Chapters

As early as late summer 1914, surprise was registered concerning the rapid rise in the numbers of prisoners of war in the 10th Department of the Austro-Hungarian War Ministry, which dealt with matters relating to soldiers captured in combat. After all, there were around 200,000 enemy soldiers in the hands of the Danube Monarchy, confronting the military authorities with new challenges.

The waiting at assembly areas and the transportation to the hinterland already entailed enormous exertion and suffering on the part of the many starving and often wounded prisoners. Once arrived at the destination in the hinterland, they then endured the lack of acceptable lodgings, especially to begin with. The camps in Central and Eastern Europe, in Siberia and Central Asia were locations of collective misery and mass death. Austria-Hungary was no exception in this regard.

A range of differing organisations set themselves the goal of removing the numerous deficiencies in the prisoners of war system. Ultimately, however, all initiatives failed in the face of the sheer scale of the problems involved.

Although the concept of the nation needs no explaining to us today, it is in fact a relatively young phenomenon. It was a long and complicated path to the modern understanding of the nation in the sense of a seemingly unquestionable collective defined by a common language, traditions and descent.

To weaken empires with many peoples in it by supporting national opposition movements was a strategy pursued by many warring powers. That the multi-ethnic monarchies of the Romanovs and the Habsburgs should use such methods themselves proved to be a dangerous game, however.

The military authorities were at pains to keep the enemy soldiers under their control as far away as possible from the local civilian population. As time passed, they had to acknowledge, however, that real fraternisation arose. Foreigners and locals were equally affected by the growing economic, social and political crisis.

Actually, according to the Hague Convention on War of 1907, captive military personnel were not supposed to carry out any activities which had a direct connection with war efforts. In fact, however, many enemy soldiers controlled by the opposing troops were even employed near the front. Generally the question arose for some countries as to whether the ‘foreign military persons’ had not become indispensable from an economic viewpoint.

More than a dozen different languages were spoken within the borders of the multi-ethnic Habsburg Monarchy. Some, however, enjoyed higher prestige than others. The course of history had seen constant change in the relative values of the various tongues.

In the Habsburg Monarchy it was common for the nobility and bourgeoisie to use a different language that set them apart from the peasants and urban lower classes who formed the majority of the population.

It soon became clear that the western European concept of the unity of nation and state could not be applied to the Habsburg Monarchy because of its ethnic, linguistic and religious multiplicity.

The source material related to the problem of the nationalities in the Habsburg Monarchy often distinguishes between ‘historic’ peoples and ‘history-less’ peoples – peoples that possessed a history and peoples that supposedly did not. This is a somewhat confusing distinction to us today: after all, if an ethnic group has existed for centuries, how can it not have a history?

As well as differing in their language and sense of national identity, the nationalities of the Habsburg multi-ethnic state also differed with respect to their areas of settlement. While some groups lived entirely within the Habsburg Monarchy, others were spread across the borders. In some cases this factor had considerable influence on historical developments.

The introduction of mandatory primary schooling from the middle of the eighteenth century resulted in broad masses of the population becoming literate. However, the schools not only provided elementary education but also imbued the young with images of national history and developed their awareness of language.

The German-speakers were the Habsburg Monarchy’s largest ethnic group. In addition they were the only group with a presence in all the lands of Austria-Hungary – though to varying extents.

The end of the Tsarist domination and the ‘October Revolution’ was linked in the minds of prisoners of war in Russia above all with the hope of a speedy return home. Those soldiers who had themselves experienced close-up the emergence of Soviet power and thus a realignment in world history were less than receptive to Bolshevik ideology.

The ‘Austrian identity’ of the German-speaking subjects of the Habsburg Monarchy was an intractably problematic phenomenon that is best described in terms of a ‘double identity’.

The Germans had a special role in the Habsburg Monarchy. As the largest language group and the most highly developed in social and economic terms, they were the most important upholders of the idea of the Monarchy as a unified state.

Through Emperor Franz II’s dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 the German-speaking lands lost a structure that had been an important, if symbolic, source of cohesion and unity.

In response to the question of national unification, many Germans considered that the logical path was for the German Confederation to be made into a federal state and then into a German nation-state. Nevertheless, the question of the role to be played by the Habsburg Monarchy was a major problem.

In the nineteenth century the Germans were considered by many to be the most important ‘guarantors of culture’ in Central Europe and were themselves convinced that they had a special cultural ‘mission’ to fulfil. This assumption, however, was increasingly challenged by the newly founded nationalist movements of the smaller peoples of the region.

The return home of hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war took place towards and after the end of the First World War under circumstances of revolution. Regular evacuation methods were hard to carry out in the wake of the upheavals in Central and Eastern Europe. To this was then added the mistrust felt towards the prisoners by those back home. Defensive measures were taken, which likewise set up conflict.

The consequences of the First World War often blocked the path to a rapid integration of home-comers from war captivity. Besides widespread economic and social problems, conflicts also arose in various countries motivated by ideology.

From the unification of 1871 onwards, more and more German-Austrians came to see Germany as their ‘true homeland’. A widespread veneration for Bismarck developed, which was only partially tolerated by the Austrian authorities, being regarded as an expression of German irredentism and of a longing to be ‘nationally redeemed’ through unification with the German Reich.

In the 1980s the concept of ‘Central Europe’ experienced a renaissance in intellectual circles. From the Austrian point of view ‘Central Europe’ was understood as being made up of the successor states of the Monarchy, which some romanticized as having been a happily harmonious patchwork of peoples. The term was not always understood in this way: around 1900 ‘Central Europe’ had quite a different meaning.