The largest urban center in Habsburg Central Europe, Vienna was predominantly German-speaking but drew immigrants from around the Habsburg domains, primarily Bohemia, Moravia and Galicia. On the eve of the war, the imperial capital’s population of 2 million resembled a Central European mosaic. Hungarian Prime Minister Count István Tisza (1861-1918) refused to recognize decrees from Vienna as valid in Hungary: “from the day of mobilization he excluded Hungary from its sphere of operations.” Similarly, food supply and distribution between the two halves of the Monarchy were not coordinated, a fact that would have devastating effects on Austrian civilians. For example, the ostensibly unified War Surveillance Office ( Kriegsüberwachungsamt, or KÜA) headquartered in Vienna never gained jurisdiction in Hungary. Throughout the war, the civilian Hungarian government jealously guarded its sovereignty against Vienna. For state-related crimes, civilians in proximity to the front lines were placed under the jurisdiction of military courts.Ī number of structural conditions at the state level prevented effective cooperation between the Austrian and Hungarian halves of the Monarchy. The lenience or severity of laws governing civilians shifted accordingly. The territories designated militarily “behind the lines” ( Hinterland) shifted with fortunes on the Eastern (Russian) and Southwestern ( Italian) battlefronts. While it is not possible to chart all conditions across the Monarchy, this essay uses the imperial capital of Vienna and the surrounding countryside of Lower Austria as an anchor and then offers glimpses of comparative conditions in Hungary and the Czechlands. No location in the Monarchy was truly representative of the whole. It is wise to speak of plural home fronts in the Habsburg case. Whatever debilitating losses the armed forces suffered on the military fronts, the Habsburg Monarchy also collapsed from within. Many on the home front had lost any sense of conviction in for what, or whom, they were fighting. This essay charts these strains on the Habsburg home front and suggests that the state had essentially lost the ability to govern its own civilians by 1918. Existing national and class tensions were exacerbated by acute shortages of food and other materials. Unsurprisingly the political strains within the Habsburg Monarchy that predated the war resurfaced early. The first two months of war saw a flood of patriotic publications, earnest discussions about the need for civilians to sacrifice material comforts in the name of the greater sacrifices of soldiers and press reports so hyperbolic that they became delicious fodder for Austria’s greatest wartime satirist, Karl Kraus (1874-1936). When Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on 28 July 1914, some segments of the civilian population expressed sentiments similar to the “war enthusiasm” found on other belligerent home fronts.
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