Imagining an Austrian Nation - Joseph Samuel Bloch and the Search for a Supraethnic Austrian Identity, 1846 - 1918

Attempting to cultivate an Austrian identity based on a civic rather than an ethnic conception of a national community, this text focuses on the ideas of Joseph Samuel Bloch, an Austrian-Jewish writer and politician who sought to cultivate a civic identity to unify the nationalities of multiethnic Austria. Bloch called for a hyphenated Austrian consciousness that respected the desire to protect pre-existing ethnic, cultural, religious and linguistic bonds while building transethnic ties based on citizenship. This study also analyses the ideas of his mentor, Adolf Fischof, another Austrian-Jewish reform-minded politician. Finally, it compares Bloch’s ideas to those of other Austrian reformers of various ethnic and political backgrounds in order to discover how they conceived of a supraethnic Austrian consciousness.