In this impressive volume, Verena Pawlowsky and Harald Wendelin convincingly argue that any history of social welfare in Austria must begin with the development of disabled veterans' benefits during and after World War I. In doing so, they radically decenter the story with which many of us are familiar—that of the welfare programs developed in Red Vienna by Dr. Julius Tandler. The result is a truly Austrian, rather than Viennese, tale, which is supported by rich research and lucid résumés of military and bureaucratic statistics.

Die Wunden des Staates is split into two parts: the first covers the war itself, and the second is devoted to the years after the war. In fact, the balance of the book lies elsewhere. This well-organized history revolves around the creation of the Invalidenentschädigungsgesetz (Law for the Compensation of Disabled Soldiers) in 1919. Indeed, Pawlowsky and Wendelin take on much more than just the war and its aftereffects—their work takes them into the Imperial Army, through World War I, two very different forms of Austrian government, and into the Nazi period. Closely following military precedents, parliamentary debates, and disabled veterans' organizations demands, the authors present a law that was to function as the basis of state care for a vulnerable population. This law, unlike so much of the work of Dr. Tandler in Vienna, was more than just a top–down, party-specific attempt to strengthen the Volk of a fragile nation. Instead, it was a negotiated solution to the very visible problem, acknowledged by Socialists, Catholics, and authoritarian regimes alike, of reintegration and care for both returning soldiers and their dependents. In addition, it was created from a chaotic wartime welfare structure that was weak and underfunded. Drawing upon countless military and parliamentary records, the authors successfully re-create the debates behind the law and its eventual triumph. They employ sources from a variety of war victims' associations as well as others drawn from daily life: newspapers, pamphlets, demonstrations, and letters.

One of the most valuable interventions the authors of this book make into the historiography of both war and welfare is their willingness to trace not only the development of laws but also the reception, negotiation, and results of those laws. This is achieved via their study of disabled veterans' organizations, beginning during the war itself and spanning the entire First Republic and Ständestaat period. The second half of the book, then, is an associational history, which balances the bureaucratic subject matter of the first half. Most interesting here is the finding that these groups chose to align themselves with fellow victims of the war—that is, widows and orphans' associations—rather than with fellow veterans of the war who returned unscathed. Indeed, the authors pause to investigate and analyze the very language of these organizations when it comes to self-conception, concluding that although Kriegsopfer (“war victim”) was a neologism for many, it was the preferred nomenclature throughout this period for most organizations representing disabled veterans and their dependents. The authors also provide a guide to the political ties behind these organizations, which, not surprisingly, were unable to hold together as apolitical as Austrian politics polarized in the 1920s.

Part of the tight organization of this large study is a decision to move all tables, census counts, graphs, and quantitative information to the end of the book. The result is an elegant appendix; however, there are times throughout the book when the reader would like a sense of how many war victims are at stake in various laws, petitions, and associations. Likewise, at times the story told here feels terribly impersonal. There are a few chapters that employ individual histories—the one on disabled veterans' vocational training in particular was wonderful—but on the whole this is not a book that engages with the voice of the little man. As the authors explain in the introduction, the sources they had hoped to use to bring out veteran's voices were so hopelessly disorganized in the state archives that they were forced to alter the parameters of their study. To mitigate this, Pawlowsky and Wendelin draw upon the wide scholarship, both in German and English, that has recently developed around World War I and its aftermath in Austria. The result is a smoothly integrated book that will advance our conversations about what that war has wrought.