The vast Austrian Empire (today’s Austria, Hungary, Czech Republic, and Slovakia) sought to maintain itself through propaganda, which played a part in its fragmentation and figured centrally in the histories of the nations that came into being in the old Habsburg provinces. At the start of the early modern period Emperor Maximilian (1495— 1519) used his power as a patron of the arts to enhance his position. Court artists included Albrecht Durer (1471-1528). Favorite depictions of the emperor stressed his virtue as a Christian knight. Habsburg propaganda reached its apogee during the rule of Maximilian’s grandson Charles V (1500— 1558). Painters such as Titian (c. 14881576) portrayed Charles V as a Roman emperor, while the house of Habsburg adopted Hercules as a mascot, reproducing that image on their currency. Emperor Rudolf II (1552-1612) combined his patronage of the arts and sciences (from his court in Prague) with an attempt to extend Catholicism. In Hungary his policies led to a revolt. The court trumpeted its victories and slandered its enemies—most famously the Turks, whose atrocities both real and imagined were widely depicted in woodcuts. The Habsburgs became the key force in maintaining a Catholic mission against the Turks.
The developing print culture of the seventeenth century was controlled by state censors and produced a steady stream of propaganda, including atrocity stories during the Thirty Years’ War. In the eighteenth century the favored method of Austrian court propaganda was extravagant architecture. The architect Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach (1656-1723) rebuilt Vienna as a baroque celebration of Habsburg power. Emperor Joseph II (1741-1790) relaxed the censorship laws but emerged unscathed from the so-called Broschurenflut (flood of leaflets) that followed. The great challenge to Habsburg power occurred during the Napoleonic Wars, with their awakening of national sensibilities across the Austrian Empire. The Austrian state made some attempt to appeal to Czech nationalism in their own propaganda—to little effect. Austria, under the leadership of Prince Metternich (1773-1859), resisted nationalist impulses through rigid conservative politics and censorship.
The historian Miroslav Hroch has identified a common pattern in the nationalist revivals that swept across Europe in the nineteenth century, seeing a progression from an academic phase, through a cultural awakening, to full-fledged political activity. This model elevates the role of the propagandist to the fore as cultural activists across the region promoted what they saw as the distinc-tiveness of their particular group. Each national group had its prophets of nationalism. In the Czech lands (Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia) Frantisek Palacky (1798-1876) led the way by writing a multivolume history of Bohemia and organizing the first Pan-Slav Congress in Prague in 1848. This united and influenced Slavic peoples across the entire region, inspiring Czechs, Poles, Slovaks, Slovenes, and Croats and Serbs living under Ottoman rule. The Pan-Slav movement used music, costume, flags, and epic history to foster a sense of self (as distinct from the “warlike” Germans or Turks). The movement rallied support in western Europe. The key Hungarian voices of the same period included the poet Sandor Petofi (1823-1849); Baron Jozsef Eotvos (1813-1871), who attacked Austrian corruption in his novel The Village Notary (1844-1846); and the lawyer Lajos Kossuth (1802-1894), an able orator who fermented opposition to Austrian rule in the journal Pesti Hirlap (Pesti News).
In 1848, inspired by the February revolution in France, the “irresistible force” of nationalism clashed with the “immovable object,” namely, Metternich. As Hungarians, Italians, Galician Poles, and Czechs all rose up against Austrian rule, Metternich fled into exile. The Hungarians forced Austria to put an end to censorship and to create a new constitution. The new policy unleashes a flood of propaganda in the form of pamphlets strewn across the empire. In 1849 Hungary declared its complete independence. As the revolutionary movements foundered, the Austrians reasserted their power in the person of politicians such as Prince Felix zu Schwarzenberg (1800-1852) and his successor, Alexander Bach (1813-1893), who pursued renewed policies of centralization, censorship, and Germanization. Kossuth fled Hungary yet continued to campaign from his place of exile, with the lost cause of 1848 swiftly becoming a romantic propaganda story in its own right. Austrian rule in Hungary continued to inspire resistance; well-known examples include the satirical writing of Count Istvan Szechenyi (1791-1860). In 1867 Vienna agreed to an Ausgleich (compromise), with Hungary accepting its half of the dual Austro-Hungarian crown.
In the later nineteenth century Pan-Slavism became a major force in Russian politics. Slavophile authors such as historian and editor Mikhail Pogodin (1800-1875) used the cause to justify Russian imperialist ambitions. Russia sponsored a second Pan-Slav conference in 1867. Pan-Slav propaganda inflamed Russian opinion to such an extent that it made any compromise with Austria over issues such as the fate of Serbia all but impossible. In August 1914, when Austria moved against Serbia, the Russians felt compelled to rally to Serbia’s defense, precipitating World War I.
Austrian-Hungarian propaganda during the Great War included the “Red Book” of 1915, which detailed Serbian and Montenegrin atrocities. Stories included the castration of prisoners of war and an account of the roasting of a pro-Austrian civilian. In the neutral United States the Austrian embassy attempted to encourage strikes among munitions workers, the discovery of the plan becoming propaganda for the Allied cause. In contrast, the government believed that its tactical deployment of “Front Propaganda” against the Russians in 1917 (in conjunction with Germany) paid dividends and aided the Russian Revolution. Austria attempted a similar campaign against the Italian army (1917-1918), but Italy rallied successfully. The British role in directing Allied propaganda against Austria-Hungary (such as dropping leaflets revealing troop positions) was exaggerated somewhat after the war. Recent research has revealed that the campaign remained largely in Italian hands and has questioned the degree to which “Allied propaganda” hastened Austria’s collapse, as the British claimed after the war. The best evidence suggests that Allied arguments acted as a ca talyst in existing internal political developments. The state’s “Enemy Propaganda Defense” work launched among the armed forces in 1918 could do little to reverse matters.
One of the most effective propaganda campaigns of World War I was that waged by Thomas Masaryk (1850-1937) on behalf of his dream of a Czechoslovak state. A philosophy professor, Masaryk had campaigned for reform while under Austrian rule as a member of parliament in Vienna. He spent the war promoting the Czech cause among the Allies. He raised a Czechoslovak legion and persuaded the Allies that his country should be given independence in the postwar world. Even before the end of the war, the Allies had recognized Czechoslovakia as a fellow Allied power. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson (1876-1924) appealed to both the Allied and Central Powers for a peace based on self-determination. The 1918 armistice, largely based on Wilson’s terms, had massive implications for the national aspirations of the subject peoples of Austria-Hungary.
The postwar settlement (the treaties of Saint-Germain in 1919 and Trianon in 1920) established “successor states” across the Austrian and Ottoman imperial lands. These new states sought to establish cohesive identities through policies emphasizing cultural coherence over centrifugal tendencies. Perhaps the clearest example of this was the “Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes,” created between 1917 and 1918 from the Habsburg provinces of Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia, and Herzegovina and the prewar kingdoms of Serbia and Montenegro. As part of this attempt to forge a common identity, in 1929 the state acquired its new name of Yugoslavia.
In Hungary a short-lived Marxist government of Bela Kun (1886-1937) gave way to the nationalist rule of Miklos Horthy (18681957). Themes in state propaganda included the formerly Hungarian lands (and the million-plus Hungarians) that lay outside the borders drawn up in 1920. In Czechoslovakia Thomas Masaryk worked hard to establish a liberal and democratic state and tried to promote this new identity through the educational system, a national flag and anthem, and so forth. Although Czechoslovakia had the most liberal press in the region, the state was challenged by ethnic propaganda from the periphery, most ominously by the Germans of the Sudetenland, who, under the leadership of Konrad Henlein (1898-1945), called for Adolf Hitler to liberate them from Czech oppression.
During the interwar period Austria witnessed extremes of both the right and the left. In 1927 paramilitary forces—the monarchist Heimwehr (home guard) and Marxist Schutzbund (protection group)— exchanged slogans and battled on the streets of Vienna. An increasing number of Austrians fell under the spell of the Pan-German propaganda emanating from the Austrian-born dictator in Berlin. Key themes in this propaganda included the injustice of the postwar settlement forbidding a German-Austrian Anschluss and the alleged responsibility of Jews for the economic misfortunes of the country. Though the Austrian state survived an attempted Nazi coup in 1934, in March 1938 Hitler moved troops into Austria and forced the Anschluss. Hitler then acquired the Sudetenland as a result of the Munich Conference of September 1938, and in March 1939 he seized the rest of Czechoslovakia, setting Europe on the path to war.
During World War II Nazi propaganda worked hard to divide and rule the nations of eastern Europe, exploiting preexisting anti-Semitism. They proved particularly successful in Yugoslavia, where they bolstered Croat nationalism. Ancient hatreds soon subsumed Yugoslav national feeling. Hungary took advantage of the war to recover its “lost territory” and joined the Axis. Propaganda campaigns directed at the region during the war included broadcasts by the BBC, including an unsuccessful campaign to prevent the deportation of Hungarian Jews. The war ended with much of the region under Soviet occupation.
After World War II Austria (which had both U.S. and Soviet zones) underwent a process of de-Nazification through attendant propaganda programs. Although lacking full sovereignty until 1955, the country effectively “relaunched the national image” with a highly effective campaign of public diplomacy. With embassy-sponsored cultural programs and tourist-related publicity Austria converted itself from the homeland of Hitler into a realm of chocolate cake, Mozart, and prancing white horses.
The Soviet influence prevailed as first Yugoslavia and then Hungary and Czechoslovakia became Communist states. Soviet propaganda attempted to revive the Pan-Slav rhetoric of the nineteenth century to justify its domination of Eastern Europe. Each national state maintained a tight control on its mass media. Symbolically the chief newspaper in Czechoslovakia was named Rude Pravo (Red Truth). After the death of Stalin in 1953, Hungary introduced a more liberal media regime. Political liberalization followed swiftly, prompting the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. Many Hungarians fought back in an anti-Soviet uprising. One controversy relating to the latter concerned the precise role of U.S.-sponsored Radio Free Europe in encouraging an armed uprising against Soviet forces. Some Hungarians later claimed that the American radio station had encouraged the move by promising military support. Media liberalization was also an early sign of the so-called Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia in 1968, associated with the moderate administration of Alexander Dubcek (1921-1992). Again the USSR crushed free expression with tanks.
In Czechoslovakia during the 1970s, as elsewhere in the region, opposition material circulated clandestinely. This genre was known as samizdat. Leading opposition voices included the dramatist Vaclav Havel (1936- ), leader of the Charter 77 dissident group. Havel endured both imprisonment and the banning of his plays but remained a staunch advocate of reform. By 1989 opposition rallies had reached such a scale that the regime had no alternative but to negotiate and share power. In the so-called Velvet Revolution Havel became president of Czechoslovakia (1990-1992) and returned after the separation from Slovakia to become president of the Czech Republic.
In Hungary a reform-minded moderate named Karoly Grosz (1930-1996) came to power in 1988 and presided over a relatively smooth dismantling of the Communist state. Grosz had a sound understanding of the mass media, having risen from printer to newspaper editor, and subsequently held a number of senior positions in the Hungarian Socialist Worker’s Party propaganda apparatus, becoming its head in 1974. The liberalization of Hungarian television reached across the border to Romania and hastened the fall of the regime of Nicolae Ceausescu (1918-1989).
Post-Communist Eastern Europe supports a lively media culture even though issues of delineation between the media and the state are still moot. Regional propaganda issues include the rise of the radical right, which is visible in its most extreme form in Austria, where in 1999 J org Haider (1950— ) used anti-immigrant rhetoric to achieve electoral gains for the extreme right-wing Austrian Freedom Party. In early 2000 Haider resigned as party leader to facilitate a less controversial participation in coalition government.
