The analysis of warfare from a gender perspective has evolved in the past three decades into one of the most productive areas of historical research, specifically in World War I studies. Feminist historians in particular have made profound contributions to the historiography of World War I by investigating the involvement of women in war economies and welfare organizations; by analyzing the politicization and nationalization of everyday life; by examining prostitution, sexual policing, and sexual violence; and by looking at the fantasies, fears, and joys of men and women during the war and its aftermath. In Habsburg historiography, this field has been tended among others by Maureen Healy, Dieter Hecht, Oswald Überegger, Nancy Wingfield, and Tara Zahra. However, the first one to make gender unequivocally the cornerstone of her analysis of World War I has been Christa Hämmerle. In this present volume, she brings together a collection of her pioneering essays, written and published during the past two decades.

Published in conjunction with the 2014 centenary, Heimat/Front aims to inspire historians in Austria to integrate into their research “a highly-developed field of historical inquiry and its theoretical and methodological contributions,” (10) instead of marginalizing it or treating its insights with disdain, as many have done, according to Hämmerle. World War I, she emphasizes, mobilized the entire population and ascribed gendered meanings to a plethora of activities and decisions. To understand why women and men behaved the ways they did, their gendered identities need to be taken into consideration, and not as tangential facts. Marianne Jarka, for example, a decorated operating-room Red Cross nurse who had encountered the horrors of the Italian Front—and probably had been most traumatized by the experience—chose at the end of the war to exchange her decoration for a liter of milk needed by her children. Jarka's dilemmas reflect in a nutshell the gendered underpinning of wartime actions and the interconnectedness of life at the front and at the rear. In fact, Hämmerle argues correctly, “the ‘Front’ and the ‘Homefront’ (or ‘Hinterland’) were interwoven and inseparable, interlocked and meshed together in so many ways” (20), that it makes little sense to use the misleading dichotomy of Front versus Homefront as though the two existed in separate universes (yet, the book is confusingly entitled Heimat/Front with its separating forward slash).

The book consists of an introduction and seven essays: the fourth, fifth, and sixth chapters, which had been written in the early and mid 1990s, are interconnected and deal with the (self-) mobilization of German-speaking women to knit, sew, and produce much-needed garments for the war effort. In Vienna alone, dozens of Arbeitsstuben were established and run by upper- and middle-class women, employing thousands of working-class women to produce badly needed articles of clothing. Knitting and sewing halls existed in every district of the city, producing 6,516,917 pieces of garment in the first 16 months of the war. Schoolgirls were mobilized to knit socks (even during recess) and were encouraged to correspond with soldiers, sending them parcels as Liebesgaben. This symbolic packaging of love, argues Hämmerle, was considerably more important for the girls who had sent parcels than to the soldiers who received them and assumed a much greater role in their wartime reminiscences.

The other chapters are individual essays that deal with specific issues. The second chapter examines the activity of tens of thousands of Austro-Hungarian women nurses at the front, and the ways in which they had been written out of official and scholarly accounts. The erasure of this exceptionally important group of women had much to do with the efforts to define the front as a purely masculine space, and it stands in stark contrast with the trauma suffered by many of these women, which was similar to that of their male comrades. The third chapter is a fascinating microstudy of the wartime correspondence of Christl Lang and Leopold Wolf, who had met in January 1914, become engaged in 1915, married in April 1917, and had a daughter together in early 1918. The chapter raises many important points about the nature of wartime correspondence, such as the fact that addressees often shared letters with other people, that women were often asked (or instructed) to perform various tasks by their spouses in the field, and that men often described the war as an excursion and attempted to downplay the brutality. Hämmerle shows very well how Leopold remained loyal to the ethos of a Habsburg officer whereas Christl became ever more skeptical about the war as it progressed.

The final two chapters of the book are more historiographical in nature. The seventh chapter examines the postwar World War I memoiristic writings of Fritz Weber, wondering how this convinced Nazi came to be called the “Austrian Remarque.” As her analysis makes clear, Weber had much more in common with the writing of Ernst Jünger and of Freikorps thugs, and was part and parcel of the Blut und Boden Nazi literature. The fact that Weber is still much in use in the collective remembrance of World War I is indicative of the failures of present-day Austria to examine its Nazi past. In the eighth chapter, Hämmerle takes issue with the thesis that World War I led to a “masculinity crisis” in Austria. If anything, she argues, it led to a short-term sense of crisis among ex-officers (who had dominated official writings about the war), which was quickly offset by the 1930s. Heavily relying on the insights of sociologist Raewyn Connell, Hämmerle emphasizes the importance of long-term structural trends in the making and unmaking of gender systems. It is regrettable, though, that she chooses to refer to Connell with a “he/she” (“der/die”) hybrid pronoun more than nine years after Connell's gender transition (169).

Whereas the contents of the book are consistently engaging, a few production choices seem a bit peculiar. As mentioned, the title is at odds with one of the main arguments of the book regarding the deceptiveness and tendentiousness of the Front/Homefront dichotomy. There were many important spheres that do not fit snugly within this binary (e.g., refugee and POW camps, occupied territories, and rear-area brothels), and in any case, all zones were interconnected and affected by the demands of total war. The book does not include a bibliography or an index, and the footnotes generally have not been updated since the initial publication of a specific chapter. Moreover, Heimat/Front is not really about Austria-Hungary as a whole, or even about Cisleithania, but rather about German-speakers from the present-day boundaries of Austria, primarily Vienna. Nevertheless, the book is consistently thought-provoking and provides a useful compilation of the works of a pioneering scholar.