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3. Civilizing the Soldier in Postwar Austria
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3 Civilizing the Soldier in Postwar Austria Maureen Healy Among ads for prosthetic limbs, gravestone engraving services, training courses for returning soldiers, and arti¤cial glass eyes (“indistinguishable from the real thing”), we ¤nd an ad in an Austrian newspaper from 1919 that reads: “Civilize yourselves.”1 Der Invalide, the newspaper running the ad, carried many articles and announcements of interest to Austria’s returning soldiers, the “wardamaged ” in particular. Except for the relatively small number of of¤cers and soldiers drawn into the Volkswehr, the Republic of German-Austria’s new army, most Austrian men who fought in the Habsburg armed forces would be making a transition back to civilian life.2 Did the injunction “civilize yourselves” imply that a return from battle might require some sort of civilizing process? Was the ad suggesting that soldiers had become uncivilized while away? Were becoming civilized and becoming a civilian synonymous? In this case, the “civilizing process ” was imagined as a fairly super¤cial one. The ad came from a dry cleaner in Vienna’s II. district who offered to convert military uniforms into civilian clothing. The cleaning and tailoring was called Umarbeitung (adaptation) and would prove important for soldiers who otherwise had no clothes. AustriaHungary had experienced extreme shortages of wool, cotton, and other fabrics during the war, and many men would still be wearing their “adapted”shirts and trousers into the 1920s. A much larger kind of adaptation was under way in Austria in the years following the war. This essay considers the Umarbeitung not simply of uniforms but of men themselves—the work of cleansing the war out of the warrior. Demobilization did not take place at the instant when a man was discharged from the armed forces; rather, it was a gradual process by which men made the transformation from soldier to civilian in their everyday lives. This process began with homecoming, the initial encounters with family members and the home front community. The Umarbeitung also involved the practical step of ¤nding civilian work; the emotional process of reestablishing one’s place in the family; and the psychological work of shedding,hiding,forgetting,ignoring,repressing, or in some other unspeci¤ed way coping with the violence one had seen and committed. The Austrian men in the following pages seem to have undergone an incomplete or unsuccessful Umarbeitung, and their stories comprise a par- tial history of defeat from below. They provide glimpses of what it meant, in everyday terms, to lose World War I. In recent years historians have examined Europeans’ efforts to reestablish normalcy and “order” following the Great War. These efforts invariably focused on gender. Restoring relations between men and women, grappling with women’s new public visibility, and mending the bodies and minds of broken men were seen as fundamental to the restoration of order—even civilization— in postwar Europe. Several historians have framed postwar debates about gender as metaphoric “reconstruction” projects. In France, postwar fears that “this civilization . . . no longer hassexes”contributedtoaprofoundculturaldespair.According to Mary Louise Roberts,the discourse of French reconstruction focused on female identity and the ¤gures of the “modern woman,” the “mother” and the “single woman.”3 Similarly, in her study of postwar Britain, Susan Kingsley Kent maintains that many saw “in a reestablishment of sexual difference the means to re-create a semblance of order.” Lasting peace, Britons thought, required a gender peace, “a relationship of male-female complementarity in which women did not compete with men in the public sphere.”4 In addition, Seth Koven has argued that restoring British men “to their masculine roles as heads of households, independent wage earners, and fathers was a major task of the postwar reconstructions of men’s bodies, gender relations, the economy and the nation.”5 Class also ¤gured in these reconstruction efforts. Jon Lawrence notes that in debates about “brutalization” in postwar Britain, it was often assumed that working-class men were most affected, “those for whom ‘civilization ’ had always been held to run only skin deep.”6 As dif¤cult as these social concerns were in France and Britain, it should be remembered that they played out against the backdrop of victory. In the defeated countries, fears about loss of “order” in gender relations were woven into explanations for the loss of the war itself. Historians have described a general collapse of patriarchal order that accompanied defeat in Germany and Austria. On an individual level, a crisis of masculinity developed when soldiering men returned to their families. Reinhard...