Beyond Vienna: The Collapse of Provincial Austria in the First World War
Open AccessThe First World War was a time of political and social unrest and transformation in Central Europe. By war’s end, the Habsburg Monarchy ceased to exist, replaced by the so-called nation-states. Recent studies of the First World War have increasingly focused on home front events, and scholars including Belinda Davis and Maureen Healy have analyzed the experience of war in Central Europe’s capital cities. However, few scholars have focused on the provincial experience of the First World War. Without including provincial war experiences, historians lack an understanding of the full extent of wartime deprivation and the full scale of social breakdown in the Habsburg Monarchy during the war.This dissertation examines the social breakdown of provincial Lower Austria and Moravia, focusing on the shared border through the lens of gender. Women, many now heading households owing to mobilization, played a larger public role during the war than they had before 1914 as they increasingly worked outside the home, sought to provide for their families, and protested increasingly difficult living conditions on the home front. Contemporary sources reveal that owing to the lack of adequate provisioning and increasing requisitioning, residents contacted officials to express their frustration and many—often women—took to the streets in protest or took other actions to undermine the Monarchy’s wartime provisioning efforts. I demonstrate that the Habsburg state actively attempted to manage its people, to provide for them, and to combat the feminization of the home front in an effort to maintain social order during wartime. I argue that the cycle of provisioning and requisitioning coupled with the arrival of outsiders—POWs, wounded soldiers, refugees from the Imperial east and southeast—contributed to a process in which ideas of who was a member of the community and who was not hardened, as residents became more concerned with their own immediate needs rather than those of the state. As a result, the Habsburg Monarchy lost the war at home even before it lost on the fighting front. My research also demonstrates that in some parts of the former Monarchy, fighting continued into the early 1920s as residents of Habsburg Central and Eastern Europe contested new international borders in the wake of the November 1918 Armistice, and the region continued to experience economic shortages. My research expands and challenges our understanding of the First World War in the Habsburg Monarchy. It provides a closer look at the provincial experience of war, which was different than that of the imperial capital owing to requisitioning. The provisioning situation in the provinces contributed to hunger in the capital; therefore, this study demonstrates that the provinces contributed to the capital’s collapse. Moreover, by expanding the chronology, this project demonstrates that ultimately the extended effect of wartime deprivation and low morale laid the groundwork for Czechoslovak takeover in the borderlands of Southern Moravia.
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