for the entire empire. One of them, Michael Haberlandt,^[33] outlined the principles of the Viennese Volkskunde in the first issue of the Austrian journal of folklore in 1895:

“We do not care for nationalities as such, but for their popular (volksthümliche), pristine (urwüchsige) roots. Ours is the exploration and presentation of the popular lower layer [of culture] alone. We want to identify, interpret and display the proper “Volk,” whose primitive economy implies a primitive lifestyle, a pristine state of mind in its natural form. … On Austrian ground these exercises automatically and inevitably will be comparative.”^[34]

In this canon, the key concept of the Austrian Volkskunde is explicated: an internal primitivism, available for discovery in the native population of the multiethnic empire. The method of comparison should facilitate the search for basic “natural” forms or pristine elementary thoughts (Elementargedanken), which are universal to all mankind but hidden behind cultural diversity. This concept, devised by the German ethnologist Adolf Bastian, opposed the trend toward evolutionist concepts of human culture.
The Viennese folklorists positioned themselves as anti- or at least non-national scholars, and aspired to elevate themselves above the emerging national disciplines of the Habsburg nationalities. The Viennese scholars also included European minorities, such as the Basques or Icelanders within their analysis.
Their main field of study was “primitive economics.” Pre-industrial handicraft was to be protected from being outcompeted by modern industry. The traditional styles and techniques of this practice were to be carefully developed into competitive cottage industries, in an attempt to provide fair economic incorporation of rural people or others similarly peripheral. In this way the monarchy’s cultural diversity could serve as an asset for economic competition by providing a multiplicity of production styles. The traditional division of labor along gender and ethnic separations could help secure internal social peace.^[35]
Haberlandt was one of the founders and the first director of the Museum of Austrian Volkskunde, as well as the initiator of the Association for Austrian Folklore and the editor of the Association’s periodical. The young discipline was searching for approval: it was not institutionalized academically until 1892, when Michael Haberlandt became qualified as the first professor for “General Ethnography,” and began lecturing on Austrian Volkskunde at the University of Vienna four years later.^[36]
To legitimize itself, the discipline claimed to be capable of closing the gap between urban “high culture” and rural “primitive culture,” by integrating the latter into the former. The aristocratic and bourgeois promoters, and actors of the young discipline of Volkskunde cherished and surely shared a form of Austrian patriotism. They emphasized the unity of the empire in space and time, and searched for the natural and organic foundation of its people. This foundation was thought to underlay the superficial cultural variety. Original, discrete national cultures were assumed to have been politically constructed.

ALBANIA: ARMED MOUNTAINEERS AND BLOOD REVENGE

In the early twentieth century up to the beginning of World War I, the political and scholarly “conquest” moved further southward to the young state of Albania.^[37] This most recent successor of the Ottoman Empire was haunted by violent conflicts stemming from both repeated Montenegrin and Serbian infringements, and from a number of insurgencies and subsequent Ottoman repression. Due to Albania’s location at the strait of Otranto (the narrow doorway to the Adriatic Sea), the overlapping strategic interests of Italy and the Habsburg Empire did not always have a pacifying effect on the country, but it did provide the geopolitical opportunity for national independence. After the first Balkan War of 1912, Italy and the Hapsburg Empire promoted Albanian independence from the Ottoman Empire. International engagement followed but failed to stabilize the hand-picked regime led by the German Wilhelm Prinz zu Wied, whose reign ultimately lasted less than one hundred days.
Albania offered unmapped landscapes and vast material for scholarly exploration, such as the archaeologically untapped classic heritage of the Roman Empire, and even pre-Roman Illyrian origins. The peoples of the mountainous north, in particular, were regarded as representative of pre-modern tribal social structures, and could thereby display an ethnic, apparently primitive, material culture, which followed authentic common law of blood revenge and honor codes. Armed violence and war were considered to be endemic in the region. Belligerence and primitivism were the two topoi of representation of Albanian culture. The image of the Albanian tribesman would have been incomplete without his gun. At the same time, armed violence and war were fundamental elements of the k.u.k.-sponsored scholarly exploration of Albania itself.

NOPCSA: GOING NATIVE BY BEARING ARMS

The Hungarian nobleman Baron Franz Nopcsa travelled the Albanian mountains during the tumultuous period of Albania’s emergence from Ottoman rule.^[38] Already a recognized palaeontologist and geographer, Nopcsa’s travels in Albania sparked his ethnological interest.^[39] Nopcsa usually travelled in the company of his native friends and servants, dressed in Albanian attire, or, to be more precise, in the costumes of the regional tribes.
A longer quote from his diaries reveals his views of the local circumstances:

“Before reaching our camp for the night, we had a hunting adventure. At the altitude of 1880 metres above sea level, we were passing a field of fern in total darkness, when, suddenly, startled by us, some goat-like animals rose up and flew away at a gallop: “chamois!” was my thought at that moment.
Dropping my notebook and seizing my always loaded gun, my first instinctive moves, the latter also exercised by my companions, just in a slower motion. We were close to letting a salvo crack at the fleeing game. In the very last moment our hunting spirit cooled down. Those were long-haired goats, separated from the herd. The mistake could have put us in conflict with the “chamois” owner. The episode did not pass without profit. The foreigner’s prestige rose, as I heard later, because in a decisive moment he did not forget what he carried a gun for. In the eyes of the malesors [the mountaineer tribe Nopcsa was travelling with] only he who knows how to handle a gun is a man anyway. “Tamam shqiptar,” just like an Albanian, this is the highest compliment you can receive from them.”^[40]

Hunting game was not the only consideration for carrying a gun – for Nopcsa it was instrumental to his research. The handling of a gun – to be performed with certainty and without hesitation – was, as Nopcsa put it, the most important means to gain confidence and respect of Albanian tribesmen, to be recognized as one of them, and through that recognition gain access to their culture. The “going native” act that Nopcsa performed was also based not only on his fluency of Albanian dialects and on dress, but also his ability and readiness to fight, represented by his gun.
Nopcsa seldomly evaded conflict. During his early travels to the Albanian vilajets of European Turkey before 1912, the Ottoman authorities were always reluctant to allow him to cross the borders armed with his Manlicher gun, or to let him roam the country without official supervision. His strategy against these obstructions was based on overwhelming boldness and audacity. According to his diaries, he belittled any Turkish official with consummate aristocratic arrogance.
Nopcsa called the Albanians “the armed children of Europe.” When dealing with them, Nopcsa advised that the “wild mountaineers were to be handled delicately, like chinaware. With rough brutal energy and brute violence one can achieve short time quasi-success but the reaction is to be expected sooner or later.”^[41] Nevertheless, the display of potential force, determination, and intolerance against any personal affront, were in his opinion indispensable for being accepted in the local culture of honor. And a big gun was the symbol of this honor. Various attempted assassinations never deterred him from travelling around the country. More likely, Nopcsa saw them as signs of recognition as an accepted part of the Albanian social system.
Naturalist explorer and romantic voyager at the same time, in his ethnographic work Nopcsa valued the Albanian natives’ point of view, but often overstressed the contrasts to the modern Western bourgeois culture he despised. In his writings he preferred fact to speculation or fiction. His statistics on murder in Albania is a refreshingly objective piece of work on blood revenge and feud; while disproving the often exaggerated notions that dominated reports on these practices, it still provided relatively high numbers for murders for some mountain areas, especially during times of political unrest. Blood revenge, as Nopcsa presented it, was a highly complex system of conflict regulation in a world without any effective state power. Analogically to Krauss’ equation of Bosnian folk epics to the classic texts of European high culture, Nopcsa equated the institution of blood revenge to the aristocratic rituals of duel still common among the k.u.k. army officers up to World War I, and to Japanese hara-kiri, and saw these three as equivalent variations of the same theme.^[42]
Nopcsa also worked on the history and structure of the northern Albanian tribes, constructing long genealogies.^[43] In his work on the tribes’ material culture, he applied a method inspired by botany. He identified cultural elements and followed their appearance through space and time, including archaeological findings. This was required, he posted, because in an area like Northern Albania, where cultural tides and streams crossed, original juxtaposition deteriorated into a spatial clutter. Disentangling it wasn’t easy work, as Nopcsa assured, but he strove to identify sixty-four cultural elements, assigning each of them to a Mediterranean, Thrakian, Illyrian, Celtic, Middle European, Latin, Romanic or Slavic origin. Modern and “Turkish” elements were left aside.
In Nopcsa’s work on northern Albanian material culture published after World War I, there is an interesting section on recent weaponry.^[44] It deals with the connections between gun and honor. Based on the observation of an Albanian rifleman privately kissing his gun after scoring in a shooting contest, the study asserts that sentimental bonding occurs between an Albanian man and his weapon. The work also contains detailed information on weapon production and trade, including an informed analysis on how to smuggle weapons into the country. Nopcsa gained this expert knowledge during the Bosnian crisis of 1908, when he was on a secret mission from the k.u.k. foreign ministry to arm and agitate northern Albanian tribes. They were intended to neutralize Montenegro’s military threat against Bosnia and Herzegovina, but the plans were bogged down in the intricacies of the Dual Monarchy’s “double” bureaucracy.
The emergence of independent Albania met Austrian and Italian political approval alike, and generated public attention. In Vienna, philanthropic, business, and scholarly circles orginized an Albanian Committee, which had the ambition to promote trade relations, discuss the colonization of Albania with German and Slavic settlers, and even advance Albanian sports. The Committee’s members went on cruises down the Adriatic coast, with stops at Albanian ports and exciting excursions into the hinterland.^[45] Nopcsa reluctantly took part in such activities, as he was bent on promoting the Albanian cause and spreading knowledge about the country, but despised the dilettantish tourist travellers.
In the years running up to the First World War, Nopcsa’s engagement with Albania turned successively from scholarship to politics. He turned away from Albanian affairs in 1913, when his plans to become king in the newly independent country caused amusement in Vienna’s diplomatic circles.^[46] He returned to Albania right after the outbreak of the War, setting up pro-Habsburg volunteer corps. But after the k.u.k. forces occupied Albania in 1916, Nopcsa was removed from the country: army officials suspected him of following his own agenda.^[47] He shared this fate with other experts on Albania. The military disliked these experts’ know-it-all manner, along with their insubordinate ways and appearance, often perceived as “orientalized.”Nopcsa never returned to Albania, and committed suicide in 1933.
Nopcsa was not the only Austro-Hungarian engaged in the ethnographic exploration of Albania. Other explorers came mainly from the diplomatic service, like the seminal scholars Johann Georg von Hahn and Theodor von Ippen.^[48] Another important source for ethnographic knowledge of Albania was the Franciscan clergy.^[49] The Habsburgs maintained good relations with the Franciscans based on the Protectorate of “dissidents” in the Ottoman empire, as the monarchy had provided support for the Albanian Catholics since 1839, and maintained the Franciscan seminary in Sarajevo.

SCIENTISTS TO SOLDIERS, SOLDIERS TO SCIENTISTS

On the 11th of May, 1916, Dr. Franz Kidrić bought himself a gun. The Slavicist, working for the Hofbibliothek and exempted from military service, was preparing to take part in a scholarly venture, the official title of which was “Expedition [for the study of] arts, history, ethnography, archaeology, and linguistics in the k.u.k. occupation zones in Serbia, Montenegro and Albania, commissioned by the Ministry of Education and the Imperial Academy of Sciences.”^[50]
World War I was now at its peak. The Austro-Hungarian multinational Empire had struck down its arch-enemy, the state of Serbia, and only after substantial help of its German ally. To compensate for its own weak military performance, the k.u.k. forces rushed further down the Balkan Peninsula, chasing the collapsed Serbian Army, conquering Montenegro and occupying the northern parts of neutral Albania on the way.^[51] The eastern part of Albanian populated territory was held by Bulgarian forces, and the south part of the country was occupied by French and Italian troops. The invading armies were impeded by flooding rivers and a lack of roads and bridges. The subtropical climate, with its heavy rains in the winter and malaria-breeding marshes in the summer, undermined the occupation forces. The local population was not hostile: the Albanian Volunteer Corps shared some of the fighting; but in the eyes of the occupiers, the Albanians remained wild, unreliable and lacked a sense of national unity. The occupation was experienced as a kind of a “colonial campaign.”^[52]
While the political and military leaders of the Monarchy were disputing the Great War’s aims in general, their subordinates on the ground in Albania were at odds about the future of the country. The diplomats wanted Albania to become a quasi-independent Austrian satellite, while the military saw it as a spoil of war, and had clear colonial ambitions. Meanwhile, the XIX corps of the k.u.k. army installed a military administration in Albania and engaged in various projects to pacify and govern the country. To end endemic violence a general “besa” was proclaimed to momentarily cease all cases of blood revenge.^[53] Later, the administration tried to end blood revenge once and for all by installing commissions for conciliation.^[54] Albanian volunteers were filed mostly into Bosnian units, but the k.u.k. administration also organized an Albanian militia seen as the basis for a later Albanian regular army.^[55] A notable project was the first census on Albanian territory, managed by the explorer Franz Seiner, who had experience in Africa where he had employed locals as census collectors.^[56] The Counsellor of the Foreign Ministry to the Military Administration, August Ritter von Kral, initiated a literary commission, assembling Albanian intellectuals such as the priest and poet Gjergi Fishta, the author of the epos of Albanian national struggle “Lahuta e Malcis,” to elaborate on the question of the official Albanian alphabet, and to develop textbooks.
The k.u.k. rule was, at least in the beginning, held in relatively high esteem by the Albanians; but it could never rely on sufficient force to impose a military draft or to disarm the population. Nevertheless, the Austrian scholarly community could take the advantage of the de facto colonial situation in Albania.

CONQUERED SCIENCE AND SCIENTIFIC CONQUER

The first impetus for the interdisciplinary expedition into the occupation zones came out of a meeting in the Ministry of Education, which addressed the question of how to handle scientific collections and libraries in the occupied Serbian capital Belgrade. These collections were scientific booty, and had to be dealt with in a scientific way. As a side-project of this discussion, there emerged a plan for a historic-ethnographic Balkan expedition. The official motive was to demonstrate the strong scientific interests and the Kulturmission of Austro-Hungary in the Balkans, and to counter enemy propaganda.^[57]
One of the participants in the first meeting was Michael Haberlandt, who attended the meeting as an official of the k.u.k. Central Commission for the protection of historical monuments. Haberlandt’s son, Arthur Haberlandt, a newly qualified private lecturer for Volkskunde, and the appointed successor to his father’s career.
Soon after the outbreak of the War, Arthur Haberlandt had enlisted himself voluntarily. He served in the fortress of Trebinje in Southern Herzegovina, and was wounded twice. Arthur Haberlandt’s name was the first on the list of the possible members of the expedition, and one of the few names that remained on the list throughout the planning process. It is possible that besides the scholarly qualifications and interests, the opportunity to personally contribute to the war efforts in a less dangerous way had its share in his motivations.^[58]
The plans for the expedition materialized quickly. Six young scholars, all in their late twenties or early thirties, were appointed to travel to Montenegro, Northern Albania, and Serbia from May 22 to August 12. The expedition’s scholars were composed of Arthur Haberlandt as the expedition’s ethnographer, the Slavicist Franz Kidrić, two archaeologists, Arnold Schober and Camillo Praschniker, the linguist and expert on Albanian dialects Maximillian Lambertz, and the art historian Ernst Buschbeck. Haberlandt, Buschbeck and Praschniker served as officers in the k.u.k. armed forces, while the others were civilians. Kidrić and Schober were exempted from military service in order to teach, respectively, Russian language at the Oriental Institute and Archaeology at the University. Buschbeck was unfit for service due to his myopia.
As no one could travel to the Balkans unarmed, the civilians received permission to carry weapons. Moreover, Kidrić sought permission to wear a kind of uniform. He was finally granted money to buy a sword and to supplement a grey raincoat with some elements of the military uniform, so that he could travel under the guise of a military leader or commander.^[59] While the civilians prepared for their war contribution by dressing up like soldiers, the gun-carrying scholars seemingly appreciated the posting as an opportunity to elude the dangerous trenches of the war’s frontlines. Additional military exemption after the expedition in order to work out its findings was also applied for. The official head of the expedition was Ernst Buschbeck, whose military rank was the highest. An official order permitted the group the use of military transportation and support, and advised the occupation forces to help the scholars in every possible way.
From Vienna, the expedition travelled by train via Budapest to Sarajevo. Arthur Haberlandt began his ethnographic work on the way from the military harbor of Cattaro to Montenegro’s capital Centinje. The expedition followed the Army’s campaign path, over the Lovcen pass, where the decisive battle over Montenegro had been fought. From Podgorica, they crossed the Skutari Lake and entered Albania. Skutari (Shkodra) was the main base of the expedition.^[60] From here the trip went via Kruja, Tirana and Elbasan, southward as far as the Shkumbi River, which separates northern and southern Albania. The expedition travelled along the banks of the Shkumbi river to its headwaters and northward back to Skutari. Their path was restricted to the k.u.k. occupied areas, due in part to Bulgaria’s refusing permission to travel the western parts of Albanian territory it had occupied. The travel proceeded, but only for Haberlandt and Buschbeck, crossing the northern Albanian Mountains into the Kosovo on foot, and then by train northward to Belgrade-. Schober had to return to Vienna for the new academic semester, and Lambertz stayed with some tribes to study local dialects, while Kidrić was hospitalized for malaria and dysentery.^[61]
As different scholarly objects and methods influence different scientific pursuits, differences of places of interest, and varying approaches to the population, the disbanding of the group came as no surprise. While Lambertz, the most independent because of his fluent Albanian, hardly mentioned his colleagues in his report, the ethnographer Arthur Haberlandt especially valued the interdisciplinarity of the enterprise; moreover, he benefited from the military support: as Haberlandt pointed out, some areas had only been accessible due to the military occupation. This included the interior of Muslim homes he could now take pictures of, something impossible prior to the occupation.^[62] Another benefit to the expedition was that some of the Albanian volunteers to the k.u.k. army could be used as objects for anthropological measurement and photography.^[63]

COLLECTOR’S ITEMS OR USEFUL EVIDENCE

The expedition encountered scientific material of various kinds. Language in spoken and written form served as linguistic or historical evidence. Kidrić collected recent war related printings for the War collection of the Hofbliothek, and unearthed ancient Orthodox religious handwriting from abandoned monasteries. The archaeologists found antique sculpture, and took measurements of medieval towns and Roman fortresses. Besides his anthropological data, Haberlandt also collected products of contemporary craftsmanship, pottery, attire, parts of costumes and the like.
Yet the expedition’s mission was not meant to prey on war spoils in the name of science. The official instructions stipulated that the members must not carry away anything that the native population could regard as valuable, at least not for the moment. Not that all the explorers obeyed these instructions: Arthur Haberlandt carried home no fewer than 120 ethnographic objects, most of them bought at the bazaars of Skutari (Shkodra) and Üsküb (Skoplje). While “Liebhaberei,” a collector’s hobby, or, better, sentimental longing, was the excuse for the officials back home, Haberlandt’s reasoning was quite different: Haberlandt’s ethnography was centred on things. As museum-based, comparative scholarship, his approach needed objects, and could not work with recorded evidence alone. Not to collect things would have meant not being able to properly conduct his scientific inquiry.
Based on the material Haberlandt collected, he and his father tried to conceive a whole program of ethnographic contributions to the war effort. Arthur Haberlandt produced two monographs during the remainder of the War. The first, a detailed account of the expedition’s findings, was published in 1917 as a special issue of the Volkskunde journal. The second, a luxuriously printed folio volume with numerous pictures and densely-spaced text, dealt with Balkan folk art, and was published in 1919 immediately following the Austro-Hungarian defeat in the War.
As a result of his somewhat long account of Balkan popular culture, Arthur Haberlandt was able to provide expert practical advice. In his appraisal, the former Ottoman regions possessed “in modern sense inferior, but sufficiently developed economic and cultural bases that must be treated as autonomous and self-centred economic entities and not as virgin soil for colonial engagement of the West.”^[64] Combined determination of will and means would be needed to drive the primitive, individualistic, unproductive assertiveness out of the natives. Imperial will based on confident power could unite the fragmented people and lead it to higher stages of organization and culture. Moreover, by providing education and literacy, it would be easy to accustomize Montenegrins and Albanians to regular labor, and thereby incorporate them into higher European civilization.
The Haberlandts also designed two exhibitions to present the folklore of the occupied territories to the Viennese public. They opened a display of Albanian products of home industry in the Museum for Arts and Industry in October 1916. And in January 1918, they organized an exhibition under the title “On the Volkskunde of the Occupied Balkan Territories” in the ballroom of the University of Vienna.^[65] Both exhibitions were highly popular with the Viennese public. While the first exhibition displayed objects collected mostly before the War and was updated with photos taken during the expedition, the second gathered objects from other undertakings in the occupied territories, like Arthur Haberlandts’ “Liebhaberstücke” or the collections of artists such as Leopold Forstner.^[66] This exhibition enjoyed strong support from the Oriental Department of the War Ministry, created in 1917 to organize support from Bulgarian and Ottoman allies.
The Haberlandts also suggested further possible contributions to the War efforts. In a memorandum for the War Ministry in 1917, they offered more expert advice, short essays for military textbooks, pictures, and movies in order to spread knowledge of the Balkan peninsula within the military.^[67]
The scientists even attempted to use the military for their purposes of collecting. The memorandum advised on how to deal with the folkloric objects of the occupied people, indicating that the objects should not be misused. Woven carpets or embroidery, and even small wooden objects like spoons or forms for cheese, should be regarded as valuable possessions of the people – valuable both in the material sense as products of domestic industry worth protecting, and as potential nationally important symbols.^[68] Research into these materials could therefore have propaganda-like effect on the occupied people, demonstrating the respect of Habsburg rule for the culture of its subjects. If such objects were found abandoned, they should be collected and delivered to the Museum. For the task of collecting and registering the objects, an officer with expertise was to be dispatched - most probably the folklorists thought of Arthur Haberlandt.
Besides such efforts to use the military for ethnographic collection, the Museum aspired to become the scholarly center for Balkan Studies after the expected victory.^[69] From 1917 until the end of the war, Arthur Haberlandt was attached to the Oriental Department of the War Ministry, giving him enough time to promote the relocation of the Museum from the stock exchange building to its new home in the Palais Schönborn in Laudongasse. This relocation was eventually carried out with the logistic support of the military in 1918.
The other members of the expedition also derived benefit from their scholarly contributions to the War effort. Praschniker went back to Albania for further research with official instructions to protect the archaeological treasures from becoming war souvenirs for the military personal. Lambertz became a member of the Albanian literary commission. Only Buschbeck remained active in the military as a staff officer, and was involved in combating the growing Albanian insurrection.

CONCLUSION

The three scholarly enterprises described here occurred at different time periods in the Western Balkans occupied by the Habsburg forces. The participants of these ventures came from a variety of backgrounds: a German-Jewish intellectual searching for negative assimilation on the margins of established scholarly realms,^[70] a Hungarian aristocrat questing after a kingdom of heroic men and for a throne, and soldier-scholars in an occupied would-be colony. In all three cases, scientific and anthropological work served both the ambitions of the individual scientists and imperial ambitions alike; and in all cases, they failed in the end.
Krauss partially attempted to go beyond the folklorist scientific realm. His universal approach was potentially capable of transcending emic/etic predicaments, but it did not counter the problematic entanglement of ethnic and racist strife. His early evaluation of Bosnian folklore as equivalent to Homeric and German medieval poetry shows his heterodox perception of the Balkan Other. Inspired by his classical training, he related this folklore to main texts of reference for European and German bourgeois high culture. After failing achieve recognition for his novel comparison, he turned his argument upside down by searching for the universal primitive within European culture. In looking for relations behind the diversity, he was unsuccessful in converting his position as an outsider into that of a cultural bridge builder. While Krauss may be seen as forerunner or contributor to an “Ethno-psychoanlysis,” the ultimate task of digging under the surface of “Kakania” was commissioned by official science, rather than archaeologists and folklorists.
Baron Nopcsa’s scientific approach and method also displayed a high esteem for the people he researched. Nopsca did not refrain from “going native,” including donning the attire and weapons of an Albanian mountaineer. But he never truly became one of them, as he always evoked his feudal status – he was more than willing to become the paternalistic chief for the Albanian “children.” Highlighting the contemporaneity of Albanian blood revenge and k.u.k. officers’ duelling customs told more about the anachronistic rites of the Habsburg military than about the practices of Albanians, and in so doing, ironically freed the Albanian practice from its ascription of pre-modernity. Nopcsa’s interest in Albanian tribal structure goes hand in hand with imperial anti-national politics of divide et impera.
In the situation of the First World War, the knowledge demanded about the newly occupied people was first and foremost practical. While some of the politics of occupation was aimed at supporting Albanian nation building (especially those fostered by diplomacy), the ethnographic work of Arthur Haberlandt supported the possible incorporation of the territory into the Habsburg’s system of internal colonialization promoted by the military. The ornamental and technical features of culture were his focus. His expertise was meant to facilitate the natives’ handicraft cottage industry transition into the modern industrial economy. Tribal organization and social structure was less interesting to him than a possible racial classification of the occupied people.
Seen together as examples of an imperial anthropological science, all three ventures reveal a specific Habsburg perspective. None of them perceived heterogeneity as negative in the first place, but rather considered it something which could be dealt with – be it by disentangling the scrambled cultural traits and elements, and sorting out the valuable from the futile, or by encountering the “primitive within” the researched “Other” and thereby facilitate its role as part the imperial diversity. The representations of this diversity, be they textual or exhibitive, offered an image of a “Greater Austrian village,” with every nation of the empire in its natural milieu, and in its entirety seen as richly colored and beautiful. In this village, tamed mountaineers from the Balkans could surely find a place for themselves. These aesthetic ambitions were shattered by the defeat and the dismantling of the multiethnic Habsburg Empire.