Sacrifice and Rebirth: The Legacy of the Last Habsburg War by Mark Cornwall and John Paul Newman (review)

How a war ends is at least as important as how it begins. There is no lack of excellent recent scholarship on the start and course of World War I, which should be matched by work on the aftermath. Mark Cornwall and John Paul Newman's Sacrifice and Rebirth: The Legacy of the Last Habsburg War is an insightful look at the many varied veterans' groups, commemorative events and societies, political ramifications, and memorials in the former Habsburg lands. The book offers valuable perspectives on the individuals and groups most affected by the war, that is, veterans and their families who remained active in commemorative groups. Memorial activity naturally varied widely between successor states and became acutely tied up in post-Habsburg political narratives, making the memory of Austria-Hungary's unusually fragmented among the newly expanded, contracted, formed, and divided countries of east central Europe. While there have been books and articles on individual communities or nations, Sacrifice and Rebirth offers useful comparisons by exploring the entire post-Habsburg world. Cornwall and Newman and their contributors find enough commonalities to argue that a shadow of the Habsburg mental space lingered on well after the war.

Cornwall and Newman divide the postwar legacy of Austria-Hungary geographically between places where the war was seen as a defeat (Austria, Hungary, the Sudetenland, and Transylvania), a victory (Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and Romania), and a mixed state—areas annexed by new or expanded victor states (Croatia, Slovenia, Polish Galicia, and Tyrol). In all regions, individual wartime experience had to be adapted and molded into broader narratives, an exceptionally difficult task for countries like Yugoslavia or Poland, made up of former and current enemies.

Catherine Edgecombe and Maureen Healy examine perhaps the most fundamental questions of interwar Austria and the former Habsburg Empire more generally. Virtually everyone in the Austrian First Republic had sacrificed in some way during the war, but for what? While interwar commemorative ceremonies and organizations offered a variety of lenses to find meaning in wartime suffering, including "fatherland," "God and religion," or just "comradeship," no interpretation was universally or even widely accepted. Naturally, this lack of a unified narrative was accompanied by a sharp rise in paramilitary and revanchist groups in Austria and Hungary, as discussed by Robert Gerwarth.

In contrast to defeated Austria and Hungary, the "victor states" were usually able to create a somewhat coherent narrative of struggle and reward. This was only possible by ignoring large minority populations and producing approved memorabilia. For example, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (Yugoslavia as of 1929) exhibited hundreds of Serbian wartime photographs from the Balkan Wars and World War I. Melissa Bokovoy's chapter examining the exhibits and accompanying photo albums shows how the Serbian ideal of militarized manhood was first created and then spread, as were narratives of wartime suffering and solidarity. This naturally prioritized the Serbian experience of war and removed Croat and Slovene memories from the national pantheon.

Czechoslovakia had a similarly conflicted experience of war. Nancy M. Wingfield's chapter on interwar commemoration of the Battle of Zborov illustrates the new state's difficult position. Zborov was a minor engagement during the Kerensky Offensive; as the first major action by Czechoslovak Legions, it became a key part in the new national pantheon. Of course, the accepted version overlooked the loyal Czech and Slovak forces fighting for the Habsburgs and instead focused on approved Czech soldiers and leaders to the exclusion of much of the rest of the multinational state. Katya Kocurek's chapter complements Wingfield's nicely by looking at the political activity of Legionary veterans' associations, particularly the more right-wing Independent Union of Czechoslovak Legionaries.

Other countries completely overwrote the memory of World War I. For example, millions of Poles served in World War I in the armies of Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Russia. However, these victims and...