Out of the Apocalypse : physical Violence in the Fall and Reconstitution of Central Europe 1914-1922
Abstract
This book uses violence as a prism for investigating the profound social, cultural, and political changes experienced by Habsburg-ruled Central Europe during and immediately after the Great War. It compares attitudes toward physical violence, and the experience and practice of it in the mostly Czech-speaking regions of Bohemia and Moravia, the German-speaking regions that came to constitute the Republic of Austria after 1918, and the mostly German-speaking region of South Tyrol in Italy.
Based on research in national and local archives and copious secondary literature, we argue that, in the context of total war, physical violence became the predominant means for conceptualizing and expressing social and political demands. It also was a means of expressing various notions of community and belonging.
In other words, violence was productive and generative, not just destructive and degenerative. In addition to comparing the three different geographic spaces (with some additional insights from the eastern parts of the newly constituted Czechoslovakia), we divide our analysis into two main parts (with numerous thematic sub-chapters) discussing individual violence and collective violence.
The chapter on individual violence focuses on murder and its shifting meaning for psychiatric and criminological experts as well as for the public at large. The public learned about murder cases from widely circulated, often sensationalistic coverage in the press.
The chapter on collective violence examines a panoply of examples, but it focuses in particular on riots associated with hunger during wartime and political and ethnic antagonisms in the postwar period. The elites in the various countries controlled the narratives in newspapers and scholarly treatises, through which murder took on a social, cultural, and political meaning.
But the perpetrators of collective violence were able to articulate their own language and meaning that escaped elite control and influence, particularly during the war. After the war, the elite's discourse of political and ethnic-national confrontation regained supremacy over the perpetrators' in interpreting the spontaneous and unruly collective violence.