Karl Theodor von Inama-Sternegg’s article examines the organization of Austria’s census of 31 December 1900 through its categories, questionnaires, and implementing instructions. Its governing concern is selective modernization: continuity preserves comparability, while administrative change requires new questions and methodological scrutiny warrants withdrawing unreliable ones. Census design consequently appears as a negotiation between statistical knowledge and the practical needs of government.
The individual remains the basic unit of enumeration, situated within dwellings and successive territorial divisions. Relationships to the principal occupant distinguish relatives, servants, subtenants, and bed-lodgers, allowing household organization to emerge within this framework. More detailed treatment of subtenants strengthens its social specificity. The question about uninterrupted voluntary residence also links enumeration to the 1896 reform of municipal domicile rights, under which ten years’ residence can establish a claim to local membership.
The proposed analysis makes these relationships central:
In diesen Kreis der Bearbeitung fällt vor allem die Darstellung der Zuständigkeits- und Gebürtigkeitsverhältnisse mit ihren Wechselbeziehungen zu den Thatsachen des Aufenthaltes.
English translation: Within this sphere of treatment falls above all the presentation of the conditions of legal domicile (Zuständigkeit) and of place of birth in their reciprocal relations to the facts of residence.
Legal affiliation, birthplace, and actual residence are thus to be examined together. The analytical value lies not merely in counting inhabitants but in identifying correspondences and discrepancies between administrative membership and population distribution.
Inama-Sternegg’s defence of continuity is especially pronounced in his discussion of Umgangssprache, the language of ordinary intercourse. Altering this question would, he argues, impair historical comparison, encourage suspicions of manipulation, and unsettle legislation based on earlier results. He distinguishes everyday linguistic practice from mother tongue as historical-ethnographic evidence and nationality as political identification. Yet the instructions bound this ostensibly objective measure: the question applies only to persons belonging to the Austrian territories represented in the Reichsrat and permits only one of nine prescribed categories. The article’s methodological defence therefore coexists with restrictive administrative definitions.
Other revisions acknowledge the limits of general enumeration. Disability questions are removed because self-reporting and non-specialist observation cannot provide sufficiently reliable evidence; medically supervised registers offer an alternative. Real-estate ownership is similarly assigned to a separate investigation. Occupational questions instead become more differentiated, distinguishing itinerant trade, work in customers’ homes, fixed establishments, and dependent home work. Employer addresses connect workers to enterprises and prepare the projected business census of spring 1901. Coordination between municipalities addresses the separation of residence from workplace.
Housing inquiries extend this effort to connect population with material circumstances. Numerous towns receive a limited investigation, while selected large cities face fuller questions concerning rents, tenure, utilities, ownership, sanitation, and construction. Statistical ambitions remain constrained by the burden and reliability of questioning. The unemployment inquiry is more explicitly experimental: selected-city coverage and a single winter reference date limit its representativeness, although its definition distinguishes employees seeking work from persons who are simply inactive. Livestock enumeration likewise survives as a practical compromise despite the limitations of a winter snapshot.
The implementing material reveals the institutional precision required beneath aggregate figures. Military classification, for example, depends on formal organizational affiliation:
Bemerket wird, dass die Militärabtheilungen der Pferdezuchtanstalten, das Militärwachcorps für die k. k. Civilgerichte in Wien und das Militär-Polizeiwachcorps dem Verbande des k. und k. Heeres angehören.
English translation: It is noted that the military detachments of the horse-breeding establishments, the military guard corps for the imperial-royal civil courts in Vienna, and the military police guard corps belong to the body of the imperial and royal army.
This rule makes visible the administrative work underlying apparently straightforward population categories. Observable activity or location alone does not determine where a person belongs statistically.
The concluding programme distinguishes local aggregation from centralized combinations of individual characteristics. Territorial totals, a planned Gemeindelexikon, housing statistics, and electrically assisted tabulation belong to a coordinated system of investigation and publication. Throughout, Inama-Sternegg presents the census as an infrastructure whose usefulness depends on stable definitions, selective innovation, institutional coordination, and a disciplined recognition of what a single enumeration can establish.
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