The Minutes of the Cisleithanian Cabinet 1893-1900

The aim of the project is to edit and subsequently publish the minutes of the Cisleithanian Council of Ministers from the period between 11 November 1893 and 18 January 1900 (Governments Windisch- Grätz, Kielmansegg, Badeni, Gautsch I, Thun, Clary, Wittek). The years under investigation constitute one of the major times of upheaval in the Habsburg Monarchy, something which also found expres- sion in the minutes of the Council of Ministers, one of the supreme bodies of the state. By virtue of the large spectrum of topics dealt with and decided upon by the council, the edition project will open up for the historical sciences a stock of source material offering a wealth of starting points for new re- search even outside political historiography (e.g. in the fields of economic, social, everyday and tech- nological history). Simultaneously, the transcription and publication of the sources will make a valua- ble contribution towards preserving the Austrian cultural heritage, as the material will suffer further damage through any use due to its poor conservation state (scorched files damaged in the Palace of Justice fire in 1927). The project is part of the long-term plan on the part of the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Historical Research at the Austrian Academy of Sciences to edit and publish the minutes of the Cisleithanian Council of Ministers (1867-1918), work on which is already in progress. The handling methods will follow the principles elaborated within the project to publish an edition of the minutes of the Austrian Council of Ministers 1848-1867, a project that was completed in 2015. In concrete terms, the surviving original texts will be critically edited and commented upon, using prima- ry sources and relevant specialist literature for the commentary. The edition section will be prefaced by a scientific introduction, summarizing the events and topics and placing them in their historical contexts. Name, place and subject indices will also be compiled. Publication of the research findings will take place in dual form, on the one hand, as a printed book and, on the other, as part of the database on the Austrian or Cisleithanian minutes of the Council of Ministers 1848-1918, currently under development at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. The project links up with a plan to digitalize the existing and all the future volumes of the edition series which is currently being pursued by the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Historical Research in conjunc- tion with the Austrian Center for Digital Humanities at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. This cir- cumstance will be taken into account in compiling and entering the data, so that only one dataset must be created for both the database and the book manuscript.

1893-1900 an erosion process took place in Cisleithania, the western part of the Habsburg monarchy. This development began with the attempt to win over the most important national and social groups represented in parliament for a coalition government (Windischgrätz government, 1893-1895) in order to settle their differences at the highest level. Discussions between the ministers, as representatives of their political parties, bear testimony to these contradictions in the Council of Ministers, such as during the debates on the electoral reform. The coalition government fell in 1895, not because of a dispute over major issues, but because of a financially insignificant budget item for the establishment of Slovene parallel classes at a German-speaking Gymnasium in Cilli. After the Kielmansegg transitional government (1895), the Badeni government (1895-1897) was appointed, which was supposed to lead politics without being tied to the political parties. It had some initial success, so the electoral reform, which the Windischgrätz government had failed to implement, was passed around 1896. However, Badeni's attempt to have the Wirtschaftsausgleich with Hungary, which was to be completed in 1897, sanctioned by parliament was unsuccessful. Although he secured the approval of the Czechs by issuing language decrees for Bohemia and Moravia, the German parties protested violently against these. The tumultuous scenes that followed in the House of Representatives prevented the necessary parliamentary sanctioning of the Wirtschaftsausgleich and led to Badeni's resignation at the end of 1897. The successor governments of Gautsch (1897/98) and Thun (1898/99) failed to persuade the German parties to return to constructive work. Only when the Clary government revoked the language decrees (1899) did the German policy of obstruction end, but this triggered resistance from the Czechs, so that Clary had to resign. Railway Minister Wittek then headed the Council of Ministers (1899/00) until a new attempt to stabilize the political situation in Cisleithania was made with the appointment of the Koerber government. Of the 442 meetings of the Council of Ministers with 3,120 agenda items, none of the original minutes survived the Justizpalastbrand in 1927. However, there are 513 copied agenda items from the period 1895-1897. Copies of 6 agenda items (1898/99) are preserved in the estate of Finance Minister Kaizl, Hugo Pollack, editor of the "Neue Freie Presse" furthermore made copies of 63 agenda items in Gabelsberger shorthand. In addition, the drafts of 10 speeches by the Finance Minister in the Council of Ministers are available, so that a total of 592 or 19% of the items on the agenda can be reconstructed. Since only the so-called Czech transcripts from 1895-1897 are generally known and readable, the content of 79 agenda items were be made accessible to the scientific community with the help of this project.