Chapters

The daily newspapers in Austria and Hungary published frequent appeals urging women to send only cheerful and edifying letters to their relatives at the front.
 

In 1989, as part of an exhibition celebrating seventy years of women’s suffrage in Austria, a group of female historians, headed by Edith Saurer (1942–2011), professor of Modern History, an important pioneer and representative of the history of women and gender in Austria, placed an appeal in the press for private holdings of letters and documents relating to this topic. This appeal led to contact with the descendants of Mathilde Hanzel-Hübner, as a result of which the first extensive holdings of accounts and letters were handed over to the archive.
 

Mathilde Hübner was born in Oberhollabrunn in Lower Austria in 1884 as the third of five daughters to Agnes Hübner (née von Coulon) and Gustav Hübner. In 1895 the family moved to the imperial capital Vienna, where Mathilde Hübner became a pupil at a private lower secondary school for girls in the same year. From 1898 she attended a higher secondary school for the daughters of civil servants in Vienna, but left after only a year in order to start professional training to become a teacher, like her parents, the following year.

Mathilde Hübner met Ottokar Hanzel at some point in 1904. Aged twenty at the time, she was preparing for the Maturitätsprüfung and took private tuition in mathematics and descriptive geometry from Ottokar Hanzel, who was training to be a secondary school teacher in these two subjects.

At Easter 1905 Ottokar Hanzel ‚declared his love’ to Mathilde Hübner ‚in a letter‘.

Just three days after Austria’s declaration of war on Serbia on 1 August 1914, Ottokar Hanzel was drafted to Fortress Artillery Battalion No. 4, and from there to Reserve Company ‘Franzensfeste’ in Tyrol.

From the perspective of the present, the images of demonstrations of public ‘enthusiasm’ from August 1914 are puzzling and rather difficult to account for. After the wars and genocide of the twentieth century it is almost impossible to understand how the outbreak of conflict between nations could be greeted with such fervour. However, there is a plethora of photographic evidence showing huge crowds of people in Vienna, Berlin or Paris celebrating with ‘exultation’ at the news.
 

On 23 May 1915, despite its alliance with Austria-Hungary and the German Empire, Italy entered the war on the side of the Entente. This act, sometimes referred to as ‘l’intervento’, aroused a wave of outrage and acrimony in the Monarchy. Later the same day a manifesto issued by Emperor Franz Joseph was published, capturing the general mood: ‘The King of Italy has declared war on me. A breach of fidelity the like of which is unknown in history has been perpetrated by the Kingdom of Italy on both its allies.’

By the end of 1916 an increasing longing for an early peace was being voiced by the population of Austria-Hungary. With no end to the conflict in sight, the countless casualties that the war had already claimed together with the continually deteriorating supply situation and food shortages, people were simply becoming ‘war-weary’.

Mathilde Hanzel, whose letters reflect a critical attitude right from the start of the war, took an active role in various peace-promoting initiatives from 1916/1917.

As the war went on, the food supply situation in the Austrian half of the Monarchy began to assume catastrophic dimensions, particularly in the larger cities. The relevant authorities attempted to secure supplies by introducing measures such as rationing or ‘meat-free days’, but this did little to relieve the dismal situation during the latter years of the war. Black marketeering and profiteering increasingly led to widespread resentment among the population and an atmosphere of general mistrust.

As was the case in many wartime correspondences, in their letters to one another Mathilde and Ottokar Hanzel evoked memories of happier times before the war and contemplated their future after the end of the conflict. Looking back on their shared past and forwards to a shared future helped them in part to overcome the pain of separation in war, giving them comfort and making the gruelling conditions of everyday life in wartime – even if only for a short time – seem more bearable.

In the evening the autumnal woods resound
With deadly weapons, the golden plains
And blue lakes, over them the sun
Rolls grimly away; the night envelops
Dying warriors, the savage lament
Of their smashed mouths.
But silently on the pastures
Red clouds gather, therein lives a raging god,
The spilled blood, the moonly cool;
All roads lead to black decay.
Under the golden branches of the night and stars
The shadow of the nurse sways through the silent grove,
To greet the spirits of the heroes, the bleeding heads;
And softly in the reeds sound the dark flutes of autumn.
O prouder grief! You iron altars,
Today the hot flame of the spirit is fed by an immense pain,
The unborn grandchildren.

Like other short stories Kafka’s In der Strafkolonie arose from a writing block, as the author found himself unable to continue with the end of Der Prozess (The Trial). Kafka wrote the story in October 1914, but it was not published until 1919, when it appeared in a one-off edition of 1,000 copies. The fantasies of guilt and punishment in Der Prozess are also to be found in In der Strafkolonie. In a key passage we read, ‘Guilt is always beyond doubt.’

Karl Kraus’s anti-war drama is a satire in which reality parodies itself, with more than two hundred scenes, most of them short, but no continuous plot. The work was produced in the years 1915 to 1922 as a reaction to the First World War.

Erich Maria Remarque was called up for war service at the age of eighteen and shortly afterwards was wounded by a piece of shrapnel from a grenade. Marked by his experience of war, he developed an anti-militarist attitude, which finds expression in his novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1928).

Die Welt von Gestern (The World of Yesterday) (1942) is a testament, a description of Old Europe, interwoven with the author’s reminiscences – which tend towards idealization.

The national unification of Italy came about not least of all from the conflict with the Habsburg Monarchy. The Triple Alliance concluded in 1882 between the Apennine Kingdom, Germany and Austria-Hungary had little effect on the fundamental mistrust between Vienna and Rome. The latent tension in bilateral relations meant that a true ‘brotherhood in arms’ alongside the Hohenzollern Empire was out of the question.

Between August 1914 and May 1915 heated debates took place in Italy on the country’s stance towards the emerging ‘peoples’ struggle’. Wherever one looked, opposing opinions on whether to enter the war were to be found at conferences and assemblies, in newspaper articles and proclamations, on demonstrations and marches.

In order to keep Italy on the side of its Triple Alliance partners, or at least to ensure the neutrality of the Apennine Kingdom, territorial cessions were on table from the outset. But the Entente also wanted to secure the goodwill of the Roman government using this method. So began the manoeuvring and haggling for the most favourable conditions and alliances.

Pessimism prevailed in the Habsburg Empire after the declaration of war by Italy. Many were convinced that the developments on the new Southwest Front would develop within a few weeks into a catastrophe. Chief of Staff Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf expected the enemy in the south to attack the Danube Monarchy area soon on account of its numerical superiority.

In the plains of Russia and France many offensives ground to a halt – the mountain war in the Alps was inherently bound to sometimes insuperable topographical and climatic obstacles, especially for those attacking.

After orders were refused among his military units, Italy’s Chief of Staff Luigi Cadorna realised that the soldiers needed a break. Yet his measures gave the impression after the eleventh Isonzo battle (mid-August to mid-September 1917) that he would soon go back on the offensive. Adequate defence positions were dispensed with. All guns remained on the foremost front line.

While Germany made use of the Austro-Hungarian naval bases on the Adria for the deployment of submarines, this part of the Mediterranean remained merely a sideshow for most countries.

In September 1918 defeat was inevitable for the Central Powers. On the western front the German troops were no longer able to launch a decisive offensive, while on the Balkans Bulgaria requested a ceasefire. While the highest army command in Germany even reckoned with negotiations with the Allies, the Danube Monarchy disintegrated within a few days at the end of October. Aware that territorial gains in the last few weeks of the war could affect future peace agreements, Italy attacked at Vittorio Veneto on October 23.