Empire and Identity is an approach to the last decades of the Habsburg Empire. The study works in a biographical mode, examining questions of identity and self-understanding in six life-careers in the Austrian intellectual and political elite. The focus in the six biographies is on the problem of the Austrian state in an age of nationalist strife and constitutional conflict, on the different perceptions of this problem and on the solutions arrived at in the, in a broad sense, political engagement of the individuals examined. The book is organized as three dual political biographies, each focusing a certain problem in the development of the Imperial Austrian state in the early twentieth century. The biographical approach also throws new light on the six examined individuals, whose scholarly, artistic and bureaucratic careers are placed in a political context .