This is a fascinating survey of how World War I has been represented in the films from the former Habsburg lands and the Habsburg monarchy's wartime opponents. Hannes Leidinger gathers an international team of scholars to offer a stimulating and unusually accessible—given the language barriers those films and the relevant scholarship often pose—opportunity to explore how popular memories of the Habsburgs’ last war have been shaped and expressed in East Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. Habsburg's Last War is a welcome and necessary step in reconstituting the broader history of World War I memories and commemoration. It is a solid starting point to question whether the available (and dominant) framework, defined mostly by the Western Front stereotypes and the subsequent British, French, and, to a lesser extent, German memory cultures, can be applied to the former Habsburg lands and its southern and eastern neighbors.
The basic premise of this project is that film has been the predominant form of “popular national interpretation of the war,” and on historical memories of World War I it continues to assert a wider and more multifaceted influence than scholars’ writings (22). The authors, moreover, are convinced that the book's national approach and organization is justified. Juxtaposing national filmic memories of World War I not only recognizes the effect of linguistic-national communities of memory but also helps overcome “patriotic narratives, ideological priorities, and state borders” through the inevitable act of comparison when the reader picks up this volume (31).
The chapters in Habsburg's Last War are rich in detail, so only some key points can be mentioned here. Leidinger sketches the trajectory of Austrian World War I films from the wartime escapist entertainment to the more critical examination of the “dark chapters,” commencing only in the 1980s. Karin Moser follows up with an overview of the World War I–related Austrian films and documentaries from the 2014 centenary, which suggest that a new, pacifist EU culture of memory is emerging. Czech and Slovak interest in World War I, according to Václav Šmidrkal, rose and declined with the political uses for which the war could be deployed. First, the nation-building myths of the Legionnaires, then reinforcing a specific Bolshevik view of history, and finally disappearing with the post-1989 commercialization of the film industry. Philipp Stiasny examines how German films of the 1920s imagined Galicia as an exotic but indistinct space upon which to project Weimar Germans’ own conflicting memories, desires, and social and political views. Márton Kurutz reminds us how deeply Hungarian novelists and filmmakers influenced classical Hollywood cinema's mostly melodramatic representations of the war; while László Deák-Sárosi discusses why silence and fictional accounts of the war are the main traits of the post-1945 Hungarian cinema when it comes to the Communist party-state's attempt to distance itself from and discredit the old Austria-Hungary. World War I was a key ingredient in the Italian Fascist mobilization, but Francesco Bono points out that by the 1930s, geopolitical considerations (seeking an ally in the Dollfuß regime in Austria) and a new self-image (a respectable bourgeois order) made the war with the Habsburg monarchy a less attractive film subject and Austrians the battlefront foes best left unnamed.
Comparable to the Czechoslovakia case, the interwar Polish films about World War I served the nation-building purpose with the Legionnaires’ stories. But even with these, the interest in the Habsburgs’ last war has always been very low. After 1945 the subject is vastly overshadowed by World War II, according to Piotr Szlanta. Enikö Dácz sees something similar in Romanian filmmaking, in which the collective memories and representations of World War I “nearly disappeared” in favor of World War II. Nationalist-patriotic messages of the few films that do touch on World War I avoid the messy realities and present the enemies in stereotypes. The villains, interestingly, are the Imperial German Army and Germans, not Austro-Hungarian soldiers. Aleksandar Erdeljanović and Karin Almasy, focusing on Serbian and Slovene films respectively, reach the same conclusion as their colleagues: World War II dominates the public memory and artistic energy. Yugoslavian/Serbian filmmakers have not been overly interested in the Habsburgs or World War I, partly due to the inconvenient complication that its peoples fought on different sides during the war. Slovenian filmmakers have moved away from their previous total disinterest after the 1990s and sought to produce academically and realistically grounded films that seek to go beyond the Isonzo. Finally, Verena Moritz details how much the recent “rediscovery” of World War I and the brave tsarist soldiers in Russian filmmaking is related to the Putin government's search for a useable past that will reinforce its brand of patriotic nationalism. Austria-Hungary is of little value in this scheme of things and is therefore mostly absent.
Providing introductions to the relevant films and national film histories, Habsburg's Last War is a handy road map of sorts for future researchers. Furthermore, the chapters collectively underline how much the prevailing national memory cultures—and the political ideologies and/or needs buttressing them—have determined the ways and intensity in which the Habsburgs’ last war has been commemorated (or not) on big and small screens. They remind us that despite the war's obvious and profound impact, World War I was (and still is) relegated to the margins of collective memory in some cases, while in others Austrian-Hungary nearly disappears or becomes unidentifiable in the film (and television) representations. It is World War II that occupies a much more central position in national commemorative cultures; and political reasons, more than recency bias, are the better explanations for this.
This common thread raises an interesting question the editor and authors may not have intended: Why do we commemorate (broadly understood) or even care about World War I at this particular point in time, both professionally as scholars of the past and as members of (national or international) commemorative communities? Why do the European Union and many European governments pump resources into the centenary events and activities? Why are these investments sometimes successful in arousing the public's interest, while other attempts are less so? If we approach this centenary memory boom (or the lack thereof, despite efforts) with the same critical eye as the authors have done with film representations, what will we find out about the prevailing memory culture(s), identity (re)formation, academia-politics interplay, and, more broadly, the world we live in? Some chapters from Habsburg's Last War give us tantalizing hints in this regard. It would be intriguing to see further investigations into the return of World War I, and the return of the Habsburgs/Austria-Hungary, into the popular memories of the former Habsburg lands.
