This book is the result of a conference held in November 2013 and sponsored by the archives of the two Austrian government parties. Yet, it is somewhat disappointing in view of its title: parties and society during World War I. Only Johannes Schönner's essay really addresses those issues. While admitting that we know far too little about the dynamics of the war years, he highlights the insecurity of the Christian Social Party, still recovering from Lueger's death and its defeat in the elections of 1911. The party was split on many issues and willing to be led by the government, the Deutscher Nationalverband, or whomever, except for one issue: its growing opposition to the confiscatory centralism of the government's food policy, which exposed a growing rift between pious Catholic patriotism and the self-interest of the farmers who constituted the bulk of their voters. Schönner's “Red” counterpart, written by Lutz Musner—not a specialist on political history—unfortunately does not deal with the war years at all, but merely with the July crisis. He revisits the old question why the Social Democrats were unable to stop the outbreak of the war, without asking the obvious question: Did not a minority, with say 20 percent of voters behind them, suffer from delusions of grandeur—at least as much as did the Austrian statesmen at the top—if they ever thought they could do that? The exotic fringe group of the peace movement, covered by lead coeditor Maria Mesner, never harbored any such illusions.

Gernot Stimmer's contribution deserves a slightly longer treatment, because it is the most ambitious. Employing numerous graphs, he tries to find a systematic formula to depict the similarities and differences among the parties combined in the Nationalverband. Stimmer reaches an impeccable conclusion. Yes, the Nationalverband drew the teeth of extremist demands successfully enough to become the parliamentary “Stützungsmacht” (underpinning) of the semiconstitutional double monarchy (90). Yet, minor inaccuracies apart, his attempt must still be considered a noble failure. Partly this is because the categories Stimmer selects are misleading and in one case actually wrong: German nationalists did try to get rid of Jewish competition by invoking race as a criterion, but they were never consistent enough to base their nationalism on these supposedly “biological” criteria. Otherwise they would have had to exclude all the Germans with Czech or Slovene family backgrounds, too. Notably, Stimmer's list regarding the mental map of the Nationalverband misses its very raison d’être—they were all anticlerical. Partly, this is because wartime pressures put a premium on national solidarity rather than on subtle programmatic differences. Finally, putting the parties on a Left–Right scale designed to meet twenty-first century prejudices and sensibilities rather than 1914 ones is bound to lead to paradoxical results, with conservative great landowners on the Left and antithrone and antialtar allies of the Social Democrats like Schönner's on the Right.

András Gerö provides an elegant piece on Hungary that concentrates on the paradox of a nationalist opposition that basically distrusted the Habsburgs, yet was enthusiastic for a war that could not really benefit Hungary in any way. In tune with the culturalist turn, he concludes that they were misled by their illusions. One might turn that argument on its head by showing that, despite all their rhetoric that Hungary could do it alone, they did realize that a Great Hungary dominated by Magyars was possible only within the context of the monarchy. Maddalena Guiotto competently analyses the different trends between Italians from the Trentino—with Alcide De Gasperi at the helm—and the Littorale, with Friulani Catholics and Triestine Socialists opting for the empire until the very end. Regina Wonisch provides no information at all about the political allegiances of Viennese Czechs during the war. Summaries of the attitudes of Catholic bishops (Michaela Sohn-Kronthaler), Jews, and Muslims (Erwin Schmidl), predictably tell us that they were all as patriotic as they could be. In this context, it is a pity there is no piece on the divided loyalties of the Greek Orthodox hierarchy.

The most obvious gap, however, concerns the Social Democrats during the later stages of the war, caught between job offers from above and discontent from below. Wolfgang Maderthaner would have been the obvious choice to analyze their dilemma, but he chose to devote himself to philosophical musings about the psychology of the masses instead. There is one welcome surprise, however. Most academic books in the German-speaking world tend to put their readers to sleep with heavy introductions. This time, though, Maureen Healy's opening foray into Alltagsgeschichte, made up of snippets of information from Viennese newspapers on 28 May 1914, a month before Sarajevo, proves to be both entertaining and enlightening.