Abstract

When Austria-Hungary broke up at the end of the First World War, the sacrifice of one million men who had died fighting for the Habsburg monarchy now seemed to be in vain. This book is the first of its kind to analyze how the Great War was interpreted, commemorated, or forgotten across all the ex-Habsburg territories. Each of the book’s twelve chapters focuses on a separate region, studying how the transition to peacetime was managed either by the state, by war veterans, or by national minorities. This “splintered war memory,” where some posed as victors and some as losers, does much to explain the fractious character of interwar Eastern Europe.

“… a crucial addition to the growing field of post-Habsburg studies…While other scholars and politicians shaped the broad memory of the Habsburg Empire, the veterans, commemorative committees, and memorial organizations in Sacrifice and Rebirth defined the fresher and deeper wounds of war. This book is highly recommended.” • Journal of Austrian Studies

“Both the editors and Berghahn books are to be congratulated on having produced an exceptional collection of essays for three reasons in particular. First, these essays address common questions in a highly coherent fashion. Secondly, despite their common focus, the essays offer a range of creative and sometimes new approaches to a difficult set of questions that are only now beginning to be addressed by historians. Third, this collection offers an excellent attempt to go beyond the imperial fragmentation of 1918 that created several often mutually antagonistic historiographies, and to relativize the meaning of 1918 for the region. Thus the volume helps the reader to understand several critical and influential continuities that survived the official end of empire.” • Central Europe

“By following the many ways in which the Great War was framed and interpreted all over the former Habsburg Monarchy, this collection provides a fantastic foundation for fresh and thought-provoking comparisons throughout Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans, and makes a strong argument for overcoming the hitherto prevailing focus on single successor states.” • H-Soz-Kult

“This volume of fascinating chapters will be welcomed by scholars and students of East Central Europe as well as by those interested in the legacy and memory of the Great War. Far too little scholarly work has engaged questions about war veterans, public grappling with the meaning of wartime sacrifice, and the memorialization of the dead in the new states that arose from the ashes of the Habsburg Monarchy.” • Daniel Unowsky, University of Memphis

“This is a strong collection that fills an important gap. Though memory and memorials of the Great War have become a fashionable subject... the Habsburg lands have been largely neglected hitherto.” • Robert Evans, University of Oxford

Mark Cornwall is Professor of Modern European History at the University of Southampton. He is author of The Undermining of Austria-Hungary. The Battle for Hearts and Minds (2000) and The Devil’s Wall: The Nationalist Youth Mission of Heinz Rutha (2012).

John Paul Newman is Lecturer in Twentieth-Century European History at Maynooth University. He is author of Yugoslavia in the Shadow of War: Veterans and the Limits of State Building 1903-1945 (2015) and coeditor, with Julia Eichenberg, of The Great War and Veterans’ Internationalism (2013).