Sacrifice and Rebirth

When Austria-Hungary broke up at the end of the First World War, the sacrifice of one million men who had died fighting for the Habsburg monarchy now seemed to be in vain. This book is the first of its kind to analyze how the Great War was interpreted, commemorated, or forgotten across all the ex-Habsburg territories. Each of the book’s twelve chapters focuses on a separate region, studying how the transition to peacetime was managed either by the state, by war veterans, or by national minorities. This “splintered war memory,” where some posed as victors and some as losers, does much to explain the fractious character of interwar Eastern Europe.

Mark Cornwall is Professor of Modern European History at the University of Southampton. He is author of The Undermining of Austria-Hungary. The Battle for Hearts and Minds (2000) and The Devil’s Wall: The Nationalist Youth Mission of Heinz Rutha (2012).

John Paul Newman is Lecturer in Twentieth-Century European History at Maynooth University. He is author of Yugoslavia in the Shadow of War: Veterans and the Limits of State Building 1903-1945 (2015) and coeditor, with Julia Eichenberg, of The Great War and Veterans’ Internationalism (2013).