An overview of the Austria's recent history written for the general reader and the student.

By the dawn of the twentieth century, Budapest was a burgeoning cosmopolitan metropolis. Known at the time as the “Pearl of the Danube,” it boasted some of Europe’s most innovative architectural and cultural achievements, and its growing middle class was committed to advancing the city’s liberal politics and making it an intellectual and commercial crossroads between East and West. In addition, as historian Anita Kurimay reveals, fin-de-siècle Budapest was also famous for its boisterous public sexual culture, including a robust gay subculture. Queer Budapest is the riveting story of nonnormative sexualities in Hungary as they were understood, experienced, and policed between the birth of the capital as a unified metropolis in 1873 and the decriminalization of male homosexual acts in 1961. Kurimay explores how and why a series of illiberal Hungarian regimes came to regulate but also tolerate and protect queer life. She also explains how the precarious coexistence between the illiberal state and queer community ended abruptly at the close of World War II. A stunning reappraisal of sexuality’s political implications, Queer Budapest recuperates queer communities as an integral part of Hungary’s—and Europe’s—modern incarnation.

Assessing the impact of fin-de-siècle Jewish culture on subsequent developments in literature and culture, this book is the first to consider the historical trajectory of Austrian-Jewish writing across the 20th century. It examines how Vienna, the city that stood at the center of Jewish life in the Austrian Empire and later the Austrian nation, assumed a special significance in the imaginations of Jewish writers as a space and an idea. The author focuses on the special relationship between Austrian-Jewish writers and the city to reveal a century-long pattern of living in tension with the city, experiencing simultaneously acceptance and exclusion, feeling "unheimlich heimisch" (eerily at home) in Vienna.

The interdisciplinary volume offers methodologically innovative approaches to Austria's coping with issues of migration past and present. These essays show Austria's long history as a migration country. Austrians themselves have been on the move for the past 150 years to find new homes and build better lives. After the World War II the economy improved and prosperity set in, so Austrians tended to stay at home. Austria's growing prosperity made the country attractive to immigrants. After the war, tens of thousands of "ethnic Germans" expelled from Eastern Europe settled in Austria. Starting in the 1950s "victims of the Cold War" (Hungary, Czechs and Slovaks) began looking for political asylum in Austria. Since the 1960s Austria has been recruiting a growing number of "guest workers" from Turkey and Yugoslavia to make up the labor missing in the industrial and service economies. Recently, refugees from the arc of crisis from Afghanistan to Syria to Somalia have braved perilous journeys to build new lives in a more peaceful and prosperous Europe.

With its legacy as the centre of one of the greatest empires of modern history, Austriaè^--s legal system has for long been enormously influential worldwide. A European Union Member State since 1995, Austria continues to enjoy its role as a major centre of international business and tourism. Austria has also become host to numerous international organisations.