Lectures from the Allen Room & Wertheim Study: The Sale that Failed : the House of Habsburg in World War One

Following introductory remarks about the strategems the dynasty used over six centuries to sustain its legitimacy , Professor Fichtner will turn to her main argument: that inept and unpersuasive propaganda played a major role in the military and political collapse of the Habsburg empire in 1918.

Paula Sutter Fichtner (Shoichi Noma Reading Room) taught as a professor of history for thirty six years at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.  Her early research covered the beginning of the modern Habsburg monarchy in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.  From this work emerged her two prize-winning books, Primogeniture and Protestantism in Early Modern Germany and Emperor Maximilian II, a study of a confessionally-tormented Habsburg ruler of the Reformation era.  She has more recently worked with more chronologically far-reaching themes such as Terror and Toleration: the Habsburg Empire Confronts Islam, 1526-1850  (2008) and her recently published The Habsburgs. Dynasty, Politics, and Culture. 

This lecture is in conjunction with the exhibit Over Here : WWI and the Fight for the American Mind - Now through February 15