The essay offers an overview on Ivan Franko’s contributions to the weekly Die Zeit; between 1895 and 1904. The famous Ukrainian writer published around thirty of his German essays in the Viennese weekly and thus attacked economical and political grievances in Galicia in a harsh and often polemical way. Accentuating these topics in particular, Franko obviously responded to the requests of Viennese editors and deliberately limited the scope of his journalistic work. These processes are interpreted as a sign for cultural subalternity of the periphery of the Habsburg Empire in its relationship to the centre in Vienna and are analyzed by means of “Postcolonial Studies”, namely by the works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. With the help of Spivak’s famous essay titled Can the Subaltern Speak?, it is possible to understand Franko’s furious attack against Adam Mickiewicz, published in Die Zeit in May 1897 under the title Ein Dichter des Verrathes, as a reaction of a subaltern Ukrainian writer against the dominant Polish culture.
This article examines the correspondence between the Austrian author Hermann Bahr and the Czech dramaturge, author and politician Jaroslav Kvapil. It focuses on the years during World War I and the increasingly divergent interests of these two figures. While Bahr is concerned with renewing Austria, Kvapil is engaged in nation building in the newly forming Czechoslovakia.