Glanz—Gewalt—Gehorsam: Militär und Gesellschaft in der Habsburgermonarchie (1800 bis 1918) ed. by Laurence Cole, Christa Hämmerle, and Martin Scheutz (review)

Historical studies of Austria-Hungary have long been dominated by the paradigm of “Vienna 1900,” modernism, and the preeminence of cultural and intellectual history. The social and political history of the Habsburg Monarchy has generally focused on the nationality question in the multinational empire, with the military being hidden away or cordoned off from the rest of society. Every now and then, historians and cultural studies of the old monarchy wheel out the local military band to listen to the Radetzky March in the central square of town, as a quaint reminder that Old Austria once stood among the great powers of Europe. What we have collectively forgotten is how militarized Habsburg society was.

This volume is a useful reminder that military life deeply penetrated the depths of imperial Austrian and royal Hungarian society. This observation serves as the starting point for the volume, which includes an extensive introduction, fourteen research-based articles, and a bibliographic essay. The editors explain in their introductory essay that military history, marginalized and embattled as it is, has begun to reinvent itself and is searching for interlocutors in the academy. But such reinvention has been late to come to the Habsburg Monarchy, where historical work on the military has been left to antiquarians and has often failed to participate in academic discussions. Moreover, attempts at a critical military historiography of the Habsburg Monarchy have been further marginalized by the nationally focused historiographical traditions of the central European successor states to the monarchy. This volume and its essays seek to rectify both omissions: the volume provides a truly Habsburg military history that attempts, on the one hand, to include as many former regions of the monarchy as possible and, on the other, to increase the status of military history within the framework of Habsburg central European history. This is an ambitious project, to be sure.

The essays cover a number of regions, styles, and methods. As several of them mention, general conscription came one year after the introduction of parliamentary and constitutional government in 1867. While such reforms were meant to modernize the army while also opening it up to greater contact with civil society, the introduction of universal conscription had the important consequence of pulling many Austro-Hungarian citizens into the planetary orbit of military discipline, values, and ideals. Several fruitful essays explore the ways in which this integration of society and military produced frictions and how those frictions were resolved, subsumed, or healed. For instance, Rok Stergar contributes an article on the relationship of the Monarchy’s Slovenes to universal conscription. This piece discusses how universal conscription served as an equalizer and leveler among classes and national groups, as well as how varied and complicated the response to military service could be within the various groupings of the Monarchy. In a similar vein, Christa Hämmerle writes on military discipline and the abuse of soldiers after the introduction of new military penal law, likewise introduced at the dawn of the constitutional era. Nicola Fontana’s article on the fortress city of Trent reminds us that civil/military relations were complicated by a multitude of factors besides national identity. Rather, the status of “fortress city” brought with it to Trent not only more soldiers and their business, but also a significant tax burden so that the city could provide adequate housing for them.

Other essays investigate topics using categories of discipline, violence, and gender. While one looks at Polish and Ukrainian women-legionnaires who dressed as men to serve in combat units in World War I, another presents the case of Austro-Hungarian men who dressed as women to depict them on stages in Russian POW camps. This was intended to uphold order and remind officers of the normal lives to which they would one day return. An essay by...