Chapters

Italy’s entry into the war on 23 May 1915 opened up a new theatre of war in the south of the Monarchy that was to be of decisive importance for the Austro-Hungarian army.

The Austrian parliament (‘Reichsrat’) had not been convened since March 1914. At the outbreak of the war its splendid home on the Ring was demonstratively transformed into a military hospital.

After two years of war Austria-Hungary was economically and militarily entirely worn out. On 21 November 1916 a further blow came with the death of Emperor Franz Joseph, who had been an important linchpin for the unity of the decrepit Dual Monarchy.

Emperor Karl recognized that Austria-Hungary’s continuation of the war in alliance with Germany would mean the end of the Habsburg Monarchy. At the beginning of 1917, in a very round-about way, he initiated investigations into the possibility of concluding a peace with the Entente Powers.

Faced by authoritarian tendencies amongst the leaders of government and the demands of the omnipotent military apparatus, Emperor Karl could offer little in the way of resistance but his own good will.

The situation in Russia at the beginning of 1917 was catastrophic. The food supply system had broken down and the populace in the large towns and cities was starving and freezing. The voices calling for a completely new ordering of society became ever louder. The autocratic rule of the Tsar was nearing its end.

Although on the eastern front the war had taken a turn in favour of the Central Powers, on the western front it had obviously reached a stalemate. However, early in 1917 a major turning point arrived with the entry into the war of the United States of America on the side of the Western Powers.

The War Press Headquarters (WPH) increased military propaganda as a means of directing public media for military purposes. Controls and censorship were intended to ensure that no unauthorised texts or images reached the public.

It was now becoming ever more obvious that the Austro-Hungarian army could only function with massive German assistance. Politically this chained the Danube Monarchy even more firmly to Germany and left it even less freedom to make its own decisions.

In the fourth year of the war there was a widespread feeling of ‘burn-out’ in the Habsburg Monarchy, with the supply situation in a catastrophic state and the mood of the general population one of war-weariness and frustration. The initial euphoria was now long forgotten.

The parliaments of the Central Powers were still manned by the old elites, who were unable to throw off the chains of war and continued to cling to the illusion of a victorious peace. Amongst the general population, by contrast, the long lists of the fallen, the ubiquitous presence of war invalids and the shortage of basic necessities made many question the sense of the war that they had initially welcomed so heartily.

In parallel with the war on the battlefields another war was being waged on the diplomatic level, in which Vienna’s confused policy between war and peace ended in a humiliation and led the Habsburg Monarchy into a diplomatic catastrophe.

On 8 January 1918, Thomas Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924), who had been President of the USA since 1913, held a programmatic speech before both houses of Congress in which he interpreted the war as a moral struggle for democracy and staked out the cornerstones for post-war Europe.

On 16 October 1918, after it had become clear that the negotiations conducted by the imperial government with the deputies of the Reichsrat and the representatives of the nationalities would be unsuccessful, Emperor Karl published an appeal with an invitation to his peoples to take part in a complete restructuring of the Austrian Monarchy.

On 14 August 1918, at a meeting between Emperor Karl and Kaiser Wilhelm at the German headquarters in the Belgian town of Spa, the German Chief of General Staff Hindenburg and his deputy Ludendorff for the first time stated the obvious: the impossibility of the ‘victorious peace’ that had so long been their goal.

For the non-German and non-Magyar peoples the incipient disintegration of the Monarchy opened up new prospects for the future.

Once the other nationalities had confirmed their decision to leave the Dual Monarchy by proclaiming their independence, the two ‘peoples of state’ – the German Austrians and the Magyars – sought to prepare the ground for their respective futures.

In the last days of October 1918 events followed in rapid succession. Having existed for nearly 640 years, Habsburg dominion in Austria collapsed within just a few days.

Emperor Franz Joseph was the symbol par excellence of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. For most of his subjects the Emperor was a sacrosanct figure who deserved their utmost respect. He had been on the throne since 1848 and for one and all was simply ‘the Kaiser’.

The famous words ‘In deinem Lager ist Österreich’ from the poet Franz Grillparzer’s eulogy to Field Marshal Radetzky celebrate the Imperial and Royal Army as the supreme embodiment of the Habsburg Monarchy: ‘There in your encampments, behold her: Austria!’. Nor did the uniformly white-coated soldiers of the multi-ethnic army serve the state: they served Emperor Franz Joseph, who was ‘Supreme War Lord’.

The civil service was one of the most important linchpins of the Habsburg Monarchy and no less multifarious and complex than the state as a whole. It featured a strict hierarchy with a system of service ranks displaying intricate ramifications bordering on the incomprehensible. An addiction to titles was satisfied by a canon of forms of address that the present-day civil servant would regard as positively bizarre.

With the December Constitution of 1867 at the very latest, the principles of freedom of religion and conscience were firmly enshrined in law, putting an end to the last remnants of practices that had put non-Catholics at a disadvantage. Nevertheless, Catholicism was still de facto the established religion of the state.

The Austro-Hungarian Compromise in 1867 transformed the Habsburg Monarchy into an alliance of two sovereign states. Austria-Hungary was a dual system in which each half of the empire had its own constitution, government and parliament. The citizens on each half were also treated as foreigners in the other half.

The Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary was a union of two states based constitutionally on the 1867 Compromise. It was reflected in shared institutions and a joint ruler, Franz Joseph, who as a person was much more than just a symbolic connecting link.