Austrian Historiography and Perspectives on World War I: The Long Shadow of the “Just War,” 1914–2018

After the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, the Republic of Austria, whose integration into the German Reich had been refused by the Allies, was condemned to be a “small country against its will.” Yet the sense of lost greatness and of the glorious past of an empire of fifty million people lingered, providing the backdrop against which the Austrian memory culture of the interwar years was played out. Two elements dominated this memory after 1919–20: the heroism of the Austrian soldiers on the one hand, and their suffering on the other. It was primarily the conservative forces in the