Military newspapers and the Habsburg officers' ideology after 1868
The Habsburg officer corps of the late nineteenth century played a significant role in sustaining the feudal anachronism of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Despite its constant appeals to tradition, it was in fact a product of the struggles to reform the army. The tensions that resulted are evident in the military press of the reform period and left their mark on the officers’ ideology.
The Austro-Prussian War: Austria's War with Prussia and Italy in 1866 . By Geoffrey Wawro. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1966. Pp. 313. $59.95. ISBN 0-521-56059-4.
This expanded and reworked Yale dissertation ventures into a topic done spellbindingly two decades ago by one of the grand masters of German military affairs, Gordon Craig, whose Battle of Koeniggraetz (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1964), was published in a series commissioned by Hanson W. Baldwin. NewYork Times military affairs editor. Wawro does not approach the literary brilliance of Craig, but his work goes beyond it in several important respects. First, although Craig dealt with a good deal of the preliminary background and also the aftermath, his book focused squarely on the major battle which decided the war, whereas the book at hand deals with the entire war, which included several other battles, notably Langensalza, between Prussia and the Hanoverians in north-central Germany and Custoza between Austria and Italy in northern Italy. Secondly, whereas Craig knew the German sources as well as anyone, Wawro here uses not only German, but Austrian, French, British, and Italian ones. Of the last two, the former are important for the diplomatic background, the latter for the southern campaign area as well as for the problematic PrussianItalian relations. Thirdly,Wawro has dug deeper than Craig into primary source archives. Especially for the central emphasis of the book, the Austrians and Italians, he has mined the archives in Vienna, Rome, Naples, Milan, and Venice. For example, he uses a number of war diaries which officers from captain to field marshal kept and later deposited in military archives. Interestingly, both authors use Hans Delbriick andTheodor Fontane. Delbriick wrote half a dozen essays on the war and after his death in 1929 two of his colleagues published a fifth volume of his classic Art of War in the Framework of Political History which dealt substantially with 1866, partly on the basis of Delbriick's Berlin University lecture notes. Fontane covered the war as a newspaper correspondent and published more than a thousand pages from his eyewitness experiences, Der deutsche Krieg von 1866, 2 vols, (Berlin, 1871-72).
The administration of the courts
Section 28 of Article VI of the State Constitution provides that the Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals is the Chief Judge of the State and its chief judicial officer. The Chief Judge appoints a Chief Administrator of the Courts (or Chief Administrative Judge of the Courts if the appointee is a judge) with the advice and consent of the Administrative Board of the Courts. The Administrative Board consists of the Chief Judge as chair and the Presiding Justices of the four Appellate Divisions of the Supreme Court. The Chief Judge establishes statewide administrative standards and policies after consultation with the Administrative Board and approval by the Court of Appeals.