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This book talks about the mass displacement of civilians, estimated to be 14 to 15 million, in the twentieth-century Europe during the First World War. It looks at the causes and consequences of the refugee crisis and its aftermath, and the attempts to understand its significance. Key sites of displacement extended from Belgium to Armenia, taking in France, Italy, Austria-Hungary, East Prussia, the Russian Empire, Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey and Serbia. The German army's occupation of Belgium, France, Poland and Lithuania prompted the mass flight of refugees, as did Russia's invasion of East Prussia in 1914. Jewish, Ruthenian and Polish civilians in the Habsburg Empire fled their homes or were deported by the military to distant locations. Following Italy's attack on Austria-Hungary in May 1915, the Habsburg authorities ordered around 100,000 Slovenian subjects of the empire to leave. The Austrian and Bulgarian invasion of Serbia brought about a humanitarian catastrophe as civilians and the remnants of the Serbian army sought safety elsewhere. However, mass flight of civilian refugees did not begin in 1914 nor did it come to an end in 1918. Muslim refugees fled to the relative safety of Anatolia in order to escape violent persecution by Bulgarian and other forces during the Balkan Wars on 1912-13. There were complex movements of population between Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey before 1914. The complex process of repatriation and resettlement affected soldiers and civilians alike and rarely took place in stable or peaceful circumstances.
were to be divided and contested between the Ottoman and Austrian Habsburg Empires, while an autonomous, multicultural principality of Transylvania played on a balance of power between the two imperial sides. However, the loss of Hungarian sovereignty did not mean the end of Hungarian autonomous institutions or consciousness among the Magyar nobility and middle classes, which were spread all over the former lands of the
strict and exact execution of the laws’. The end of the instruction is indicative: ‘The signed ministries are persuaded by your preparedness to accept the assignment and by doing so are trusting your expertise and solicitude in this affair, which is a question of protecting Germany and the whole of western Europe (‘die Sicherung Deutschlands und des ganzen Westens von Europa’) against the terrible evil from the Orient.’ 13 This assessment is important for two reasons. First, it confirms that the border between the Habsburg Empire and the vassal states of the Ottoman
reviving public interest in medicalized borders. This chapter focuses on the installation of medical quarantining as a new technological surveillance strategy at border entry points in the Habsburg Empire. Although the politics of health and combatting diseases are not new subjects of research, it has been recently shown in the anthology Epidemics and Pandemics in Historical Perspective (edited by Jörg Vögele, Stefanie Knöll and Thorsten Noack) that it is necessary to shift the focus to specific case studies, which allow more in-depth questions with precise foci to be
collapse of the Habsburg Empire, Vienna continued to draw in Jewish students, the ‘ numerus clausus exiles’ – who were forced to study abroad by quotas limiting their access to university education in their home countries. 6 The category ‘Ostjuden’ , to which these students belonged, applied to men and women coming from the former Russian Empire, but also to those who came from territories that had been under the Habsburg monarchy before the First World War. Therefore, for some the decision to study in Vienna
This chapter analyses how, in the context of the multinational Habsburg Empire, predominantly German-speaking members of the Christian Social movement considered the importance of this national side of their character. The Empire was buffeted by conflicts between bourgeois political representatives of different nationalities, but these became particularly acute for Christian Socials in Vienna when, as a cosmopolitan city, German speakers clashed with Czech speakers there. This chapter shows how, despite their claims to be universalist Christians, above such national disputes, Christian Socials were drawn into these Viennese clashes. It shows how this German dimension would be important for debates as to what should happen to German-speaking areas of Austria if the multinational Empire fell and collapsed, as many suspected it might under international stress.
This chapter considers the democratic, secular Austrian republic that was created as a remnant of the Habsburg Empire, and of which Vienna became the capital. This was a state pulled in multiple directions: by those who wanted to abolish it, and to join with Germany; by those who were happy to keep it, as long as it ceased to be a democracy. It is a chapter that highlights a struggle to make it a Catholic state, but it is also a chapter that highlights considerable social division on many subjects, such as the economic direction the state should take. It is a chapter that highlights the tensions between the national governments of Austria, usually led by Christian Socials, and the Vienna City Council, overwhelmingly controlled by the Marxist Social Democrats.
Semini is one of several names for a small Gallo-Roman sculpture that was installed above the gate of Antwerp’s Vieux-Bourg some time in the fourteenth century. Little is known of the early history of Semini, although it was rumoured to be the object of a fertility cult. Yet in 1549, at a crucial moment in the political identity of the city and its relationship to the Habsburg Empire, the statue came to be identified as Priapus, the Greco-Roman god of the fields and of procreation. This essay examines the reappropriation of Semini in the context of Counter-Reformation Antwerp. It considers the importance of this small antiquity to emerging practices of local antiquarianism, historiography and philology, while also examining some of the everyday street activities that both reinforced and challenged concepts of antiquity in the early modern city.
v 6 v ‘Cities of barracks’: refugees in the Austrian part of the Habsburg Empire during the First World War Martina Hermann The unprecedented mass displacement of civilians during the First World War represents a crucial component of the seminal catastrophe of the twentieth century. All belligerent nations confronted issues generated by large population movements. However, while enemy aggression and the loss of territory were the primary factors causing refugees to flee, at the same time, the multinational Habsburg Empire forcibly evacuated its own nationals
–nationalist memory cultures that arose towards the end of the nineteenth century were grounded in the imperial precedents rather than the liberal spirit of 1848. Commemorative practices and rituals in the Habsburg Empire before the revolutions in 1848–49 did not enjoy the grandiose public attention they received under Emperor Franz Josef in the second half of the long nineteenth century. The