In 1995, a minister from Slovenia visited my university. I had the pleasure to speak to him for a few minutes and asked how Slovenians view their Habsburg past. He replied that when considering the previous fifty years, the Habsburg experience was perceived better.
This book is the product of “Memorialization and Regeneration: The Male Wartime Generation in the Successor States,” a project at the University of Southampton. Mark Cornwall and John Paul Newman have compiled a volume of important essays from twelve historians that offer readers a comparative study of veterans and memory in former Habsburg states. The multinational, multiethnic, and heterogeneous nature of the former empire makes the study of such postwar experiences potentially confusing, but Cornwall and Newman have done an excellent job constructing an organized and coherent compendium. Its purpose is to explore the transnational narratives that emerged in the postwar years and challenged a “Habsburg mental space” (10). Yet, Cornwall and Newman are not interested in the “loudest” voices, but the more “quiescent and non-national viewpoints” (10).
Cornwall's introductory chapter provides a map to navigate the complexities of the subject matter. The book is divided into three parts, beginning with “Part I: Sacrifice and the Vanquished.” In this section Austrian, ethnic German, and Magyar experiences in postwar Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Romania are analyzed. “Part II: Sacrifice and the Discourse of Victory” explores the response of the ethnic and national groups who achieved their independence after the war but sought to build a national identity within the framework of the war to reflect their actual and constructed experiences. Lastly, “Part III: Sacrifice in Silence” examines Croatians, Slovenians, Poles, and Austrians who found themselves citizens in successor states that saw them as enemies or “others” because they served on the wrong side. Their memories were not integrated into the national narratives that emerged in the new states.
Memorialization of wartime experiences in Austria and Hungary had to contend with the defeat and dismemberment of the former state. Political and national-ethnic considerations often frustrated attempts to establish a coherent narrative. For Austrians, was it a “German” experience or a uniquely “Austrian” one? In Hungary, the defeat led to territorial loss, and the concept of national “regeneration” became a fundamental part of postwar narratives. Similarly, the chapter on Germans in Czechoslovakia is quite important, as the manner in which that population defined itself often clashed with the new Czechoslovak account. Their experiences in the postwar era lead the historian and reader to the development of a Sudeten German identity and directly to 1938.
In postwar Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Romania, the ethnic-national narrative of resistance dominated the memorialization of wartime experiences. Czechs emphasized the Czech Legionnaires as opposed to those of Czech soldiers in the K.u.K Armee to craft a narrative apart from the Habsburg Empire. In Yugoslavia, the Serb perspective of “liberation and unification” (98) dominated the discourse in a purposeful and methodical manner. This official state memorialization suppressed Slovene and Croatian commemoration and saw their compatriot's wartime experiences in the Habsburg army as part of an undesirable past. Romanians, conversely, could agree, but the newly acquired Transylvania included a Magyar minority, who were cleaved from their former Kingdom and Empire. Their memory of the war conflicted with the national narrative and was officially silenced. The territorial redistributions after the war also created further difficulties in Galicia and the South Tyrol (Trentino), where the population's experiences made it virtually impossible to develop a coherent wartime account. Thus, Poland's narrative rested on the Polish-Ukrainian War of 1918–19, because the millions of Poles who fought in the war served in several armies on opposite sides. Similarly, in the Trentino, Austrian memory was quite strong, yet after 1922, Mussolini's Fascist regime “restricted overt displays of collective remembrance” (298).
The volume's only shortcoming is the absence of a chapter dedicated to the memorialization of World War I among the Jews of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The authors of the respective chapters almost uniformly explain that Jews were considered “outsiders” in the new states of interwar Central Europe. The fact that Jews were considered “others” is a fundamental element in understanding the fashioning of a national image. The exclusion of Jews in virtually all these states from the manufactured memory was part of the antisemitic history of Central and Eastern Europe and paved the way for the complicity of nationalist and fascist groups that actively participated in the genocide of Jews in their respective countries during World War II. The editors should have recruited an author to examine the collective experience of Jews of the Empire in the interwar years to complete their history.
This criticism notwithstanding, Cornwall and Newman have produced an important work on postwar memories. This volume serves as a solid first step into deeper works on the individual experiences and constructed memories of the successor states and their populations.
