Difference and the City: Minority Migrants in Vienna ca 1900

This project is designed to thoroughly investigate one particular aspect of historical diversity in fin-de-siècle Austria-Hungary: The project sets out to describe migrants from the southeastern, largely South-Slav provinces of the Habsburg monarchy in its capital Vienna around 1900, and to investigate into the ambivalences of representation and self-representation of these migrants in the context of contemporary nationalism. This involves investigating the meaning of the ethnic category in concrete migrant life worlds and discourses in the contemporary context of Difference in general. In other words, migrant strategies to deal with their Difference in the city will be described both as every-day practice (housing, sociability, work, business, leisure etc.) and as attempts at intentionally managing Difference (organizations, publications, public events etc.). In which relation was the trans-regional hybrid reality of migrants in the metropolis to contemporary identity projects and emerging and dominant projects of nationalization or even ethnification as the various shades of the South-Slav, the Croatian, Serbian or Zionist ones? How and when was migrant ethnicity constructed? Were migrants organizing their lives according to ethnic principles, and how? Were there ethnic clusters or ethnic communities from the South-East? On which levels and in which contexts was migrant ethnicity important? When were other differences in the foreground, most importantly gender and class, and how can their contingency be described? What was the economic impact of gender among migrants? Painstaking archival research, mainly based on church records, administrational and material and socio-economic data on housing will allow to link archival data to reconstruct both individual lives and networks of so-far non- described migrants, in order to describe every-day practices of dealing with difference in the city. To describe attempts of (predominantly) South-Slav migrants at managing such difference, these findings will again be combined with discourse analyses of publications and other representational practices (including parliamentary work) of publicly visible migrant individuals. The research will be put forward in close co-operation with international colleagues through regular visits at several institutions in Europe and Canada and will be accompanied by a handful of quality publications in journals.

Never before had there been more Serbs, Slovenes, and Croats in Vienna than in late 19th century. At the same time, their national identity projects were thriving. Why was there no such public culture in Vienna? What were the networks such migrants had developed and in/with which spaces did they communicate if not in the wider public? DatC has developed answers to these questions. DatC has also raised new questions and new answers. These lead to a broader and more profound understanding of how migrant identity politics work in the modern city. The project reached over the Atlantic, back into the late 18th century and forward into the early 20th century. And it needed new methods. Paradoxically, national identity projects were promoters of territorialism, but could not develop without excessive mobility. In order to explain this paradox, it is helpful to understand community and identity as projects, i.e. open processes as is making an unorthodox move in research and taking a look at the infrastructure and places mobile managers of identity were using. In order to get a manageable framework of explanation, Difference and the City has concentrated on newspaper publishing projects of Habsburg Serbs between 1891 and 1929 that were realized in several seemingly unrelated places: Vienna, Novi Sad, and Pittsburgh. Why Vienna around 1800? It had the largest library, was the political center and Cyrillic printing was forbidden elsewhere. A small group of Orthodox Slavic traders with a multilocal system of family presence and facilities in the city connected to many Balkan orthodox towns met with a slavophile network of single intellectuals who were using the infrastructure of knowledge connected to the court to secure artifacts of Slavic identification. The first Serbian newspaper appeared in Vienna in 1891. Of course, Novi Sad with its Serb population was the next station. A multinational town with trade and transport infrastructure, place of knowledge transfer, adjacent to the metropolitanate, it was now open to formerly restricted know-how that facilitated Slavic publishing. In 1848, Novi Sad was a center both of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary activity and the first Serb newspaper landscape developed there. But why was Vienna no place for Serb publishing in the late 19th century anymore? Although there were many potential readers, the changed political status of Vienna after 1867 had weakened the interest in making politics there for Hungarian citizens. Knowledge and technology were more proliferated than before. At the end of century however, another country had become a place for politics of Habsburg Serbs: the USA. Like other migrants, they started their own public sphere there. In 1906, the first US-Serb daily appeared in Pittsburgh. Its working class protagonists were a stark contrast to 100 years before.