The Holy Roman Empire versus the United States: Patterns for Constitution-Making in Central Europe

1938 ◽  
pp. 271-284
1996 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 21-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter Pohl

In1996,Austriawill celebrate its millennium. As in many other cases, the chronological justifications for the anniversary are open to question. Austria has never been “founded,” and certainly not one thousand years ago; its independence is the result of a process that took centuries and cannot be symbolized by a date like July 4 in the United States. Austria's national holiday, October 26, marks the date in 1955 when the Austrian parliament voted permanent neutrality and the last of the Allied occupation troops left the country. Nobody, it is true, would doubt that Austria's history stretches back considerably before 1955, 1945 (the foundation of the Second Republic), 1918 (the birth of the First), or even 1804 (when the Habsburg emperor Francis I declared himself emperor of Austria after the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire). Nothing comparable happened in 996. In a charter dated November 1, 996, Emperor Otto III granted some land at Neuhofen, in the west of the modern province of Lower Austria, to the bishop of Freising. Even the exact date of the charter—whose original has survived—has not always been accepted, for the seal it carries was Henry II's, whose reign began in 1002. Recently, some scholars have even tried to prove, although not very successfully, that it was a forgery.


Author(s):  
John M. Owen

This chapter considers the fourth lesson: a state may be rational and ideological at the same time. Islamism is the ruling ideology of several countries, led by Saudi Arabia and Iran. In non-Muslim countries such as the United States, the question that often arises is whether Islamist states, or their governments, are rational or fanatical. In truth, a state may appear irrational to outsiders, but may be rationally pursuing goals shaped by its ideology. The chapter looks at three such states: the Palatinate, a German estate in the old Holy Roman Empire; the Soviet Union; and the United States. It concludes with an assessment of the rationality of Islamist states by distinguishing their ends from their means.


Author(s):  
Sam Bush

After a while, I began to feel that studying great art and accomplishment isn’t enough. Writing a thesis about art didn’t seem to be as fulfilling as trying to make the art. I had the special background with Karl together with the exceptionally academic nature of Reed, and then I stumbled onto William Morris, and things began to coalesce. One day I went to Lloyd Reynolds, the great calligrapher and teacher at Reed and showed him pictures of my wood work. I asked him what he thought I should do. He said, “You have a teacher who helped you make this? I think you ought to leave Reed immediately and go to him.” I finished out the year, my sophomore year, but after that meeting I was on my way. I wrote a zillion letters to European craft schools and universities where I could study woodwork, not realizing at that time that further work with Karl was a possibility, and eventually I was accepted at two—Carl Malmsten’s school in Stockholm and the Royal Academy in Copenhagen. I was actually on my way there when I stopped in Pottstown to see Karl and stayed ten years. In the spring Alumni Bulletin of Hill School for 1972, I began an article about Karl in this way— . . . Born in a tiny self-sufficient village at the foot of the Tatra Mountains of Slovakia, Karl Pacanovsky . . . was apprenticed in woodworking at eleven and a half years and took his first job at fourteen; as a journeyman he traveled through much of central Europe. Perhaps most influential were the years he spent building the monumental carved Gothic altars which were the expression of religious faith in his region. . . . Pacanovsky came to the United States in 1944. In twenty-eight years at the school he built a powerful foundation for the philosophy which we embody today. When he retired I merely took up where he left off. His influence still lives in this room. And he’s alive, too. I see him every week or two.


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