"At last we welcomed with flowers what had been overdue and suppressed for so long."

Enthusiasm for the war was evident not only in the Dual Monarchy but also in many other countries waging war. This mood reached a climax especially in Germany in late July and early August 1914. Public squares and streets were crowded with cheering people acclaiming the German Fatherland and demonstrating for the war. In the cities of the Habsburg Monarchy there were also frequent mass gatherings and patriotic demonstrations. Railway stations saw scenes of riotous celebration, manifest in newspaper pictures of the time. The recruits were hailed and sent off with flowers and tokens of affection. They went to war with confidence and certainty of victory, which – as was prophesied – would be theirs in any case within a few months.

Even Stefan Zweig, a writer who later spoke out in no uncertain terms against the war had to admit that "there was a majestic, rapturous and even seductive something in this first outbreak of the people from which one could escape only with difficulty. […] As never before, thousands and hundreds of thousands of people felt as they should have felt in peace time, that they belonged together […] each one experienced an intensification the self; he was no longer the isolated human being from earlier, he was integrated into the mass, he was the nation, and his person, his otherwise unnoticed person, had been given a meaning."

This is the feeling described by Stefan Zweig of a retrieved national unity; it describes the mood prevalent in July and for Germany the so-called "Augusterlebnis" (August experience). In the ecstasy of national exultation class distinctions seemed set aside and rivalling social classes united. "I know no more parties, I know only Germans" – thus the motto of the German Kaiser.

The war was deemed to be a means of overcoming the disintegration of society exacerbated by industrialisation and modernisation. With it, national and social tensions would retreat into the background and social distinctions abolished. The idea of national unity was of special significance most of all for the Habsburg Monarchy, for its stability had begun to totter owing to the enduring conflicts of nationalities. The author Hermann Bahr revealed his enthusiasm when he wrote: "The whole of Austria is one, of the same will, the same readiness, the same self-sacrifice, Germans, Slavs and Hungarians brothers, no more strife, harmony everywhere, Austria is here again! It seems a miracle. Whoever would have thought it?"

Nonetheless, this enthusiasm for the war was not a phenomenon that encompassed all sections of society, but one of many different sentiments to be found in the population in summer 1914. Propagandist and generalising versions of these sentiments deliberately camouflaged the ambivalent and negative voices at the outbreak of the war and thus hindered a more discriminating view.

Translation: Abigail Prohaska