Francesco Frizzera has produced a clear, balanced, and well-written account of civilian evacuations along the Austrian-Italian front during World War I. Focusing on the Trentini, the Italian speakers of Tyrol on the southwestern fringe of the Habsburg Empire, he examines their removal and internment by the two belligerent powers, their eventual return, and the consequences for their evolving sense of belonging.

The Trentini became a “problem” only when Italy abandoned its alliance with Germany and Austria and entered the war on the side of the Entente. For the Austrians, this betrayal was compounded by Italy's proclaimed goal of “redeeming” Italians under Austria's yoke. As Austria retreated from Tyrol's southern rim to more defensible positions, its belief that the Trentini could not be trusted had brutal consequences for those who lived along the frontline: seventy-seven thousand people were forcibly evacuated. The bitter irony for the Trentini was that the Italians too did not quite trust the inhabitants close to the battlefront who were, after all, citizens of an enemy state, even if they spoke Italian. Thus, the Italians, too, eventually evacuated a large number of Trentini. Out of the region's total Italian-speaking population of 380,000 people, around 105,000 were displaced (13).

As Frizzera shows, while Austrians and Italians viewed the Trentini through different lenses, the dominant note on both sides was suspicion. Both belligerents characterized the Trentini in simplistic and monolithic terms, belying the subtle and multifaceted ways in which the Trentini related to village, region, and fatherland. Often, both states resorted to violence. In the Austrian case, the military oversaw the sizeable evacuations, which extended far beyond the combat zones. Wherever possible the Italians refrained from evacuations, but in 1916, in the context of Austria's Strafexpedition, they forcefully relocated twenty-six thousand people. Reflecting on larger patterns in World War I, Frizzera places these actions in a continuum of “forced migrations” (80), many of which reflected long-standing misgivings about particular groups. The use of force in turn shaped the public discourse surrounding evacuees and the quality of help and civil rights afforded them.

In chapter two, Frizzera explores the Trentini's treatment in Austria. Dispatched in cattle cars to Bohemia, Moravia, and Lower and Upper Austria, the evacuees were generally not well received and subject to police controls. Beyond emergency housing, assistance was limited and the scope for self-help small. A quarter of the refugees were quartered in camps, the others integrated into small village communities. The former faced harsh labor conditions and little to no room to ameliorate their situation. Perversely, camp residents were resented because of a mistaken belief that they were being offered every comfort and “luxury.” In reality, close to 10 percent of the camp population died, in some places significantly more. Trentini in the villages fared better, but as food shortages grew for all Austrians, tensions burgeoned here too. Over a two-and-a-half-year period, Frizzera traces a change in attitudes among the displaced Trentini as their strong dynastic loyalty to the Habsburg monarchy eroded, leading them sometimes to reject the empire altogether. Diaries record a shift from a sense of themselves as “profughe” (refugees) to “esiliate” (exiled), and from seeing themselves as Tyrolian to feeling allegiance to Trentino.

Chapter three turns to the evacuees in Italy. Here again, local authorities were mistrustful. In theory, there should have been a big difference between those who were “interned” (i.e., deemed to pose a danger to Italy) and those who were “evacuated.” But the military in fact made little distinction. As in Austria, the drive to control was paramount, and even local associations seeking to help evacuees were placed under surveillance. In the absence of central guidelines, treatment varied considerably from place to place, and tended to be better in central and northern Italy than further south. In general, the evacuees experienced the Italian state as uninterested and unjust, and in a mirror image of their counterparts under Austrian rule grew more enamored of the Habsburg monarch, not less. This sentiment was all the more troublesome for the Italian state after the massive defeat of Caporetto, when the supposedly “redeemed” Trentini asked to return to their homeland, which was now again under Austrian control.

The Trentini's return is examined in chapter four. Return from Austria began already in 1916, as the authorities conscripted evacuees under military discipline to work land left uncultivated. Many more returned in 1917, some of them forcefully expelled from their host communities. After those left behind in Austria at the end of the war were stripped of their Austrian citizenship, they turned to the Italian government for help, which managed to repatriate them all by March 1919. The traumatic and complex experience led the former evacuees to revert to the “small fatherland” of their villages as sites of identification. Turning from the evacuees in Austria to those dispersed throughout Italy, the latter were viewed, in theory, more benignly by the state because Italian authorities were keen to make them feel “redeemed” and thus to facilitate a speedy return. Yet because many former borderland villages were uninhabitable, the military authorities blocked the move, allowing return only to the least destroyed areas. Feeling enduringly displaced, many refugees fell back on local patriotism and sometimes Habsburg nostalgia. Frizzera notes that those who had stayed in Trentino also suffered considerably: locked in Trentino, they too were deemed untrustworthy and subject to military violence.

The book's conclusion turns to questions of memory. Frizzera's study seeks to correct the official narratives that took shape in postwar Italy, which portrayed those sent to Austria as “internees” and those removed to Italy as “emigrants,” as if all of them had been Italian patriots and as if Italy had welcomed them with open arms. That patriotic narrative bore some truth when it came to irredentist elites, but it bore little relationship to the experience of the common population. Pushed and pulled, controlled and conscripted, they had no longer been full citizens; rather, their citizenship was “amputated: citizens with halved rights in Austria; citizens on probation in Italy” (242). To underscore this point about duress, Frizzera is at pains to classify the evacuees as “displaced persons” rather than “refugees,” a distinction that may be overdrawn given the multiple ways both terms have been used in different contexts. As well as correcting the Italian patriotic narrative, Frizzera makes a valuable contribution to recent scholarship on the last years of the Habsburg Empire. Like Pieter Judson, he sees the war as critical for the fall of an empire that had asked great sacrifices of its citizens but proved unable to guarantee their sustenance. He rejects the idea that popular nationalism had pulled the polyglot empire apart; indeed, agreeing with Laurence Cole, Frizzera notes that at war's end the Austrian state rid itself of its citizens, rather than citizens rejecting the empire. Partly for that reason, it proved paradoxically harder for the evacuees dispersed throughout Italy to feel “Italian”; they maintained their allegiance to the old fatherland, in a way no longer possible for the evacuees mistreated and ultimately ejected from Austria.