Katherine Arens is a Professor of Germanic Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin, USA. She is also a Professor in the Center for European Studies and the Center for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of seven books, including Belle Necropolis: Ghosts of Imperial Vienna (2014), Empire in Decline (2001), and Austria and Other Margins: Reading Culture (1996). She has been the recipient of a number of awards, including the Plato Award from the International Biographical Centre, Cambridge, UK.

• Introduction: Austria as a Challenge to EuropeSection 1: An Austrian Imperial Europe Chapter 1: Letters to the Ruling Class: The Public Spaces of EnlightenmentChapter 2: Extending Europe's Enlightenment: Why Grillparzer Resists Weimar Chapter 3: Revolution from the Prompter’s Box: Rewriting Public Dreams of Political MoralityChapter 4: Eclipses, Floods, and Biedermeier Catastrophes: Public Spaces in extremis Section 2: At the Margins of Europe, In the Heart of EuropeChapter 5: Hofmannsthal's European Revolution: Recapturing a Space for Common Culture Chapter 6: Schnitzer and the Space of Public Discourse: The Politics of Decadence in Fin de siècle ViennaChapter 7: Kasperl and the Wiener Gruppe: artmann, Bayer and Handke Chapter 8: A New Balkan Challenge: The Reemergence of Austria's EuropeAfterword: Austria as Europe?: The Art and Science of the Post-National CultureBibliographyIndex

Vienna’s Dreams of Europe is a critique of familiar teleological readings of modern history, an attempt to provide a more nuanced understanding of regional public institutions and public spaces in Central Europe, and an exploration of distinctively Austrian approaches to the idea of Europe. Arens brings to cultural studies—and to German studies in particular—a complex picture of European history and culture, which challenges common assumptions about modern Europe since the eighteenth century, especially “the fiction of an emerging ‘German’ culture-nation."