Chapters

In the Austrians’ culture of memory in the post-war years the war in the Alps played a special role. The ‘steeled’ men battling against nature and the enemy appear as ‘martyr heroes’ and exemplary figures in a process of making sense of what had happened which attributes heroic traits, mythical qualities and symbolic capital to the soldiers of the Austro-Hungarian army despite their having been defeated. The ‘sons of the Alps’ – mountain warriors and Tyrolean militiamen who were exposed to indescribable hardships amid the rocks and snow of the Alpine front and had stood the test very well – corresponded particularly well to the ideal of tough military masculinity.

The extent of violence and destruction in the First World War was horrifying for all participants. Military norms were also transgressed in a dimension never seen before. As the Allies shifted the main portion of guilt to the German Empire, this nation – long an object of suspicion with its militarism for the victors of the war – was to be made an example of. 

Karl Kraus has given an apt summary of the way in which mechanized warfare provided new conditions for the demonstration of heroic forms of behaviour and the loss of manly and militaristic attitudes. He describes the First World War as a ‘technoromantic adventure’, in which courage has become entangled with technology and confrontations on the basis of muscle power have become obsolete.

In the First World War the unique multinational concept underlying the Habsburg Monarchy’s army, according to which the different ethnicities were committed to the emperor and the idea of a common ‘fatherland’, led to different forms of military masculinity determined by region, faith and social background.

In his novel Die Kapuzinergruft (The Capuchins’ Crypt, published in English as The Emperor’s Tomb) (1938) Joseph Roth formulates a literary diagnosis of the superficial and foolish profile of soldiers from Vienna, the city of the waltz: ‘They were all too spoiled in Vienna, this city fed incessantly by the crown lands of the Monarchy, these harmless, almost ridiculously harmless, children of the capital and imperial residence, pampered and sung about much too often.’

In Austrian literature the devastating effects of the war on individual men and on the condition of military masculinity are major themes. Writers confront the aspect of war as a merciless ‘engineer’ who mows down men or turns them into invalids.

Five years after the war the Austrian writer Joseph Roth depicted the conditions and mechanisms needed to restore soldierly masculinity.

In post-war Austria military masculinity became a resource that was in dispute. After the end of Austria-Hungary most of the army’s professional officers flocked to Vienna, where they made clear their overwhelmingly anti-republican stance and wanted to ensure the continued existence of a military formation. In the wake of defeat they felt that their honour had been insulted, especially as society reacted with a public ‘castration’ of masculinity.

The Croat language group in the Habsburg Monarchy in 1910 numbered 2.8 million people, 5.3 per cent of the total population.

The 1848 revolution called for the dismantling of traditional hierarchies and the emancipation of nations. The leaders of the emerging Croat nation saw their opportunity for claiming their national future.

The Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 heralded a new era, which brought about a complete change in the balance of power between the young nations in the Habsburg Monarchy. The Croats attempted to further develop their status in the multinational state.

In 1910 the Serbs were one of the smaller ethnic groups in the Habsburg Monarchy with around 1.9 million people, 3.8 per cent of the total population. They were scattered throughout several crown lands and regions and did not enjoy an absolute majority anywhere.

The cradle of modern Serbia was to be found significantly in Vienna and Pest, where small but prosperous and politically influential Serb communities lived in the Diaspora and Serbian intelligentsia absorbed influences from western Europe.

Within the Monarchy as a whole, the Bosnians, i.e. the southern Slav Muslims in Bosnia, were one of the smallest ethnic groups accounting for just 1.2 per cent of the population of the empire.

Attempts to model the administration, school system and judiciary on the structures in other parts of the empire offer interesting examples of the integrative potential of the Habsburg Monarchy.

National unification ideologies developed on the principle of a common language for the southern Slavs. One of the contentious issues was whether it should be led by Serbs or Croats. The question of the inclusion of the Slovenes also remained to be solved.

By 1910 Vienna had grown to become an international metropolis with around 2.1 million inhabitants and worldwide cultural and scientific significance.

Even before 1914, the Serbs were regarded in the shadow of Austria-Hungary’s aggressive Balkan policy during the Balkan crisis from 1908 as ‘enemies’ of the Habsburg Monarchy. With the outbreak of war they became definitively the prime object of patriotic hate.

The Hungarians – or in a narrower ethnic sense Magyars – saw themselves as a nation state within the Kingdom of Hungary. In the realm of the Crown of St Stephen, the Magyars were not only the dominant language group but also the largest ethnic group.

In the era of emergent national identity, the foundations of a modern Magyar nation were also laid in Hungary, where it took place on the basis of a strong national awareness and historical identification with the Crown of St Stephen.

Vienna was not a theatre of war, nor did it suffer destruction as a result of the fighting. Externally it changed very little, but the war quite clearly left its mark. War propaganda and patriotic enthusiasm dominated daily life in the city. The euphoria waned markedly as the war progressed and the supply situation became increasingly critical.

As in the majority of the Habsburg empire, the aristocracy was the ruling class in Hungary and was able to maintain its political and economic privileges until the First World War. In the process of national development, however, it played a more important role in Hungary than in most of the other nationalities of central Europe.

In the Vormärz era, a new generation emerged in Hungarian ‘patriotic’ circles, a young and more radical movement that became increasingly assertive in its claims for nationhood, demanding a special constitutional status for Hungary within the Monarchy.

After the defeat of the Hungarian revolution, brutal retaliatory measures were decreed by the Austrian authorities. Officers, officials and other representatives of the revolution were court-martialled.