Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
s e v e n
Fault Lines and Borderlands:
Imperial Austria, 1880-1914
Our knowledge of a natural phenomenon, say of an earthquake, is as complete as
possible when our thoughts so marshal before the eye of the mind all the relevant
sense-given facts of the case that they may be regarded almost as a substitute for
the latter, and the facts appear to us as old familiar figures, having no power to
occasion surprise.
—ernst Mach,
The Analysis of Sensations,
1886
1
How did the self-reports of ordinary people inform planetary physics? The
Habsburg monarchy is an excellent field on which to track exchanges be-
tween local knowledge and international science. The circulation of knowl-
edge could not be taken for granted in a state that included eleven major
linguistic groups and encompassed the plains of Bukovina, the Adriatic
coast, the Alps, and the Carpathians. Charged with understanding the mon-
archy's celebrated unity amid diversity, Habsburg scientists sought an inte-
grated approach to the study of natural and human conditions.
2
Austria-Hungary contained regions of moderate to high seismicity in the
Alps and along the Adriatic. There is even evidence that seismicity in these
regions was on the rise in the monarchy's final decades.
3
Particularly in the
Balkans, earthquakes called into question the political framework that tied
the monarchy's fringes to its two capitals: which level of the state's intricate
web of governance would respond? newspapers in vienna, Prague, and Bu-
dapest printed wary reports of the camps pitched by earthquake victims
to their south (see figure 7.1). The specter of homelessness raised fears of
irredentist nationalism. Yet earthquakes also inspired humanitarianism.
In 1895, when national disputes seemed to be crippling Austrian politics,
a catastrophic earthquake struck the city of Ljubljana (German: Laibach),
