Chapters

The new military mobilisation led to a system of political coercion in Austria Hungary, which is referred to in the historical literature as "wartime absolutism". This was made possible by several emergency regulations that had already been laid down in the 1867 "December Constitution" in the form of the Emperor's powers to issue emergency decrees, as well as in the right to suspend selected basic rights.
 

The outbreak of the First World War saw a change in accepted gender roles. Where there had previously been an opposition of masculine/public and feminine/private, a new form of differentiation emerged, defining the front as masculine and the home(land) as feminine.

With the outbreak of war and male conscription, many women suddenly had to fend for themselves. Now they were responsible for the survival of the family, which, given dwindling food supplies, was becoming a more difficult task with each passing day.

The consequences of the First World War reached unprecedented proportions. The war penetrated the lives of civilians, and the home(land) itself was turned into a theatre of war. Women and children, too, were called upon to play an active role in the war effort through war welfare and assistance societies, and to do their bit for the Fatherland.

As the war drew on, ever more men were called up to serve. Now it was up to women to compensate for the lack of available workforce and replace the men who were at war.

During the First World War, there was an unprecedented mobilization of the civilian population ­– and, above all, of women. Their work to support the war effort was not confined to the home; ever more women went to the front as military auxiliaries.

The notion of war as a specifically male activity was long ago dispelled by women’s and gender history. During the First World War, women were not only active in the war effort at home; they also served on the front as female auxiliaries and Rot-Kreuz-Schwestern [Red Cross nurses].

For a long time, the imaginary dichotomy between the ‘masculine front’ and ‘feminine homeland’ made it possible to make subtle distinctions between the various fields women worked in during the First World War. Why should we look for them in the trenches when their place was on the home front anyway?

By instruction of 27 July 1914, a War Monitoring Office (WMO) was set up in the Ministry of War in Vienna under the direction of Leopold von Schleyer as the top-level authority for ensuring the enforcement of the emergency regulations.
 

On 25 July 1914, “a regulation of the ministries of the interior and justice explicitly banned the publication of military news in print”.
 

In addition to the press, the Censorship Group within the War Monitoring Office also dealt with telegrams. This essentially involved two measures: “the closure of certain telegraph offices” (for instance in the broader area of the front) and “the monitoring and control of telegrams by what were known as Censorship Commissions”. The latter were set up in a number of cities of the monarchy (Vienna, Krakow, Lviv, Prague, Innsbruck, Graz, Trieste and Zadar) at the start of the war, and were under the control of the armed forces, with staff comprising military and telegraph officials.

The censorship of letters covered all correspondence sent to and from abroad, (random samples of) domestic correspondence, and initially the entire field post and all letters from prisoners of war.
 

In order to be able to censor the huge mass of mail, sorting offices were set up after the reform of the letter censorship in 1916, dividing the letters into “language and subject groups”. If there were no objections to a letter, it was stamped by the censor and passed on to the Outgoing Group, from where it was sent to the recipient.

During the entire war, it was not only the contents of letters that were monitored but also the censors themselves were subject to permanent control. What was known as "hypercensorship" was applied at all censorship offices, “carried out by particularly reliable and experienced censors or by the censorship administration”.

First used in the German press in 1879, the term anti-Semitism rapidly became popular, and stood for the ideologization of hostility to Jews, presenting the "Jewish question" as the solution to social and political crises.

Around the turn of the century, over 2 million people of the Jewish faith lived in the Habsburg Empire. In the age of liberalism, the gradual introduction of legal equality raised their hopes of social integration, while at the same time the emerging anti-Semitism was developing to be a potential threat to the Jewish population.

The 1873 stock exchange crash and the subsequent social tension brought a sudden end to the hopes of the Jewish population of achieving complete social equality through their own modernisation and assimilation efforts.

The decline of political liberalism towards the end of the 19th century was accompanied by a surge of anti-Semitic movements. In Vienna, anti-Semitism manifested itself at political level in two competing directions: in German-National and Christian-Social anti-Semitism.

With Karl Lueger's election as Mayor of Vienna in 1897, political anti-Semitism reached its climax and became a social force dominating everyday life.

In the Habsburg Empire, the anti-Semitic movement was strongly concentrated on Vienna. Student and craftmen's movements assumed opinion leadership and carried anti-Semitism into the public.

For Austrian Jews, the Habsburg Monarchy as a supranational entity meant the possibility of developing an identity that was not based solely on membership of a national, ethnic or religious body. They saw themselves as the backbone of an integrative force loyal to the Imperial family within the multiethnic state, and advocated multinationalism up to the end of the war.

The overwhelming majority of the Jewish population in the western half of the monarchy reacted with enthusiasm to the start of the war. They saw it as an opportunity to exhibit their patriotism and counter anti-Semitic prejudices. Behind this lay the desire to earn membership and respect by demonstrating Jewish commitment.

When in winter 1915 over 130,000 persons sought refuge in Vienna from the Tsarist army, the initial reaction was one of sympathy. However, the mood rapidly swung against the mostly Jewish migrants from the Galician "shtetls", and anti-Semites began to prepare their weapons.

The dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was regarded by many Habsburg Jews with concern. They welcomed democracy but feared an increase in anti-Semitism. By now they were all too familiar with how rapidly blame could be laid on "the Jews".