Over the past fifteen years, the conflicting memories and commemorations of the Great War in the former belligerent countries have been studied in much detail, with a particular focus on France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Central Europe and East-Central Europe, by contrast, have been largely neglected. This collection of essays, coedited by Mark Cornwall and John Paul Newman, is thus an extremely welcome and important contribution to the burgeoning scholarship on the ramifications of World War I for political cultures in interwar Europe. The focus of the twelve chapters is on the six successor states of the Habsburg Empire after its collapse in the autumn of 1918. The overarching picture resembles that of a fragmentation of remembrance along political lines, which is familiar from the situations in France and Germany, but the one in East-Central Europe was altogether much more complicated. Only a small minority of the war veterans in the newly founded successor states had actually fought for their respective irridenta (liberating nationalism) during the war, such as the members of the Czechoslovak and Polish Legions. For the overwhelming majority of the veterans in this region, their sacrifice had been in vain, either because their nation had been defeated (i.e., Austria and Hungary), because they had served as conscripts in the Austrian or Russian armies and had thus fought on the “wrong” side, or because their service was marginalized or challenged in the post-1918 environment.

In order to reduce the bewildering complexity of the post-Habsburg situation, Cornwall and Newman have divided the volume into three sections. The first surveys the different readings of the sacrifice of the “vanquished” in the first Austrian Republic and in Hungary. Catherine Edgecombe and Maureen Healey chart the memorial culture in Austria, in which Greater-German nationalist interpretations of the meaning of death competed with Catholic and socialist ones; nostalgia for the lost Habsburg monarchy appealed to many at the same time as well. A discourse of masculine comradeship endeavoured to transcend the partisan nature of war memorials in post-1918 Austria, but it had its own exclusionary effects, as former POWs were suspected of desertion and noncombatants could not claim recognition. Yet, as Mark Cornwall demonstrates in his essay, the notion of an aggressively masculine in-group or Männerbund did serve to integrate the nationalism of the Sudeten Germans in the Bohemian lands.

The second section analyses patterns of remembrance in Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, where veterans could make a claim to membership among the victors. Yet, the fragile ethno-nationalist situation in each of these countries prompted attempts to craft a hegemonic narrative that highlighted the specific sacrifice and martyrdom of one national group over all others. Serbian attempts to use photography as a means of framing the Serbian peasant soldier as a hero had already commenced during the war; this continued in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and thus overshadowed the sacrifice of Slovenian and Croatian veterans, as Melissa Bokovoy argues in her contribution. In the multinational state of Czechoslovakia, the Battle of Zborov emerged as a crucial reference for commemorating sacrifice, as Nancy M. Wingfield demonstrates: on July 2, 1917, soldiers of three Czechoslovak regiments in the Russian army, who had volunteered for service from Russian POW camps, successfully attacked a position held by Czechs in the Habsburg army. Whether this was a result of their own bravery—or of treachery by the Czech soldiers who surrendered in droves—remained contentious. After 1918, the members of the Czechoslovak Legion at Zborov were nevertheless hailed as the “first citizens of the Czechoslovak Republic” (133), and the remains of an unknown Czech soldier from Zborov were buried as the Czechoslovak Unknown Soldier in Prague on July 1, 1922, thus deviating from Armistice Day as the usual time for this type of commemoration.

The most complicated aspect in any analysis of historical memory is to reconstruct those largely silent voices that have been crowded out by hegemonic discourses of commemoration. In the last section of the volume, titled “Sacrifice in Silence,” John Paul Newman, Petra Svoljšak, Christoph Mick, and Lawrence Cole offer fascinating glimpses into such marginalized remembrances. Newman, for example, describes how Croatian war veterans—some of whom had fought with distinction in the Habsburg army, while others served in the Serbian army—tried to renegotiate their place in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia at the intersection of national, political, and class identities. Cole, for his part, points to those inhabitants of South Tyrol and the Trentino who privately sustained positive recollections of service in the Habsburg army; by contrast, the Italian Fascist regime streamlined the memory of the war along the lines of a narrative of victorious redemption.

Every one of the twelve chapters in this collection combines fresh and substantial empirical research with a lucid interpretation of the competing national claims for the symbolic “capital” that service in World War I potentially provided. Taken as a whole, the book provides a rich canvas of the many conflicting and often marginalized ways in which the Great War was commemorated in the successor states of the Habsburg Empire. It will be compulsory reading for anyone interested in the political and cultural legacy of World War I in interwar Europe.