Please do elaborate on his issues with Joseph ii π
Sure thing! The problem with explaining this one well is that he doesn't have an issue with actual Joseph so much as the idea of Joseph.
To explain that, I'm going to have to go on a digression to explain a concept that seems to only exist significantly in German language academia? So, it's what is known in Austria academic writing as "Josephinismus" or Josephinisim. To horribly simplify the concept, it's the idea that Joseph II had his own form of Enlightened absolutism driving his policy positions, which was then reinterpreted and reshaped by the generation that followed, and that Josephinisim is the interpretation of those policies more than Joseph's original intentions. The person whose theory I tend to use on this is Helmut Reinalter's version that he lays out in the introduction to Josephinismus als AufgeklΓ€rter Absolutismus.
The problem with Joseph II is that he was such a lighting in a bottle moment for Austrian politics that people had to immediately make sense after his rather sudden death. And there was, quite frankly, a lot of lying and misinterpretation. Partially because he was inscrutable as a person, mostly because he died at the waning of the Enlightenment, the start of the French revolution and the start of the backswing. Derek Beales (Joseph's best English language biographer) wrote a scathing piece about this called "The False Joseph II" that indicted the whole field for believing forgeries and rumors and books written about him immediately after his death instead of actually reading Joseph's personal papers. People had claimed all sorts of things, like that he was radically anti-Church or a proto German nationalism, without much grounding in fact.
Franz Fillafer's article in the book Was Blieb von Josephinismus goes as far as to call what the nineteenth century understands to be "Josephinisim" was "a ghost story for adults" that had very little basis in what Joseph actually thought. To again simplify a very brilliant argument, people in the nineteenth century tended to project their own politics onto Joseph. So, the conservatives, for example, saw his Church reforms as an attack on the Catholic church, and then projected those fears onto the contemporary liberals.
And, to swing back around to the original question, Max's issue with Joseph comes from one of the main misinterpretations. For context, Joseph II made German the language of government. If you ask Joseph's biographers now, he did this because he thought one language was efficient, and German was the best choice. But he would have made it practically anything if we could get every government official to write in one language. This is, however, not at all how German nationalists in the 19th century understood this step. They saw Joseph as the first German nationalist who tried to make the Habsburg empire into a German state.
This is Max's problem with him, because he sees the Josephinist reforms as an attempt to make "a model German state instead of a united Austria" and sees it as the forerunner to the kind of German-speaking Crownland centered politics that were neglecting the rest of the provinces. This is why he favors Maria Theresa as the model of reform, because she didn't impose German onto a diverse empire.
But, to be clear, this is the product of the game of telephone that presented Joseph's reforms as a part of making Austria a German state first and foremost. This is also not particularly surprising, because many of Max's contemporary self-proclaimed liberals in Vienna were themselves German nationalists.
And he does not like nationalism. He sees it as chauvinistic and myopic, and most importantly, dangerous to Austria as a state that has its strength in its diversity. So, he doesn't like Joseph for providing this model for it. But he does like him enough for the civil rights and the Toleration Patent and whatnot to have his portrait up.
