Only recently have historians, including the late Mark Pittaway, begun to question the idea that 1918 marked an impenetrable caesura in the history of east central Europe. Obviously, for the new states, mostly “small empires” as Pieter Judson has correctly called them, founded on the ruins of the Habsburg Empire, the year was supposed to mark the absolute beginning of a new historical era. However, historians who have now began to look more closely at this seemingly “hard” break have found numerous continuities and many necessary compromises between the old and new regimes. The collection of a dozen chapters on the “Embers of Empire” deals with questions of continuities and transitions between the pre- and post-war years and study the often complicated processes of administrative turnover in various parts of the late Habsburg Empire that had been swallowed by the new states.
Practical questions had to be solved in a chaotic situation. This required muddy compromises that did not fit the later glorious history of “national rebirth.” In order to withhold law and order, for example, Austrian policemen and administrators were integrated into the new Polish and Czech authorities. The new Czech government (not yet “Czechoslovak” as it claimed) even decreed that all laws of the Old Regime remained in place, as Claire Morelon writes in her concise introduction. One of the main questions the contributors to the book tried to answer was the impact the habitus of the numerous imperial bureaucrats and officers, clergy and aristocrats had on the new “national” institutions. Not only defeated Austria and Hungary had to come to terms with the Habsburg past, but also Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Interestingly, Morelon emphasizes that the nostalgia of the Habsburg Empire, created by, among others, writers such as Joseph Roth and other intellectuals, has obscured the history of the concrete struggles with this legacy in various local, regional, and national contexts. We can here review only a few selected chapters.
Studying local and regional transitions in Upper Hungary (Slovakia) and Transylvania, Gábor Egry determined significant differences and contradictions between what happened on the local and regional levels and what national elites in the center had imagined to do in their furor to destroy the remnants of the old regime. Because of the pressing material problems in the chaotic situation at the end of the war, local gangs attacked state representatives indiscriminately and engaged in robbing and looting, no matter whether victims represented the old Habsburg state or the new power (15). Cooperation between different ethnically-defined groups was seen as undermining the new order, but for example in Pozsony (Bratislava), it took the Czechoslovak government until the mid-1920s to break the influence of the German-Hungarian Social-Democratic Party (19). Nationalizing or unifying attempts from central governments could, at times, push some people who had been rather indifferent before towards minority nationalism, as happened when new national holidays were introduced or old ones suppressed.
Richard Bassett begins his study of the aftermath of the Habsburg army following 1918 with the astonishing statement that in December 1917, the Austro-Hungarian army appeared to be a most successful army while the armed forces of Romania, Russia, and Serbia were defeated and out of the war, and Italy in retreat (117). This fact contradicts still widespread ideas about the collapse of the Habsburg army, which was allegedly undermined by conflicts among its various “nationalities.” One of the reasons why the Habsburg army showed such unexpected discipline and coherence, according to General Glaise-Horstenau, was the fact that it was a “living, active, historically evolved body” (119). As late as November 1918, the Croatian General Boroević offered his troops as support for Emperor Charles, which the latter refused because he wanted to avoid further bloodshed where peace instead was needed. The end of the war and the final collapse of the monarchy and its army resulted in bitter disappointments for numerous officers, many of whom died young soon after 1918. Others who fought in World War II, serving Adolf Hitler's army while most Jewish and a few Catholic former officers fell victim to the new regime. Two other chapters deal with Romanian (Irina Marin) and Croatian officers (John Paul Newman) of the Habsburg army. In the case of many high-ranking Romanian officers, Marin found that they were extremely loyal to the Habsburgs until 1918. Since they also had represented their national minority, however, many of them started political careers once Transylvania had become part of the enormously extended Romanian kingdom. The case of the Croatian officers was more complicated when they entered, after 1918, the new South Slavic Kingdom of Yugoslavia, dominated by Serbs. Like many Austrian German, Hungarian, and other former Hapsburg officers, many Croats enraged by the total collapse of 1918 joined Fascist organizations, such as the Ustaša, often creating transnational radical networks stretching to Fascist Italy or Hungary (159).
The final chapter of the book deals with the memories of the heir to the throne, Franz Ferdinand. The very name still today evokes such reminiscences of tragedy on a historical scale that a Britpop band from Glasgow choose it as its name in the early 2000s. Although the Scottish musicians had probably not studied the topic profoundly, they instinctively found the reason why and how the tragic victim of the 1914 assassination is still remembered today: as a figure that had come to signify more than just another victim of the long list of late nineteenth and early twentieth century regicides; a person that somehow symbolized the end of a huge empire, and, even more, the end of the “old world” dominated by European powers. In his brilliant article, Paul Miller tries to get beyond this immense mountain of myths that had inspired so many writers, intellectuals, and the wider public in Austria since 1914. He correctly emphasizes that Franz Ferdinand was not the first victim of World War I because the war started months after he died. Tacitly passing over of this fact, as he demonstrates convincingly, could be used to obscure the responsibilities of the Austrian leadership in unleashing the Great War. Another major question related to the complicated character of the Archduke was the hope that he could somehow have saved the Empire by introducing reforms that could have met some of the grievances of the Slavic minorities who aimed at reducing the dominance of Austro-Germans and Hungarians at the head of the realm. While the authoritarian Ständestaat included a more positive picture of Franz Ferdinand in their Austro-patriotic politics of memory, the Nazis despised particularly his anti-völkisch, pro-Slavic leanings. Miller's final chapter rounds up an edited volume that sheds new light on a new field of inquiry on the monarchy: the transition to the new states. From the perspective of Hungarian studies, however, it is a bit disappointing, as with so many edited volumes on the Habsburg Empire, that the Hungarian part is underrepresented.
