Word: austro
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...Broadway in the '50s. In a sad measure of the disillusioning years since, it now triumphs as a comedy. Harris Yulin is fine as the betrayer and Jane Alexander dazzling as the raddled revenger. But the real star is Alexander's husband Edwin Sherin, who has directed in high Austro-German style, most of the characters sporting masks and sounding like puppets. He controls the tone unerringly. The simpler and more childlike the telling, the more piercing the satire gets in Broadway's finest revival of the past half-dozen years. W.A.H...
Neither centuries under Turkish and Austro-Hungarian domination nor more than four decades of communist rule have obliterated the ethnic passions that made the Balkans a synonym for fractious politics. Now, with the communist world crumbling, new instability may follow the glum quiet of the Pax Sovietica. The peril exists side by side with the opportunity for healthy change, but the current political ferment of Eastern Europe is an inherently volatile mix in which old demons -- belligerent nationalism and demagogic populism -- could win out as easily as liberal democracy...
...Czech and Slovak Federative Republic, removing a hyphen they had inserted only four weeks earlier. The new monumental mouthful was a concession to the country's 5 million Slovaks, who have resented the dominance of the 10 million Czechs ever since the country was formed in 1918 from the Austro-Hungarian empire's two western Slavonic provinces...
...believe that nothing happens by accident, so Bruno Bettelheim has a theory about why psychoanalysis, and indeed "all modern methods of treatment for mental disturbances," first emerged in Vienna. The fact that Sigmund Freud lived there is too easy. More fundamental was the half-hidden disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, defeated on the battlefield by Prussia, torn apart by Balkan nationalism and devastated by the bank crash...
...despotisms like Fidel Castro's Cuba or Najibullah's Afghanistan would probably wither quickly, as might many Third World Communist insurgencies. The U.S. economy would benefit handsomely from vastly reduced defense expenditures. But the blessings of a Soviet collapse would certainly be mixed. Just as the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War I led to Hitler's brutal exploitation of the resulting power vacuum, so the end of the Pax Sovietica in Eurasia might touch off an ethnic bloodbath among the squabbling successor regimes. For University of Alabama historian Hugh Ragsdale, a Soviet collapse would lead...