I'm no /u/commiespaceinvader , but here goes

Although like other historical myths, the specifics are somewhat nebulous, the Habsburg Myth is a notion that the the Dual Monarchy was a somewhat placid and laid-back polity in which the Habsburgs deliberately eschewed both Prusso-Germanic nationalism of Imperial Germany and the autocratic repression of the Romanovs. This particular myth has received a degree of popular currency in the novels of Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth, and later with the postwar Sissi films, which vividly portrayed a bygone world of yesteryear that would be destroyed by modernity. In Roth's case, novels like The Radetzky March or The Tale of a 1002 Nights portrayed the Habsburg state as a benign and rickety institution that creaked along with genial inefficiency. In one delicious chapter of the former novel, for example, Roth goes into the mind of Emperor Franz Josef I on an inspection tour who inadvertently ruins the life of a regiment's barber by promoting him to sergeant for attending to the Emperor.

One especially notable aspect of the Habsburg Myth is that its most prominent articulations came after two major traumas in Austrian history: the dissolution of the empire and the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. This particular historical mythology rendered the Austrian past usable for the present and differentiated it from both the messy interwar present and set Austrianness as diametrically opposed to a pathological and predatory German nationalism. In both his capacity as a journalist and a novelist, Roth valorized the Habsburgs' quaint stupidity over the the political world of the 1920s and 30s. Nationalist squabbles between the various Habsburg successor states in the interwar period also added a nostalgia for the recent past as the Habsburgs had evaded the nationalities question by seemingly ignoring it. The Habsburg Myth also became useful after the Second World war because it helped prop up the notion that Austria was one of Hitler's first victims and the Habsburg's patronage of both the arts and the Catholic church set the dynasty as the antithesis to the Germanic nationalism exemplified by Hitler. Franz Josef I in the Sissi films is a dutiful, semi-bourgeois, husband and a monarch reluctant to impose the death penalty or enact other stringent policies on his subjects, which stood in stark contrast to the dominant postwar image of Hitler as a degenerate and abnormal psychopath.

The Habsburg Myth has proven somewhat problematic for historians of Austria and the Dual Monarchy for a number of reasons. Firstly, these mythologies tend to obscure some of the more nasty and illiberal policies of the Habsburgs. The Austria-Hungary of Franz Josef I's colorful dotage was also the one of the antisemitic Christian Socials of Karl Lueger. These mythologies often confuse a monarchical political strategy with actual fact. It was in the Habsburg's political interests to portray themselves as aloof and above mass politics. This was in keeping with other dynastic political strategies in Europe which portrayed monarchs as possessing a common touch and less remote figures. This embourgeoisement of monarchical institutions was found in liberal polities like Britain or autocracies like Imperial Russia. In this context, the Habsburgs at the fin de siècle appear as less atypical dynasts than the norm.

And of course the postwar iterations of the myth also cloud historical reckoning with Austria's Nazi past. In the 2008 anniversary of the Anschluss, the head of the family Otto von Habsburg, gave a speech claiming Austria was above all Hitler's first international victim and his speech was championed by a number of Austria's right-wing politicians. This was emblematic of a larger trend by the contemporary Austrian far right to selectively borrow from the Habsburg Myth for their own purposes. The Myth's exaltation of Habsburg cultural patronage has allowed unsavory figures like Jörg Haider to invoke the defense of the Habsburg cultural patrimony when attacking foreign migrants or other undesirable interlocutors (this of course is ironic because the Dual Monarchy was in many ways the epitome of a polyglot entity that Haider and his ilk see themselves as the enemy of).

More often than not the Habsburg Myth falls into the trap of presentism; projecting a modern standard onto the actions and personas of the past. Historians need to see the Habsburg's relative toleration of polyethnicity on their own terms, not as a precursor to a twenty-first-century multiculturalism. While this is not to say that the Habsburgs did not enjoy the support of the population or that the image of a benign dynasty is a complete political sham, a number of notable figures ranging from Freud to Zweig after all expressed deep affection for the Habsburg past, but rather that historians need to acknowledge the complexities of the Hapsburg state that are often erased in service of these mythologies.