To what extent has enshrining World War I as a historical watershed—treating 1914–18 either as the terminus of one storyline or the prologue to another—impoverished our understanding of the past by eclipsing the subtle yet consequential continuities that thread unbroken across that divide? Iryna Vushko’s Lost Fatherland, a collective portrait of twenty-one statesmen born in the Habsburg Empire, makes a compelling case, showing how “a cluster of ideas rooted in the nineteenth-century Habsburg Empire … continued to shape European politics and society in the twentieth century” (2). The Habsburg ideological classroom generated a wide spectrum of political and intellectual orientations. Vushko marshals a remarkable array of positions—conservative, nationalist, liberal, social democratic, communist, fascist, etc.—and weaves them into a coherently conceived narrative, a notable achievement considering the book’s expansive cast of characters. Each thematic chapter intertwines several life stories, revealing patterns.
By juxtaposing Christian socialists, Austro-Marxists, Ukrainian and Polish nationalists, and Italian and Slovenian socialists (among others), Vushko turns individual careers into a barometer of continental change, showing how the war reset societal and political relationships and initiated the erosion of stability. Although the book’s structure is organized around distinct ideological frameworks, the journeys of its protagonists reveal that Europe’s political transformations were not solely driven by abstract “isms,” but rather by the trajectories of individuals. These metamorphoses expose the porous border between internationalism and nationalism in the early twentieth-century imagination. The storyline begins with the liberal optimism of the 1867 Ausgleich and extends to the ideological showdowns of the 1930s, but the book primarily focuses on the last decade of Austria-Hungary and the immediate aftermath of World War I.
Two central arguments gradually take shape throughout the book. First, Vushko challenges the notion of a clean break in 1918 by tracing continuities and evolutions across the imperial rupture, arguing that “it was not 1918 but rather 1938–39 that brought an end to the Habsburg period in European history” (247). Second, it addresses the competing responses to the question of governance in a multiethnic state, contrasting federalist, internationalist, and regionalist projects, such as Austro-Marxism, which sought to accommodate ethnic pluralism in one way or the other, with national-statist visions that promoted homogeneity either through nationalism, fascism, or nationalized class struggle. Vushko suggests that Austrian politics was tolerant and cosmopolitan (251), and, above all, moderate, either in comparison with the interwar period or with the policies of the neighboring countries (112, 201, 227, 230).
The rejection of 1918 as a moment of abrupt discontinuity successfully builds upon numerous historiographic interventions from the last quarter of the century that re-evaluate the 1918 transition, highlighting numerous similarities between pre- and post-1918 regimes, and thereby further destabilizing the teleological conclusions of inevitability that are so often ascribed to the change of 1918. Vushko expands this body of literature with an analysis of a broad scope. The rest of the argument depends on the selection of individuals that are studied. Vushko focuses on actors such as Leon Biliński and Alcide De Gasperi, whose hybrid identities placed them in a liminal position, making them politically suspect by both the imperial government and their nationalist compatriots (38, 76, 77). The book does not claim to have a perfect selection of analyzed cases (eleven), yet, out of twenty-one scrutinized individuals, all of them are representative of Cisleithania, leaving Hungary and Bosnia and Herzegovina out of the picture. This reflects a broader trend of viewing Austro-Hungarian history, especially the national question or the empire’s collapse, primarily through an Austrian angle, which limits the complete understanding of the last years of Habsburg history. We read about the democratic tradition that Poland inherited from the Habsburgs (259), but the 1907 electoral reform was valid only in Cisleithania. In Hungary, at the same time, around 7 percent of the population had the right to vote, and the numbers in Croatia/Slavonia were even lower—around 2 percent.
This non-Cisleithanian part of the monarchy—poorer and predominantly agricultural—was where the empire met some of its biggest challenges in internal and external relations before 1918, and, if compared with the Austrian part of the empire, provoked different political expressions among the population. As Jakub S. Beneš recently demonstrated in The Last Peasant War (Princeton, 2025), even though desertion was an empire wide phenomenon during World War I, it was precisely the Hungarian—rather than the Austrian—part of the monarchy that experienced larger internal chaos during the war, due to the number of deserters and the support that deserters received from the local communities. This is not to say that the experiences of individuals like Biliński and De Gasperi were confined to Cisleithania. Sarajevo lawyer and politician Danilo Dimović wrote countless petitions to free political prisoners in the monarchy during the war. Simultaneously, the imperial authorities considered him a spy of the Serbian government, and some Serb nationalist activists considered him the worst kind of national traitor.
The book’s title comes from Hugo von Hofmannsthal: “We once had a fatherland, a mission, and a history” (1, 231). However, a sense of the lost fatherland is tied to the selective cast of protagonists. Slavko Županski, a lawyer from Nagybecskerek/Veliki Bečkerek/Großbetschkerek, was arrested after the war broke out in 1914 as an editor of a Serbian-language newspaper, which was enough to make him a suspect. When he was released from the “internment camp,” the imperial army wanted to mobilize Županski. He chose to break his arm with a shovel rather than serve in the imperial army. In the autumn of 1918, he stood among the architects of the emerging National Councils, steering Serbs and South Slavs out of Austria-Hungary and into Yugoslavia. Županski did not lose his fatherland.
Vushko, an author of rare linguistic abilities, shows how the political habits, social networks, and ideological commitments forged under the monarchy continued to shape European affairs well beyond 1918. Lost Fatherland compellingly traces the continuities of imperial political culture. If we are to understand fully the empire’s denouement—and its lingering footprints—historians must move past an Austria-centric vantage. We can only grasp the full story of Habsburg dissolution and afterlife by reintegrating these neglected spaces.
