Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I.

Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I. By Maureen Healy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xiv plus 333 p. $75.00).

Scholarship on the social and cultural history of the Great War in Western Europe has proliferated in recent decades. Equivalent studies for central and eastern Europe have been less prevalent, although they are no less significant. The result has been not only the absence of this region from a broader European discourse on the First World War, but also a dearth of social history of the war in the historiography of this region. In this thus much-needed, ambitious, and remarkable study, Maureen Healy makes important contributions to both fields by bringing the Habsburg Empire into a comparative dialogue and by broadening our understanding of Austrian politics and the internal process of disintegration of the Habsburg Empire.

Healy broadens by focusing on the everyday experience of total war of the two million ordinary citizens in the imperial capital of Vienna. Inspired by the everyday approach to history of Alf Ludtke, she deals with a broad range of subjects including women's organizations, children and schools, home-front men and paternalism, entertainment, and rumors. (1) Food, which Healy calls "Vienna's new arena of politics," is at the center of the story (33). The first section of her book, entitled "Politics and representation," treats food distribution and the politics of sacrifice, as well as the state's unsuccessful attempts to persuade the population of its discourse on sacrifice through propaganda, especially the cinema and Vienna War Exhibition of 1916-1917. Like other social historians of the First World War before her, Healy rightly recognizes the important connection "between scarcity and large-scale political change" (32). (2) In the second section, entitled "State and Family" and comprised of chapters on women, children, and the men left behind, Healy explores how the state used the institution of the family to mobilize the home front. Her chapters are persuasively interwoven into a narrative centering on the overarching theme of the broadening of the political arena.

Healy considers sites not generally considered places of political activity and people not generally considered political actors. She convincingly demonstrates the political relevance of shops, street corners, pubs, apartment buildings and of the women and children of Vienna. She mines a wide variety of unexplored primary sources, especially the many letters of denunciation, appeal, complaint, and petition generated by the "epistolary culture of Vienna" (20), as well as newspapers, minutes of city government meetings, and police reports. Healy's approach gives a place to these people, whose position in social and political life has not received adequate attention from historians. This contribution is important not only because of their sheer number, but because as the author persuasively demonstrates, the conditions of war transformed non-political or proto-political individuals into political agents and objects of the state. Healy's focus is especially compelling and important in light of the fact that during the war traditional political bodies such as parliament, political parties, and organized interest groups ceased their activities.

Healy examines the various levels on which the Viennese interacted with their communities and with government authorities. She demonstrates how the government failed to mobilize the population with its discourse of sacrifice, which instead brought about a social disintegration of the Viennese home front and ultimately the collapse of the city. The food shortage was central to this social dissolution because it fundamentally altered the role of the civilian and the home front in warfare. The existing literature on the social and cultural history of the First World War, in which Healy is very well-versed, has long argued for the blurring of the distinction between the home and the front line. Healy argues that the case of Austria was even more extreme in that the home front was itself a site where "residents waged an internecine war against one another" (300). The state failed to mitigate the conflict, as it experienced a breakdown of its institutions. For example, the broken food distribution system created "not only hunger, but envy and imaginative tales that explained that hunger," which Healy dubs food fantasies (69). Schools also failed to develop a supra-national civic education and to produce "children of the empire" because too much of their attention and resources were diverted towards the war. Healy argues that total war was a prism through which every action was distorted. It created grievances and provided people with a vocabulary, like "enemy" or "traitor," to use against their fellow citizens. Under these circumstances, issues of citizenship and national belonging came to the fore. The experience of total war fundamentally redefined relations between the state and it citizens. The state increased in significance in the lives of its citizens, who were asked to sacrifice and fight for it. At the same time, citizens gained importance in the eyes of the state, which had to rely on them to support the war effort. Healy's important and compelling insights regarding citizen-state relations are one of the most valuable contributions of her work.

Much of what Healy describes in the Austrian case has parallels in other wartime European cities. At the same time, the Habsburg case is unique because of the "disjuncture in Austria between the nation and the state" (214). Here the nation could not be the rallying point as Jean-Jacques Becker argued that it was in France. (3) So, what was the rallying point it Austria? Healy argues that ultimately there was none. By demonstrating how the Austrian state failed to mobilize its citizens for the war and to create a common imperial allegiance, Healy's work sheds light on the "struggle to articulate a workable Austrian Staatsidee" (217).

This study provokes important questions regarding the relationship of the particular to the general, specifically how the local, social experience of Vienna relates to the national, political experience that has traditionally received attention from historians. Healy concludes that Vienna fell before the state collapsed, and that her study demonstrates how "the collapse [of the state] was even more deeply internal than previously imagined," as it was discredited not only in the eyes of traditional opponents but at its very heart (300). Was the relationship between the two collapses merely temporal, or was it causal? Studies of other local experiences of war and social disintegration in the empire would shed greater light on Healy's assertion that "the roots of the collapse of the Habsburg state [are found] in the mundane and the everyday" (300). And one hopes that Healy's work will inspire other scholars of central and eastern Europe in this direction, and thus will mark a powerful beginning of a broader and deeper discourse on the subject of war and society in this region.

Jovana Knezevic

Yale University 

ENDNOTES

1. Alf Ludtke, Ed. History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life (Princeton, N.J., 1995).

2. Such as Belinda Davis, Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (Chapel Hill, 2001); Barbara Alpern Engel, "Not by Bread Alone: Subsistence Riots in Russia during World War I," Journal of Modern History 69 (December, 1997): 696-721; or Jean Louis Robert and Jay Winter (eds.) Capital Cities at War: London, Paris, Berlin 1914-1919 (New York, 1997).

3. Jean-Jacques Becker, The Great War and the French People (Dover, NH, 1985).