You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Recent research has revised earlier views about the role of veterans of World War One in paramilitary formations, radical nationalism and political extremism in inter-war Europe, yet there remain considerable gaps in our understanding of the role they played in the ‘successor states’ of the Habsburg Empire. Vanquished and Victorious provides an innovative comparative investigation of veterans in Austria and Czechoslovakia, two states whose wider political development was of crucial importance to the question of stability in Central Europe after 1918. While differing in terms of how successfully veterans reintegrated into post-war society, this volume shows that both countries incorporated elements of ‘cultures of victory and defeat’.
From the Treaty of Versailles to the 2018 centenary and beyond, the history of the First World War has been continually written and rewritten, studied and contested, producing a rich historiography shaped by the social and cultural circumstances of its creation. Writing the Great War provides a groundbreaking survey of this vast body of work, assembling contributions on a variety of national and regional historiographies from some of the most prominent scholars in the field. By analyzing perceptions of the war in contexts ranging from Nazi Germany to India’s struggle for independence, this is an illuminating collective study of the complex interplay of memory and history.
This volume places the Eastern, especially the Austro-Russian, fronts of the Great War centre stage, examining the little-known environmental and spatial dimensions in the history of the war. The focus is particularly on the Austrian crown land of Galicia, which was transformed from a neglected periphery into a battleground of three imperial armies, and where for the first time, nature was a key protagonist. The book balances contributions by emerging and established scholars, and benefits from a multi-language approach, expertise in the field, and extensive archival research in national archives. Contributors are Hanna Bazhenova, Gustavo Corni, Iaroslav Golubinov, Kerstin Susanne Jobst, Tomasz Kargol, Alexandra Likhacheva, Oksana Nagornaia, David Novotny, Christoph Nübel, Gwendal Piégais, Andrea Rendl, Kamil Ruszała, Nicolas Saunders, Kerstin von Lingen, Yulia Zherdeva, and Liubov Zhvanko.
Joint Winner of Fraenkel Prize for Contemporary History 2001, London. Winner of Talmon Prize, Israel, awarded by the Israeli Academy of Sciences. Although it was one of the most common experiences of combatants in World War I, captivity has received only a marginal place in the collective memory of the Great War and has seemed unimportant compared with the experiences of soldiers on the Western Front. Yet this book, focusing on POWs on the Eastern Front, reveals a different picture of the War and the human misery it produced. During four years of fighting, approximately 8.5 million soldiers were taken captive, of whom nearly 2.8 million were Austro-Hungarians. This book is the first to consi...
This military biography reveals the secret life of a closeted Austro-Hungarian intelligence officer who became a double agent in pre-WWI Europe. On the night of May 24th, 1913, three high-ranking military officials waited outside a hotel in the center of Vienna. At around two am they heard a gunshot and knew that one of their own had just ended his life. Colonel Alfred Redl, the former deputy head of the Evidenzbüro, the Austro-Hungarian General Staff’s directorate of military intelligence, and confidant of the heir to the throne. His suicide note read: ‘Levity and passion have destroyed me’. No one knew that for almost a decade, Redl had been giving military secrets to the Italians, French, and Russians. His motives for betraying the army he revered were a mystery for over a century. But after the discovery of long-lost records, the truth has been revealed. Spy of the Century tells the tragic story of a devoted military man who was forced to hide his homosexuality, and used his wealth to please his young lover. Authors John Sadler and Silvie Fisch vividly reconstruct Redl’s secret life and dramatic downfall.
In recent decades, historians of early-modern Europe, and above all those who study the eighteenth century, have elaborated the concept of what has been called the 'fiscal-military state'. This is a state whose international effectiveness was founded upon the development of large armed forces, whose performance and supply necessitated both further administrative development and the provision of large sums, the raising of which involved unprecedented levels of taxation and borrowing by governments. The present collection of essays, by leading authorities in their individual fields, all of whom have published widely on their chosen topic, explores the subject of the fiscal-military state by fo...
By the end of the nineteenth century, Europeans had come to see the Alps as the ideal place to fashion an alternative to the era's dominant energy source: coal. After 1850, Alpine water increasingly became "white coal": a power source with the revolutionary economic potential of fossil fuel. In this book, Marc Landry shows how dam-building in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries transformed the Alps into Europe's "battery"—an energy landscape designed to store and produce electricity for use throughout the Continent. These stores of energy played an important role in supplying the war economies of west-central Europe in both world wars as demand for munitions and other factory production...
French and Soviet Musical Diplomacies in Post-War Austria, 1945-1955 investigates how promoting 'national' music and musicians was used as an important asset by France and the USSR in post-Nazi Austria, covering music’s role in international relations at various levels, within changing power frameworks. Bridging international relations, musical sociology, media studies, and Cold War history, four incisive chapters examine the crossroads of Soviet, French, and Austrian cultural politics and discourse-building, presented in two parts - institutions of musical diplomacy: Soviet and French cultural diplomats in comparison; sounds of music coming to Austria: Soviet and French musicians on tour. Using a communication- and media-oriented approach, this study casts new light, firstly, on the interpretative power of 'receiving' publics and, secondly, on the role of cultural transmitters at different levels. This is a valuable study for those specialising in Russian and East European music and music and politics. It will also appeal to cultural historians and all those interested in the intersections between music, international relations, and Cold War history.
During the phases of mobile warfare, the ethnically and religiously very heterogeneous population in the border regions of the multi-ethnic empires suffered in particular. Even if the real military situation in the course of the war hardly gave cause for concern, the image of disloyal ethnic and national minorities was widespread. This was particularly the case when ethnic groups lived on both sides of the border and social and political tensions had already established themselves along ethnic or religious lines of conflict before the war. Displacements, deportations and mass violence were the result. The genocide of the Armenian population is the most extreme example of this development. This anthology examines the border regions of the Ottoman, Russian and Habsburg empires during the First World War with regard to radical population policy and genocidal violence from a comparative perspective in order to draw a more precise picture of escalating and deescalating factors.
Based on a broad array of sources from Russian and Austrian archives, this collection provides a comprehensive analysis of the Soviet occupation of Austria from 1945 to 1955. The contributors cover a wide range of topics, including the Soviet Secret Services, the military kommandaturas, Soviet occupation policies, the withdrawal of troops in 1955, everyday life, the image of “the Russians,” violence against women, arrests, deportations, Soviet aid provisions, as well as children of occupation.