The recent centenaries of World War I and the 1918 armistice prompted a number of new studies that offer a fresh perspective on the collapse of the ancient empires and the ethnic and political reshuffling of East Central Europe. One of these new contributions, penned by two prolific authors from the Czech Republic—Oto Konrád and Rudolf Kučera—analyzes the changes in perceptions and manifestations of physical violence and collective protest in the western parts of the Habsburg lands and the successor states between 1914 and 1922. The authors were inspired by the current trend in historiography that looks for continuities of the wartime violence and brutalization of societies in the first years after the Great War until the stabilization of the economic, social, and political situation in the early 1920s. Methodologically, Konrád and Kučera employ a historical comparison of the developments in three different territories—the Bohemian Lands, Austria (Vienna), and South Tyrol—to reach novel conclusions about the nature of the public perceptions of violence and about public protest in the turbulent years of the war and postwar reconstruction. The authors persuasively argue that there was a sharp increase in the cases of physical violence and murders during and after the war in comparison with the pre-1914 period. There was also a widespread acceptance of the brutalization of societies, which was ascribed to the impact of the war, material deprivation, and postwar national and political conflicts in the region.

The book is divided into two major parts. The first part, “Blood in the Imagination” (Krev v představách), delves into the changing perceptions and constructions of physical violence, in the form of murder, by professional and public institutions. The authors show how the discipline of criminology and judicial treatments of criminals developed unequally across the Habsburg monarchy. Some of the territories were inclined to focus on the mental characteristics of the criminals (or what the authors call the “medicalization” of the murder), whilst institutions in other parts rather stressed the need to look for a material motivation for murder. The authors also discuss the role that the new mass media played in the public imagination of violence and murders—either with the effort to create the image of an enemy within, or as a tool in the struggle between competing political parties or national groups. The conclusion that the mass media in each territory presented murders differently, adjusting the stories to fit the local political and social needs, is persuasive.

In the second major part, “Blood in the Streets” (Krev v ulicích), the authors offer a microhistorical analysis of the formation and construction of mass protest during and after the war. Working with immense primary material from various archives, the authors portray a vivid image of the changing nature of mass protest in the Czech, Austrian, and South Tyrolean streets. They show the diversification of the crowds that, with the progress of the war, included mostly women, but also adolescents and children. Crucially, the authors believe that the protest against the collapsing monarchy was triggered by the state's inability to cater to the citizens’ material needs at the time of wartime austerity and hunger. According to their cultural and social analysis, the violence was surprisingly lacking any national or political motivations and was solely formed as social and hunger protest against the state and those who were seen as living at the expense of the general population (the rich, profiteers, Jews, but also people whose physiognomy implied that they were not suffering from the general material deprivation, such as fat people).

We can commend the authors for bringing us down to the microhistorical level of the cultural formation of crowd violence in the late Habsburg Empire. Yet their insistence on the lack of any political and national demands of the crowds leaves us wondering about the ultimate reasons that led to the collapse of the monarchy. It also does not help explain the documented sharp rise in national fervor shortly after 1918, which contributed to the continued violence in the region, for example in the Bohemian lands—now the cornerstone of the new Czechoslovak Republic. The reader would also appreciate a deeper discussion of how the Socialist wave that swept through continental Europe between 1917 and 1919 influenced the nature of protests in the monarchy and the successor states. The microhistorical nature of the project unfortunately leaves the bigger questions unanswered.

Also, the comparative nature of the project—or rather the selection of case studies—has its limitations. One issue is the problem of consistency. The sudden inclusion at the end of the second chapter of the Slovak territories and of the Italian authorities can confuse readers. Furthermore, as the authors correctly suggest, each case study was completely different, and diverse factors influenced the nature of the violence and its public presentation. To put it simply, there were not many similarities between South Tyrol and the Bohemian lands. Yet their conclusions about the nature of the public protest and the media construction of murder in postwar South Tyrol, now under the Italian administration, lent itself to a possible parallel with the borderland territories of the new Czechoslovak state, usually referred to as the Sudetenland. The authors only focus on one particular national narrative in each territory, though a discussion of competing discourses in one territory—for example, those employed by Bohemian Germans and Bohemian Czechs—could potentially be more beneficial.

My reservations aside, the book brings a fresh and needed contribution to the discussions of the cultural and social constructions of violence and protest in the first decades of the twentieth century. We can hope that an abridged version, which would help to get rid of the sometimes-tedious repetitions, will soon become available for the English-speaking audience.