Abstract
This contribution discusses István Deák’s influence on the rapidly expanding field of gender in Habsburg Central Europe. While Deák did not employ gender as a category of analysis in his own work, some of the categories he did analyze, including collaboration and resistance, war and retribution, and the Habsburg military, and the way he analyzed them, often with a focus on social history, helped open the way for some of his students to move into the newer field of gender and sexuality.
One of the less remarked-upon aspects of István Deák’s influence is how his big ideas about nationalism, antisemitism, war, and revolution have allowed space for so many of his students and mentees to use them as a starting point to incorporate gender as an important category of analysis in their work on Habsburg Central Europe. Many of us, including Eliza Ablovatski, Benjamin Frommer, Pieter Judson, Cynthia Paces, Iris Rachamimov, and I, among others, have done so. Deák showed us that Habsburg nationalities did not have to be the only, or even the primary, frame of reference. His 1967 intervention in the discussions of then-leading historians, reminding these men—virtually all of them were men—that there were no dominant nationalities, “only dominant classes, estates, institutions, interest groups, and professions,” provided space for gender to appear on the Habsburg stage.1
It doesn’t surprise me that Deák influenced the rapidly expanding field of history of gender and sexuality in the Habsburg monarchy. We can certainly categorize gender as an “interest group.” After all, where did we learn about Emperor Charles VI’s change in Salic law that permitted his daughter, Maria Theresa, to rule as the sole female empress in Habsburg history? Or that the devout empress was so concerned about her subjects’ sexual morals that in her battle against unchaste conduct, she established a Chastity Commission (Keuscheitskommission) in February 1752? Her son and successor, Emperor Joseph II, appears to have been concerned about his subjects’ sex lives, full stop. These two Habsburg rulers brought their subjects’ sexual behavior into the historic record.
Deák’s work didn’t just allow us to bring the importance of gender to the fore in our publications; his example also encouraged his students to collaborate in promoting studies of gender in Central/Eastern Europe, outside his supervision but within the intellectual networks he helped us establish. Being part of the “Deák School of History” meant that in 1999, when Cynthia Paces, whose early work applied the concept of gendered nationalism first to national celebrations in Prague’s Old Town Square and then to the history of Prague itself, emailed with the news of a conference in Belarus on “Writing Women’s History and History of Gender in Countries in Transition,” Eliza Ablovatski and I responded with alacrity. We came up with topics, wrote papers, and figured out how to get funding to go to Minsk.2 Then, inspired by a group trip to the Minsk Great Fatherland War Museum, Maria Bucur and I co-edited a collection, Gender & War in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe.3 Three Deák students contributed chapters to the volume: Eliza Ablovatski, Benjamin Frommer, and Iris Rachamimov. All of them addressed some of Deák’s big subjects: antisemitism, collaboration, retribution, war, and revolution—but with a twist: They employed gender methodology in their historical analyses.
In “‘Female Generals’ and ‘Siberian Angels’: Aristocratic Nurses in the Austro-Hungarian POW Relief,” Iris Rachamimov built on one of Deák’s preferred subjects, the multinational, supranational, even, nonnational, Habsburg officer corps during the First World War. Rachamimov’s soldiers were not living up to masculine norms of wartime heroism, however, nor were they fulfilling their traditional obligations of protecting the home front. Rather, these men were wasting away in Russian prisoner-of-war camps, where many of them died, far from the fighting front. Rachamimov analyzed the noble women serving as nurses in the POW, whose relative power over the POWs owed both to their class background and their Red Cross institutional affiliation. These women were meant to report on the captured soldiers’ loyalty, reinforce hierarchical norms and discipline in the camps, and embody the maternal care and goodwill of their royal-imperial homeland.4
The book chapter foreshadowed Rachamimov’s later work on life in POW camps, including her pathbreaking article, “The Disruptive Comforts of Drag: (Trans)Gender Performances among Prisoners of War in Russia, 1914–1920.” There she issued a clarion call for greater research into issues of gender and sexuality by historians of the First World War’s Eastern Front. In the article, Rachamimov turned issues of the masculine wartime fighting front on their head, asserting the centrality of female impersonators in the Russian POW camps for officers, where drag shows were lively and ubiquitous. Following a brief overview of interpretations of drag, she asserted that the all-male POW theaters—the so-called Plennytheater—enabled officers to explore and express the pressures of captivity through theatrical performances that possessed both disruptive and normalizing potential. Indeed, the theater was more than a “‘safe space’ that reaffirmed upper- and middle-class heterosexual masculinity.” It also “created powerful contrary undercurrents that sanctioned forms of homoerotic relations and transgender identifications.”5 The ambivalent nature of the Plennytheater, Rachamimov concluded, reflected and revealed the ambivalent condition of officers as neutralized warriors. Far from the fighting, POW officers occupied a space that was not clearly defined in the dichotomous gendered female home front/masculine fighting front of the First World War. Deák’s analysis of Habsburg officer culture along heteronormative lines did not preclude Rachamimov’s subsequent work, which also helped answer the rhetorical question in his 1990 study Beyond Nationalism: A Social and Political History of the Habsburg Officer Corps, 1848–1918: “Who were the men who made up this strange, multitongued, multiconfessional, supernational band?6
István Deák’s mother, Anna (Timár) Deák, (1898–1961), in 1920. (From the Deák family collection.)
István Deák’s mother, Anna (Timár) Deák, (1898–1961), in 1920. (From the Deák family collection.)
István Deák Doktorgeschwister Eliza Ablovatski, Nancy M. Wingfield, Cynthia Paces (and Lisa Kirschenbaum) at the Gum Department Store in Minsk, Belarus during a break from a conference on gender, 1999. (Courtesy of Eliza Ablovatski)
István Deák Doktorgeschwister Eliza Ablovatski, Nancy M. Wingfield, Cynthia Paces (and Lisa Kirschenbaum) at the Gum Department Store in Minsk, Belarus during a break from a conference on gender, 1999. (Courtesy of Eliza Ablovatski)
Ablovatski’s chapter, “Between Red Army and White Guard: Women in Budapest, 1919,” reflected other aspects of Deák’s influence. She connected gender to issues of antisemitism, nationalism, and war and retribution. In her transnational study of gender violence, Ablovatski analyzed the attempts of Hungary’s victorious political right to reestablish traditional gender roles as part of their postwar, postrevolutionary “national and Christian” consolidation of power in Hungary. She asserted that the tropes of the “pure” White, that is, noncommunist, reactionary, woman and the politically and sexually “dangerous” Red woman dominated the gender assumptions of the political right across interwar Central Europe. Both the Hungarian Left and Right recognized the vulnerability of their women; they also both asserted that rape and sexual abuse reflected the immorality and barbarism of the competing side.7
Ablovatski also addressed themes of nationalism and antisemitism in her recent comparative monograph, Revolution and Political Violence in Central Europe. Analyzing the 1919–1920 revolutions and counterrevolutions in Budapest and Munich, she provides an insightful account of political mythmaking that in both cities employed antisemitic and nationalist ideology, violence, and gender tropes. Ablovatski evaluated counterrevolutionary gendered violence against women designated enemies of national Hungary, who were considered morally dangerous and uncontrollable, that is, stepping outside bourgeois moral norms. State-sanctioned, or at least tolerated, violence against these women included arrest, rearrest, and rape.8
In the last decades of his career, Deák’s research interests moved from the Habsburg world to issues of World War II and communist Central and Eastern Europe, including questions of collaboration and resistance. Like Deák, Benjamin Frommer has focused on collaboration and resistance, demonstrating how gender mattered in his chapter “Denouncers and Fraternizers: Gender, Collaboration, and Retribution in Bohemia and Moravia during World War II.”9 Frommer has written women into collaboration, arguing that women were both victims and perpetrators. In the Nazi-administered Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, the line between collaboration and resistance could be subtle, he notes, and gender played a role. His foci are the most typical, even stereotypical, forms of female collaboration: denunciation and fraternization. Gender and sexuality was also important in the designation and prosecution of denouncers and fraternizers in the wartime Protectorate and postwar Czechoslovakia. While denunciation was the most common crime for which women were tried, the postwar Czech People’s courts were more likely to punish men than women for it.
Frommer’s monograph, National Cleansing: Retribution Against Nazi Collaborators in Postwar Czechoslovakia, which focuses on postwar Czech retributive justice, also addresses gendered elements of collaboration, denunciation, and fraternization, Deákian topics, all. He shows that Czech postwar authorities treated female and male fraternization with Germans differently, ignoring, as some of his female subjects pointed out, Czech men’s relationships with German women while they were working in Nazi Germany. Frommer describes the sexual torture of women in sometimes makeshift jails and detention centers during what he terms an era of “wild retribution” before formal retribution courts and tribunals began full operation.10
Building on topics we traditionally associate with Deák, collaboration and resistance, Frommer has recently written about intermarriage in an interdisciplinary collection co-edited with Adrienne Edgar. Frommer’s contribution, “Privileged Victims: Intermarriage between Jews, Czechs, and Germans in the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia,” analyzes the effect of the Nazis’ application of different sanctions to intermarried families according to the sex of the Jewish spouse and whether the children were official members of the local Jewish community.11
Deák’s students have expanded upon his oeuvre to address a variety of gender topics. Cynthia Paces, much of whose work on gender addresses the politics of commemoration in the Bohemian Lands/Czechoslovakia, has recently analyzed maternal iconography in the Czech national movement and the nascent Czechoslovak state.12 Pieter M. Judson is perhaps best known for The Habsburg Empire: A New History. This much-lauded synthesis addresses issues of women and gender, subjects like female labor, women’s organizations, sex crimes, and sex work that have heretofore not found places in other large synthetic histories of the monarchy.
Judson has, however, more explicitly addressed gender in other work. Like Deák, Judson has employed the Catholic Church as an explanatory category. In “A Scandal in the Seminary,” he analyzes the moral panic that erupted in Austria in summer 2004. The discovery of child and other pornography on the main computer at the seminary in Sankt Pölten resulted in a public discussion of larger issues that have long bedeviled Austrian society: religion, homosexuality, and the family.13 He concludes that certain tropes about homosexuality retain enormous explanatory power especially in terms of church issues.
Finally, I came to focus on gender through the concepts of cultural and gendered nationalism. Although I cite Deák in my recent monograph, my real debt to him—one I assume I share with his other students—is his example of exemplary archival research, which I hope I have followed here. My work, too, is transnational and comparative: I have addressed the fluid movement across regional, provincial, and imperial borders of a group of women—sex workers—who varied across the monarchy by age, confession, education, language, and national identity. I have taken a page from the Hungarian historian, Oscar Jászi, whose The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy Deák had me read for orals, lo these many years. Jászi’s argument about centrifugal and centripetal forces in Austria-Hungary applies to prostitution: like the aristocracy, bureaucracy, church, and military, female sex work was a pillar of the monarchy.14 I think Deák would agree that historians ignore these women and so many others at our own peril.
This brief overview of the gender histories that some of István Deák’s students have produced over the past two decades or so reveals a consistent theme. These scholars have expanded upon questions Deák raised or topics he explored by employing gender as a category of analysis. In so doing, they have helped change our understanding of war and revolution and of collaboration and retribution, among other topics. Moreover, women and other issues of gender as historical subjects appeared in Deák’s final book, Europe on Trial: The Story of Collaboration, Resistance, and Retribution during World War II.15 Their thoughtful studies and sometimes surprising conclusions have helped expand and invigorate the field of Habsburg Central Europe. Long gone are the days when Maria Theresa, Marie Vetsera, and other aristocratic women, mentioned overwhelmingly in terms of their spouses and progeny, were virtually the only women to appear in Habsburg history texts. They have been joined by a panoply of historic figures across Habsburg Central Europe, reflecting a wide range of sexual and gender identities.
Notes
István Deák, “Comments,” Austrian History Yearbook 3, no. 1 (1967): 303–8, here 303.
Cynthia Paces, “Rotating Spheres, Gendered Commemorative Practice at the 1903 Hus Memorial Festival in Prague,” Nationalities Papers 28, no. 3 (2000): 523–39; and Paces, Prague Panoramas: National Memory and Sacred Space in the Twentieth Century (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), esp. 13–14.
Nancy M. Wingfield and Maria Bucur, eds., Gender & War in Twentieth-Central Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006).
Iris Rachamimov, “‘Female Generals’ and ‘Siberian Angels’: Aristocratic Nurses in the Austro-Hungarian POW Relief,” in Wingfield and Bucur, Gender & War in Twentieth-Central Europe, 23–46, here, 23–24.
Iris Rachamimov, “The Disruptive Comforts of Drag: (Trans)Gender Performances among Prisoners of War in Russia, 1914–1920,” The American Historical Review 111, no. 2 (2006): 362–82, here 363–64.
István Deák, Beyond Nationalism: A Social and Political History of the Habsburg Officer Corps, 1848–1918 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), ix. It is only fitting that this volume has been translated into so many of the languages his officers spoke, including German, Hungarian, and Italian.
Eliza Ablovatski, “Between Red Army and White Guard: Women in Budapest, 1919,” in Wingfield and Bucur, Gender & War, 72, 74–75.
Eliza Ablovatski, Revolution and Political Violence in Central Europe: The Deluge of 1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 11, 116–18.
Benjamin Frommer, “Denouncers and Fraternizers: Gender, Collaboration, and Retribution in Bohemia and Moravia during World War II,” in Wingfield and Bucur, Gender & War, 111–32.
Benjamin Frommer, National Cleansing: Retribution Against Nazi Collaborators in Postwar Czechoslovakia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 33, 56–57, 59.
Benjamin Frommer, “Privileged Victims: Intermarriage between Jews, Czechs, and Germans in the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia,” in Intermarriage from Central Europe to Central Asia: Mixed Families in the Age of Extremes, ed. Benjamin Frommer and Adrienne Edgar (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020), 47–82, here 50–51, 53, 58–59.
Cynthia Paces, “Czech Motherhood and Fin-de-Siècle Visual Culture,” in Gender in 20th-Century Eastern Europe and the USSR, ed. Catherine Baker (London: Palgrave, 2016), 25–48.
Pieter M. Judson, “A Scandal in the Seminary,” in Sexuality in Austria, ed. Günter Bischof, Anton Pelinka, and Dagmar Herzog, Contemporary Austrian Studies 15 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2007), 145–57.
Nancy M. Wingfield, The World of Prostitution in Late Imperial Austria (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 7–8.
István Deák, Europe on Trial: The Story of Collaboration, Resistance, and Retribution during World War II (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2015), for example, 119, 123–24, 204, 226.
