The article illustrates the policy of wielding the hero as a symbolic political and nationalizing instrument in the Montenegrin, Ottoman, and Serbian armies before the Balkan Wars. The heroic became an integral part of other social disciplines (such as schools). Besides standing in a clear interdependent relationship, these social disciplines represented a necessary result of various centralizing processes of the governing elites. The primary efforts for the nationalization of the population were undertaken in the pre-/post-military life, in which the role of different state agents was equally important. Hence, the grid of the social disciplines became ever denser, which led to the uniformity of the heroic. This process enabled the legitimization of the ruling elites, subsequent actions in war, and heroization among recruits. The article argues that uniformity of the heroic is lacking in the Ottoman context. Given the ideological context and intellectual background of the preachers of nationalism, the consistency of the Ottoman heroic narrative before, during, and after military service is missing. The article shows that the so-called medievalism closely linked to the heroic offered a framework for constructing continuity between the immediate and distant past, providing meaning to someone’s death. A link between the past, the present, and the future was established, which constructed the nation’s primordial character and the feeling of ancient hatred towards an imaginary enemy.

Keywords: heroic, military, Montenegro, Ottoman Empire, Serbia, soldiers

Introduction

I am (…) convinced that (…) just as each of you would give your life for your parents, other close relatives, your house and your property, just as you would do for yourself, if there were any danger, so too would you die and sacrifice your life for our exalted commander of the army, the King Petar I, because I know that among you, Serb sons, there is no such coward who would leave his loved ones, his house, and property, and shamefully flee just to save his life. No, no… Such renegades are no longer born to Serb mothers! (…) As our great-grandfathers, grandfathers, and fathers did, so should and must the descendants of Miloš Obilić, Kraljević Marko, Hajduk-Veljko, Tanasko Rajić, Stevan Sinđelić, Kurusla, and many other proud and undead Serb heroes should and must do.

A Serbian Officer Petar Bojović (1907)1

Petar Bojović was one of the many officers in the tumultuous first decade of the twentieth century who believed that the military could forge an ideal and conscious soldier and compatriot from what his peers in the Ottoman army called an ignorant or illiterate peasant (cahil köylü).2 Since the officers thought that the military played a crucial role in secondary socialization, they adhered to instrumental archetypes and metaphors, which were vital (albeit not adequate) to maintain the inner cohesion, control, and the recruits’ motivation.3 The military tried various strategies to stage and schedule the members’ daily activities and was also utterly imaginative when it came to formulating messages of purpose.4 One of these strategies was to fashion images of the ideal hero. Heroes are understood here as historical or fictional characters presented as having or are ascribed certain heroic qualities. The process of attributing heroes with particular virtues creates a sense of interaction between these heroes and their followers, followed by imitation and appropriation of heroic deeds.5

In this essay, I focus on the non-commissioned, junior, and high officers who defined and transmitted heroic norms in the military and negotiated them in military manuals and articles. To a certain degree, these sources serve as a genre of the ego-documents since the state actors relied on their personal experiences with recruits when conveyed their messages. Given the low literacy rates and poor infrastructure, oral propaganda methods in encouraging military mobilization played an important role.6 I adopt a comparative approach to explain similarities, differences, convergences, and divergences, and I also relate notions of heroism to specific institutions and actors.7 I analyze these sources by adhering to historical discourse analysis and seeing them as part of a system of “symbolic violence.” The military manuals and articles had to simplify the recruits’ complex social situations. Through these means of education, the officers tried to ascribe symbolic positive and negative symbolic meanings to specific processes.8

Examining the heroic allows one to look at the structures and discourses of nationalism, domination, subjecthood, and gender from a different angle. Soldiers had to possess the necessary masculine military virtues, which were supposed to become an integral part of their bodies and souls.9 The “stigmatized” and the “normal” are two sides of the same coin, and they were not persons but rather perspectives. The military wanted to create deviant behaviors and a black-and-white picture through which conformity could be quickly praised.10 Venerating the heroic facilitated the furthering of nation-building projects, cultivating solidarity among the recruits, and preparing them to lay down their lives, since the notion of heroism gave meaning to someone’s death. Soldiers were the recipients in this case; yet, connecting to the ideal hero is always selective and does not indicate the totality of the heroes’ features. Employing the ideal heroic enabled the legitimization of the ruling elites and subsequent actions in war among the recruits. But the notions of the heroic also became alive in the present.11 The existence these notions facilitated control over subjects, whereby the heroes functioned as “a double crowd.” The actions of the common men are measured and evaluated in relationship to these idealized heroes.12 The policy of wielding the hero as a symbolic political instrument and the nationalization of this heroic figures started in revolutionary France.13 Where did this discourse come from in Montenegro, the Ottoman Empire, and Serbia? What were the functions of these invented heroes? And how were they significant?

Heroes, Recruits, and Their Superiors

The discourse about the heroic in Serbia and Montenegro stemmed from several areas: the “golden age” of the medieval Serbian state under the Nemanjić dynasty, the myth and epic songs that revolved about the Battle of Kosovo (1389), the epic songs about the Serbian Uprisings (1804–1815) and the 1876–78 Ottoman-Serbian wars, and oral folklore about kinship heroes in certain parts of Montenegro.14 By instrumentalizing folklore as a legitimizing claim, the preachers of nationalism tended to constitute and encode certain societal norms as ethnonational.15 As new studies on the construction of the Kosovo epic have already illustrated, nationally minded actors from Serbia and Montenegro selected certain epic songs which had not been widespread among the people, disregarding others in the process, and they based their decision on their personal preferences. In doing so, they were inventing tradition.16

Folklore, however, did not constitute a foundation on which the nascent nation-states rested. Rather, the construction of the national narrative erected a foundation which in turn rested on studies and appropriation of oral traditions.17 Medievalism was closely linked to this process, which offered a framework for constructing continuity between the recent past and the distant past. By viewing the present through the prism of the medieval past (the continuing process of creating the Middle Ages), the elites sought to link the past, the present, and the future.18 This primordial character is palpable in the myth of Kosovo. It included historical and fictional characters and a whole cycle of epic poems in which the imagined Serbian community was presented as having been enslaved ever since they had lost the battle to the Ottomans. Three characters dominate the narrative: Prince Lazar (who died during the struggle, thus passing into eternal life by sacrificing his life for the imagined community); Miloš Obilić (a knight who killed the Ottoman Sultan, thereby displaying his courage and loyalty to his prince and nation), and Vuk Branković (who allegedly betrayed the prince, his father-in-law, and left the battle, thus deserting the army). The poems that referred to the myth and other subsequent events contained messages of moral principles, loyalties, bravery, infidelity, camaraderie, and an eternal fight between the imagined Christian/Serb and Muslim/Turk.

By surrendering life as a Christian martyr, one became a national martyr, meaning that the elites tended to blur the boundaries between state-fostered and local cultures.19 The canon of martyrs was weaponized against the Ottoman Empire. A newly constructed site of the invented tradition was located: the cradle of Serb-hood, Kosovo, which functioned as something between the place of mourning, memory, and mobilization.20 Binary opposition revolved around the myth, which inspired revenge and the nation’s rebirth.21 After making the 500th anniversary of the battle a state holiday in Serbia in 1889, the governing elites organized annual services on the day of the battle, which falls on the day of St. Vitus, hence Vidovdan. On the same day, they prepared the “memorial to Serbian fighters who died for their faith and homeland,” which raised the eyebrows among the Ottoman Hamidian elites.22

In Montenegro, the ecclesiastical powers also prepared a memorial service. Yet, the Montenegrin government did not publicize the memorial service by nurturing good relations with the Ottoman Empire. As a result, the imagined Muslim Albanian began to occupy the first place in the public discourse.23 In Montenegro, the myth claimed that its inhabitants were the direct offspring of the Serbs who had fled from Kosovo after 1389, finding refuge in the nearly inaccessible mountains, the unconquered fortress of the imagined Serb-hood and the Orthodoxy. Montenegrin soldiers were identified as sons of Miloš Obilić, so the highest military decoration carried his name. While discussing colonization measures in post-Ottoman areas after the Balkans Wars (1912–13), the Montenegrin Minister of the Interior used the same expressions that invoked the primordial narrative by referring to “the centuries-old silenced Serb hearths,” implying that they should be reawakened.24 Thus, this myth might take varying forms within the Montenegrin and Serbian public discourses, because Montenegro and Serbia “did not share the idea of liberating the oppressed Serbs, nor do we now share it,” as a Montenegrin official writes.25

The Montenegrin cap, which most of the soldiers wore, allegedly symbolized this narrative. This small and circular headgear consisting of a black part on the sides conveyed the message of mourning for the overthrown medieval homeland. In contrast, the red part on the top signified the blood. In addition to the king’s initials or cross on the top, five gold semicircles of a rising sun symbolized the five centuries since the Battle of Kosovo. A child would wear the cap as soon as (s)he stopped spending time in the cradle. A Norwegian officer noticed that this cap reminded a Montenegrin sailor of his homeland and people, and it was as vital to the Montenegrin as a national flag.26 But this myth in the Serbian context was also introduced in elementary and high schools, where children learned how to become honest, hardworking subjects like their national heroes.27 As outsider accounts and ego-documents illustrate, a Montenegrin or Serbian peasant or boy heard about the heroes before entering the barracks or participating in drills. While witnessing military training in Montenegro (1903), a contemporary made the claim that heroism filled a prominent place in the mind of the average Montenegrin. Montenegrins conceptualized these figures like celebrities, and these celebrities became a constituent part of their communicative and social memories.28

Thus, military discipline stood in a clear interdependent relationship with other social disciplines due to the elites’ various centralization processes. In Serbia, certain military buildings or units were named after these national heroes. The regiments celebrated the days on which the heroes died their heroic deaths, which then became their Patron Saint Days, or they participated in ceremonies surrounding the erection of monuments of these heroes.29 This ensured the performance and staging of the past, which were manners of reexperiencing it or inventing it for contemporaries.30 Since all people are mortal and all heroes are people, heroes must die, but a soldier would be admired after death. Death was one form of the heroic deed, and the average soldier could become either a heroic fallen figure or the person who paid tribute to the fallen hero by honoring his sacrifice. On the Patron Saints Day, he had to hear about and remember his unit’s fallen heroes/brothers.31

In the Ottoman context, heroes were used as figures in the constructing of a linear historical narrative (from the thirteenth century to the twentieth). Army recruits, for instance, were supposed to be able to name a few famous heroes. The public discourse linted the national tradition with the oral tradition. This reached its peak in Republican Turkey.32 One nevertheless notices a rigid hierarchy among these heroes, which emphasized masculine values. For instance, the rank and file would hear about Bayezid I (1389–1402) and his achievements at the height of the Battle of Kosovo, when the charge he led against the stronger enemy decided the outcome of the battle. Then, they might listen to the story of Adil the Corporal, who “was always looking for opportunities to serve his army.” Ottoman forces could easily maintain their hold on the castle due to his self-sacrifice during the siege of Nagykanizsa (1601). Of course, Adil stood under the command of another hero, Tiryaki Hasan Pasha, who “showed the whole world the greatness of the Ottomans in persistence and courage, loyalty and obedience to their superiors.”33 Thus, by learning about the military successes of these figures, the soldiers were supposed to learn the importance of sacrifice, endurance, discipline, intelligence, morale, loyalty, and courage.34

However, in contrast to the other cases, some Ottoman officers put particular emphasis on the deeds of heroines such as Kara Fatma. Kara Fatma was depicted as a lioness (dişi arslan), and in the officers’ narrative she was presented as a defender of the homeland and nation and as a mother of children who defended the homeland and nation. She encompassed both masculinity and femininity. During the siege of Erzurum (1877), Kara Fatma took care of Ottoman soldiers, brought water and food, carried the wounded on her shoulders, bandaged their woods, and took part in the fight. The underlining message is that only lions could bear from such women and that the martyr cemeteries also had graves where women lay buried.35 One should not, however, that this image of Kara Fatma was only one of many. Various (non-patriotic) versions of a Kara Fatma emerged in the Ottoman discourse fields beginning in the early nineteenth century.36 Still, the extent to which Ottoman officers used songs to encourage soldiers to emulate images of physical and emotional strength remains unknown. Some officers indeed complained after 1908 that the soldiers lacked physical and emotional strength.37 Scholars have already stressed that Ottoman soldiers also sang non-patriotic ballads (türküler). Erik Jan Zürcher assumes that perhaps the relatively high morale among the Ottoman soldiers during World War I might have been rooted in these ballads, in the sense of having nothing to lose.38

It was necessary to create this “social choreography” by crafting rousing narratives of heroic deeds because these narratives, it was hoped, would help supress undesirable respinses to the negative outcomes of military service. The officers sought to hail the draft as a rite of passage through which the imagined youth became a real man. The masculinizing effect of the draft was supposed to instill in the recruits virtues such as courage.39 However, many recruits entered the Serbian and Ottoman barracks with specific fears brought from home. They were told that excessive austerity reigned in the barracks and that the soldiers were severely punished when they made minor mistakes. As Serbian officers noted, this fear initially sprouted confusion. It then interfered with successful basic training, since the recruits were beset with feelings of sadness and longings for their kin.40

Some recruits chose to flee the army before they were ever actually called on to serve in the field, as many archival examples illustrate, not least because former soldiers and their neighbors told them how recruits were being treated in the Ottoman army. They would also leave after discovering that they might end up in Ottoman Anatolia, Hijaz, or Yemen, far from their loved ones. The regions were well-known for their hot climate, stormy conditions in the barracks, distance, and rebellions.41 By using images and narratives of heroic deeds and martyrs, the governments tried to underline positive notions about military service in order to nationalize and sacralize it.42 Singing, for instance, was a tested strategy in the Serbian case, since the officers noticed how singing helped calm fears and other unwelcome emotions among the recruits, and they combined it with marching. Some officers deliberately chose soldiers who could sing folk tunes or songs about heroes and had them mix with the newer recruits.43

Images and narratives about heroic deeds also paved the way for the establishment of a “primary group” in the military. The primary group had two principal functions to maintain morale for combat: (i) “It enforced group standards of behavior, and it supported and sustained the individual [faced with] stress[es] he would otherwise not have been able to withstand” and (ii) “the group enforced its standards principally by offering or withholding recognition, respect, and approval […], while the subjective reward for following an internalized group code enhanced an individual’s resources for dealing with the situation.”44 Here, the trope of camaraderie (druželjublje or kardeşlik, uhuvvet, alay arkadaşlığı) emerged, which was supposed to further socialization within the ranks of the military and to last even after military service had ended.45 Not only could this include other soldiers from different military branches, but it also embraced (for instance in the post-1908 Ottoman setting) all those who were not part of the military regardless of their national or confessional belonging.46 To aptly illustrate “the most beautiful image of loyalty and fidelity,” Serbian officers drew on epic songs and the image of Miloš Obilić, the epitome of all that was desirable in the military. Together with his two blood-brothers (Ivan Kosančić and Milan Toplica), Obilić had allegedly slaughtered the Ottoman sultan in the battle of Kosovo (1389), thereby killing many enemies before being “gloriously” dying in the process.47 Songs that ignited the military spirit and kindled a sense of camaraderie were part of the repertoire, and the Serbian NCOs often reminded soldier sof these heroes when teaching them how to use weapons.48

Further research would be necessary to determine the extent to which the establishment of the primary group was successful, but sources indicate that this was a challenging process for myriad reasons.49 The sense of camaraderie between the rank and file and their superiors, however, fostered a rigid hierarchization and the assigned patriarchal roles among them, which subdued the masculinizing effect of the draft. Military units were viewed as a new family (yeni bir aile gibi or kao porodica), in which the commander was considered one of many soldiers’ fathers. At the same time, their peers were seen as younger brothers.50 The NCOs, who in the Ottoman army were referred to as the soldiers’ “godfathers” (büyük baba), were supposed to “complete the education my father lacked” and teach the recruits how to become the true men. One of their most essential duties consisted of keeping their “children” healthy, which some soldiers expected them to do, and thus the soldiers also cared about their “fathers.”51 Older soldiers played the role of fathers who accepted the newcomers as their children, although only if the soldiers would dutifully act like brothers. In the Montenegrin and Serbian cases, the insistence of the importance of obeying one’s superiors was justified with the reference to the notion that disobedience and threason had ruined the medieval Serbian empire and “thrown Serbs into powerlessness and slavery [which lasted for] 500 years.”52 Unity was crucial in times of war, when a tremendous psychological mobilization was necessary, and when the NCOs and junior officers played a vital role in maintaining their units as parts of an effective fighting force, as studies have shown in the context of the Western Front during World War I.53

But in the Montenegrin and Serbian contexts, there were historical figures who, in the narratives, embodied the vices of treason and desertion, whereas in the Ottoman case, the figure of the deserter was faceless. Drawing on the lore, Serbian and Montenegrin officers depicted deserters, embodied in Vuk Branković, as the most despised persons. They sought to establish this image in the minds of the soldiers, too, since Serbian mothers, like their Ottoman counterparts, only gave birth to future heroes and lions. Vuk Braković was ideal for this role, because he allegedly left at the most crucial moment of the battle with his knights, betraying their brothers in arms. That is why this “cursed” Vuk was labeled as an infidel and oath breaker.54 The message was that it was better to die gloriously, like other heroes, than to betray everyone and live shamefully like the “damned” Vuk, whom the Ottomans soon killed him anyway. Not only was the soldiers’ masculinity but also his honor was at stake.55 An Ottoman officer sought to convey that those who absconded had neither a place among the people nor any honor. They were ungrateful cowards (nankör alçak) and a burden on the imagined homeland (vatanın yükü).56

The Serbian officers also sought to transmit desired values and certain functions by describing the deaths of these people or by citing the epic songs which made mention of their fates, such as that of Boško Jugović, one of nine brothers who died in the Battle of Kosovo while defending the greatest military shrine, the flag. Losing the flag also meant losing military honor, like in the Ottoman case in which the story of the standard-bearer Ali was supposed to illustrate the importance of the flag.57 Yet, if a regiment was distinguished by heroism or managed to steal the enemy’s flag, their chief father decorated either their regimental flag with an order or a medal for bravery or decorated their soldiers personally. This decoration was supposed to make the latter proud of serving in a particular regiment.58 Sometimes this was a calculated policy since the elites and officers realized that the passion for decorations in the Montenegrin setting could be used to pit certain kinship fraternities against each other. If a soldier was honored for heroism, he wore a medal for bravery every day, even if he was plowing or mowing the fields.59

Uses of images and narratives of heroism differed in the Serbian and the Montenegrin context due to the military organization of these countries. While the modernization of the Serbian military generally drew on the Prussian model, serving in the militia became the rule in Montenegro.60 Officers and the NCOs, who might know the people being drafted, directed the military exercises, which varied depending on the season. The role of the Montenegrin military fathers could be limited, since they had to negotiate often with their soldiers (who could turn violent if their superiors struck them) more often than their peers in the Serbian army.61 Moreover, the Montenegrin military relied on the state-led tribalization policies, since its organization revolved around the family and village structure. Depending on the context, this situation could both facilitate and repress the feeling of military superiority and subordination. The rank and file and the officers would instead “[agree] on something, whereby a very exact compliance with such agreements may not be expected,” as a Habsburg military attaché wrote during the Balkan Wars.62

Through images of heroic, a soldier in the Serbian and Ottoman armies was told that if he were to die, ecclesiastical authorities would pray for his soul, and his family and the whole imagined community would praise his heroic death and merits. Both king and sultan would take care of the soldier’s family, which would have God’s blessing, and thus they would prosper. A similar narrative was given for those who did not betray their military oath. They were assured that they would be respected and rewarded here on earth. Thus, by sacrificing their lives, the rank and file became members of the pantheon of heroes whose deeds would never be forgotten.63 Yet upholding this social contract lay at the heart of relations between the state and the soldiers. Hence, the state had to care for the soldiers’ families while their male relatives were at the front. Failure to fulfill this duty threw everything into question, as examples from World War I in the context of Montenegro amply illustrate.64 In some cases, this part of the contract came first, and only then came the tacitly signed agreement between the soldiers and the state, the foundation of which was the state’s obligation to provide food, equipment, and lodging and to ensure that superiors treated their inferiors with due respect. Were this contract broken, this could create serious problems for the state, since soldiers could flee or become unmotivated to fight.65

The heroes’ death offered the soldier and his family a chance to accommodate the human cost of the war in a vision of historical continuity, similar to British or German contexts amid and after World War I.66 In this regard, the combination of the locals and state-driven cultural norms is evident, because in certain parts of Montenegro, for instance, a detailed oral tradition among the kinship fabrics preserved the memory of the local heroes. It functioned as a memory bank, the canon of which the state authorities sought to control. Moreover, the local norms enculturated young males into their roles as warriors.67 It is doubtful whether this narrative motivated the soldiers during the war. For instance, German soldiers made jokes about the idea of the Heldentod after seeing the front during World War I. Yet some Serbian ego-documents show that some soldiers had used this idea to come to the terms with the deaths of their comrades or to comfort the soldiers’ mothers.68

Keeping in mind the period under examination, officers did not start from anything. Ideally, they only extended and added new meanings to the previously established social view of the population, meaning the population’s education only continued in the barracks.69 The primary efforts were undertaken in the pre-military and post-military life, in which the roles of birth parents, civil officials, paramilitary leaders, teachers, and clergymen were equally important.70 Indeed, not every Serbian peasant (the peasantry made up around 80 percent of the rank and file) found it amusing to spend several months in the barracks and swap his freedom for strict discipline. Even before 1912, national belonging in Serbia had not yet penetrated the broader layers of the population. Not everyone knew of or identified with the elites’ ambitious and imperialistic plans.71

Yet the state had succeeded by 1912 in one thing: by launching systematic public mobilization, it convinced its subjects that military service was one of their many assigned duties. Thus, “everything has been called up from the 17th to the 50th year of life” for the Balkan Wars, and in doings so, the authorities did not face any significant challenges. However, during the first weeks, both military service and the war itself were not enthusiastically praised by everyone, implying that this consensus of the peasantry cannot be interpreted as a national consensus.72

Nevertheless, one notices the uniformity of the image of the heroic among the Serbian social disciplines, a uniformity which was lacking in the pre-1913 Ottoman context—hinging on the ideological context and intellectual background of various actors, the consistency of the Ottoman heroic narrative before, during, and after military service is missing. While officers spoke about the soldiers, viziers, and sultan who had expended and defended the political borders of or laid down their lives for the imagined community, others (such as pan-Turkish intellectuals) would focus on the pre-Islamic pagan Turkic world.73 For example, in some parts of the Ottoman province of Kosovo, Muslim subjects had a distinct understanding of local heroes, whose self-sacrifice was praised. Still, their inner essence was not a national essence but rather was essentially confessional.74 In the Serbian and Montenegrin cases, the school and the military inculcated in the subjects of the state a deeply national sense of memory. The mental images became icons, stories, and myths the most significant feature of which was their persuasiveness.75 In the barracks, the officers and NCOs adhered to the medievalism of the past together as priests. However, not everyone was moved by this narrative since not everyone was interested in listening to the epic songs in school.76

As the 1900 and 1901 infantry curriculum openly advises, “when the soldiers are together, and when the weather is poor, heroic folk songs are to be read to them more often.” The more they were subjected to the latter, the more they absorbed this narrative as being natural.77 This “tradition,” as an officer calls it, excited and moticated the soldier. It “aroused courage and the desire for revenge and the return of the glory and greatness of the Serbs,” thereby uplifting and filling their chests, souls, and hearts with Serbian history, Serbian lands, pleasure, and the aspiration to be celebrated in the heroic struggle.78 By singing songs and reading about heroic ancestors, the officers tended to remodel a soldier’s perception of revenge and honor along the ethnonational line since the goal was to awaken the soldier’s desire for glory. Thus, a local’s sense of honor was entangled with the military, the imagined homeland, and his birth family. In this regard, any material gain was supposed to lose its value.79

The military fathers sought to control the soldiers’ emotions by constructing a narrative of collective trauma fueled by experiences of the pain and suffering of the imagined community. They acted as symbolic or cultural creators in the symbolic-cum-emotional representation of social suffering.80 As they heard this same narrative before, during, and after the military service/drill, Montenegrin or Serbian soldiers were expected to be eager seek revenge and reclaim the lost glory of the imagined medieval Serbian homeland. They were taught to look through the primordial perspective at the constructed past, which resonated on the eve of and during the Balkan Wars.81 This narrative represented the testament of Kosovo, and the soldiers would obtain eternal glory by being addressed as the avengers of Kosovo, like those who fell on the battlefield in 1389. This notion was also passed on during the literacy classes in the military. The narrative was embodied in the phrase concerning “our” five-century-old oppressor or enemy, which various Slavic-speaking Christians (both male and female) appropriated when filing petitions to the government.82 Since 1389, the imagined Turk had been killing, robbing, and demolishing the personal property of the imagined brethren. This “oppressor” committed an array of outrages acts, including desecrating places of worship, burning and mocking God, and selling Serbian brethren as slaves.83

Thus, through the heroic, the purpose of the military was to reify the construction of “the political enemy” since acting politically meant distinguishing friend from foe. A state exists as a political entity if it can make this distinction and fight the enemy in an emergency.84 Although the construction of an enemy in the Ottoman case is apparent, the enemies of the Empire remained rather faceless. The overarching message was to be ready to protect the imagined homeland (vatanı beklemek), which was intertwined with one’s honor and confessional loyalty.85

A soldier in Serbia also learned about how lucky he and his birth family were to live in this golden freedom. This narrative was essential in the domestic context (as it provided a tool with which to legitimize the rule of the elites, much as similar narratives had done earlier in France and the Habsburg Monarchy), and the later “international” context (as it provided motivation to restore freedom for and protect the imagined brethren).86 In the case of the larger international context, the narrative helped nurture the belief in the necessity of a “defensive” war against the Ottoman Empire within its territories.87 This narrative of an imperialistic war affected some Serbian and Montenegrin subjects. Like many British soldiers who fought in France during World War I, so too did Montenegrin soldiers during the Balkans Wars travel from the USA to fight “for the liberation of our oppressed brothers from a five-century-old enemy” in the first months of the Balkan Wars.88 Thus, educating the rank and file, mapping the imagined national territory, and fostering national loyalty were intertwined. In the Ottoman context, this involved references to battles in which heroes died or became famous.89

Depending on a soldier’s place of birth, Serbian officers would deliberately emphasize in their narratives a hero who had hailed from the same area as the soldiers. Hajduk Veljko was used as a figure in narratives intended to remodel recruits from the eastern provinces. Having died fighting against the Ottoman army in the First Serbian Uprising (1804–1813), he was similar to Miloš Obilić and other Kosovo heroes.90 The same strategy was utilized after the “liberated Serbian” brethren from the Prilep region (post-Ottoman Macedonia) began to serve under the banner in early 1914. In their case, Marko Kraljević was a hero, a historical person from the Middle Ages whose palace was in Prilep.91 Officers were so determined in their role as so-called educators that one of these recruits wrote in a censored letter, “we are dead sick when they tell us about Kraljević Marko.”92 Still, others identified themselves with the latter. While passing through some populated areas in late 1914, the Macedonian recruits boasted publicly that they were descendants of Marko Kraljević and were going to “liberate” Habsburg Bosnia.93

The practice of disparaging those who did not follow this narrative as lower men and expecting the soldiers to become heroes implies that the military distinguished this type of masculinity from other forms. All other men had to position themselves to the heroes. Hence, one could speak about hegemonic masculinity, whereby hegemony signifies the displacement of other forms of masculinity by this form, which was praised in the military as the norm. The idealized view of masculinity was used to construct the perfect self-image of the nation.94 Having been “the healthiest, strongest and youngest—the most capable of all the other people in our nation,” the masculine men’s bodies, which now embodied the heroic values, served as weapons to defeat the imagined enemy.95 The calling of the soldiers was difficult in peace times, and much more so in times of war. Soldiers had to endure harsh conditions, because they had to be in good health, have sturdy body, “male” strength, and a strong will.96 This notion of endurance also applied to those who fell into enemy hands, as they were expected to remain loyal. If they had complied or surrendered themselves, they were regarded as traitors and perjurers, meaning their national obligation did not cease after capture or defeat.97

But the hegemonic military masculinity, which played a role in the war, did not always correspond to actual worlds of the locals. It was not fixed but was embedded in specific environments. Locally seen, it was metaphorically represented through the interplay of specific masculine practices that had local significance.98 Thus, alternative masculinities were critical and could be defined as anti-types of the hegemonic model, including with respect to non-core groups.99 However, the reading of masculinities among the Ottoman subjects did not overlap with the reading of masculinities among the ruling elites. For instance, in the Lower Vasojevići, an area located in the Montenegrin-Ottoman borderland in the province of Kosovo, the Slavic-speaking Christians of the Vasojevići brotherhoods at certain times despised other Christians who did not belong to their kin. They viewed them as less worthy. They labeled them as Srblji, Srbljaci, or (H)Ašani (Tr. aşağı, meaning inferior) since they were regarded as not sufficiently manly. This term possessed a derogatory and subordinating reading like Arnautash, Grecoman, or Bulgarofil.100

One finds a similar narrative concerning the imagined Serbian (Srbijanac) from Serbia, who, given the state policy, could not carry a weapon publicly, which in the eyes of a Vasojević conveyed the message that they were also less worthy.101 This narrative was evident when a Montenegrin officer saw the official headgear (šajkača) of the Serbian army in Peć/Peja, a town which during the Balkans Wars (1912–13) was occupied by the Montenegrin army. After noticing that a certain number of the new rank and file consisted of the local Slavic-speaking Christians wearing the šajkača, the officer instructed them to buy the fez, “because you are not a soldier under that hat.”102 The authorities dubbed the headgear as a hat for scum (fukarska kapa), ordering even the locals not to display it on threat of arrest. Wearing the latter was interwoven with the notion of (hegemonic) masculinity or honor, and offending this notion could easily incite dispute or physical violence and could even push one to become a brigand.103

Sources do not reveal the extent to which these locally grounded hegemonic masculinities hampered the nationalization attempts of these polities; however, the case of the Romani population aptly shows that this could be possible. The word “Gypsy” in Montenegro had offensive connotations, and one could be prosecuted for using the term. Still, this did not stop the authorities from using it during World War I when they compared infectious diseases with this hidden non-core grouping.104 Allegedly, in the Montenegrin-Ottoman borderlands, only the Romani wanted to become blacksmiths, since the vocation was considered a disgrace, and those who practiced this trade were labeled the lowest people. In Serbia, most peasants did not want to make a sink or become trumpet players. That is why the Romani were generally appointed in the military as buglers.105 In the Serbian army, some soldiers did not want to eat together with the Romani soldiers, since the Romani were equated with the notion of filthiness and illness, as an officer recalls.106 In short, this means that pre-military prejudices were becoming embedded into the military, though the ruling elites made efforts minimize this.

Conclusion

By paying heed to the soldiers’ performance in the barracks and on the battlefield, and their voice fragments in sources during the Balkan Wars and World War I, one realizes that while some rejected the notions of heroism presented in the narratives offered by the state and the surround cultural milieu, others embraced these notions. Why this was the case and whether these narratives had long-term consequences are questions that can only be addressed with further research. In Montenegro, the Ottoman Empire, and Serbia, the heroic narratives shared many features with other heroic narratives in other parts of Eurasia. One could consider the Prussian context, where the ideal of the hero was intended to “put [men] in a frame to mind to fight, to kill and die willingly ‘for the fatherland.’” In addition to using notions of heroism to justify war, the Prussian elites presented imagined heroes “as role models for ‘average men.’” Hence, these visions occupied a special place in the collective commemoration of national warrior heroes.107 The was true to some extent in the French and Russian settings, where officers also used the medieval past, the heroic epics, national flags, and the military oaths as tools with which to foster the homogenization of recruits.108

These policies were supposed to enhance what George Moose calls “the Myth of the War Experience,” which presented the war as a meaningful and even secret event and included the people as active participants in the national quest through rites, festivals, myths, and symbols.109 The processes by which notions of heroism were adapted to new settings and the transformations of the narratives in which these notions found expression in these settings are also interesting. One could consider the Yugoslav case, where the officers used the same imagined heroes of the Serbian army in the contemporary context because they remained the “heads” of specific military units in the early 1920s.110 The national feature of the “Serb lands,” the boundaries of which the heroes had to reify before 1912, simply changed after 1918, becoming the new boundaries of the Yugoslav state, or “all the lands where our nation lives.”111 This change aptly illustrates that “the national-patriotic discourse simply manipulated, transposed and modelled itself on an existing set of symbols, metaphors and rituals.”112 The extent the heroic mitigated or furthered the development of a unified Yugoslav military culture in the interwar period remains to be answered.

But the success of the tropes concerning heroism as tools with which to foster loyalty and devotion to the military and the state also depended on what David M. Edelstein calls “the strategies of inducement,” which were intended to buy and maintain the population’s loyalty (i.e., tax exemptions, agrarian reform, welfare policies, financial and food assistance). It was essential for the elites to improve and support the wellbeing of the subjects if they sought to legitimize their rule or engagement in a conflict and ensure that their subjects did not lose heart.113 Soldiers and their families were looking for something tangible in return for shedding their blood (or losing their fathers, sons, and brothers) for the imagined community. Emphasis on the ideological essence of a given political push (for instance, emphasis on the importance of the national cause as a justification for a military campaign) is not enough to ensure the loyalty of the wider population or of the rank-and-file members of the army if material benefits are not provided. Through these strategies and the interdependence of the political and the material, the governments attracted locals to their armies. Hence, the latter knew how to win something for themselves and their families in exchange for their support for the war.114

Conceptualized as part of government practice, these strategies must be seen as a form of activity with which ruling elites sought to shape, lead, and influence their subjects.115 When one combines the strategies of inducement and the ideological techniques introduced above during and after military service and the coercive methods used with the subjects’ consent, it becomes clear that the state’s mobilization efforts never revolved around one strategy. In other words, they did not rely exclusively on national or confessional fervors. Instead, it was the interdependent use of an array of mobilization tools that yielded results. These factors worked together in complex interplay, and they had a powerful effect on the population, although varying success in varying contexts. Methodologically, it is not feasible to gauge which particular strategy counted more than the others.116 Thus, the elites had to approach and adjust to the subjects’ expectations and ways of acting.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank two anonymous peer-reviewers for their critical remarks, suggestions, and comments on the final version of the paper.

Archival Sources

Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Sarajevo [Archive of Bosnia and Herzegovina] (ABH)

Zemaljska vlada (ZVS)

Arhiv Jugoslavije, Beograd [Archive of Yugoslavia] (AJ)

Ministarstvo unutrašnjih dela (14)

Cumhurbaşkanlığı Devlet Arşivleri, Istanbul [Presidency State Archives] (CDA)

Dahiliye Nezareti Mektubî Kalemi (DH.MKT)

Vojni arhiv, Beograd [Military Archive of Serbia] (VA)

Popisnik 2 = Arhiv Prvog i Drugog balkanskog rata (1912–13)

Popisnik 3 = Arhiv srpske Vrhovne komande (1914–20)

Popisnik 6 = Ratna arhiva divizija i divizijskih oblasti (1914–20)

Popisnik 14 = Arhiva vojske Kraljevine Srbije do Balkanskih ratova (1847–1911)

Državni arhiv Srbije, Beograd [State Archives of Serbia] (DAS)

Ministarstvo inostranih dela, Političko-prosvetno odeljenje (MID PPO)

Ministarstvo inostranih dela, Političko odeljenje (MID PPO)

Državni arhiv Crne Gore, Cetinje [State Archives of Montenegro] (DACG)

Ministarstvo inostranih djela (MID)

Ministarstvo unutrašnjih djela, Upravno odjeljenje (MUD–UO)

Ministarstvo vojno, Vojni sudovi (MV–VS)

Političko-pogranični komeserijat Žabljak (PPKŽ)

Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, Kriegsarchiv, Vienna (ÖStA)

Allerhöchster Oberbefehl Chef des Generalstabs (AhOB GSt)

Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amts, Berlin (PA AA)

RZ 201 (1867-1919) R 14218: Türkei 203, Balkankrieg (1912–13)

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* This article was written as part of a doctoral dissertation funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD, Graduate School Scholarship Program #57320205) entitled “Heroes, Traitors, and Survivors in the Borderlands of Empires: Military Mobilizations and Local Communities in the Sandžak (1900s–1920s).” The project was done at the Chair for Southeast-European History of Humboldt University of Berlin and the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies of the Free University Berlin.

The article discusses the under-researched topic of the Albanian troops in the Austro-Hungarian military during World War One. The topic represents a forgotten moment in World War One Balkan historiography, and it is also an unstudied colonial example. Based on English, Hungarian, and German archival and secondary sources, the article first provides a short historical description of the Albanian fighting units under the Ottoman Empire, their organization, and their infamously bellicose nature, up until the independence of the country. The paper then analyzes how these units became part of the Great War (despite the fact that the country itself remained neutral) under the Austro-Hungarian Army; first, as irregular fighting troops (Freischärler Albanien) between 1914 and 1916 and later as ethnical regimental units (Albanisches Korps or Albanische Abteilungen) between 1916 and 1918. Finally, the article compares the Albanian troops to other colonial forces of the time, including how these Albanian units were recruited, trained, and used in the battlefields with the purpose of creating a sense of loyalty to the Habsburg Monarchy. The case study of the Albanian Corps is a prime example of how the inability to ensure safety by force in a newly created state met with the geo-strategic and war necessities of a Great Power through colonial martial practices disguised as transnational help.
Keywords: World War I, Austria-Hungary, Albania, national and transnational army, colonial army, colonial practices

The entry into the Great War found the Austro-Hungarian Army in a precarious situation. By January 1915, the German general Ludendorff told his colleague Falkenhayn that “Austria’s emergency is our great incalculable.”1 Another German liaison officer reported back to Supreme Army Command (OHL) that the Austrians were “exhausted, rotten.”2 The frailty of the Austro-Hungarian Army had never been a secret to anyone. What was shocking was the dimension that it had acquired in such a short period.

In relative terms, the situation was the direct result of Monarchy’s own conditions and faults. For example, in matters of war-economy, there was a crisis of supply and prewar provisions. The 2nd Army fighting in the East had only 2,000 guns (of 45 different types) against the 3,000 of the Russians, and the majority of them were of lower quality, mainly made of bronze. Even more worrisome for the authorities was the incapability of their own industry to mass produce ammunition for these guns.3

Even if weaponry had not been a major issue, the failure by the end of 1914 of the Central Powers’ prewar strategy of a swift victory on one front and the repositioning of the troops on the other one unquestionably was. The Germans had failed to seize France quickly, and meanwhile, the Habsburg Armies were stuck with their nose on the ground after three unsuccessful offensives in Serbia. By the beginning of 1915, the k. u. k. forces were spread too thin on multiple stretches of the front, spanning from Poland and Ukraine in the East to the areas on the south in the Balkans and up to the mountain ranges of the Italian Alps. As chief of the General Staff (Armeeoberkommando, AOK), Conrad von Hötzendorf had pushed the Thronefolger and the emperor to launch a preemptive war against Italy and Serbia4 several times before 1914 precisely to avoid this bleak scenario: the encirclement and tightening of the “Iron Ring around Monarchy’s borders.”5 His warmongering—though also prescient warnings went unheard, and by the time of the conflict, Conrad and his staff had to fight an uphill war for which they were not prepared.6

Nonetheless, the greatest military issue was the human cost. By 1914, the Habsburg Empire had called into arms around 3,500,000 young men, which included all the trained reserves and a portion of the untrained territorial forces. In a short period, the intensity of the conflict led to casualties so massive that they were shocking and entirely unanticipated. By the end of 1914, losses amounted to 1,250,000 men, and by the end of the first year of the war, this number had risen to 2,738,500.7 The slaughter was as vertical in the martial hierarchy as it was horizontal. By the end of 1914, 3,168 officers had been killed, with total casualties amounting to 22,310, or almost half of the prewar corps of career and reserve officers.8 The lack of troops turned into an even greater security problem after 1916, due to the partial occupation of Serbia, Montenegro, and Albania and the resulting need for an administrative force. Thus, the most pressing issue at the time was for the AOK to find a solution that would have helped alleviate the rising military disparity with the Entente forces, furthered the geostrategic plans, and addressed security needs. The envisioned solution was the bolstering of the ranks through the recruitment of forces that were possibly friendly to Austria-Hungary’s cause, especially from invaded areas labelled “Friendly occupied territories.”9

One of these countries was Albania. First and foremost, Albania represented a geostrategic asset for whichever Great Power controlled it. At the height of the prewar rivalry with Vienna, the Italian Foreign Minister Tommaso Tittoni in 1904 had stated, “the true value of Albania lies in her ports and in her seacoast, possession of which would mean for either Italy or Austria-Hungary incontestable supremacy on the Adriatic Sea.” Any attempt by one or the other to seize this precious coastline had to be “opposed by all available means.” The Austrian position was identical: as long as the Albanian coastline remained nominally Ottoman or independent, there was no threat that another Great Power would risk her maritime and trade lifeline to Venice or Trieste.10 This position was reinforced by the time of the Balkan Wars of 1912–13, when on November 28, 1912 the Albanians declared through a “rocambolesque” series of events their independence from a collapsing Ottoman Empire11 and a policy of neutrality to defend themselves. The declaration proved insufficient to halt the Serbian and Montenegrin forces from seizing Kosovo and Shkodra, because according to the Serbian prime minister Nikola Pašić, “an independent Albania was neither desirable nor possible.”12

As a result of the Austro-Hungarian threats of war to Serbia and Montenegro, on December 17, 1912, the Great Powers ambassadors met in London to reach a peaceful settlement. The solution was a smaller and neutral state without key areas that were partly inhabited by Albanians, such as Kosovo, Dibra, Ipek, and Ohrid. The country was not established based on its ethnographic boundaries, but because its existence within the borders specified was considered “essential for the peace in Europe.”13 None of the interested parties was happy with the decision, but the Austrians had managed to prevent Russia’s satellite states from gaining a foothold on the Adriatic coastline, and Serbia and Montenegro had almost doubled in size.14

As Europe’s final diplomatic attempt to prevent war, Albania proved a short-lived experiment. Within a matter of months, the already weak government of Wilhelm zu Wied had collapsed as a result of inner power struggles and two revolts raging in central and south Albania. By September 1914, the country was in a state of anarchy and at the mercy of its neighbors. The first neighbor to take advantage of the situation was Italy, which seized the Saseno island and a month later, in October 1914, landed her forces in Vlora. Greece, fueling the irredentist movement of Vorio Epirus, seized large parts of southern Albania. After June 1915, Serbia took control of most of the country and ultimately installed her Albanian ally, Essad Pascha, as leader.15 Only with the Bulgarian entry into war on October 1915 and the opening of the Balkan front could the policy-makers in Vienna redirect their efforts to Albania. In the ministerial meeting of January 1916 over the new war aims of the Monarchy, the control of Albania by the k. u. k. armies was made a paramount concern, not only to ensure the safety of navigation for the Imperial fleet but also for the security of the left flank of the Central Forces stationed on the Macedonian front.16

A second reason for the decision of the AOK to recruit these troops was the long ethnographic policy that Vienna had pursued with the Albanians as a salient counterweight to the “Serbization” or “Slavization” of the peninsula.17 Mainly by supporting through investments the development of an Albanian national consciousness18 while simultaneously extending its economic and cultural control, the Ballhausplatz hoped to curb Albania’s political trajectory to its own advantage. The natives, who were mainly Muslim and were ethno-linguistically different from and often hostile to the Slavs of the peninsula, represented for the Monarchy an effective buffering force against the plans of her rivals (Italy and Russia). This cultural support along with political support during the Balkan Wars was not without a price. By the eve of World War I, the k. u. k. army, aware of its own weakness, would demand repayment of this “debt” in the form of men at arms.19

The recruitment of third-party and colonial forces ones during the Great War is a broader and well researched topic. However, in addition to being a subject which has been understudied, the recruitment of Albanian troops by the Austro-Hungarian army represents a rather fascinating historical question due to the dual nature of its problematic: when does support become exploitation in military terms of a weak, defenseless country by an empire? And how can one discern the foggy line between an independent national army and a dependent colonial one? These questions cannot be answered without putting into perspective the characteristics of these military units before and during World War I.

Albanian Troops under the Ottoman Rule

Fundamentally, the Albanian troops were and remained a mercenary force throughout the period of Ottoman rule, thus displaying all the characteristic and weaknesses that the mercenary system had.20 Historically, there were good reasons why the Ottomans chose to recruit these forces. First, in the Albanian lands, the existing strong feudal system endured under the sultan’s rule through the Ottoman process of istimalet.21 This meant that the Albanian fighters managed to keep unscathed their characteristic social structure, which was centered around local connections and obedience to lords, firstly through the timar (fief) system (post 1385) and later on the devshirme. Second, the Sublime Porte faced a major governance and safety deficit in Rumeli, especially after the end of the expansionist campaigns brought by Vienna’s defeat in 1683. The constructed castles and fortresses in the borderlands did not have the necessary manpower despite Istanbul’s attempt to fill the gap with Janissaries or state troops. Thus, the only remaining solution was to hire mercenaries with long guns and matchlock guns from Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Albania.22

These troops served in the Ottoman army as infantry or cavalry units, and commonly the Ottoman records described them as brave, fearless, heroic, hard and warlike.23 Due to their lifestyle, they generally engaged in guerrilla type warfare, with bands of mercenaries as small as 30 warriors under a sergeant (bölükbaşı tur.) up to 1,000 warriors under chieftain (başbuğ tur.).24 Despite the existence of several surviving contracts, the number of these units was fluid. For example, the leaders in the southern Albanian speaking vilayets (the Toskë alb.) based their ability to raise larger numbers of warriors on personal or vassalage connections (Bey-Agha/Ağa relationship).25 In the northern Albanian speaking vilayets (Gegëria alb.), it was much more difficult to recruit solders than it was in the south because the methods used were tied to blood or kinship (fis alb.) relationships and thus had a tribalistic nature. As such, the size of the mercenary units was linked to the “good name” of the leader’s family (oxhak alb.) and its origins.26

Usually, the troops served regionally and seasonally, with fighting periods of two, four, or at most six months.27 If called into arms in the summer, many Albanian fighters would withdraw from the battlefields by November, regardless of the current military situation. This scenario, which commonly happened with northern Albanians (the Gegë alb.), many times forced the Ottoman state to pay for additional mercenaries during winter rotations.28

As part of their contractual obligations (mukâvele tur.), these forces had to bring their own equipment and horses.29 This was a double-edged condition, because on the one hand, it saved the contractor from the obligation of paying for the equipment used by the mercenary forces, but on the other, it often weakened the Ottoman state because a given unit’s cohesion and fighting ability were greatly endangered by their lack of equipment or the striking differences in the assorted equipment which they brought to battle. This remained a distinctive characteristic of the Albanian fighting units up until the Balkan Wars, and it was noticed even by the Irish captain Duncan Heaton Armstrong, who served the Albanian Crown in 1914. 30

During the Tanzimat Era (1839–1876), the Ottoman state underwent a series of reforms, including the creation of a modern, centralized, and national army similar to the Prussian one. These reforms had an unintentional impact on the Albanian units as well. On the one hand, these strengthened the Albanian fighters by creating the necessary conditions for them to receive a stable income as regular or reservist soldiers and to develop professionally, as they were given a modern education and took part in training, and military drills, opportunities which they had not before (and this had undermined their ability to fight beyond small skirmishes when they operated as seasonal mercenaries).31 On the other hand, these reforms proved to be too constraining for the Albanian fighters due to their centenary military practices, mainly in the aspects of longevity of the service (from seasonal to five-year periods), the type of military units (from kinship/vassalage units to modern type regiments), and their deployment (from mainly native regional forces into imperial ones). As a result, the Tanzimat Era in military terms drew a wedge between the Ottoman Army and the Albanians, where one side saw these reforms as a necessity for the survival and safety of the empire while the other interpreted them as an infringement on freedom and military status quo. This led to a number of protests, insurgencies, and rebellions by the Albanians, which were met by the Ottoman authorities with counteroffensives, purges, imprisonments, and disarmament campaigns.32 As a result, by the beginning of World War I, the Albanian fighters had calcified features of a pre modern military unit: they were poorly or rather loosely organized, ill-equipped, and hardly trained, and they had an opportunistic (if not predatory) view concerning how they operated, fought, and attained their military objectives. The only incentive to use them was their military knowledge of the area as natives and their fighting spirit.

 

The Albanian Irregular Troops (Freischärler Albanien) under
the Austro-Hungarian Army (1914–1916)

The secret military operation of September 1914

The creation of a smaller Albanian state in 1912–13, proved a rather powerful incentive for many Albanians to ally with Austria-Hungary in 1914. The keenest supporters of the empire among these forces were the refugee Albanian leaders from the ex-Ottoman vilayets of Kosovo and Macedonia. Unsurprisingly, even before the official entry into the Great War, the Austro-Hungarian institutions had made plans for the recruitment of these forces as irregular troops with the hope of opening a second front that would have attacked Serbia from the South. In an encrypted telegram dating July 23, 1914, the Ballhausplatz informed its consuls in Albania and the k. u. k ambassador in Istanbul Pallavicini of the possibility of organizing and using the Albanian fighters in the offensive against Serbia. In the introductory section one finds the following: “In the event of the outbreak of war between the Monarchy and Serbia, from our point of view it would be very desirable—and fortunate, given the mood in the Serbian-Albanian border areas—that the Albanian population should be active and expose the Serbian military in those areas as a response to the terrible oppression imposed on them by the Serbian tyranny.”33

Two days later, on July 25, 1914, Augustus von Kral, the Austro-Hungarian diplomat in Albania, replied positively to Vienna’s military proposition. He had been in continuous contact with nationalist leaders from the north and from Kosovo (Hasan Prishtina, Isa Boletini, Bajram Curri, Selim Batusha, etc.), and they were all in favor of joint military action against the enemy (shkjau alb.) in the form of a general uprising. However, in his view, the most logical starting point for the operation was Albania, not Kosovo, because from there, the Monarchy could have shipped the necessary weapons and equipment for the Albanian fighters. From there, these forces, aided by the Monarchy’s officers, could have divided into two groups, which then would attack Serbia on two fronts, one toward Macedonia through the region of Dibra and one from the Albanian-New Serbia border of the Luma region.34

After receiving this encouraging answer and with the hope of gaining a military advantage for the Monarchy’s armies, on July 27, 1914 the Ballhausplatz instructed General Consul Kral to deliver to the “Albanian insurgent leaders” the following message:

The declaration of war against Serbia has not been made yet, but it is coming. I ask to You high-born [possibly the name of the leader] to spread the rumor among the Albanian insurgents that the state of war has already occurred, that Belgrade has been abandoned by its court and government, that Kosovo is completely emptied by the [Serbian] troops, and that k. u. k. troops have already crossed the Serbian border.35

The message cited above is significant for three reasons. First, each of the four statements was chronologically false, thus indicating that the Monarchy was willingly lying and quite possibly sending her allies to a slaughter with the hope of gaining a temporary military advantage for her own forces. Second, by initiating the operation from Albania, Vienna was willingly compromising the neutrality of the country, which she had previously protected and guaranteed in the London Conference of 1912–13.36 Third, the way in which these forces would have been organized and armed and the manner in which they would have operated under the directives of the k. u. k. officers were in total breach of the Hague convention of War on Land (1907).37 The archives do not indicate whether the message was ever transmitted through Kral to the Albanian leaders, but the logic of the events that came in the wake of its drafting suggest that it was.

A day later, Vienna reassured Kral (who by then was acting as the leader of the operation) that the Monarchy would provide 2,000 rifles, 100,000 cartridges, and 50,000 Kronen to the “insurgents.”38 On July 29, the Ballhausplatz also informed the chief of the Evidenz Bureau Colonel Hranilovic, who as the k. u. k. army representative had agreed to the necessity and objectives of the operation, of the military details.39 The same day, Kral traveled toward Castelnuovo (Herceg Novi), where he met with multiple Albanian leaders, such as Hasan Prishtina, Isa Boletini, and Dervish Hima, to attempt to organize the operation.40 According to the plan, the Austro-Hungarian authorities would have secretly shipped the necessary weapons and ammunitions41 to the port of Shëngjin in unmarked boxes, along with the Albanian fighters from the Serbian controlled regions of Kosovo along with six k. u. k. army officers. The Albanian leaders on the other side had the duty of securing the landing area and procuring the transportation animals (200–300 horses). After the successful conclusion of the first phase, the forces would divide into two groups and attack the enemy from the Macedonian and Serbian borders, as had been suggested earlier by Kral. The odds of success were fairly high, considering the fact that other tribal leaders from Northern Albania (the so-called great highlands or Malësia e Madhe) had replied positively to Consul Kral’s request.42

Despite the initial enthusiasm, by the end of September 1914, the entire operation had become a massive fiasco for the Monarchy. One of the many reasons for this failure was the multiple delays that the operation suffered. By early August, most of the weapons had arrived, but there was no sign of the horses that were needed to transport them43 or even of the key k. u. k. army officers in charge of the action.44 These delays became even more persistent throughout the entire operation, since the country had no road or railway system. Even more problematic was the fact that the landing area and the route through which the forces had to travel through were constantly subject to incursions by the peasant (Muslim) rebels45 in central Albania and the predatory raids of the tribal highlanders of the north.46

Another major reason for the failure of the operation was the lack of secrecy from all the actors involved. The Monarchy bore the lion’s share of the responsibility for its inability to transport in secrecy most of the troops and weaponry via commercial vessels. These lines, according to the Albanian expert prof. Seiner, were operated mainly by sailors of Italian and Slavic origin many of whom were spies for their own governments.47 As a result, by early August, the majority of the interested powers in Albania had caught a whiff of Monarchy’s actions on the ground.48 The Albanians also bore some of the blame, because multiple Austro-Hungarian reports indicate that personnel close to the Albanian government and even tribal leaders had divulged relevant information to enemy powers.49

Nonetheless, the biggest obstacle to the successful completion of the operation of 1914 was the reigning chaos between the chain of command and the forces on the ground. Practically, there was no defined hierarchical organization or even trust between the institutions (the Ballhausplatz and the Evidenz Bureau) and the actors.50 When Kral came down with malaria in August,51 the operation became even more hectic and chaotic, because the k. u. k. officers had no direct line of communication with the center from where they could have gotten information and orders. The most vivid testimony to the relevance of this issue was the frustrating letter sent by k. u. k. army officer Lieutenant Colonel Spaits on September 10, 1914:

Since August 9, I keep receiving the answer ‘as soon as possible’ from Vienna and partly from Durazzo. Now that everything is finally in place and all precautions have been taken care of, the order ‘later’ comes! I will comply with this order, but I hereby decline any responsibility, even if the whole thing fizzles into the sand! Such an endeavor, the preparation of which covers a distance of 100–150 km, cannot be regulated in the same way as the departure of a battalion in the absence of all means of communication!52

 

Furthermore, under the chaotic AOK/Albanian leadership, it became almost impossible to keep a mercenary and heterogeneous force like the Albanian fighters motived and organized. By mid-September, the operational funds had gone dry, while expenses for a mercenary force that had not even once fired a gun against the enemy kept increasing.53 The situation grew worse, as the k. u. k. officers had to bargain on daily bases, using money they didn’t have, to prevent mutinies, discourage desertion, and cope with threats posed by hostile tribes. In another letter dated September 12, the infuriated Lieutenant colonel Spaits wrote the following to consul Kral: “...these good-for-nothing people in Mirdita, Ibolje, and Fierza! They stage a revolution every day for breakfast! Last night they came and asked for 80 Mauser [rifles], otherwise they wouldn’t let us pass through! I prefer to spend 10,000 more kronen—just to keep peace and not to have a riot that the Italians would hear about! This is the only reason why I have approved even the most outrageous demands! Our so-called “Noble Guard,” made of twelve men recruited by Nopcsa from Merturi, Rajah, and Sirlu, costs us 48 Kronen every day; they are more of a burden than a benefit to us. These guys are lazy, [and since] the locals are jealous of them, [they have] demanded that we also take a ‘guard’ from them—of course, a ‘man’ from every ‘fis’ [tribe]… All these negotiations come with the same corresponding shouting and ‘readiness to shoot,’ and they always end up with a bag full of money.”54

The tribulations of the k. u. k officers in Albania came to an end when, by September 30, the Evidenz Bureau ordered the withdrawal of all of Monarchy’s personnel, thus ending the joint offensive against Serbia.55 By the beginning of October 1914, the majority of the Monarchy’s officers had left the country, which by then had plummeted into anarchy after the departure of the Albanian Crown and Government under the threatening guns of the rebels and the approaching Serbian Army. However, as was typical of them, the Albanian irregulars who had been taking part in the secret operation passed another winter enjoying the fruits of another mercenary expedition that, from their point of view, had been successful, even if not actually fought.

The Albanian Legion and the Durrës’ offensive (Autumn-Winter 1915–1916)

The military fiasco of 1914 convinced Conrad and the imperial authorities, that it had become, if not impossible, obsolete to conduct modern, large-scale operations in the frame of the Great War with “irregular forces” like the Albanian mercenaries. The country, which since the Balkan Wars had been at the mercy of marauding gangs, had to be secured under the k. u. k military administration. However, using these forces under a “shaky/joint” military hierarchy meant in principle taking more imperial troops from other fronts, and this was a luxury that the AOK could not afford.

For these reasons, by December 1915, the AOK had contacted Hasan Bey Prishtina, an Albanian nobleman from Kosovo, with the proposition of organizing the Albanian warriors into a larger ethnic unit under the k. u. k. army, similar to the Polish legion. During the first two years of the war, Hasan Bey and his 8,000 fighters had fought against the pro-Entente Esad Pasha’s troops, the Serbian and Montenegrin forces, thus proving himself worthy for the Monarchy’s cause. Additionally, he had good links with the Bulgarian military authorities and had advocated a quick political organization of the occupied parts of Albania while rejecting political offices for himself.56

Hasan Bey saw the AOK proposition as positive and, if it were to prove necessary, he offered to travel personally to Vienna to discuss the details. After the Austro-Hungarian armed forces would have concluded the occupation of Albania, he planned to form a strong force of 15,000 men to fight against the Italians on the southwestern front.57 Upon receiving this encouraging reply, the AOK put at his disposal 10,000 kronen for the formation of the legion and asked him to raise as quickly as possible a force of at least 10,000 men.58 The necessary equipment, including weapons, uniforms, coats, blankets etc. which had been seized by the Montenegrins, could have been collected from the two depos of Mitrovica and Ferizovic (or Ferizaj in Albanian). However, the transport of this equipment had to be arranged by the Albanians themselves, since the rail lines had been destroyed and most of Kosovo’s and Albania’s horses had been taken by the retreating Serbian forces.59 In addition to the money and the rifles, the Legion was also promised eight batteries of guns, each with 240 rounds of ammunition. As a final request, the AOK instructed him to avoid as much as possible any conflict in the newly liberated areas, because these incidents would harm the reputation and safety of the Monarchy’s troops.60

After many detailed discussions, Hasan Bey agreed to organize a brigade of Albanian volunteers. This would consist of two half brigades, each of two regiments. These would in turn be divided into four battalions, which would respectively consist of four çetas of 100 men each. The çetas subsequently would be divided into four sub-çetas. Hasan Bey would be provided with a k. u. k. general staff officer serving under him as aide-de-camp, fluent either in Albanian or French. The two half-brigade commanders, the four regimental commanders, and the 16 battalion commanders had to be K.u.K officers, while the çetas and sub-çetas were to be led by Albanians selected personally by Hasan Bey.61 The first recommendations for these positions by the AOK were Captain Hässler, Lieutenant Colonel Nopcsa, Lieutenant Rudnay, and Captain Steinmetz, along with four other non-commissioned officers. The rest of the officer spots in the legion would have been filled with volunteers. The Albanian legion was subject to the Austro-Hungarian Army orders and its regulations. However, Hasan Bey invoked the right to proceed legally and liquidate spies on the spot, particular Serbian spies.62

Volunteers, who would be between 20 and 25 years of age, would receive basic training and wear the distinctive badges of the Albanian Legion (black and yellow armband with a black and red cockade on it).63 As a final step, they would swear their loyalty with a handshake.64 Each one would be paid like an Austro-Hungarian soldier, receiving a payment in advance every ten days, including a daily allowance of one and a half Kronen. The leaders of the sub-çetas would receive a payment similar to that of a train conductor, while the çeta commanders would get a paycheck of 175 kronen per month. Initially, upon the directives issued by the AOK, the legionnaires were not offered any other benefits (such as food or tobacco) apart from their paychecks, because it was thought that these recruits were doing their patriotic duty. If anyone distinguished himself in the battlefield, they would be given rewards, and bronze medals would be distributed according to soldiers’ merits.65 Hasan Bey spoke out vehemently against this condition, because he feared that if the volunteers were not been self-sufficient, they might easily turn into a gang of robbers. The legionnaires had to be given the same level of care and remuneration as the Austro-Hungarian soldiers, since generally they had to operate in very resource-poor areas.66

The directives of the Third Army Command dating December 12, 1915 stipulated in which areas and under what conditions the Albanian volunteers had to be recruited.67 Particular attention was given to the zones where the “good name and influence” of Hasan Bey was thought to be stronger, particularly areas around Vushtrri, Prishtina, Gjilan, Ferizovic, and Novipazar. The AOK expected him to be able to recruit some 6,000 warriors for the Legion in a period of 20 to 25 days, with at least 2,000 men from his hometown of Vushtrri and another 2,000 from Prishtina by January 5, 1916. Regarding the conditions, there was a strict policy of religious demarcation between the recruits and the area where they would have served. According to this policy, the Muslim or Catholic recruits could only join their own religious units in the legion and serve in areas where their faith was predominant among the locals. As a result, the recruits were to be divided into three groups: the first group of 2,000–3,000 Muslim Albanians from Ipek and Mitrovica under the command of Captain Hässler would have operated in the area of Podgorica; a second group of 3,000–4,000 Catholic Albanians from Gjakova under the lead of Lieutenant Colonel Nopcsa68 would have fought in Shkodra and Lezha; and a third group of 1,000 Muslim Albanians from Prizren and Prishtina under Captain Steinmetz would have stormed Kruja. Hasan Bey was against the breakdown of the volunteers according to their religious or tribal affiliations because he feared that this would create dangerous competition between Catholics and Muslims which later could promote separatist tendencies and destroy the vision of Albania’s unity. In his opinion, religious conflict was a minor issue in Albania, and it only occurred in the area of Shkodra for political reasons.69

Despite the initial enthusiasm of the AOK for the Legion, the recruitment of volunteers from Kosovo proved more tedious and time-consuming than expected. Due in no small part to the disagreements between Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria over the respective zones of influence and military control in Djakova and Prizren,70 the recruitment process almost came to a halt during the entire month of December 1915. Another factor which led to delays was the typical slow pace of the Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy, which was made even more hesitant and cumbersome by the racist attitudes of many army officers regarding the Albanian legionnaires and their lack of trust for their would-be brothers in arms. A certain Captain Lauer, for instance, wrote the following:

I don’t expect anything at all: so far, the Albanians have done nothing, and they will not do anything in the future. They stroll behind the front just to annoy us, and if there is any action on the front, then they are not available. They just want to eat at our expense, … [they are] nothing more than an undisciplined, rotten, unreliable burden. Together with their leaders.71

By January 26, 1916, the Third Army Command had compiled a report with title “Results of the actions directed by the VIII - XIX Corps Commando.”72 According to the data, the recruitment of the Albanian legionnaires had gone more slowly than expected: Nopcsa had gathered only 2,000–3,000 men in Blinisht, and Steinmetz had managed to sway only some 1,000 volunteers and Captain Ghilardi expected to recruit only 1,000 warriors from Prizren. Hässler had only 200 men ready to fight in Ipek, and he was expecting to recruit more people from the region of Dibra with the help of the nationalist nobleman Murad Bey Toptani. Additionally, another squadron of 700 men in Vushtrri (probably under the command of Hassan Bey) was available to engage on the front. These relatively small numbers notwithstanding, the army command saw these forces as adequate to start the offensive in Albania and thus secure two main objectives: first, to liberate 15,000 men held captive by the Serbian forces who were attempting an escape by sea from the port-cities of Durrës and Vlora; second, the Italians had to be driven from all Albanian territory, if possible.73

Upon receiving these orders, most of the members of the Albanian Legion under the command of the imperial officers began to prepare for the final charge toward the sea. Steinmetz moved with his men from Prizren to Selita,74 from where he headed towards Lezha and Durrës, later joining Nopcsa’s group on January 30, 1916.75 Nopcsa and his forces had been struggling to march toward the front due to the encirclement between the fleeing Serbian and Montenegrin forces and their allies in the region of Mirdita. The tribal leader (or bayraktar in Turkish) of this area—the catholic Prenk Bibë Doda—had been involved in pro-Serbian activities, and he had prevented the recruitment of 1,000 men from his tribe to the Albanian legion, as previously promised to the k. u. k. army. Only when Gjakova fell into Austro-Hungarian hands could Nopcsa and his men travel toward Tirana. There, his forces met with the forces of Hässler, who had left Prizren along with 1,600 men on January 30 and was charging with full speed toward Durrës.76 Hässler’s legionnaires were the first troops initially to seize Tirana,77 and on February 16, 1916, they encircled the Italian rear forces in the small town of Kavaja from a hilly position. In the heat of the fight and without the necessary artillery cover, Hässler’s unit pressed the offensive on its own while storming an important hill in front of Durrës and seizing two mountain guns. In the process of conquering the city, Hässler himself was badly wounded.78 Despite this victory, the pursuit of the enemy forces fleeing toward Vlora was halted, as the Austro-Hungarian forces were spread too thin and a second regrouping was necessary in order to replenish the supplies.

Nonetheless, the offensive against the Entente forces in the south resumed quickly under the lead of the Bulgarian standing Captain Ghilardi,79 who had entered the service of the k. u. k. VIII. Corps Command. In a short period of time, he managed to set up nine battalions with 500 men, mainly with recruits from northern Albania. After first securing the plains south of Durrës, Ghilardi then directed his forces toward the region of Myzeqeja. By March 8, he had taken Lushnja and Berat, and the following day he captured the city of Fier. After successfully driving off the Italian rear guard across the Vjosa river, his forces camped on the northern bank of the river near Këlcyra, a position which they would have held until the end of the war.80 The military regrouping of the k. u. k. XIX Corps Command under Lieutenant Marshal Ignaz Trollmann on March 3, 1916 brought “the colonial campaign”81 with the help of the Albanian Legions to an end.

Attempts to build an Albanian Army (Albanisches Korps) between
1916 and 1918

While it may have offered an excellent example of a major victory for the Monarchy against the Entente forces, the invasion of the country turned into a major administrative challenge for the military authorities, especially in regard to the safety question. As a result of the low number of the imperial troops in the country, the gang activity of the natives and proximity to the Italian and French forces, the AOK opted to create an Albanian Army. By February 1916, the army command announced a proclamation asking all physically fit male Albanians between the ages of 18 and 50 to enroll as volunteers. According to this command, each house had to provide at least one man for military service, usually the youngest and healthiest.82 The volunteers would receive six to eight weeks of training, which included, in addition to military exercises, instruction in German and Albanian. In a similar fashion to the recruitment propaganda used on Bosnians soldiers in 1878,83 the proclamation made an appeal to the bellicose spirit, sense of duty, and patriotism of the Albanians and encouraged them to take arms:

Shqypëtaren!

…we now turn to you with the request that you protect your fatherland with arms in hand alongside us. No capable Albanian would watch idly while the enemy bursts into his country, no one would find it compatible with his honor not to dedicate his weapon and his life to the fatherland to defend it against every enemy… Remember, brave Shqypëtaren, that Albania’s best days were those when the greatest Albanian folk hero Skanderbeg, with his well-trained soldiers, was horror to the enemies of Albania. He and his brave comrades are your role models!84

The initial idea of the AOK was to organize this army into eight and later eleven battalions with 600 to 800 men85 trained by Dalmatian and Bosnian-Herzegovinian officers and soldiers. The first cycle of enlistment and training would start on May 15, 1916, followed by annual cycles every first of September and December.86 Additionally, commissions were created for the enlistment of the volunteers in each military district, and if anyone attempted to avoid the conscription, he had to face punishments which began with fines in gold or cattle and went to being driven from their homes or even burned by the authorities. Certain categories of people were excluded from the obligation to enlist, such as clergyman, free professionals, civil officials, tribal elders, and adult sons who were providing care for sick and weak family members.87 The enlisted had to bring their own weapons, including ammunition and cartridge belts, as well as bread sacks and water bottles.88 Meanwhile, the k. u. k. army had the responsibility of equipping them with uniforms and insignia similar to the Albanian Legion consisting of volunteers from Kosovo (hats with red and black cockades and a yellow armband).89

Though the AOK actively used the clergy and tribal leaders to bolster the recruitment process, it managed to recruit less than half the expected number of soldiers during each of the three cycles: 2,452 men were recruited in the first cycle, 1,889 in the second, 2,876 in the third, and an unexpected increase in the fourth and final cycle, which managed to produce 4,292 volunteers.90 The reasons for this failure were multiple, starting from the wrong policy of initially applying a voluntary form of enlistment addressed to a skeptical and indifferent society. Even when enlistment was made obligatory, the authorities couldn’t enforce their own decisions. They simply didn’t have the necessary manpower to chase down deserters or gang members. Yet interestingly, the main problem was the fact that most of the instructors didn’t know Albanian.

In a final attempt to address this problem, during the third and fourth cycles, the authorities opened training courses for aspiring officers with the hope of turning them into instructors for the other Albanian recruits. The basic conditions for their enrollment in the program were: having a clean penal record, knowledge of reading and writing in Albanian, and being from a “good family.”91 After performing service on the frontlines for six weeks, these officers were named “Ensigns of the Albanian Militia.” However, the Austrian-Hungarian military authorities recognized that,

due to their low level of education, it is of course not possible to apply [to them] the same standard of classification as applied to our junior officers. For this reason, the main focus rests on their military, practical, and moral suitability as leaders and instructors in the state militia.92

Though the rhythm of applications for both programs increased in time, opposition to the entire process remained strong. At the center of the critics were the Austro-Hungarian officers stationed in Albania, who saw the organization of an eight-week training program for the Albanian militia as a difficult, unreasonable, and very costly endeavor. One senior officer pointed out in March 1917 that of the expected 800 men for the sixth Albanian battalion in Lushnja, only nine volunteers had enlisted.93 Another officer wrote of the demoralizing effect that the Albanian trainees had on the Austro-Hungarian forces working with them:

It remains a sad picture when one sees our old countrymen working hard in the most miserable swamp areas, while young Albanians in neat uniforms, go for walks in the cities.94

 

By August 1917, the officer’s critical remarks had caught the attention of the Operational Department of the AOK. As a result, the department ordered the XIX. Corps Command stationed in the country to stop playing “soldiers’ games” with the Albanians and use them for agricultural purposes or in workers’ departments. A detailed report on the “Albanian Militia” experiment was also mailed with the order. It was written for the most part in a tone of disappointment and despair:

forcing the occupying forces to provide non-commissioned officers for training purposes is downright damaging to our force due to the low number of troops… [even] if the Albanians are eventually trained with a great deal of effort, they will desert to the enemy side at the first sight. They’ll grab their weapons or will form gangs of robbers in the mountains. If you catch a deserter […] you cannot treat him with the full strictness of our laws, because the Albanian has not taken an oath, but only a vow… Finally, these Albanian battalions, which no commander dares use in battle, are a blessed propaganda tool for the Entente, which points out that we brought military service to the Albanians instead of freedom.95

A National Army Experiment or a Colonial One?

Answering this question is not an easy task because generally it involves taking into consideration two interconnected elements: first, the context, meaning the precise nature of the relations between the two countries and the direction which this relation took during the war, and second, the historical/military evolution that the Albanian troops underwent as part of the k. u. k. army.

Regarding the context, there is a rich bibliography on this period which indicates Albania’s strong and increasing dependency on the empire.96 This dependency97 had grown more intense by the time of the Great War due to the unilateral decisions of the Habsburg policy-makers, which initially sought to drag the newly-born and weak state from its safe position of neutrality98 and later compromised its territorial integrity as a bargaining chip, offering territories first to Italy99 and later to Bulgaria and Greece.100 After the successful “colonial campaign”101 in Albania, matters of neutrality and territorial integrity became obsolete topics, since the imperial policy-makers threw the existence of the country as a whole into question. In the GMR meeting of January 1916 over the new war aims of the Monarchy after the successful invasion of Serbia and Montenegro, two factions split over the future of the country. On one side, the Ballhausplatz with Minister István Burián sought the creation of a friendly and bigger Albania with territories from Kosovo, Macedonia, and Montenegro as a counter solution to the Slavic problem in the peninsula. On the other side stood the AOK, with Conrad advocating the annexation of the entire country as the ideal solution for a failed state-building experiment in the Balkans.102 De jure, the GMR didn’t reach any agreement over the fate of the country, but de facto the country was run and modelled administratively by the Army to match and further promote its integration into the Monarchy (legally, fiscally, and financially), similarly to the quasi-colonial Bosnian model.

As the context gave meaning to the actions of the k. u. k. army in Albania, we can certainly argue that the historical/military evolution of the Albanian troops during the war served and gave shape to the colonial agenda of the Monarchy in the country. I use the word colonial because this evolution had similar characteristics to other cases of colonial armies used by other Great Powers of the time.

The first characteristic was the passage from a premodern to an institutionalized fighting force. Historically speaking, with certain exceptions,103 the Albanian soldiers remained largely outside the Ottoman military either due to their komitadji/mercenary nature or due to the rather loose and atrophying authority of the Ottoman state. This deviation from the institutions remained a staple characteristic even during the Tanzimat Era, when a number of revolts in the Albanian-speaking areas were directed against the obligatory enlistment of soldiers serving abroad or in other parts of the empire.104 The entry into the Great War changed this military paradigm, because due to the managerial qualities of Austria-Hungary as a Great Power, a large number of Albanian warriors were involved in large-scale, modern, and complex military operations. This change is only comparable with other colonial armies of the time (such as the French Armée d’Afrique and Armée Coloniale, etc.), where alien bellicose groups without past institutional or state-building experiences entered into the service of modern national or imperial armies (post-mercenaryism).105

This institutionalization came thanks to the military regimental system. The regiments as a western modernity replaced the previous socio-military structures, where at the center were the personal, vassalage, or kinship connections.106 As a result, the ability to enlist and send into war the fighters shifted from individuals to a chain of command which—importantly—was alien to the natives. Additionally, the regimental system brought other changes that aimed toward the creation of a cohesive, loyal, and professional fighting body, such as: a periodical salary and a pension, continuous drills and training, a defined period of military service, a system of rewards (medals, acknowledgments, etc.) and punishments based on a military law or code, a common regimental culture/camaraderie, etc. Last but not least, all the colonial regimental units were distinguished by unique regimental colors, distinctive signs, badges, accessories, or uniforms, which symbolized the union between the old and the new or the native and the colonial power.107 These patterns of a modern but colonial regiment were visible in the Albanian units during the Great War, especially in the cases of the Albanian Legion and the Albanian Army.

The second characteristic was the introduction of the Albanian soldiers in the Austro-Hungarian army as a martial race.108 This concept is distinctive for the majority of the colonial units of the time, because it represented the fusion of the prejudices of the Western authorities (binary view Occident/Orient, realm of progress vs. realm of war) and their need to uphold their military power in the “new lands.” As a result, different native communities/races were elevated to a special social and military status due to their “innate martial qualities,” and they were rewarded with the “honor” of serving along with other imperial troops as special units. The British were the most successful among the other colonial powers to encourage the construction of artificial communities for their bellicose interests, where for example between 1885 and 1912, three allegedly martial races (Sikh, Gurkha, and Rajput) played an increasingly important role in the British Indian Army.109

The Austro-Hungarians, famous for their “army of many nations,” had a regimental system that was quite open and adaptable to different ethnical groups.110 However, only after the invasion of Bosnia-Herzegovina 1878 and the recruitment of the Bosnians did the colonial concepts of “martial races” jump inside the Habsburg military. The Bosniaken, though militarily very capable, remained during the whole period of their service a foreign and exotic fighting entity for the imperial authorities and general public, mainly due to their alien/oriental nature.111 The same approach was visible with the Albanian units, where the majority of the k. u. k. troops were instructed to treat the Albanians differently, not for political reasons, but also due to their socio-anthropological peculiarities and alleged proclivity for war.112 According to the General Staff officer and military historian Hugo Kerchnawe:

It is understandable that, under these circumstances, efforts were made to use the human resources of the country for purely martial purposes, rather than as a liberator, as an ally, while at the same time meeting the warlike wishes of the population. This way, we pacified the troubling elements and used them wherever. They could express their warlike spirit in an expedient manner, especially at the front.113

These characteristics, along with other minor elements such as the use of ideological mechanisms to motivate the troops (support of the Albanian nationalism) and distinctive elements of racism, point to the idea that the Albanian troops under the k. u. k. army went through a transformative process that aimed their evolution (purposely or not) into a quasi-colonial unit more than a national and independent army. Despite the fact that these military processes are very similar with the Bosnian counterpart and other colonial regiments of the time, the answer remains to the basic question (was this an imperial force or a colonial one) inconclusive due to the short lifespan of this “military experiment,” which came to an end with the end of the war.

Archival Sources

Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, Vienna (ÖStA)

Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv (ÖHHStA)

Politisches Archiv (PA I): k. 66, 936.

Kriegsarchiv (KA)

Neue Feldakten (NFA): HHK AK 3. Armee OPAK, k. 10, 68.

KK XIX. Korps., k. 2574.

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In interwar Czechoslovakia, the construction of a well-founded military establishment was a core component of the state building process. Reflecting broader trends across the post-imperial, particularly post-Habsburg space, Czechoslovak state builders deployed a rhetoric of radical military transformation predicated in part on a rejection of the imperial military legacy. As this article shows, however, certain elements of Habsburg military tradition survived the transition from empire to nation-state. Focusing on the legacy of Bohemia’s old Habsburg regiments, I argue that “imperial” military tradition could be adapted for use in the new republic through a process of selective reimagining. During the interwar period, regimental groups consisting of Czech-speaking Habsburg veterans dedicated considerable time and energy to the project of “nationalizing” Habsburg regimental tradition. By emphasizing the historically Czech character of their former regiments within the broader Habsburg military establishment, these veterans’ groups provided a means by which Bohemia’s old imperial regiments could be incorporated, conceptually, into prevailing interwar narratives of Czech military heritage.
Keywords: Austria-Hungary, Czechoslovakia, military tradition, veterans, regiment

On March 25, 1936, President Edvard Beneš addressed members of the Czechoslovak 5th Infantry Regiment with a speech on “military tradition and its meaning for our armed forces.”1 Every army, he began, requires a sense of tradition, which “undergirds the soldier’s self-confidence, strengthens his sense of self, and, at the decisive moment, his courage and bravery.” Beneš then offered his listeners a litany of the Czech nation’s martial heroes. He began with the warrior kings of medieval Bohemia, who “strengthened our once independent state and won it a proper position of power in Europe.” Next, he continued on to the fifteenth-century Hussites, who had resisted the “political oppression” of the Holy Roman Empire. Then, skipping forward in time, he brought up the Czechoslovak “Legionnaires,” who had fought with the Allies against the Central Powers during World War I. With these three eras in mind, Beneš confidently claimed that “our army, though young, already has a rich and old martial tradition.”

Conspicuously absent in this litany were five centuries of history during which the lands of Czechoslovakia had been part of the Habsburg empire and had contributed countless soldiers to its armies. At the end of his speech, Beneš meditated aloud on these soldiers’ proper place in Czechoslovak tradition. They were “sons of our nation,” Beneš conceded, but because they had served in “foreign armies” when “we did not have our own state,” these sons “did not belong to us.” Belonging to the emperor, these warriors of the past were unsuitable “for national and state tradition,” regardless of their personal bravery or soldierly competence. In Czechoslovakia, Beneš explained, the army should only draw inspiration from warriors of the past who had fought out of “zeal for a separate state community.” The Hussites and Legionnaires met these criteria, while the nation’s sons who had donned Habsburg uniforms did not.

Beneš’s speech illustrates a central problem of military tradition in interwar Czechoslovakia: how should the historical deeds of Czech Habsburg soldiers be interpreted? But it also elucidates a vital point about “military tradition” more broadly. Since states and armies do not officially celebrate every aspect of their past, military tradition is not synonymous with military history. Military tradition is better understood in processual terms as the careful curation of military history—the lifting up of certain eras or episodes and the downplaying of others.2 In this way, the cultivation of military tradition creates a useable version of the past that is then instantiated by an army’s symbols, ceremonies, and customs. Ultimately designed to convey a certain set of desired values, the cultivation of military tradition is thus sensitive to changing societal attitudes, political ideals, and cultural conceptions of service and sacrifice. In the multinational Habsburg empire, official military tradition conveyed a vision of the past that emphasized service to the dynasty and loyalty to the empire above any one nation. When the empire collapsed in 1918, the history of its “supranational” army had little resonance in the new (or newly enlarged) “nation-states” of East-Central Europe. While Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavia, and Romania all resorted in varying degrees to the integration of formerly Habsburg officers and the repurposing of Habsburg military structures, there was little impetus in these states to celebrate such continuities in the realm of official tradition.3 Instead, evoking memories of the Habsburg army as an oppressive, “denationalizing” institution and explaining the need for radical military transformation, politicians and defense officials promised to build armies that were “brand-new and pristinely national.”4

If, as the dominant contemporary paradigm would have it, historical development culminated in the eclipse of empire and the emergence of nation-states, then official military tradition would be designed to celebrate those who had fought and died in service of this project. In Poland, for example, recently reconstituted after centuries of partition, the Poles’ long history of service in the Habsburg, Hohenzollern, and Romanov armies was sidelined in favor of more recent history, namely, Poland’s post-1918 border conflicts with Ukraine and the Soviet Union. Fought in defense of the reunified Polish state by soldiers in Polish uniform, these conflicts had a “national meaning” that was “undisputed.”5 The situation was somewhat different in Yugoslavia, which brought together into a single state the Habsburgs’ former South Slav territories and the preexisting Kingdom of Serbia. Many saw the Serbian army as the chief instrument by which this “liberation and unification” of the South Slavs had been achieved. By adopting the Serbian army’s prestigious mantle and many of its institutions and cultural assumptions, the Yugoslav army found little need to integrate the history of South Slav soldiers in Habsburg uniform into the narrative of its history, function, and future.6

The creation of new national military traditions and the obfuscation of Habsburg military legacies were thus important aspects of the nation-state project in East-Central Europe. As the speech by Beneš shows, Czechoslovakia was no exception. As one scholar has even suggested, it was in Czechoslovakia that the break with the imperial military past was pursued most vigorously.7 Yet the study of Czechoslovak military tradition also reveals countervailing attempts to reclaim certain elements of the imperial military inheritance. Importantly, the same language of nation used to reject the Habsburg military past could also be used to reclaim parts of it. As this article shows, this occurred primarily at the regimental level. In other words, while the history of the Habsburg army proved difficult to incorporate, the history of its Czech-speaking regiments could be rewritten from a more national perspective and made to fit the needs of Czechoslovak military tradition. This “nationalization” of Habsburg regimental history thus offered a subtle means by which to reclaim a useable Czech military inheritance from the wreckage of the multinational empire.

As we shall see, this project had supporters and opponents in interwar Czechoslovakia owing to the ambiguous legacy of the empire’s Czech-speaking regiments. Therefore, we will begin in the late Habsburg era and examine two parallel discourses surrounding army regiments: one in which they served as vehicles for imperial propaganda and a second that framed certain regiments as “national” institutions. Next, we will look at the complex history of Czech-speaking regiments during World War I and their eventual deployment, under the Czechoslovak flag, in the young republic’s postwar border conflicts. The second part of the article then tackles the development of Czechoslovak military tradition. Here, we focus in particular on regimental veterans’ groups, which served as the chief interlocutors and translators of Habsburg regimental history for a Czech national audience. Part three concludes with an investigation of the process by which the Czechoslovak army eventually adopted the history of the empire’s Czech-speaking regiments as its own.

Between Nation and Empire: Czech-Speaking Regiments in the Habsburg Army

In the late Habsburg empire, military tradition served the needs of imperial state building. In 1867, after two unsuccessful wars and an ensuing political crisis, the Habsburg empire split into two separate halves: “Austria” and “Hungary.”8 While continuing to recognize the monarchical authority of the Habsburg dynasty, the two halves of “Austria-Hungary” were now legislatively and administratively independent of each other, with both halves having an elected parliament and governing cabinet. One of the few empire-wide institutions to survive this split was the Austro-Hungarian “Joint Army,”9 which continued to recruit soldiers from both halves of the monarchy and which was overseen by the Imperial War Ministry in Vienna. Many elites, such as Archduke Albrecht, thus touted the army as the “last cohesive ligament of the split-up monarchy.”10 Military tradition became an important arena for instantiating this claim, and the final third of the nineteenth century witnessed an explosion of interest in military Traditionspflege (the cultivation of tradition).11 Military symbols and celebrations conveyed a vision of the past that emphasized the army’s historical devotion to the Habsburg dynasty and the unified Habsburg “Fatherland.” Some tradition projects, such as the rechristening of Vienna’s armory collection as the more ambitious “Army Museum” in 1891, aimed at a broad civilian audience.12

Within the military, this project of renewal-through-tradition manifested primarily at the regimental level. This is unsurprising since, as one commentator wrote in 1861, “the history of our army lies in its regiments; in the individual regiments reside the elements of that immense moral force which is called the spirit of the Austrian army.”13 While the regiment had always been a pillar of Habsburg army culture, conscious efforts to cultivate regimental tradition increased dramatically in the late nineteenth century. Alongside its customary function as the focus of soldiers’ collective military identity, the regiment took on a second, more overtly political function. As another commentator observed during this period, regimental tradition projects contributed to the army’s goal of creating not just “internally competent warriors,” but also “loyal, contented subjects” inoculated against the “corrosive influence of modern subversive ideas.”14

One indicator of the regiment’s growing importance in the late nineteenth century is the upsurge in published regimental histories, since, to fulfill their dual military and political functions, regiments needed to codify their own mythical pasts.15 As the Vienna War Archive journal proclaimed in its inaugural 1876 issue,

there is hardly any means more suitable for lifting the military spirit, for invigorating the most noble warrior virtues—love of Kaiser and Fatherland, loyalty to the flag, courage, and willingness to sacrifice—than a glance backward on the glorious past of the unit to which the soldier belongs as a family member…16

The same article then provided practical guidelines on the style, content, and structure of an ideal regimental history. With this sort of technical support and subsidized printing costs at court publishing houses,17 Austria-Hungary saw 198 new regimental histories published between 1860 and 1906, compared with only 24 in the preceding half decade.18 To supplement these tomes, which were usually written in German (the army’s official language of command), many regiments published abridged versions for use by the common soldier. Written in the soldiers’ native languages and focusing on acts of bravery by the humble infantryman, these volumes were often distributed to soldiers to mark special regimental occasions, such as the dedication of a new battle flag.19 As one commentator wrote in 1899, presenting soldiers with this sort of material offered a necessary corrective to public-school education, which the author considered overly fixated on local or national affairs. It was through army and regimental history, he argued, that soldiers would be exposed to “real history,” that is, “the history of the whole monarchy” (Gesammt-Monarchie).20 If, as many hoped, the army was to become a true “school of the peoples,” then its regiments would be the classrooms.21

Yet while military elites idealized the regiment as an engine of imperial patriotism, there existed a parallel discourse in which the regiment embodied local or regional particularisms.22 The origins of this discourse lay in the late eighteenth century, during which Austria’s regiments were “territorialized,” that is, tied to specific recruiting districts. Thus, by the late nineteenth century, many Bohemian regions had been home to the same regiment for nearly a century. The 35th Infantry Regiment, for example, had made its home in the city of Plzeň since 1771.23 To be sure, for most of the nineteenth century, the army purposely stationed most regiments far from their home districts.24 Nevertheless, these units saw generations of local men pass through their ranks, and as a result, they often became popular symbols of local or regional identity. Both inside and outside the ranks, colorful nicknames like the 28th Regiment’s Pražské děti (Children of Prague) expressed the local character of particular units.

The territorialized nature of Habsburg regiments also tended to give them certain ethnolinguistic profiles. By 1914, the Bohemian lands were home to around forty infantry regiments, a few of which were quite homogeneous. Examples here include the mostly Czech-speaking 102nd and mostly German-speaking 73rd from south-central and northwestern Bohemia, respectively. But most Bohemian regiments, especially those recruited from districts along the Czech-German “language frontier,” included both Czech-speaking and German-speaking soldiers in varying ratios.25 Even in these “mixed” regiments, administrators tried to organize soldiers into linguistically homogeneous subunits (i.e., battalions or companies). By requiring soldiers to select their preferred language and then organizing them accordingly, this practice encouraged soldiers to think of themselves in increasingly national terms.26 This policy also affected public perception of local regiments. As Tamara Scheer has argued, regiments were often “not regarded publicly as Habsburg supra-national entities, but were identified by their regimental languages as, for example, Czech, German, or Hungarian.”27 For Bohemia’s mixed regiments, this sort of national coding proved more complex. South Bohemia’s 75th Regiment, comprising about 80 percent Czech speakers and 20 percent German speakers, provides an interesting example. When the regiment received a new battle flag in 1912, the ceremony included a rendition of the Czech national hymn “Kde domov můj” (Where is My Homeland?) by the regimental band. But later, at a luncheon for military and civilian VIPs, one speaker pointed out that “both of the local district’s nationalities serve in the home regiment.” He continued by expressing hope that “the harmony of both nations represented in the regiment should shine as an example for the harmony of both nations inhabiting our beautiful homeland.”28 In this way, people often discussed Habsburg regiments, whether homogeneous or mixed, in terms of their “national” profile.

These parallel discourses of the regiment—as embodiments of empire or nation—were not necessarily mutually exclusive. Even among military intellectuals, some suggested that celebrating regiments’ national character strengthened their ability to popularize imperial patriotism at the local level.29 Regimental ceremonies, popular fixtures of the festival calendar, lend credence to this argument. In 1883, for example, Mladá Boleslav’s Czech-speaking 36th Regiment marked its 200th jubilee with an extravagant, weekend-long ceremony. In a printed address prior to the event, the city’s mayor encouraged citizens to help celebrate their “homeland regiment,” which “has our sons [and] our brothers in its ranks.”30 On the day of the jubilee, inhabitants responded eagerly to the mayor’s call and thronged the streets in their thousands. Some adorned their homes with banners reading “To the success of the 36th Regiment!” and “God bless the arms of our regiment!”31 Crown Prince Rudolf attended the event, having served with the 36th from 1878 to 1880, and his presence lent it an air of imperial majesty. The nationally oriented regional newspaper Jizeran responded well to the event, noting that “our people [lid] has merged with the military to such an extent that it took this military celebration as its own and made it into a national celebration.” At night, the report continued, “a national celebration in the truest sense of the word” took place. Fueled by music from the regimental band and beer dispensed at tents for each of the regiment’s companies, soldiers and civilians celebrated well into the night.32 Public celebrations of this kind demonstrated the regiment’s capacity to embody local and national pride within an overarching imperial framework.

At the same time, particularly in the immediate prewar decades, Czech-speaking regiments increasingly found themselves the subjects of controversy. Around the turn of the century, Bohemia’s increasingly polarized nationality politics induced bouts of public unrest during which Czech-speaking formations sometimes refused orders to pacify protestors.33 In 1898, Prague’s 28th Regiment also generated controversy after three of its reservists responded to their commanding officer with the Czech word zde (present) rather than the prescribed German response hier at an annual muster. This provocation, for which the soldiers in question received two days’ confinement, became a cause célèbre for Czech politicians, who, by vigorously defending the accused, sought to solidify their nationalist credentials among the voting public.34 During partial army mobilizations in 1908 and 1912 intended to cow neighboring Serbia, several Czech-speaking formations refused to board troop trains and were declared to be in a state of mutiny. Motivating factors here included pan-Slavist sentiment—that is, antipathy toward war with the “brother” nation of Serbia—as well as local squabbles between Czech-speaking and German-speaking soldiers.35 Yet while soldiers usually held back from criticizing the empire or dynasty, per se, military officials increasingly associated Czech-speaking regiments with disloyalty and disobedience.

The outbreak of war in 1914 sharpened these suspicions. In the spring of 1915 on the eastern front, significant elements of Prague’s 28th and Mladá Boleslav’s 36th Regiment allegedly deserted en masse to Russian lines. At the time, military investigators explained this behavior as a function of the Czech soldier’s inherent disloyalty, and, after two centuries of service, both historic units were disbanded. But as recent scholarship has shown, these “mass desertions” often had less to do with nationalism or disloyalty and much more to do with poor logistics and planning, which left the accused regiments in untenable military positions.36 Indeed, it was the military’s overzealous reaction to these events that tended to sharpen soldiers’ national grievances. One method used by the military involved reducing the percentage of Czech speakers in individual units. This meant assigning new recruits not to their local regiments, but to supposedly more “dependable” ones—usually German-speaking or Hungarian-speaking units.37 Reducing the proportion of Czech-speaking soldiers also meant diluting traditionally Czech-dominated units. In 1914, for example, Čáslav’s 21st Regiment was 80 percent Czech-speaking, but by 1918, this figure had dropped to 75 percent.38 This experiment often had unintended consequences. Assigning soldiers to regiments dominated by speakers of a different language tended to exaggerate their perceptions of national difference, which were even further inflamed in the later war years, as worsening supplies caused some to associate access to provisions (or lack thereof) with certain national groups.39 Nevertheless, in spite of mass casualties, dwindling supplies, continued outbreaks of insubordination, and the intensification of rank-and-file nationalism, Czech-speaking regiments proved themselves generally capable. This was particularly true on the Italian front, where pan-Slavist critiques of the war had less purchase.40 In 1917, the Italian 3rd Army issued a report to subcommanders warning them not to assume that Slavic units would present easy targets. The report mentioned Czechs in particular, noting that they “defend themselves with unrivaled tenacity and would rather let themselves be killed in the trenches […] than surrender.”41 By one account, soldiers of south Bohemia’s 91st Regiment had a particularly fearsome reputation among the Italians, earning them the nickname “Green Devils” on account of their green regimental facings.42

In October 1918, as the empire reached its breaking point and national governments began to emerge across the Habsburg imperial space, these new states’ competing territorial claims led to new conflicts. In Prague, the new government faced a German separatist movement in the western borderlands, Polish claims to the contested city of Těšín, and a Hungary determined to hold its Slovak territories. In desperate need of troops, Prague made extensive use of Czech-speaking Habsburg formations returning from the front. In a few cases, entire Habsburg regiments escaped the collapsing front in good order and placed themselves at Prague’s disposal. Such was the case for west Bohemia’s 88th Regiment, for example. During its return voyage from the Balkan front, the regiment’s Czech-speaking personnel deposed their commander and elected a reserve officer to take his place. Swapping their Habsburg army badges for cockades in the red-white colors of Bohemia, they also decided to part ways with their German-speaking regimental comrades and proceed as a “Czech” regiment in the service of the new government.43 In other instances, like that of the 75th, the brunt of the field regiment fell captive during the Italians’ last-minute Vittorio Veneto offensive.44 In such cases, only the regiments’ reserve battalions made it home, where they then served as skeleton formations for the construction of new field units.

Whatever the specific circumstances, these formerly Habsburg units came to comprise the so-called “domestic army” and, with orders from Prague, they helped pacify the German separatist borderlands. By December 1918, elements of the Czechoslovak Legions began to trickle home and join the “domestic army” in the field. After a brief showdown with Polish troops over the fate of Těšín, this composite Habsburg-Legionnaire army deployed to Slovakia, which had been claimed by both Prague and Budapest. The 1919 battle for Slovakia pitted the ad hoc Czechoslovak forces against a relatively well-organized Hungarian army and, while the conflict was ultimately decided in Czechoslovakia’s favor by Allied intervention, the campaign nevertheless exposed severe organizational weaknesses in the improvised Habsburg-Legionnaire army. Through the winter of 1919–20, in an attempt to place the improvised army on a more permanent organizational footing, the Czechoslovak Ministry of National Defense oversaw a process of army “unification.”45 During this process, fifty-one formerly Habsburg regiments amalgamated with twenty-one formerly Legionnaire regiments to form forty-eight brand-new Czechoslovak regiments.46 For the remainder of the interwar period, these forty-eight units, with institutional origins in the regiments of old Austria, formed the main combat branch of the Czechoslovak army.

As we have seen in this first section, the history of the Habsburg empire’s Czech-speaking regiments is one of ambiguity. On the one hand, regimental tradition became an important vehicle for Habsburg “Fatherland” propaganda in the late nineteenth century. Yet these same regiments often became equally important embodiments of Czech national pride at the local level. Within the ranks, regimental linguistic practice tended to increase soldiers’ sense of national self-identification, while controversial acts of insubordination—and their politicization by Czech nationalist parties—earned Czech-speaking regiments a reputation as “unreliable.” The war introduced its own ambiguities. Highly publicized instances of “mass desertion” seemed to confirm military elites’ worst suspicions regarding Czech-speaking regiments, even as some of these units proved to be model combat formations. Finally, in 1918 and 1919, formerly imperial regiments provided a central element of Prague’s improvised national army and, after 1920, the institutional basis of the permanent Czechoslovak army itself. Embodying both empire and nation, the old Czech-speaking regiments of the Habsburg army created interpretive controversy in the new republic.

War Veterans and the Nationalization of Habsburg Regimental History

Like their Habsburg counterparts several decades earlier, Czechoslovak state builders understood the political benefits of a well-articulated body of military tradition. While official Habsburg military tradition conveyed a historical vision of loyalty to dynasty and Fatherland, the nascent Czechoslovak army was to embody the principles of democracy and national self-determination that had legitimized the Republic’s creation. Thus, the army looked to the wartime Czechoslovak Legions as its chief wellspring of historical identity.47 First organized in 1914 by émigré Czechs living in Russia and later bolstered by Czech-speaking and Slovak-speaking volunteers from Russian POW camps, the Legionnaire units eventually saw service with the French, Italian, and Russian armies. Having taken up arms against the empire during the World War, the Legionnaires best exemplified Czech national resistance to Habsburg rule and were widely understood as having played the key role in securing Czechoslovak independence. In popular culture, the Legions were also seen as the direct predecessors to the postwar Czechoslovak army.48 In a process Martin Zückert has labeled the “state invention of military tradition,” the Ministry of National Defense created a number of memory institutions to cultivate this mythology.49 New army traditions such as holidays, unit designations, and the uniforms of the Prague Castle honor guard were designed to reflect the army’s Legionnaire origins.50 For a civilian audience, the Legionnaire veterans became paragons of citizenship and masculinity, and their privileged “national warrior” status was underscored by public commemoration, political access, and generous social benefits.51

The state’s invention of Czechoslovak military tradition thus promulgated an exclusive vision of Czech military identity. The Czech soldier worthy of emulation was one who had striven for political independence and who had resisted foreign (i.e., “Habsburg”) domination. The 1935 speech by President Beneš that opened this article made essentially the same claim. The Czech soldier in Habsburg uniform may have been a competent warrior, but he had not contributed to the project of Czech independence as had, for example, the Legionnaires or Hussites. Embedded within this distinction was a state-centric, teleological understanding of history in which the struggle for statehood gave conceptual unity to an otherwise disjointed Czech military identity. Thus, in terms of official tradition, the centuries of Czech service in the Habsburg military became something of a historical black hole.

In this context of institutional amnesia, custodianship of Habsburg regimental history passed into the hands of Habsburg war veterans. Numbering at least one million, Czechoslovakia’s Habsburg veterans were a socially, politically, and ethnolinguistically diverse population with an equally diverse range of veterans’ groups. Some veterans’ groups organized on the basis of a specific political ideology, while others relied on a shared sense of unique victimhood (there were, for example, groups for war invalids and former POWs).52 Of interest here are those veterans who continued to value their Habsburg regimental affiliations and participated in veterans’ groups based on these shared identities.

The Czech regimental veterans’ movement can be roughly divided into two phases, coterminous with the two interwar decades. During the 1920s, Czech regimental groups were small, few in number, and disunified. Early examples include groups dedicated to Prague’s 28th and Mladá Boleslav’s 36th. At this point, though, Czech regimental groups paled in comparison to those of German-speaking veterans centered primarily in north Bohemia.53 Wary of these German groups in particular, some military officials requested a ban on regimental organizing. After the administration refrained from a general ban, both Czech and German regimental groups were permitted to operate, though under government observation (see section three). Still, the number and size of Czech regimental groups remained low. This lack of interest, which was mostly self-imposed among Czech-speaking veterans, changed dramatically around the late 1920s. As historian Jiří Hutečka has suggested, the worldwide economic depression caused many veterans to lose their jobs and breadwinner status, which encouraged many to reappraise their wartime service in search of a lost sense of masculine pride. Simultaneously, the rise of Nazi Germany and the threat of another major war encouraged many Czech-speaking veterans to position themselves as sage witnesses to the last great European conflict.54

This conceptual sea change resulted in an explosion of Czech Habsburg regimental groups. In south Bohemia, veterans of the 75th Regiment established an organization in 1932 that by 1936 had grown to 1,347 members and eight local chapters.55 Veterans of the 102nd Regiment, meanwhile, organized a large association that eventually included 24 local chapters and 3,467 members.56 This association even published its own monthly newsletter, Stodruhák (One-hundred-seconder). Western Bohemia’s 88th Regiment also saw efforts to organize veterans. In 1934, the group’s first annual reunion was attended by around 1,000 former 88ers, and within a few years the 88th Regiment association had several local chapters and a central administrative group in Prague. The 75th, 88th, and 102nd regimental groups are the most well-documented, but certainly not the only ones, and around a dozen Czech regimental groups cropped up throughout Czechoslovakia during this period. A particularly important development for the Czech regimental veterans’ movement was the creation of an umbrella federation, the Kamarádské sjednocení (Comradeship Union), in 1935. Uniting some half dozen Czech regimental groups, including the 75th and 88th groups mentioned above, the Union also put out a monthly (later bi-monthly) journal called Kamarádství (Comradeship), which served the regimental veterans’ movement as a central discussion forum.57 By printing associational news and excerpts of regimental history from the union’s many subordinate associations, Kamarádství not only encouraged the creation of additional regimental groups, but also helped weld diverse regimental narratives into a well-articulated and relatively coherent veterans’ discourse.

This sort of organizing, based on shared regimental affiliation, reflected specific impulses and concerns, which in turn produced a unique sort of veterans’ activism. For one, regimental organizing reflected a desire to socialize among former comrades. While veterans’ groups of all stripes referenced “comradeship” ubiquitously, it often served as a byword for an idealized “frontline” experience in which social, political, and religious differences had ostensibly disappeared in the face of mortal danger.58 Within the regimental movement, though, “comradeship” took on a more concrete meaning. Regimental comrades were often those with whom one had shared trench sectors or, as one German-language regimental history put it, “the last bite, the last sip.”59 As a Czech-speaking veteran wrote for Kamarádství in 1933, regimental comrades who had served at different points in the war or in separate companies nevertheless shared an indelible regimental bond: “membership in the same regiment inspires mutual confidence, even if there had not been any previous acquaintance.”60 This was especially important since many regiments, with a full combat strength of around 4,000 men and officers, saw four or five times that number of men pass through their ranks during the war.61

The regiment also framed veterans’ experiences of war, creating highly localized memory communities within which certain names, places, or dates conjured worlds of unique shared images and experiences. Within the 102nd Regiment association, for example, the regiment’s participation in the disastrous crossing of the Drina River on September 8 and 9, 1914, held special significance as a uniquely horrifying experience and became a concrete point of postwar commemoration.62 As a narrative device, the regiment also helped ex-soldiers demystify their disjointed memories of combat. After the war, the writing and reading of regimental war narratives helped the individual veteran contextualize his own role in the wider war by situating the regiment (and thus the ex-soldier himself) within the proper tactical and operational contexts.63 Nearly every regimental veterans’ group engaged in the production of regimental histories, which they published in single-volume books or, more commonly, monthly newsletters. Contributing to regimental histories or newsletters allowed veterans to articulate individualized war experiences within the context of a comprehensible war narrative and a meaningful collective identity that they themselves controlled.

Herein lay the regiment’s most important function for Czech-speaking Habsburg veterans. Unable to claim Legionnaire status and invoke Czechoslovakia’s hegemonic “national warrior” archetype, Habsburg veterans encountered a public culture that ascribed little significance to their wartime sacrifices. This exclusionary war discourse was more than a matter of pride and was in fact inscribed onto Czechoslovakia’s welfare code, with the result that the vast majority of former Habsburg servicemen were not entitled to the same benefits enjoyed by their Legionnaire counterparts.64 When Habsburg veterans did appear in public discourse, their experiences were usually reduced to “forced and senseless suffering” endured while in “foreign service.”65 With Czech-speaking Habsburg veterans trapped between two archetypes—one that was highly desirable but inaccessible and a second that reduced their sacrifices to “senseless suffering”—the ability to craft a unique regimental identity allowed veterans to ascribe significance to their war experiences on their own terms.

In the first issue of Stodruhák, the monthly newsletter of the 102nd Regiment veterans’ association, one of its editors declared that, “it will be up to us to inform the public how our regiment conducted itself during the war and how it contributed to the liberation of our homeland.”66 In addition to the 102nd’s wartime record, the association also inherited responsibility for the regiments’ deeper history, and Stodruhák frequently published pieces by veterans who had served with the peacetime 102nd during the 1880s and 1890s. While the 102nd was a young regiment, only created in 1883, other Czech-speaking regiments had histories that stretched back to the eighteenth and even seventeenth centuries. Regardless of the age of the unit in question, constructing a regiment-based veteran’s identity involved the blending of history and memory, with both subjected to veterans’ collective control and reinterpretation.

That the onus to preserve the history of the 102nd and other Czech-speaking regiments fell on the shoulders of their former members meant that these men also had the freedom, collectively, to shape that history however they pleased. Herein lies the most important factor explaining the nationalization of Habsburg regimental history in interwar Czechoslovakia. Marginalized in a society where wartime service attained real significance only if it had contributed to national liberation, many Habsburg veterans attempted to “link their wartime experience to the story of the victorious Czech nation.”67 While Habsburg army veterans could never attain a “national warrior” status on par with the Legionnaires, they could at least craft useable identities as 28ers, 36ers, 75ers, 88ers, 102ers, etc. As a result, the very people most motivated to cultivate Habsburg regimental history were those who also intended to use their regimental identities for demonstrating the national significance of their forgotten sacrifices.

In other words, by emphasizing certain elements of their units’ prewar, wartime, and postwar histories, veterans hoped to fashion new and thoroughly nationalized regimental identities. Central to this project of reimagination was establishing the historical “Czechness” of certain regiments within the Habsburg military. Veterans asserted that service in Czech-speaking regiments had insulated soldiers against the denationalizing impulses of the wider Habsburg army. A veteran-authored history of the 36th Regiment, published in 1923, argued that the 36th had been a space where there had been no need to hide Czech national sentiment: “The regiment was purely Czech and the ‘lads’ did not have to fear that they would be ratted out, and therefore loosened the reins on their national sentiment at every opportunity.”68 Other veterans argued that the atmosphere of linguistic homogeneity within certain units even helped to “rescue” prodigal Czechs who had been lost to “Germanization.” As an older veteran wrote in 1933, remembering his time in the ranks during the early 1880s: “Within the 102nd regiment, the men were purely Czech up to the rank of sergeant—there might be 1–2 Germans in the company, but these were Germanized sons of Czech families who, in a few short weeks, quickly acclimatized to Czech attitudes and learned [to speak] Czech.”69

In some cases, veterans connected their regiment’s Czechness with local or regional identities. Jan Vošta, chairman of the 75th Regiment association, prefaced a 1936 regimental scrapbook by arguing that the shared south Bohemian heritage of the regiment’s soldiers had helped bind them together during the war. As casualties mounted, he wrote, the 75er at the front had been joined by “his father and his brother […] blood of the same blood, sons of the same part of south Bohemia.”70 Another 75er, in an essay on the regiment’s wartime commander František Schöbl, fondly remembered how Schöbl had once given a speech to the men that began by addressing them as “South Bohemian soldiers, descendants of the Hussites, Seventy-fivers!” The author remembered the speech as an “historical moment” when a “Czech officer, even though in Austrian service, was able to awaken in us a feeling of national and state tradition.”71 Here, the 75th was made a symbol of south Bohemia’s special place within Czech military heritage and an embodiment of the Hussite revolutionary tradition.

Veterans also took care to frame their former regiments as having been bastions of Czech resistance to Habsburg imperial aims. As we saw above, the fin-de-siecle decades’ fraught domestic politics and a series of partial army mobilizations occasioned several instances of mutiny in predominantly Czech-speaking regiments. When the army mobilized in 1908 during the Bosnian Annexation Crisis, for example, elements of the 36th Regiment had been declared in mutiny after soldiers refused to board troop trains. “The incident,” 36er veterans claimed in their 1923 regimental history, “was a welcome opportunity for certain circles to demonstrate their disfavor towards every Czech regiment and ours in particular.”72 In the hands of veterans, of course, the “disfavor” of Habsburg military circles became a badge of national honor. Veterans also mythologized instances where Czech-speaking regiments had refused to carry out internal policing duties against their co-nationals. An older veteran of the 102nd Regiment, remembering his service during the 1890s, celebrated the 102ers’ refusal to use rifle or bayonet against street demonstrators during Prague’s 1897 riots. Thanks to instances like this one, he insisted, “Czech cities liked to see conscious Czech regiments in their garrisons.”73

In addition to these prewar incidents, veterans celebrated acts of national “resistance” during the war itself. Members of the former 75th Infantry Regiment, for example, lionized their subversive role in the famous 1917 battle of Zborov. At Zborov, the Russian army had made use of independent Czechoslovak Legionnaire brigades for the first time, scoring a decisive victory over opposing Habsburg forces—among them the 75th. In Czechoslovakia, the date of the Zborov engagement (July 2) became “Army Day,” a holiday for celebrating the Legionnaires’ contributions to independence and the Legionnaire origins of the new army.74 Hoping to capitalize on the mystique surrounding Zborov, veterans of the 75th Regiment framed their defeat by the Legionnaires as the product of intentional, nationally minded resistance. According to former 75ers, the regiment’s Czech-speaking soldiers had voluntarily ceded their positions at Zborov, allowing themselves to be captured by the attacking Legionnaires without firing a shot, thereby contributing to Legionnaire victory.75

As they reconceptualized their regimental identities and sought to make them more “Czech,” veterans returned again and again to this theme of resistance. Tying together memories of the prewar period and the war itself, veterans commemorated their old regiments as islands of Czech nationalism within the Habsburg military. This narrative strategy was popular because it coincided with the hegemonic ideal of Czech military identity based on anti-Habsburg struggle. But as the example of the 75ers and Zborov illustrates, this strategy often required veterans to embrace a “passive” form of resistance that paled in comparison to more proactive forms of resistance embodied by the Legionnaires. Adopting the resistance narrative meant ceding traditional notions of martial masculinity and embracing such unmilitary acts as desertion, refusal of orders, or willful surrender.76 For most of the 1920s, veterans were willing to make this compromise in order to carve a space for themselves within Czechoslovakia’s official culture of war remembrance. In the 1930s, however, regimental activists were more willing to scour their regiments’ histories for positive examples of Czech military virtue, even if these deeds had been done under the Habsburg banner. Following this impulse, veterans reappraised conflicts of the past in a way that allowed for the occasional confluence of “Czech” with “Habsburg” interests. Regimental histories published during the 1930s, for example, often celebrated the early-modern Habsburg-Ottoman wars as an acceptable collaboration between Czech soldiers and their Habsburg overlords in defense of Europe.77

Rehabilitating memories of the distant past was one thing, but veterans in the 1930s also reconceptualized their regiments’ contributions during the World War itself. Reflecting new emphases on dutiful wartime service was a series of museum exhibitions staged by regimental veterans’ groups in the mid-1930s. Rather than shying away from the Habsburg soldier’s war experience, these exhibitions placed weapons, maps, medals, trophies, and other combat artefacts directly before the Czechoslovak public. A 1936 exhibition put on by veterans of the former 88th Regiment, installed at the Beroun city museum, even included a full-scale replica trench.78 A much larger exhibition staged that same year in Prague brought together individual installations organized by veterans of the 21st, 28th, 36th, 88th, and 102nd Regiments. During its brief run at the Holešovice exhibition grounds, this display of regimental militaria was attended by an estimated 80,000 visitors and was even recommended to active-duty troops by Prague’s garrison commander.79

In addition to the prewar era and the war itself, veterans highlighted the period between October 1918 and the summer of 1919, when their regiments had fought in Czechoslovakia’s brief postwar border conflicts. As Hutečka has argued, this 1918–19 moment was central to the project of reimagining the role of Czech-speaking veterans.80 For those involved in the regimental movement, it was also central to cultivating a national mythology for their old units. As noted in the preface to the 75th Regiment essay collection from 1936,

The question arises: If the 75th Regiment as a whole performed its duty so well throughout the entire duration of the war despite a series of debacles, reestablished and replenished again and again, how would its sons and grandsons perform their duty […] once it was no longer defending a foreign dynasty, but rather, within the framework of the Czechoslovak Republic, its native [home region of] Jindřichův Hradec and Tábor? They gave a clear answer to this question in 1919 at Těšín and in Slovakia[.]81

 

Here, the 75ers deemphasized the “resistance” model and argued instead that theirs had been a regiment of model martial resilience under the Habsburgs. Even so, they claimed, the regiment’s latent national fervor remained untapped until 1918, when it deployed alongside the Legionnaires in defense of the republic’s threatened borders. For the 75ers—and the regimental veterans’ movement more broadly—the postwar border conflicts came to represent a long-awaited moment of apotheosis when Czech-speaking regiments were finally able to demonstrate their full military potential in pursuit of national rather than “foreign” aims.

Regimental Continuity and Czechoslovak Military Tradition

As we have seen, nationalizing the history of the empire’s Czech-speaking regiments offered Habsburg veterans a means with which to claim their own status as warriors for the nation. To self-identify as a former 36er, 75er, or 102er was to claim membership in a historically “Czech” military community that, while created to serve a “foreign” dynasty and empire, had nevertheless contributed to the Czech national cause before, during, and after World War I. In the remaining pages, I examine the Czechoslovak army’s gradual acceptance and recognition of this vision. Here, too, regimental veterans’ groups provided a vital interlocutory role. By establishing close ties with their Czechoslovak “successor” units, these groups came to embody a certain continuity between the regiments of the old empire and those of the new republic.

This convergence was neither preordained nor without opposition. For one, while institutional continuities seemed to create a predecessor-successor relationship between Habsburg and Czechoslovak regiments, this concept had no weight in official tradition. As mentioned above, the Czechoslovak army began its life as an improvised force consisting primarily of formerly Habsburg and formerly Legionnaire regiments. In light of severe organizational shortcomings exposed during the 1919 Slovak campaign, the Ministry of National Defense mandated the unifikace (unification) of these Habsburg and Legionnaire units in early 1920. Resulting in forty-eight new “Czechoslovak” regiments, this process preserved many elements of the Habsburg regimental system. Czechoslovak recruiting districts, for example, more or less mirrored those in force before 1914 while, of the forty-eight new Czechoslovak regiments, thirteen carried on the same regimental numbers as their imperial predecessors.82

With the benefit of hindsight, modern-day assessments tend to interpret the 1920 unification as a conscious and ultimately successful effort to preserve continuity at the regimental level.83At the time, though, the impulse to downplay the Czechoslovak army’s Habsburg legacy problematized these continuities, and there were many in the Czechoslovak military who completely rejected any relationship between Habsburg regiments and their Czechoslovak successors. In official terms, Czechoslovak regiments were not considered successors to the old imperial regiments at all, only to the “domestic army” regiments that had emerged from them during the imperial army’s collapse. As military publicist Karel Teringl wrote in 1938, for a twentieth-anniversary retrospective on Czechoslovak army tradition: “Since our regiments are not continuations of Austro-Hungarian regiments, and have no internal relationship to them, they began to form their own tradition from the moment they were created, that is, after the revolution…”84

Officially, then, there existed a legalistic conceptual barrier across 1918 that severed Czechoslovak army regiments from their Habsburg forebears. Consider the case of the Czechoslovak 35th Regiment, created in 1920 through the unification of the Habsburg 35th and the Legionnaire 35th. In addition to the continuity in unit designation, the new Czechoslovak 35th was, like its predecessor had been since 1771, stationed in the west Bohemian city of Plzeň. Despite the obvious continuities, incorporating the history of the old 35th was made conceptually difficult. In 1930, in an attempt to “awaken and deepen” soldiers’ “grasp of the regiment’s military tradition,” officers decided to furnish the 35th’s regimental canteen with a plaque honoring its fallen members. Seeking approval for the project from the Ministry of National Defense, the organizers were careful to note that the plaque would commemorate “those members of the regiment who fell in battles for the liberation of our homeland and the defense of its integrity—battles in Italy, at Těšín, and in Slovakia.”85 The many Plzeňers who had fallen in service with the old imperial 35th did not count among this number. Thus, while unification preserved a level of institutional continuity between Habsburg and Czechoslovak regiments, that continuity did not necessarily translate into the realm of official tradition.

Meanwhile, during the early 1920s, Czechoslovak military officials maintained a deep suspicion of the nascent regimental veterans’ movement. By the mid-1920s, German-speaking veterans concentrated in north Bohemia had constructed a well-organized network of at least half a dozen individual regimental groups.86 It was largely in response to these German groups that the Czechoslovak state first took notice of Habsburg regimental organizations. As early as February of 1923, senior military officials met in Prague to discuss the growing problem of regimental veteran organizing.87 Military officials feared that the real purpose of German regimental groups was to maintain contact among former comrades so that these units could be “reactivated” in the event of a Habsburg war of restoration or a border conflict with Germany or Austria. As one government report put it wryly in 1925, in the event of a future war “these regimental associations among our Germans […] might prove to be an unpleasant surprise.”88

During this early period, the relatively small and disunified Czech regimental groups were considered equally subversive, but for different reasons. Not deemed security threats like their German counterparts, Czech regimental groups still appeared dangerous because, as one report put it, they too served to “revive memories of the former military attitudes under Austria” and threatened “the development of C[zecho]sl[ovak] military tradition.”89 In 1923, the Ministry of National Defense asked the Ministry of the Interior, which regulated associational life and public assembly, to ban Habsburg regimental organizing entirely. While the Ministry of the Interior shied away from this request, the two ministries did begin cooperating to minimize what they saw as the most egregious aspects of regimental veterans’ activism. Throughout the interwar period, the government regularly intervened in the affairs of regimental veterans’ groups, instructing them to excise particular elements of reunion programs or parts of regimental publications.90 Within its own jurisdiction, the Ministry of National Defense had greater freedom of action. In 1923, the Ministry banned active-duty military personnel from participating in or interacting with Habsburg regimental groups, though this ban proved to be quite flexible in practice.91

The result, as far as Czech-speaking regimental groups were concerned, was a process of accommodation between veterans and military officials. An instructive case here is that of the 36th Regiment veterans based in Mladá Boleslav. During the 1920 unification of the Czechoslovak Army, Mladá Boleslav’s 36th Regiment had been redesignated the Czechoslovak 47th Regiment. This change of regimental number, from 36 to 47, elicited powerful reactions from veterans, who allegedly “exhibited dissatisfaction and wonder at why they deprived a regiment with such grand history and tradition of such a dear title.”92 Former members of the regiment spent the early 1920s begging the Ministry of National Defense to return its original number 36. When these attempts failed, the veterans began organizing a mass rally to demonstrate publicly for the regiment’s re-designation. When military administrators learned of this plan, they immediately implored the Ministry of the Interior to ban the event. From their perspective, the event represented a “revival of traditions of the former monarchist army” and was thus “antithetical to present attempts to inculcate a conscious, lively state feeling and loyal allegiance to the Czechoslovak state.”93 The 36er veterans strenuously rejected this interpretation. On March 3, 1924, a police observer sat in on a meeting of reunion organizers and reported that they

consider it their duty to point out that the former infantry regiment no. 36, based in Mladá Boleslav and recruited purely from Czech districts, was never seen by Czech people as a militaristic formation belonging to the Austrian dungeon and Habsburg dynasty, but quite to the contrary, was always a symbol of national consciousness and manful defiance.

 

Later at the same meeting, the organizers further emphasized this point, arguing that their regiment had never been “an instrument by which Czech lads were transformed into unthinking creatures of Austrian militarism.”94

After a series of negotiations involving the event organizers, local administrators, and the Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry of National Defense ultimately gave in. Their consent was given on the condition that the reunion focus not on the 36th Regiment, per se, but on its history of “resistance” to the Habsburg empire. In terms of public branding, then, the event took place as a “Celebration of Resistance by Former Members of the 36th against Former Austria,” rather than the originally intended “Reunion of 36ers.”95 Agreeing to this compromise, the 36ers finally held their reunion in June of 1924 and drew some 25–35,000 attendees. The main event, which was held on a Sunday, included a ceremonial procession of veterans alongside “all local patriotic and national associations.” Most surprisingly, given its recent ban, the Ministry of National Defense even authorized the participation of active-duty Czechoslovak troops. Mladá Boleslav’s 47th Regiment took part in the ceremonies with gusto, treating veterans and locals to demonstrations of “modern assault tactics.”96

To coincide with the reunion, the 36er veterans compiled a ninety-six-page history, which laid out the regiment’s Czech national credentials from its founding in 1683 to the present. True to their word, the veterans who authored the history focused on the 36th’s character as a “purely Czech regiment” as well was its history of rebellious “resistance” to Habsburg imperialist aims. The book’s chapter on World War I, for example, focused entirely on the regiment’s “mass desertion” to the Russians in the spring of 1915. At the same time, the booklet did not shy away from rehabilitating certain positive elements of the regiment’s long history under the Habsburg dynasty. Most surprising, perhaps, was its coverage of 1848–49. During the revolution, the 36th had deployed to Slovakia to battle the Hungarian revolutionary army. In the veteran-authored regimental history, this campaign was recast as “aid to the Slovak national guard against the Magyars.”97 Formulated this way, the regiment’s participation in the dynastic counterrevolution of 1848–49 was reframed as an example of early Czech-Slovak solidarity, with obvious parallels to the 36th Regiment’s more recent involvement in the Slovak campaign of 1919.

In the end, the reunion’s main goal—the renaming of Mladá Boleslav’s 47th Regiment—went unfulfilled, rejected once again by the Ministry of National Defense for “technical and administrative reasons.” Where the reunion did succeed, though, was in popularizing the 36er veterans’ “Czech” version of their own regiment’s history. It also succeeded in establishing a relationship between the 36ers and their 47th Regiment “successor” that continued throughout the interwar period. When the Ministry of National Defense acquiesced to the 36er reunion of 1924, and to the participation of the 47th Czechoslovak Regiment, they framed this decision as a one-time exception to their “fundamental opposition” to Habsburg regimental organizing.98 But by and large, army administrators ignored their own official stance and took a lax approach toward contact between Czech regimental veterans’ groups and active-duty military personnel. Indeed, the following year, when the city of Mladá Boleslav bequeathed a new regimental flag to the 47th, 36er veterans took an active role in the ceremony.

This was itself an important symbolic gesture. During the early and mid-1920s, towns and cities across the republic began commissioning new regimental flags for their local Czechoslovak regiments. Often involving local notables and patriotic societies, the commissioning of new regimental flags was meant to represent the birth of a new army. Indeed, recognizing their symbolic power, the Ministry of National Defense insisted to the country’s town councils that each of the army’s regiments be gifted a new flag in time to celebrate the republic’s tenth anniversary in 1928.99 That veterans of Habsburg regiments often took part in the symbolically weighted dedication ceremonies gave informal sanction to the predecessor-successor relationship. And it is clear that Habsburg regimental veterans’ groups understood the flags of their Czechoslovak successor units to be their collective property too. When veterans of the 75th Regiment held their first annual reunion in 1929, they insisted that their successor unit, the Czechoslovak 29th, be represented at the reunion by a delegation of officers, its regimental colors, and the regimental band. In their letter to the Ministry of National Defense—whose approval they required for such a delegation—the veterans evoked the idea of an unbroken lineage between the Habsburg-era 75th and its 29th Regiment successor. Referencing “brotherly partnership” and the “joyful consolidation of our national army,” the 75ers wrote that “we would feel abandoned at the reunion if we were not able to walk in the shade of our [regimental] banner.”100 On this occasion, as on others, the veterans’ request was granted. Several years later, in 1935, veterans of the Habsburg 102nd Regiment donated a ceremonial ribbon to be affixed to the battle flag of their successor regiment, the Czechoslovak 48th. Following the ribbon ceremony, soldiers of the 48th assembled alongside veterans of the 102nd for a joint inspection by a local brigade commander.101 This desire to foster relations between Habsburg predecessor and Czechoslovak successor regiments was not one-sided either. When the 102nd Regiment veterans’ association held their fifth annual reunion in May 1936, the Czechoslovak 48th Regiment was more than happy to accept honorary chairmanship of the festival committee.102

As the 1920s gave way to the 1930s, Habsburg regimental veterans’ groups became constant fixtures at Czechoslovak army ceremonies. To be sure, many voices within the military community continued to reject the principle of regimental continuity and the army’s embrace of Habsburg regimental veterans’ groups. A 1935 editorial in Vojenský svět (Military World), insisted that the old regiments of Austria-Hungary “are known to our military only as dry numbers.” The author continued by pointing out that “we have our own regiments, which must lie in the hearts of the people more so than the Austrian ones.” In conclusion, he insisted that Habsburg regimental associations were “not something that our public life requires.”103 His recommendation came too late. By this point, even the Ministry of National Defense had begun sending delegations to events hosted by, or in conjunction with, Habsburg regimental associations. In July of 1932, for example, the south Bohemian town of Písek hosted a celebration of its hometown Czechoslovak 11th Regiment. Veterans of its predecessor unit, the Habsburg 11th Regiment, were also in attendance, giving the appearance of a single regimental community that blended the imperial past with the national present. Also in attendance was the Minister of National Defense, Dr. Karel Viškovský, whose address reflected many of the arguments circulating within the regimental veterans’ movement:

It is a wonderful habit of former soldiers to gather and thereby renew their bonds to their regiment. And the “Eleveners” are rightfully proud of their regiment and its history, which was glorious and heroic since the days of old Austria. Even then, the “Eleveners” were not considered Austrians [Rakušany] but were already at that point the nucleus of a future independent nation!

The minister’s further remarks included references to the “famous deeds of the regiment” during the early-modern Ottoman wars as well as its “meritorious” service in the 1919 campaigns for Těšín and Slovakia.104 This speech, given by the republic’s most senior military administrator, was a clear recognition of the attempt by Czech-speaking Habsburg veterans to recast their former regiments as useable symbols of Czech military heritage.

Conclusion

As a mechanism by which states and armies ascribe significance to the past, the creation of military tradition offers a powerful lens through which to observe moments of rupture and reconfiguration.105 In interwar Czechoslovakia, debates about regimental numbers, flags, and lineages reflected much larger questions about the Czech nation’s relationship to its imperial past. From one perspective, the empire was the very antithesis of the national republic, and the history of its Czech-speaking regiments offered little inspiration for the Czechoslovak soldier of the present. This assessment reflected a teleological understanding of history that culminated with the emergence of nation-states and thus marginalized people and institutions not linked to the realization of this project. The countervailing perspective was expressed succinctly by Rudolf Kalhous, a former Habsburg officer and architect of the Czechoslovak army’s 1920 unification. Discussing the Habsburg army’s Czech-speaking regiments in his 1936 memoir, Kalhous wrote that “it is true that they served foreign interests, but it was nevertheless our people [lid] who won these regiments their name and respect.”106 In Kalhous’ eyes, the history of the empire’s Czech-speaking regiments, some of which traced their origins to the early seventeenth century, belonged collectively to the Czech people and deserved recognition in the new army.

Initially rejected by Czechoslovak state builders and military officials, this latter perspective nevertheless gained traction in the later 1920s and 1930s thanks to the motivated activism of Czech-speaking veterans in the Habsburg regimental movement. Sidelined within Czechoslovakia’s culture of commemoration, these veterans sought to change the narrative regarding their wartime service by demonstrating their contributions to the Czech national cause. The result was a symbiotic relationship of sorts: the preservation of Habsburg regimental history depended on marginalized veterans, who in turn relied on regimental history for crafting useable veterans’ identities. In short, Habsburg regimental history “became Czech” during the interwar period because its chief custodians needed it to be so. That this nationalized version of Habsburg regimental history was eventually sanctioned by the Czechoslovak army reflected the willingness of local army commanders and senior defense officials to permit increasingly formal ties between Habsburg regimental groups and their Czechoslovak successor units.

Ultimately, the story of how Habsburg regimental history became Czechoslovak military tradition suggests some limits to radical, post-imperial state building in East-Central Europe. Monopolized in theory by the state, the process of creating military tradition in interwar Czechoslovakia proved surprisingly sensitive to challenges by organized regimental groups. At least at the regimental level, this process was one of accommodation on the part of veterans and military officials alike. These findings also point to the ambiguous role of “nation” as a contemporary framework for interpreting the imperial past. After all, arguments both for and against the incorporation of Habsburg regimental history mobilized the language of nation and reflected specific interpretations of Czech national life under the empire. In a broader regional perspective, then, this case study of Czechoslovakia’s old Habsburg regiments suggests further research on the negotiation of military tradition as a fruitful analytical tool for understanding nation building in East-Central Europe—not only after 1918, but also the region’s many other moments of political caesura.

Archival Sources

Národní archiv [National Archive], Prague (NA)

Czechoslovak Interior Ministry collection

Státní okresní archiv Benešov [State District Archive Benešov], Benešov (SOkA Benešov)

102nd Regiment Veterans’ Association collection (fond no. 1934)

Státní okresní archiv Beroun [State District Archive Beroun], Beroun (SOkA Beroun)

88th Regiment Veterans’ Association collection (fond no. 818)

38th Regiment Flag Dedication Ceremony Organizing Committee collection (fond no. 1326)

Vojenský historický archiv [Military-Historical Archive], Prague (VHA)

Ministry of National Defense collection

Czechoslovak 38th Regiment collection

 

Abbreviations

1. odd. – 1. oddělení (1st Section)

f. – folio

HlŠ – Hlavní štáb (General staff)

Inv. č. – inventární číslo (inventory number)

k. – karton (carton)

MNO – Ministerstvo Národní obrany (Ministry of National Defense)

MV – Ministerstvo vnitra (Interior Ministry)

PMV – Presidium Ministerstva vnitra (Presidium, Interior Ministry)

PO - Památník odboje (Resistance Memorial)

ppl. - pěší pluk (Infantry Regiment)

PZSP – Prezident Zemské správy politické (President of the Political Land Administration)

sign. – signatura

STRP - Státní tajemník u říšského protektora v Čechách a na Moravě (State

Secretariat for the Reichsprotektorat of Bohemia and Moravia)

VO – Vojenské oddělení (Military Section)

ZO – Zpravodajské oddělení (Intelligence Section)

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The Slovak Republic of 1939–1945 was established on the doorstep of the deadliest war in history. It almost immediately became an active participant in the war as an ally of Nazi Germany. Moreover, already in March 1939, Slovakia, just after its foundation, found itself in a military conflict with Hungary. These facts were naturally reflected in all spheres of society, including urban spaces. This study aims to analyze interventions in the public spaces of Slovak towns related to a cult of martyrs. There was strong need to justify the new Slovak Republic’s participation in the war. This need became increasingly pressing, especially after the invasion of the Soviet Union, which met with the disapproval of the majority of the population. I therefore ask how the regime responded to this. I am especially interested in following questions: how were public spaces transformed change in an effort to build a martyr cult before and after the attack on the Soviet Union? Were there significant interventions in connection with this event (the declaration of war against the USSR)? Had the symbol of a martyr or a soldier changed, and if so, how? The study is organized chronologically. I analyze interventions in public spaces during the so-called Little War in March 1939, at the moment of entry into the war against Poland in September 1939, and at the moment of entry into the war against the USSR in June 1941. I examine interventions on architecture-material level which involved the renaming streets and the creation of memorials. I also focus on perceptions of the street as a “stage” for military parades or ceremonies in the course of which soldiers were awarded decorations.

Keywords: interventions, military, nation, politics, public space, Slovak Republic 1939–1945

Introduction

In this article, I aim to analyze efforts by the state to create symbolic embodiments of martyrs and heroes in the period between 1938 and 1945 in Slovakia. With this analysis, I seek to contribute to the discussion of the authoritarian regimes and their propaganda uses of the concepts of martyrdom and heroism in the urban public spaces. I also consider how the participation of the Slovak army in the war as an ally of Nazi Germany affected the public urban spaces. Chronologically, I follow events and interventions in public spaces in Slovak cities in connection with the conflict also known as the Little War with Hungary, the entry into the war against Poland, and the entry into the war against the USSR. The latter (Slovakia’s participation in the war against the USSR) is often cited in Slovak historiography as an important milestone which significantly influenced the moods and attitudes of the majority of Slovak society towards the regime of the Slovak Republic. The regime enjoyed the support of the majority for the first years of its existence, but with its decision to go into war against the USSR, it lost this support. Thus, the following question arises: with its involvement in the war against the Soviet Union, did the regime attempt to make propaganda elements parts of the public urban space, and if so, how? The interventions on which I focus are not limited to the placement of statues and monuments and the renaming of streets, but also include state organized festivities in public spaces, especially military parades and celebrations which involved awarding soldiers decorations.

Historiography and Methodology

In the last few years, public space as a topic of historical research has enjoyed considerable popularity in the region of Central Europe.1 Particular attention has been paid to works dedicated to the creation of historical memory.2 Some of these works also deal with research on public space understood through the perceptions of streets and squares as “stages” or “scenes.”3

In the case of non-democratic regimes, which dominated Central Europe twentieth century (though by no means exclusively), one can speak of the significant impact of politics on public space. According to the hypothesis suggested by urban planners, the development of urban public space was one of the main priorities of nondemocratic regimes.4 The architecture and other symbolic uses of urban spaces in the Third Reich offer ample illustrations of this political practice, as do the symbolic uses of urban space in Soviet Russia at the time.5

The case of Slovak towns in the mid-twentieth century also fits this trend. One finds several works reflecting the relationship between politics and the symbolic uses of public space in Slovak towns during the war, although many of these towns saw only comparatively minor war-related interventions in the human geography of their urban spaces.6 However, there is no comprehensive study which focuses on the relationship between militarization of society and the transformation of public spaces. With this paper, I contribute to the discussion of this topic.

For purpose of my inquiry, I interpret public spaces as sites which can be understood as the opposite of private spaces. They are managed by public institutions and laws, and they are usually accessible to all citizens. They have four metaphorical dimensions: legal, functional, social, and material-symbolic.7

Political regimes are unquestionably aware of the value of public space as visible and accessible sites, and there is clear connection between the ideologies on the basis of which political regimes make their claims to power and the ways in which they use public spaces. The uses of public space are often closely connected to propaganda, a term which I understand as referring to the efforts of the state to shape people’s opinions and manipulate them by disseminating potentially misleading information, presenting arguments, and crafting a symbolic language.8 As Jowett and O’Donnell have noted, propaganda is systematic in its efforts to shape public opinion, and it serves the aims of those who craft it.9

According the Cambridge dictionary, the word martyr means a person who suffers or is killed because of his or her religious or political beliefs and is often admired for having adhered to these beliefs in the face of persecution.10 By this definition, a person can become a martyr (and usually does) immediately after his or her death, but this can also happen later, and a person can be transformed into a martyr by regime and then used as an instrument of political propaganda.11 Research into the relationship between the political regime, the nation, and the martyrdom draws on a rich tradition. In his book Die for Germany: Heroes in the Nazi Pantheon, Jay W. Baird focuses on several strategies that were used to create a cult of martyrs in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. This cult evolved from a unique tradition, nurtured by ancient stories and medieval legends, and the heroic death was perceived as a form of redemption at the time. Through death, the sins of the fathers were to be washed away. Death was cast as the promise of national resurrection. The collective trauma which Germany suffered after World War I was a breeding ground for similar considerations. Finally, as Baird emphasizes, the development of similar notions of heroism in nationalist debates has often stemmed from the a nation’s perceived inferiority and a concomitant feeling of despair.12

Similar parallels are found in Slovak society in this regard. An alleged thousand-year period of Hungarian oppression was one of the key motifs used by Slovak nationalists and historians since the middle of the nineteenth century.13 The feeling of belonging to an oppressed nation persisted in part of Slovak society even in the interwar period. As Adam Hudek points out, the construction of the Slovak national story (not yet fully developed in the interwar period) also contained elements connected to the personification of history through the personalities of the nation’s heroes and martyrs. Of course, this is not unique to the Slovak national narrative. Notions of martyrdom are integral parts of the national stories and national mythologies which spread across Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.14

Public spaces provided a stage where these images could be physically depicted. before the establishment of Czechoslovakia, Hungarian cities were full of urban spaces that were used as sites for the expression and glorification of elements of the various (often competing) national narratives.15

However, as Anton Hruboň points out, the roots of the narratives of martyrdom used by Andrej Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party can be found in connection with Rodobrana.16 Rodobrana was a paramilitary organization of the Slovak People’s Party (later renamed Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party). It was established in January 1923. The organization’s role was to ensure the safety of party members, especially during public gatherings. It was established in January 1923. was known for its catholic and anti-socialist attitudes.

A guide Rodobranecký katechizmus written by Vojtech Tuka17 proclaimed as martyrs e. g. victims of tragedy in Černová,18 fallen Slovak volunteers in the revolution of 1848/184919 or members of the group around Jánošík.20 Hruboň also refers to the relationship between Rodobrana and the cult of martyrdom of Vojtech Tuka, which was related to his imprisonment during the existence of Czechoslovakia.21

Short Preview

The Slovak Republic 1939–1945 was established in March 1939, just a few months before the outbreak of World War II, after the disintegration of Czechoslovakia. The secondary literature contains ample materials on the circumstances of its formation.22 In addition to domestic political reasons, its main engine was Germany’s foreign policy ambitions to redraw the map of Europe, which had been established by the Versailles peace treaties after the World War I. The non-democratic regime in Slovakia was essentially created immediately after the Munich Agreement and Vienna Award, in the autumn of 1938, as a consequence of which Czechoslovakia suffered territorial losses. The Munich Agreement, which made clear the willingness of the Allies to give in to Germany’s territorial demands, transformed the social atmosphere in Slovakia. The destabilization of Czechoslovakia led to the decline of democracy in the country. Authoritarian elements began to come to the fore and remained even after the establishment of an independent Slovakia. This period was characterized by the elimination of political opponents, persecution of minorities, and the introduction of a one-party government.23

Those changes also affected the creation of an autonomous Slovakia. The autonomous Land of Slovakia was formally established by Constitutional Act No. 299/1938 on November 22, 1938. However, the declaration of independence had already been made on October 6, 1938. From the outset, one sees the transformation of the government into an authoritarian regime, as Zuzana Tokárová has argued persuasively in her book. 24 The regime can be characterized as authoritarian with limited political pluralism, a vague ideology, and a lack of political mobilization. However, it gradually took on several totalitarian tendencies. Propaganda played an important role in the strategies used by the emerging regime, for example a propaganda office was established in October, only a few days after declaration of independence. The head of this office was Alexander Mach.25 As Igor Baka mentions, the central aim of the propaganda was to cast the birth of the Slovak state as the result of the efforts of the Slovak nation.26

I argue that the symbol of the martyr was an important part of wartime propaganda in Slovakia, and public spaces provided ideal sites for this propaganda because of their visibility for the inhabitants of and visitors to the cities. The symbol of the martyr, I argue, was used as a motif in narratives intended to prove the oppressive nature of the regimes which, until the creation of an independent Slovakia, had controlled Slovak territory and also to help the regime legitimize its existence and its involvement in the war against Poland and the Soviet Union alongside Germany. If I consider the cult of martyrs as part of propaganda at the time, it should be understood as one element of the systematic attempt to shape public opinion. The cult of the martyr, which was addressed to Slovakia’s Catholic majority, would win support for Slovakia’s involvement in the war as a German ally. I claim these propagandistic interventions in public spaces related to the cult of martyrs can be seen mainly in the social dimension (in the form of celebrations and holidays, military parades, and festivities) and the material-symbolic dimension (the erection of statues and monuments and the renaming of streets). I focus on these two dimensions. As mentioned above, I proceed chronologically, primarily concentrating on county centers (cities where the bureaucratic apparatus of the regime was concentrated).

Slovak Cities and the Rise of the Authoritarian Regime

The authoritarian regime largely determined what was happening in Slovak society, including Slovak cities. After the events of the autumn of 1938, the cities found themselves under new rule and facing new pressures. The liquidation of political opponents was followed by the construction of a new, mostly Slovak urban elite in many towns. The representatives of this elite had the support of the governing Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party. Although it is possible to speak of a certain degree of continuity in the cases of some cities,27 there were significant changes to the ways in which power was exercised. The cities were no longer headed by elected representatives from the democratic elections, but by appointed party representatives. The mayors were replaced by government commissioners, and the city councils were replaced by advisory boards.

The fates of the members of the previous urban councils differed from town to town. Jewish Parties were banned and their members were excluded from the elite.28 Some members of the Christian elite started to cooperate with Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party, while others lived in seclusion or retired. Some of them (for example Bernard Rolfesz, who had served as the mayor deputy in Nitra) ended up in internment camp in Ilava.29 These changes all pointed in the same direction: a more authoritative way of managing the cities.30

These changes significantly affected the nature of interventions to all four aforementioned dimensions of public urban spaces. From the perspective of the legal dimension, public spaces were used and controlled in accordance with the interests of new political actors, which meant the government and the relevant ministries and the new or old-new urban elite. The ideas of these actors were transferred to other dimensions of public space. The interventions also concerned the functional dimension (changes in the uses of public spaces, e. g. the change of a given site from a leisure zone to a zone with a political purpose), the social dimension (political rituals and celebrations), and the material-symbolic dimension (interventions related to ideological motivation, political propaganda, and actual construction activities).31

Building the Regime, Searching for Martyrs, and Intervening in the Public Space

The emerging regime made its first interventions in public spaces immediately at the end of October 1938, when a mass and sudden renaming of streets took place in all major cities. 32 Such an intervention was a means of furthering a change in the political and social paradigm in Slovakia in the public arena. Personalities and events connected with the autonomist movement came to the fore, while personalities connected to the Czech or Czechoslovak social and political visual language had to be erased.33 Personalities who had become significantly involved in the Slovak autonomist movement or who had suffered or been killed because of their national beliefs34 gained importance.

This trend was most pronounced in the city of Prešov in eastern Slovakia. In November 1938, Prešov became the biggest city in eastern Slovakia, taking over the position of Košice.35 The whole region (historically known as Šariš and Zemplín) belonged to the poorest parts of the Czechoslovakia and had only weak historical and cultural ties to the Czechs. Therefore, during the whole interwar period, the city and region had been frequent targets of propaganda in both directions: of propaganda - Pro-Hungarian and anti-Hungarian. This continued after the Vienna Award.36

The new advisory board and its head, government commissioner Alexander Chrappa, decided to rename several streets after the martyrs connected with the region. The streets of martyr Hula, martyr Hanušovský, martyrs Tomášovci, and martyr František Majoch were created here. The nominees were killed either in connection with the activities of the Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party or in connection with activities identified by the regime as “national.”

This use, in the renaming of the streets, of the names of local personalities who had been killed during previous period was part of the propaganda effort aimed against Hungarian oppression and Czech oppression, and it was also intended to prove the loyalty of the new political elite of the city to the autonomous government.

The choice of the martyrs, I would argue, was not accidental. Two streets were renamed after people who had been killed by Hungarian Bolsheviks. Ján and Ondrej Tomášovci (father and son) were killed in 1919 by Hungarian Bolsheviks. František Majoch,37 who served as a Catholic priest in the village of Hermanovce near Prešov, was also killed by Hungarian Bolsheviks in August 1919.38 The other two streets were renamed after young peasants. Ján Hanušovský died in September 1923 during the assembly of the Slovak People’s Party in Košice. The assembly took place in the presence of Andrej Hlinka. The accidental death of Hanušovský was caused by a quarrel between the supporters of Hlinka (members of Rodobrana) and supporters of socialist parties in Košice. Matej Hula died in July 1925 in the village Nižný Šebeš near Prešov. He died accidentally in a fight between villagers and Czech gendarmes.

The Cult of Andrej Hlinka in Ružomberok

In addition to cults of local martyrs, such as the abovementioned cult of martyrs in Prešov (which did not cross the city limits), a cult of Andrej Hlinka was also nurtured. Hlinka was the leading figure in the interwar autonomist movement, and he died less than two months before the “ľudácky” regime came to power. The new regime adored the personality of Hlinka and his political career. He was depicted by the state organs as a suffering martyr, and the image of Hlinka as a martyr became an important element of state propaganda. 39 This cult of Hlinka as a martyr was fully developed even before 1918, and as Roman Holec states, Hlinka consciously built this aura of the martyr and let it built by others.40 The image of Hlinka as someone who had suffered, which was an image shared by a large part of the Slovak public, grew more intense after his death. Autonomous government which took power in Slovakia from in 1938 only continued to build on this legacy. Streets, squares, statues, and memorial plaques dedicated to Andrej Hlinka began to appear in large numbers in public spaces in Slovak cities. The use of in public spaces of depictions of Hlinka as a martyr took place against a background of massive agitation.41 The propaganda, led by Mach, emphasized the importance of remembering Hlinka’s martyrdom in every municipal council in every town and village. According to Mach, “[we should] always have this name in front of our eyes and in our squares and streets ..., so in time, there must be a monument to Andrej Hlinka in every city.42

While the first commitment was easy to fulfill for the cities (especially without financial costs) and perhaps each city had its own Hlinka Street (located mostly in the central part of the city), there were not many monuments dedicated to Hlinka. The propaganda was replaced by the reality of war, and many cities did not have the funds to erect costly monuments.

A monumental building dedicated to Hlinka was created only in Ružomberok, a town in central Slovakia where Hlinka had worked and where he was also buried in August 1938. His mausoleum was built there in 1938–1939. The magnificently conceived building replaced a more modest project. At the initiative of the mayor of Ružomberok, the city took over the financial burden and the technical design of the building.43 Construction was financed using city monies in the amount of 1.5 million Slovak crowns.44 An important message during its construction was that only Slovaks would be employed to erect the building. The designers of the project were city architects and engineers. The local construction company from Ružomberok took care of the construction. Other projects were also launched under Slovak direction. The press did not forget to emphasize that the marble used was also Slovak.45 By publishing the list of local and regional companies in the press in detail, city officials presumably sought to demonstrate that they could provide a fitting place for Hlinka to rest in peace themselves, without the help of the state.

Creating an Idea of Martyrdom for the Slovak State in March 1939:
The Cult of Anton Kopal in Bratislava

“The first martyr of the nascent independent state, brother, guard, Slovak young man.”46 These are some of the names used by the Slovak press immediately after the establishment of the Slovak state in March 1939 to refer to the 27-year-old member of the Hlinka Guard, Anton Kopal. Kopal, who came from the village of Veľké Uherce near Nitra, worked in Bratislava as a laborer. When he was killed on March 10, 1939 in street fighting between military and gendarmerie units and the Hlinka Guard and Freiwillige schutzstaffel47 units, the propaganda machine immediately took advantage of his death. The press presented Kopal as a man who was fired from a factory in Prague after the events of October 6, 1938. From the outset, the stereotype of an honest working Slovak who had suffered in “foreign” because of his attachment to his national identity was presented to the public.

Immediately after Kopal’s death, a demonstration farewell took place in the public space in front of the Slovak National Theater in Bratislava. Members of Hlinka Guard, Hlinka Youth, and Freiwilliege Schutzstaffel took a part in the demonstration too. Kopal’s death has been presented as a sacrifice for the freedom of the Slovak nation against Czech centralism. The autonomous flag and the Slovak double cross (symbols connected with the new regime) were part of the whole ritual, which took place in front of a crowd of several thousands. The ritual was completed by the Slovak anthem and guard songs. The Hlinka Guard naturally played an important role in the whole procession. During the march through the city streets, one of the main stops was the Hlinka Guard headquarters. The whole ritual was intended to amplify feelings of support for Slovak independence and to reinforce the image of the Hlinka Guard as one of the main pillars of the new state. The place of Anton Kopal in the “pantheon” of martyrs for Slovak freedom, along Hlinka, was also confirmed a few days later by Alexander Mach during a speech at the Hlinka Guard demonstration’s meeting on Hviezdoslav Square in Bratislava. 48

Kopal’s affiliation with the Hlinka Guard was one of the main factors that made him the first martyr after March 1939. As Mach often repeated, Kopal’s heroism offer eloquent testimony that “the guards would rather fall than betray the nation.” 49 At the same time, Mach used his death to strengthen the image of the Hlinka Guard as the organization which was equivalent to a proper army. The army itself also added to this narrative on the outside. This was already evident on the first anniversary of Kopal’s death. On this occasion, a monument was unveiled in Kopal’s birthplace during the festivities. Ferdinand Čatloš, serving as Minister of Defense, took a part in the ceremony.50 In his speech, he assured the audience that the “Hlinka Guard is one with the army and the army is one with the Hlinka Guard.”51

Immediately after the establishment of the Slovak Republic on March 14, 1939, a conflict erupted between Slovakia and Hungary in eastern Slovakia which lasted a few days. 52 It came to a tragic end with the bombing of Spišská Nová Ves on March 24, 1939, which claimed a total of twelve victims. In connection with this unfortunate event, a funeral demonstration was held in the city which was interpreted by the regime in similar way to Kopal’s death. The deaths of inhabitants of the city were considered a sacrifice made for the newly emerging state. 53 Alexander Mach and Karol Murgaš attended the funeral as distinguished guests. 54 As in the case of the farewell to Anton Kopal in Bratislava, the Hlinka Guard and the Freiwillige Schutzstaffel played an important role in the funeral ritual in Spišská Nová Ves.

The Outbreak of World War II and Propaganda against Poland in Public Spaces

In September, when Germany launched an attack on Poland, the Slovak state had existed for only a few months. In connection with the beginning of the war, the changes affected mainly the territory of western and northern Slovakia. In preparation for the war, the relevant military infrastructure was built in this area, including the construction of military warehouses, trenches, and antiaircraft shelters and repairs were made to roads and bridges. 55

Meanwhile, the public space became mainly a stage for propaganda. This propaganda sharpened against Poland in August 1939 and was undoubtedly part of Germany’s preparations for war.56 Demonstrations in the squares were an integral part of it. The largest of these demonstrations took place in Bratislava on August 22, 1939. The unplanned arrival of Hlinka Guard members took place in Slobody Square in the early evening. The organizer of this demonstration was the guard itself, and according to the press, up to 100,000 people took part, including 50,000 civilians.57 Given the spontaneity of the whole demonstration, I regard these estimates as exaggerations. It is clear from the archival reports that the whole event aimed to prepare the Slovak population for the impending conflict with Poland. The demonstration was therefore in the spirit of the motto “We want ours, we want ours, we want everything that is ours!” 58 Karol Danihel’s59 speech to the guards and the civilian population was intended not simply to incite anti-Polish sentiment, but also to defend Slovakia’s cooperation with Germany and, above all, to motivate Hlinka Guard members to obey any orders they might receive in the coming days.

The end of summer in the Slovak countryside was traditionally marked by harvest festivities.60 In the Slovak agrarian environment, these festivities are of special importance. They are milestones in which harvesting and field work symbolically come to an end. For the regime, this holiday was an important propaganda tool. The festivities were primarily used to highlight the regime’s social efforts, but the content changed significantly depending on domestic political developments. Throughout the existence of the Slovak state, in all major cities politicians performed on stage as part of harvest festivities and filled the celebrations with their own content. 61

At the time of the attack on Poland in September 1939, one of the main points of the harvest celebrations in Zvolen was the performance of Jozef Kirschbaum.62 He replaced Jozef Tiso on the stage, who did not take part in the celebration, even though according to the original plans, he would have participated. In his speech, Kirschbaum emphasized that Slovaks, in cooperation with Germany in the attack on Poland, were only pursuing the correction of an old injustice, and thus the return of territories that had been taken away from Slovakia. Unity with Germany was also symbolically underlined by the decoration on the square where the celebration took place. Slovak and German flags flew on the sides of the square.63 A similar speech was held a few days later in the small town of Topoľčany, where the Minister of Economy Gejza Medrický spoke in the same spirit. 64 The politicians were trying to convince their audiences that it was the duty of every brave individual to fight for the nation and that the performance of military duty is equivalent to work in the field or in the factory.

Constant persuasion of the audience of the necessity of a military attack on Poland suggests that massive support from the population was crucial for the regime. The propaganda campaign, also conducted through demonstrations in public, eventually proved effective. As stated by Zuzana Tokárová, who examined the shows of loyalty by the population in the city of Prešov, even though military aggression was accepted with reluctance by many residents, in practical terms, there was no great resistance to the idea of going to war with Poland.65 In addition to gaining support, the regime pursued another goal by organizing various demonstrations and celebrations. Through the speeches, the political elite sought to create a national collective identity that would be connected to a picture of the peaceful character of a Slovak who wants nothing but what belongs to him.66 The cult of the heroism of the martyr for the homeland began to thrive in these months (it had also appeared in hints in the previous period), because with the onset of the war, the regime had an ever more pressing need for this cult.67

Further militarization of Slovak society68 in the public space took place mainly through the organization of celebrations associated with the honor of soldiers. The soldier as a symbol was closely tied to discipline and obedience slogans that were often used in the contemporary propaganda. According to a speech held by Jozef Tiso in June 1939 in Prešov,

The whole Slovak nation lives in its military determination to live, work, and die for its nation and state, and even the most independent soldier is determined to do the same. The Slovak soldier will always be a model for every Slovak. The nation gives the army its tradition. A soldier gives a nation his qualities: military modesty, unity, unpretentiousness, toughness, and perseverance.69

In the propaganda of the time, these qualities were contrasted with “decadent” capitalist society. Tiso imagined the typical Slovak as a humble, hard-working, unassuming man, and it was in these points that the propaganda sought parallels with the symbol of a soldier who was to become a model of civic virtues. 70

From the point of view of political leaders, it was important to makes shows of Slovak-German unity in front of the local audiences. In the public space, there was an opportunity to do so during the military festivities in Piešťany, which took place in mid-October. Both Ferdinand Čatloš71 and Jozef Tiso took part in them. On Hlinka Square, in the central area of the city, Slovak and German pilots were honored and decorated. Tiso himself presented the award of the victorious cross72 to the General of Antiaircraft Artillery Fritz Hirschauer. In addition to Tiso and Čatloš, the ceremony was also attended by the Minister of Transport Július Stano and the Commander-in-Chief of the Hlinka Guard Alexander Mach. The Hlinka Guard also had a role at the ceremony, and a guard parade was part of the performance for the Piešťany audience. In Tiso’s speech, the words devotion, courage, and perseverance were repeated many times as the virtues to adorn every soldier. The celebrations included military music, and the Slovak and German national anthems were also played.

The offensive militarization of Slovak society which began in August 1939 also affected the cult of Andrej Hlinka. When, at the end of October 1939, his remains were ceremoniously transferred to the newly built mausoleum, the propaganda took the opportunity to connect Hlinka’s personality with the symbol of a warrior. According to Ferdinand Čatloš, Hlinka was no longer just a martyr and the founder of the state. He also became a warrior with military virtues.73 In an editorial printed in a Slovak newspaper, Čatloš did not forget to highlight Hlinka’s masculinity and authority, which were aspects of his personality that were highly valued in the contemporary propaganda.

After the end of the fighting in Poland, the war agitation in the propaganda weakened. In the subsequent period, the symbol of the martyr-soldier-hero appeared in public space mainly in connection with the celebration of public holidays and various anniversaries. The army played an important role in the celebrations of the first anniversary of state independence in March 1940. The national holiday of March 14 was celebrated in all major cities and culminated in a military parade. These ceremonies were intended to evoke the strength of the Slovak army and the determination to defend its country among the audience. The speeches again addressed the need to cultivate military virtues, and they emphasized the need for discipline and unity.74 In the capital, where the entire government took part in the military parade, an army order was issued by Jozef Tiso.75 The army presented itself on the streets of the city as the greatest source of support for the young state. After a military parade on Slobody Square, the army moved through the streets of the city to Vajanského nábrežie. Here, the army had to show the audience its strength, discipline, and unity. At the head of the parade was General Alexander Čunderlík, followed by his aides, military music, and the honor guard. The propaganda did not forget to emphasize that the infantry, which formed the largest part, drowned out the sounds of the military music with its thundering footfalls.76 Undoubtedly, the greatest response was evoked by motorized units, including panzers, which had to make an extraordinary impact on the audience of the time. In terms of reflections on the army’s traditions, references to the past of the Hungarian and Czechoslovak troops were out of the question. According to the periodical press, “There was no Slovak army and it was born.”77 Only the connection between the legend of the army from Sitno and the army of that time came into consideration.

Sitno is the mountain near Banská Štiavnica, where according to a folk story, a sleeping army is waiting to help the Slovaks in bad times. The story about the knights of Sitno is found in the work List of Slovak fairy tales published in 1931. It was written by Jiří Polívka (a Czech philologist and Slavist).78 According to propaganda, like the mythical army under Sitno, the Slovak army should have be prepared to defend itself.79

The propaganda also highlighted the “building” aspect80 in the army, especially on the occasion of the May 1 celebrations. According to the ideas of Jozef Tiso, the army was to become a builder of the nation. This included the involvement of the military in politics. Tiso also stressed that the military should primarily protect the nation, not the individual. 81

War against the Soviet Union, Militarization of Slovak Society, and Public Space as a “Stage”

Slovakia’s involvement in the war against the Soviet Union in June 1941 marked a new wave of militarization of Slovak society. This trend affected public spaces, especially in connection with the staging of celebrations and shows of loyalty. These rituals included a ceremonial welcome of frontline soldiers. In the city of Prešov, which was a strategically exposed city with a large military garrison, ceremonial welcomes were held regularly either in the area near the Church of St. Nicholas or in a less solemn spirit directly at the train station.82 Representatives of not only military but also civilian authorities took part, including representatives of the Hlinka Slovak People’s Party, the Hlinka Guards, the Hlinka Youth (Hlinkova mládež), and the Slovak Red Cross (Slovenský červený kríž). There were also pupils from all the schools in Prešov. The welcomes that were held for soldiers from the front contained several recurring elements: a strict organization and hierarchy in the central area near the Church of St. Nicholas, the presence of the most important personalities of the regime from the region. The space was dominated by a ceremonial tribune with a place of honor for a mayor, a government commissioner, and German officials. In June 1942, the ceremony was attended by the mayor Andrej Dudáš, the government commissioner Vojtech Raslavský, the German consul Peter von Woinovich, and the chairman of the DP Franz Karmasin. Representatives of church and cultural institutions were also present.83 The most distinguished guest was the Minister of Defense Ferdinand Čatloš.

More urgent for the regime was the need to associate the symbol of the soldier with the very existence of an independent state. The celebrations of state independence, which took place on March 14, were ideally suited to this. With the start of war operations against the USSR, the army came to the forefront of the celebrations. Its members occupied places of honor during ceremonial parades alongside the main representatives of cities and counties. During the celebrations, the audience was presented with an image of Slovak independence and freedom closely connected with the symbol of a soldier ready to lay down his life for his homeland.84 The regime purposefully linked the preservation of the state’s independence with its involvement in the war alongside Nazi Germany. The celebrations of state independence stretched over two days. The city’s public space was properly decorated for the celebrations with Slovak, German, and Hlinka Guard flags. Illuminated shop windows in the city center were decorated with busts of Hlinka. The two days of celebrations culminated in a military parade.

The Cult of the Unknown Soldier

Initially, the regime used the symbol of an unknown soldier, who was also depicted as a hero. The only exceptions were articles published in the newspaper Slovák with short biographies of those who had fallen at the beginning of the war. However, the regime did not initially create any specific cult of the personality of a fallen soldier. The soldier was an anonymous hero with no specific destiny and no name.

In this spirit, a monumental statue was planned as a tribute to of the Slovak Air Force. It was to be erected in the small village of Liptovský Peter in the north of Slovakia. The initiator of this event was Minister Ferdinand Čatloš, who planned to build a modern airport near the village.85 In October 1942, when Čatloš discussed the monument with the well-known Slovak sculptor Majerský,86 the Slovak political scene had already become considerably radicalized. That month, a law on leadership was passed87 which marked a significant attempt towards a totalitarian establishment. A few months earlier, in May 1942, Act no. 70/1942 Sl. Coll. on the Slovak working community had been passed, which was an attempt to establish a corporative society. The reflection of these changes can be seen to some extent in the design of the monument. The design of the monumental sculpture, authored by the sculptor Ladislav Róbert Ján Majerský, contained ideological elements that radicals sought to promote in Slovak society. However, these elements were given legitimacy in the internal political struggle by the wing grouped around president Tiso.

The dominant element of the monument which had been envisioned was the symbol of the pilot with the airport revolving around his figure. Below it, the Slovak soil was depicted on a pedestal, on which the Slovak working community awaits the arrival of Slovak eagles with joy.88 The design worked ingeniously with contemporary ideological concepts such as land or the notion of the working community. Part of the design was to emphasize that Slovak sandstone would be used in the creation of the statue. The monument was to be bold in size. It was planned to be 12 meters tall. However, Čatloš assessed the costs as too high and the creation of the monument was postponed indefinitely.

As the war continued, the need to explain Slovak participation grew. In Slovak historiography, there is a perception that, despite the efforts of government, the population of Slovakia had not been persuaded of the need to wage war against the USSR. Less attention is already paid to the tools that were used by the regime to do this. I noted above that the cult of the martyr for the homeland was fostered (quite naturally) immediately in connection with direct participation in the war. The regime’s efforts to foster this cult were undoubtedly visible in September 1939. It is noteworthy that these efforts were less visible in the case of the attack on the USSR. Of course, the welcome shown to frontline soldiers and the importance of the army in state celebrations of independence were among the pillars of the presentation of military (and political) power in public spaces. On the other hand, the cult of the martyr for the homeland did not seem to be at the forefront of the agitation speeches delivered at the celebrations for a while.

The Cult of Eugen Budinsky

The most significant attempt to build a cult of personal sacrifice for the homeland among the soldiers in the Slovak army can be considered the cult associated with the person of Eugen Budinský. Budinský89 came from a middle class family in Ružomberok. Part of his family became Hungarian under the influence of Magyarization at the beginning of the twentieth century and part of the family saw themselves as Slovaks.90

After the establishment of the Slovak Republic, Eugen Budinsky, who was an excellent athlete, was chosen by the Minister of Defense Ferdinand Čatloš as his aide charged with the responsibility of organizing military sports.91 After the invasion of the Soviet Union, Budinsky joined the Slovak Rapid Division, which in late July and early August 1942 participated in the fighting in the Caucasus. He died in action on August 4, 1942 near the town of Kropotkin. According to the recollections of several soldiers, Budinský was one of the most popular Slovak officers on the Eastern Front.92

Budinský became the prototype of a perfect Slovak for the regime. He had been a “manly,” capable athlete who had shown protective concern for his subordinates. He was exactly the man that the propaganda machine needed. In Budinsky’s personality, the people who crafted the propaganda found the missing piece they needed to build an image of a disciplined army and sacrifice for the benefit of the nation. The representatives of the regime decided to replace the hitherto vague cult of an unknown soldier with a cult of a particular personality. It was no secret that the fate of a particular personality would serve well “as a sign of early and fresh commemoration of Slovak victims for the idea of state independence.”93 Čatloš, who initiated the whole event, was extremely involved in honoring (or manipulatively crafting and using) the memory of Budinský.

Budinský’s remains were transported from the Caucasus to Ružomberok, where a reverential celebration was organized on the occasion of the first anniversary of his death. The importance of this event for the regime was underlined by the personal participation of Tiso and Čatloš. Other prominent guests also sat in the audience, such as Minister of Transport Július Stano and Minister of Finance Mikuláš Pružinský.94 Part of the celebration was the unveiling of the mound dedicated to Budinský, set in the central area of the city, between the manor house of St. Sophia and the entrance to the barracks.95 The monument was three meters high, and at the top was mounted a sculpture depicting Budinský and his soldiers in the fight against the enemy. The author of the project was the well-known Ružomberok architect Jozef Švidroň, and the construction was financed by the Ministry of Defense. At the initiative of the ministry, the Ružomberok barracks were also named after Budinský.

The unveiling of the monument to Budinský was one of the important propaganda acts of the regime. The idea of erecting a Budinský monument in that spot stemmed from the regime’s efforts to develop the martyr cult associated with the personality of Andrej Hlinka. On a practical level, this was offered as a logical solution, as Budinský was a native of Ružomberok. Although Hlinka was a key figure in the regime’s propaganda and the regime’s decisions were based on the narrative of his martyrdom, a need had arisen to present new examples to the public of self-sacrificing heroes who would follow Hlinka’s legacy and fight for the independent state. This intention clear in the speech held by Tiso, who during the unveiling of the monument emphasized the spirit of the national hero and his commitment “to work – to sacrifice – to die.” 96 Almost immediately after its ceremonial unveiling, the mound was included among the regime’s pilgrimage sites. In addition to Hlinka’s mausoleum, Budinský’s resting place has become part of the program of every major visit to the city. As early as August 14, 1943, a Bulgarian envoy stopped at the site during his visit.97 The last resting place of Hlinka, as a politically and culturally active personality and national martyr, thus found a parallel in the monument to Budinský, a war hero who had sacrificed his life to defend his homeland. The installation of this monument in the public space of the town of Ružomberok meant a further strengthening of the town’s image as an official pilgrimage site of the regime.

However, the efforts to build the cult of the martyr for the homeland associated with the figure of Budinský cannot be described as successful on a national scale. The spread of the narrative of Eugene Budinský’s fall in battle as a national martyr and hero came to a halt in the following months, and his cult never really developed. The events of the following months and, in particular, the emergence of resistance to the government at the turn of 1943 and 1944, which culminated in the events of the Slovak National Uprising in August 1944, did not offer the regime much space to cultivate the martyrdom cult.

Conclusion

From the outset, the Slovak Republic of 1939–1945 connected its existence with Nazi Germany. The sudden emergence of the state under the pressure of German aggression meant that government officials were forced to explain to the Slovak population the ambitions of the new state and the traditions on which it built its claims to legitimacy and power. Therefore, the rapid sequence of events and the entry into the war alongside Germany largely determined the propaganda. Government officials grabbed swift, populist solutions. Propaganda was adapted to this situation. One of its most important stages was the urban spaces of the country, which provided useful backdrops for the authoritarian regime because they were under state control. From the outset, the regime continued the almost 20-year tradition of the autonomist movement, and in the first months, it drew on this tradition in its interventions in public spaces. This was especially reflected in the renaming of the streets. The symbol of martyrdom, connected from the beginning with Andrej Hlinka in particular, became an important factor in the formation of the national identity created by state. In some cities, attempts were also made to foster local cults of martyrs. The city of Prešov offers one example, where the martyrdom cult represented by local personalities was a part of anti-Hungarian propaganda.

Later, in connection with the conflict with the central Czech government and the military conflict with Hungary in March 1939, the importance of defending the establishment of an independent state came to the fore. The symbol of martyrdom for the homeland was represented in this case by the victims who emerged from both conflicts. In honor of the fallen heroes, reverential festivities were held. These festivities were used to nurture the idea in Slovak society that independence is not free and, if necessary, one may well need to lay down one’s life for it. These ideas were then used by political representatives when the state joined the war against Poland. Slovak propaganda in August 1939 significantly contributed to the militarization of Slovak society, and urban spaces again played an important role. They became sites of demonstrations and military parades to prepare society for an attack alongside Germany. The regime militarized society by creating an image of a peaceful Slovak who was just defending himself. According to this propaganda, the typical Slovak did not want expansion. He wanted only what rightfully belonged to him.

As part of the militarization of society, the regime also used the symbol of military discipline as a model of civic obedience. The highest state officials, including Tiso, imagined the typical Slovak as a humble, hard-working, undemanding man, and it was at these points that propaganda sought parallels with the symbol of a soldier who was to become a model of civic virtues. The army was to serve as a model for the citizens also in the work of construction, which was contracted mainly in connection with the celebration of Labor Day. As in the case of the military, discipline and obedience played an important role in the establishment of labor camps, and they were qualities that were seen as (or depicted as) key to the regime’s leaders.

Slovak society was further militarized in connection with the attack on the Soviet Union. Welcoming frontline soldiers in the city center became a standard part of events in public spaces. These events were attended by a wide urban audience, including school students and representatives of the army and the city. The symbol of the soldier as hero was an increasingly prominent part of the celebrations of state independence. The culmination of efforts to promote the martyrdom cult in public spaces came with plans for and the erection of monuments dedicated to specific personalities. From the outset, visual narratives of martyrdom in public spaces were connected mainly with the personality of Andrej Hlinka. Later, Eugen Budinský’s was added. Both personalities came from Ružomberok, so the cult of martyrs was strongest in this city. Their last resting served as an official pilgrimage site for the regime.

In conclusion, the discussion above shows that the notion of martyrdom as a narrative trope was an integral part of propaganda at the time. This notion was used, largely successfully, in the regime’s attempts to gain the consent of the Slovak Christian majority to join the war against Poland and the Soviet Union. The martyrdom cult was implemented every time the regime needed to explain the demands of militarization. Public spaces were important sites for martyrdom propaganda, and this propaganda mostly affected the social dimension of these spaces (for instance in celebrations dedicated to martyrs) and their material-symbolic dimension (for instance with the renaming of streets and the creation of memorials).

The cult of sacrifice for the homeland was fostered with particularly fervency in the time immediately before or during the outbreak of a specific conflict involving Slovak society. However, the regime reacted mainly to the war situation at the given moment, and the narratives of martyrdom were used systematically and with clear purposes as part of the propaganda.

The symbol of the martyr, and the soldier as hero underwent process of evolution during the period under discussion. Initially, the regime used personalities who sacrificed themselves for the cause of an independent Slovak state. Undoubtedly, the most prominent figure from this perspective was Andrej Hlinka, who became a symbol of the authoritarian regime and after whom a square or street was named in each city. His vocation as a priest also played an important role. Later, it was necessary to rely on new personalities. Guardsman Anton Kopal, who became a symbol of resistance against the Czechs, was tied to radical circles, including Alexander Mach. In addition, his death could be questioned as having merely been a matter of coincidence. A more acceptable personality was Eugen Budinský, an officer of the Slovak army and a capable, masculine athlete who could be portrayed as having been determined and committed to his homeland. However, due to the rapid fall of the Slovak state, this cult could no longer developed. Andrej Hlinka thus remained the most prominent figure of the Slovak martyrdom cult during World War, and this cult has survived in a large part of Slovak society to the present day. The continuity of the martyrdom cult can also be seen in the form of the martyrdom of Jozef Tiso, who is considered as a martyr today mainly—but not only—by radical right-wing groups in Slovakia.

Archival Sources

Štátny archív v Žiline so sídlom v Bytči, pracovisko Liptovský Mikuláš [State Archive Bytča, Department in Liptovský Mikuláš] (SA Bytča)

 

Newspapers

Slovák 1939–1943

Slovenská sloboda 1939–1942

Tatranský Slovák 1943

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In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Habsburg government had a very complicated task of inventing some form of supranational identity as an alternative to nationalist programs in Cisleithania. It sought to craft this supranational identity first and foremost as part of the self-images of schoolchildren as future citizens. One of the major ways to create and solidify a notion of a common “Austrian” identity in school history classes was to highlight the Habsburg wars, triumphal and bloody battles, and military heroes as reminders of an integrated supranational past. Official instructions obliged teachers to emphasize the “heroic times of Austria,” its “glorious battles,” and its “valiant wars,” as emphasis on these episodes of the past, it was hoped, would further the development of “the idea of the integrated statehood in Austria.” In this article, I offer an example of this cult of the Austrian wars in school education by the ways in which the wars fought during the early period of Francis Joseph’s rule, namely, the Sardinian war of 1859 and the Seven Weeks’ War of 1866, were taught to later generations of schoolchildren. Ironically, the fact that Austria lost these wars was humiliating. Nevertheless, during the late period of Francis Joseph’s rule, narratives and visual depictions of the events of these wars in schoolbooks strongly contributed to the formation of a heroic image of the Austrian army and to the idea of just Habsburg rule. I focus in my discussion first on how the accounts of the wars in schoolbooks deviated from the historical facts and, second, on how these accounts nonetheless furthered the emergence of the “Austrian” identity.

Keywords: Habsburg Monarchy, Austria-Hungary, Francis Joseph, supranational identity, history of education, schoolbooks, history lessons

 

Fans of Habsburg history may well remember the story of Joseph von Trotta, “the Hero of Solferino,” from The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth. Trotta was appalled by an imprecise narrative about the battle of Solferino (1859) found in a schoolbook, which grossly overstated his own actions and represented them as great heroic deeds. Trotta found the situation intolerable, although people around him, including the emperor himself, delicately explained him that the story “is for children,” and “all historic events are rewritten for school use.” Moreover, they assured him, this was the “proper” way of doing things.1

It is true that history schoolbooks represent a peculiar type of source. Like hardly any other medium, schoolbooks, which remain formative teaching aids in history instruction and civic education, convey official and quasi-official images of history to certain age groups of children and young people within the compulsory schooling setting.2 Given their broad impact, schoolbooks have long been used in the service of the prevailing ideology and rhetoric. Political elites quickly understood that national memory could be most easily constructed in history classes which presented current issues in their (alleged or constructed) historical context. They also realized that public mass schooling inculcated a sense of national unity in pupils, as well as loyalty and obedience.3 For these reasons, history schoolbooks were broadly used by European governments as early as the nineteenth century in the invention and consolidation of a previously non-existent sense of national cohesion.4

Scholarship on civic education in Europe and the United States shows that many states saw public education as an essential tool for crafting national identity and national loyalty, which were by no means innate, the claims of primordialists notwithstanding. Eugene Weber and James Lehning argued that schools were a central force in cultivation of the patriotic loyalty of future French citizens.5 Troy Paddock claims that public education in imperial Germany served as a robust tool to build loyalty to the newly founded united empire.6 Paula Fass and Christina Ziegler-McPherson show that American educators of the nineteenth century utilized English and history courses in order to Americanize a diverse population and create a sense of loyalty to the state.7 Similar efforts were made to Russify and nurture patriotic sentiment among the subjects of the polyethnic Russian Empire.8

The creation of a patriotic and loyal citizenry was likewise one of the main concerns of the Habsburg government in Austria-Hungary. The Habsburg Monarchy faced the complicated task of inventing some form of supranational identity as an alternative to the programs of national elites, who had challenged the state’s cohesion. The government identity politics exemplified an intended fabrication of history and myths to be used first and foremost to shape the self-images of schoolchildren as future citizens.9 Roth’s character was right when he complained about the “pack of lies” in his son’s reader: historical images in schoolbooks were narrated so as to foster patriotic feelings and dynastic loyalty in schoolchildren, and as part of this, exaggerations and understatements were not only permissible, but even welcome.

Habsburg identity politics and its effects on the society of the Dual Monarchy have long been the focus of academic discussion. Many prominent scholars published works on the development of Habsburg culture and civil society with a focus on the complexity of national identity.10 Their findings have led to a crucial revision of the previous assessments in the nationalist literature. The latter tended to define the Habsburg Empire as a kind of anacronism compared to the European nation states and a “prison of nations,”11 which appeared unable to address the nationality conflicts facing it in the nineteenth century. In contrast, revisionist studies offer strong evidence that the Empire and its institutions were of great importance for its population, which showed a high degree of engagement. The recent book by Pieter Judson on “how countless local societies across central Europe engaged with the Habsburg dynasty’s efforts to build a unified and unifying imperial state”12 summarizes the most important finding of the revisionist works.

Moreover, the recent studies have shown that, despite their prominence in political parties, legislative institutions, and the press, national elites largely failed to awaken passionate attachments to national identity among the larger part of the population of Cisleithania.13 During the last decades of the Dual Monarchy, nationalists had to fight against apparent indifference to the national causes, and they were met with general loyalty to Habsburg non-national institutions and an embrace of multilingualism in the public and private spheres. Many researchers have stressed the paradoxically sustainable phenomenon of massive loyalty to the emperor and the ruling dynasty, the so-called Kaisertreue, which contributed significantly to the cohesion of the Habsburg Empire and moved its peoples look for options to preserve the unified state.14 This loyalty to the multinational empire was largely due to the various measures adopted and implemented by the Habsburg government and administration. Although in the traditional (national) literature, these measures were usually assessed as too limited and backward as responses to the challenges posed in the era of nationalism15 (a view which is still shared by some recent researchers),16 the revisionists tend to attach greater value to the efforts of Habsburg officials to achieve cohesion among the population of the composite state. A number of excellent works examine commemoration and celebration practices in the Habsburg Empire as a means of fostering loyalties to the state and the dynasty, as well as “invented traditions” at the Viennese court and the complex array of symbols which were intended psychologically to consolidate the citizens of the monarchy.17

In 1849, the Habsburg government embarked on a program that would lead to the creation of the most advanced and cutting-edge state schooling system in Europe.18 The structure and core principles of this system, which included the principle of equal language rights, are discussed in detail by Helmut Engelbrecht, Gary Cohen, and Hannelore Burger.19 Other scholars consider the important issue of the certification and translation of schoolbooks in their studies, as well as the content of history textbooks that was appropriate and reliable in the view of the Viennese Ministry of Culture and Education.20 Scott Moore’s brilliant study explores how the civic education was utilized in Habsburg schools to cultivate the patriotism of its peoples and forge a complex, “layered” identity.21

One of the major themes of the patriotic version of the Habsburg past that was presented in schools was wars: narratives about the triumphal and bloody battles waged by the Austrian army and its military heroes were exploited as reminders of the shared supranational past of the Habsburg peoples. According to the Instructions for Classes in the Gymnasien of Austria (1884), emphasis was to be placed on “the heroic time of Austria” and “its glorious battles and valiant wars,” for they were “the moments through which the consciousness of common belonging to the peoples united under the scepter of Habsburgs” was awakened, and “the idea of an integral statehood in Austria” was developed.22 Stories about wars helped convey the memory of a common “glorious past under Habsburgs” through the emphasis that was placed on the triumphant battles, which had required united efforts. There was also room for mention of the bloodbaths and massacres that the the peoples of the monarchy had survived together and preserved in their collective memories as outrages and injustices inflicted by an external common enemy. Commemoration of the whole train of glorious military commanders who fought at the service of Habsburgs functioned as a means of offering narrative embodiments of the symbols of the “supranational” Austrian identity.23 Along with the military heroes Prince Eugène of Savoy and Archduke Karl (who were the figures of Habsburg military history who were the most vigorously glorified by the Viennese court), Joseph Radetzky developed into the most prominent military hero in imperial Austria as early as the mid-nineteenth century. The latter functioned, according to Laurence Cole, as “the symbol of a patriarchal, conservative, patriotic ideology that wished to subsume class and national conflicts within a discourse of loyalty.”24

In the discussion below, I focus on the narratives in Cisleithanian schoolbooks published between the 1860s and the 1910s about the wars in which the Austrian monarchy fought during the period of neo-absolutism, or in other words, the Austro-Sardinian war of 1859 and the Austro-Prussian-Italian war of 1866 (otherwise known as the Seven Weeks’ War). Both wars represented a vulnerable episode in the history of the Habsburg monarchy. The Habsburg forces failed miserably, suffering heavy losses, and the empire had to cede its vast Italian territories to Sardinia and its supremacy in the German Confederation to Prussia.25 Some researchers even consider the defeat at Königgrätz “the death of the army.”26 It is easy to exploit narratives concerning wars in which one’s country emerged victorious wars for the benefit of the image of a “Great and Powerful Fatherland” of which every citizen or subject is proud. But how did the authors of schoolbooks craft narratives about these lost wars, given that they had to reflect on the defeat but without downplaying or undermining the greatness of the Fatherland? Were there any strong deviations from historical facts? Which persons and episodes were singled out or overemphasized, and which were sidelined and obscured? And finally, did the authors managed to preserve the image of a great and glorious Austrian monarchy under the wise rule of Habsburgs?

The research on which I have based my conclusions draws largely on the collections of schoolbooks kept in the library of the Austrian Ministry of Education, Art, and Culture in Vienna. I used only schoolbooks that addressed relatively recent political events and contained narratives about the wars in question, which means that I used the schoolbooks designed for the last three years of Volksschulen and Bürgerschulen, for middle and upper classes of Gymnasien, and for the last two years of teacher training colleges. I went through roughly 60 units published with the official sanction of the imperial and royal Ministry of Culture and Education. However, in the discussion below, I cite a limited number of these sources, as most of the units appeared to be unchanged reissues of the same narratives. The fact is, the Viennese Ministry was very vigilant about the narratives included in schoolbooks. A thorough inspection by ministerial officials preceded the decree of official approval to publish or reissue a particular schoolbook or translation, and only then could the schoolbook in question be used in schools.27 Close attention was paid to the political views of the people who compiled textbooks, and the range of compilers was, therefore, relatively limited. Partly for this reason, textbooks were reissued eight to ten times on average and translated, most often from German, into the languages of the different nationalities. Translations were welcomed by the Viennese Ministry, as they offered the reassurance that textbooks in the national languages also met the political requirements of the imperial center.28

The authors of the upper level schoolbooks were professional historians who taught in Gymnasien and often held posts as university professors. Dr Theodor Tupetz, for example, the author of the schoolbooks cited in this article, had an impressive career, serving as a school inspector but eventually moving up to the position of court counselor. As professional teachers and historians, the authors of schoolbooks had their own views of historical events, which influenced the narratives they wrote, although they had to adhere to ministerial instructions and regulations. After the Compromise of 1867, some competences, including the compilation, translation, and distribution of textbooks, were transferred to the crownlands. Not all crownlands and languages were treated equally, however. While in Galicia, for example, the textbook certification system came under the control of the Polish-dominated Galician parliament,29 Slovenian-language textbooks remained completely under the supervision of the Viennese Ministry until the fall of the monarchy.30 In both cases, however, the final decision on approval was made in Vienna. Although the state publishing house in Vienna lost its monopoly to publish textbooks and schoolbooks were then published by private publishers (especially middle and upper level schoolbooks), the Ministry of Culture and Education in Vienna continued to supervise their content and language design.31

The narratives about the wars of 1859 and 1866 that I analyze in this article are mostly taken from the textbooks in German. Despite the December constitution of 1867 and the school reform of 1869, the language of instruction in many Gymnasien was still German, while the number of secondary schools with a minority language of instruction was growing slowly. In many cases, the books by German authors approved by the Viennese Ministry of Culture and Education were simply translated into the required language, and this was especially true for schools with Slovene and Italian as languages of instruction.32 Even in Galicia, where local authorities exerted a significant influence on the design of the educational system, the first Ruthenian-language history textbook that was translated not from German (but rather from Polish) was only published in 1895.33 Thus, narratives from the textbooks in German, I would argue, are representative for the whole picture of the way in which the history of the Austrian wars in question was taught in Cisleithanian secondary schools. However, I also offer a few samples of narratives in Czech and Romanian languages for comparison. I tried to compare the narratives from three perspectives: the alleged causes of the wars, the course of the wars, and the outcomes of the wars. I also focus on the style and biases of the narratives.

In the Austrian textbooks published in the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth, the names of the wars differed from those used in contemporary literature. The Austro-Sardinian War of 1859 was most often referred to simply as the “war against Austria” or “the Italian War,” and the Seven Week’s War was called the “Prussian war.” The first mentions of the Sardinian war (1859) appeared in the schoolbooks as early as 1864. For example, in Gindely’s textbook on world history for upper classes of Gymnasien, one can read that the most important events since the 1848 revolt and Napoleon’s declaration of the French empire in 1853 were “the oriental war” (that is, the Crimean war) and “the Italian War.”34 These early mentions were very short and succinct, little more than a few unbiased sentences with simple facts. However, with every passing year, the narratives got longer and increasingly detailed. In the 1880s, narratives about “the Italian war” of 1859 reached a page and a half or two pages, and the narratives devoted to the relationship between Austria and Prussia between 1859 and 1866 were three to four pages, even in the textbooks designed for the lower and middle classes in secondary schools.35 In the schoolbooks published in the 1890s, narratives of the wars were most often blocked under the title The War Years. They also were three to four pages long and included a large portrait of the Austrian commander Archduke Albrecht, a photo of the monument to the Austrian admiral Tegetthoff, and a reproduction of a depiction of the battle of Lissa (1866). The narratives, moreover, were getting increasingly biased, vivid, and emotionally loaded.

In many schoolbooks, the narrative was also accompanied with a familiar portrait of Francis Joseph I in 1849, in which the young, good-looking emperor is wearing a military uniform with the insignia of the Order of the Golden Fleece, the Military Order of Maria Theresa, and the Cross of Saint George of the fourth class, which he was awarded by the Russian tsar Nicholas I “for pacifying the Hungarian riot in 1848–1849.” Narratives often included the contention that the adolescent emperor’s accession to power took place at a “terribly serious and pressing time,” when in most of Austria’s lands there was “disorder and confusion” and “even open outrage in several lands.” But the young emperor coped with the difficult situation and managed to keep Austria’s lands together, and a short period of peace then followed during which the emperor took trips to several crown lands, and everywhere the Habsburg peoples “cheered the new ruler and gave him evidence of unfeigned love and unshakable loyalty.”36 However, a few years later, Francis Joseph “had to pick up his sword again […] despite his pronounced love of peace.”37 In some textbooks, the period of 1859–1866 was titled Emperor Franz Josef I defends his lands.38

The Causes of the Wars

In the 1890s, considerable attention began to be devoted to the issue of the causes of the wars in question and, in particular, to the characteristics of aggressors and the interests they pursued. For example, in the most widespread Gindely’s reader on history for Volksschulen, which was revised by Gustav Rusch and appeared in seven editions without any significant changes between 1898 and 1910, it is stated that in 1859, King Victor Emmanuel of Sardinia allied himself with “the ambitious French Emperor Napoleon III” and “urged Austria to go to war,” while in 1866, Prussia “seized the opportunity to declare war on Austria,” since “it had long been striving for vested interests in Germany,” and at the same time, the Danube monarchy was attacked by Italy. 39 One finds the same information in the Pennerstorfer’s textbooks on history designed for the same category and age of schoolchildren.40

For the schoolchildren going to Bürgerschulen, Pennerstorfer explains that it was the death of Radetzky in 1858 that encouraged “the Sardinian king to try his luck with arms.”41 The image of a heroic commander who was so fearsome that the enemy did not dare attack while he was alive both reflects and contributes to the official Radetzky cult, which saw a resurgence between 1880 and 1914.42 For the children in the last year of secondary school, the same author wrote even more emotionally:

Victor Emmanuel was just waiting for an opportunity to wrest the provincems of Lombardy and Veneto from Austria. As long as Radetzky was alive, of course, he did not dare attack. But no sooner had the military general closed his eyes (1858) than he was again preparing for war. His ally here was the emperor of France, Napoleon III. With his help, he succeeded in defeating the Austria and obtaining the cession of Lombardy. […] In a similar way, Victor Emmanuel came into possession of Veneto in 1866. This time, he allied himself with the king of Prussia, which threatened our Fatherland on two sides at the same time.43

 

So Sardinia was commonly represented as the aggressor and the guilty party in both conflicts, with the Sardinian king Victor Emmanuel being the main culprit and Napoleon III and Frederick William IV of Prussia serving as his accomplices. The authors of the schoolbooks normally omitted the fact that it was Austria who officially declared war on Sardinia in 1859.44 Still, there were several textbooks for secondary schools which mentioned that hardly trivial detail. For instance, Dr. Emanuel Hannak describes the casus belli more accurately in his schoolbooks and notes, “As Sardinia was arming and gaining reinforcement from France, the Austrian General Count Gyulai opened the war.”45

In his textbook on modern history, Hannak provides even more details, but he again maintains that in 1859, Austria was actually forced to go to war in response to the actions of Sardinia and France and the Sardinian government was the main aggressor in the Italian war of 1859. According to him, however, the aggressor in 1866 was not Italy, but Prussia with its unwarranted political ambitions and unjust territorial claims.46 As a matter of fact, Austria rather than Prussia was the first officially to declare war on July 17, 1866, although sophisticated intrigues of Prussia did take place and hostilities preceded the official declaration of the war.47

The interwar conflict, namely, the Austro-Prussian-Danish war of 1864, was omitted in most textbooks for Volksschulen, but it was mentioned in the textbooks for Bürgerschulen and Gymnasien. In Hannak’s textbook, for example, it is described quite accurately from a historical point of view and more or less unemotionally, although Hannak takes the opportunity to recall “the victories of the Austrians at Översee and Veile and the victory that Tegetthoff achieved at Helgoland over the Danish flotilla,” which “form a glorious leaf in the laurel wreath of the Austrian army.”48

The most detailed and biased narratives about the wars in question are in the textbooks published after 1900. The main aggressor in the 1859 conflict had changed. This time, it was the ambitious “upstart” Napoleon III, although Victor Emmanuel II is also cast in unflattering light as not particularly honest and ready “to cede without hesitation the old ancestral land of his house, Savoy, to France” in exchange for assistance to “come into possession of the royal crown over Italy as far as the Adria.”49 The change of the aggressor can be explained by the different political setting at the turn of the century: Italy, unlike France, was now an ally of Austria-Hungary within the Triple Alliance framework and could not be directly accused of wrongdoing. However, it was not as closely allied with Austria-Hungary as Germany, and this made it possible for the narratives to include some veiled criticism of its political behavior. In contrast, Prussia’s guilt for starting the war in 1866 is blurred and obscured for the same reason. The emphasis has shifted to the joint success of Austria and Prussia against the Danish king in 1864. The conflict of 1866 is exposed as an unfortunate misunderstanding between the two reputable powers defending their natural interests and leadership in the German Confederation.50

In addition to narratives in schoolbooks, students also heard the narratives and explanations given by the teachers in classroom. The versions of events told by instructors may have been clearer and more memorable for schoolchildren, as they may have sounded more like the whole truth. Those stories probably exerted a strong influence on the political orientation of schoolchildren as they grew up. Teachers in turn presumably restated the information they found in the textbooks used in the teacher training colleges. For this reason, these narratives are also of interest from the perspective of this discussion. One of the most commonly used textbooks for the future teachers was the book by Tupetz. For example, his textbook on the world history for the second-year students had eight editions that were published without any significant changes between 1890 and 1917. His textbook on world history for the third year students had eight unchanged editions, the last of which was published in 1918. For soon-to-be history teachers, Tupetz suggested a long narrative about the period of war in question, accompanied by many more details and a corresponding ideological bias.

In his discussion of the war of 1859, Tupetz depicts aggressive France and Sardinia as lands under the rule of unfair leaders, but he also stresses that “it was hoped on the Danube that an attack on a member of the German Confederation would be repulsed jointly by all German states,” and particularly Prussia. But for their disloyalty to the staunch Austrian ally, Austria would have kept her Italian possessions. Once more, Prussia employed underhanded tactics when it declined the “brilliant” proposals for a reorganization of the German Confederation by Francis Joseph, who was only seeking to maintain peace and justice among the German states. The king of Prussia did this on Bismarck’s advice, for “had the Austrian plan succeeded, Prussia would have had to give up hope of taking the lead in Germany for a long time, perhaps forever.”51 Thus, Tupetz delicately rebukes the German states, including Prussia, blaming them for the two main misfortunes that befell the Austrian monarchy in the 1860s, the loss of territories and the inability to preserve supremacy in Germany.

Tupetz also describes the conflict with the Danish king, who also proved covetous and unjust. His actions were illegitimate, and Austria could not tolerate this, as Austria remained loyal to the principles of the German Confederation and ready to defend the rights of any of its members.52 Thanks to the joint forces of Austria and Prussia, Denmark was forced to abandon its rapacious plans and cede the duchies to the victors, who soon started a dispute over the fate of the two German lands. Prussia was apparently inclined to deprive Schleswig-Holstein of its traditional independence, but Austria could not accept this. The war of 1866 “between the two great German powers” began because Prussia longed for supremacy in Germany. It concluded an alliance with Italy, and Austria saw itself attacked from two sides. “Most of the German states, on the other hand, feared the destruction of their previous independence from Prussia and sided with Austria, which had never infringed on their independence, but had always defended it.”53 Based on this narrative and similar ones from other textbooks by Tupetz,54 it can be supposed that the version most commonly heard by the Habsburg children in classrooms reiterated the information from most schoolbooks: the illegitimate ambitions of Sardinia and Prussia led to the bloody conflicts and induced Austria, under its peace-loving emperor Francis Joseph I, to wage wars.

The Course of the Wars

Most of the textbooks for Volkschulen did not contain any description of the course of the wars. The textbooks for younger children did not even contain any mention of specific battles during the Austro-Sardinian war of 1859, perhaps because none of the major battles were won by the Austrian army. These books make mention of only three battles that took place during the Seven Weeks’ War of 1866: the Battles of Lissa, Custozza, and Königgrätz. The names of the first two battles, in which the Austrian army triumphed even if these triumphs remained indecisive for the outcome of the war, are bolded in the text and described in detail, while the battle of Königgrätz, the decisive battle, in which the Austrian army suffered a crushing defeat, is referred to very briefly. One notices a clear difference between the textbooks for girls’ schools (Mädchenbürgerschulen) and the textbooks for boys’ schools (Knabenbürgerschulen). The latter, while following the same basic scheme of the narrative, contained more detailed descriptions of battles, hostilities, military maneuvers, armaments, troop numbers, etc. and more names of commanders. As soon as universal military duty was introduced by the 1867 constitution, schoolboys were obviously regarded as future soldiers and officers in the Austrian army, who needed deeper knowledge in the field of military history and warfare.

In connection with the Battles of Lissa and Custozza, the textbooks glorify Archduke Albrecht of Austria and Admiral Wilhelm von Tegetthoff as talented commanders and Austrian military heroes. The Austrian army acquired “new and everlasting fame”55 under the leadership of Archduke Albrecht, “who had already given proof of fearlessness at Sa. Lucia in 1848 and, under Radetzky’s excellent guidance, matured into a capable warrior. Moreover, he was the son of the victor of Aspern and had inherited his father’s general virtues.” 56 On June 24, 1866, Archduke Albrecht won “a brilliant victory over Victor Emmanuel’s army at the memorable site where Radetzky had once put the troops of Karl Albert to flight, near Custozza.”57

Thus, a relatively recent hero was presented in the textbooks in close connection with the earlier military heroes Radetzky and Archduke Karl. This perfectly supports Laurence Cole’s claim that the Habsburg government sought to establish explicit continuity in terms of the representation of heroes within the military culture of the monarchy.58 The heroes of relatively recent wars were finely interwoven into the general Austrian imperial cult of military commanders who were famous for their patriotism and their loyalty to the state and dynasty. Thus, the Habsburg state undertook “a conscious effort to promote a conservative patriotic agenda in the 1890s and 1900s, which presented the army as a positive, cohesive force within the multinational state,”59 and the narratives in schoolbooks can be seen as a display of this effort.

In the same manner, compilers of schoolbooks praise the “glorious” Admiral Tegetthoff who “without hesitation” attacked “the much stronger enemy fleet and forced it to retreat,” a “heroic deed [which] will not be forgotten”:60

The young Austrian fleet also took a glorious part in the battle against Italy. Its commander, Admiral Tegetthoff, attacked the far more numerous Italian fleet off the Dalmatian island of Lissa and forced it to retreat. Not one Austrian ship was lost in this battle, while the enemy lost three ironclad ships. The sea victory at Lissa was all the more honorable for Admiral Tegetthoff, as he could only oppose the iron-armored ships of Italy with wooden ones. Unfortunately, the glorious winner died in 1871 at the age of 41. The magnificent monument which Emperor Francis Joseph had erected to him in Vienna reminds us of his heroic deed.61

 

It is true that from the 1880s onwards, the state became increasingly involved in the propagation of Austrian military heroes’ cult, for instance by unveiling monuments to them.62 Gestures of the Habsburgs’ gratitude for the services to the Fatherland and inviolable loyalty to the ruling dynasty must have been very meaningful for the politics of identity, as long as they were included in the narratives which schoolchildren not only had to read but often had to learn by heart. The narratives were normally accompanied by large images of a half-page or a whole page size, which invariably included a photo portrait of Archduke Albrecht wearing the Austrian uniform and military rewards; the painting of the battle of Lissa, depicting the Italian ship Re d’Italia sinking after being rammed by Tegetthoff’s flagship Ferdinand Max; and a photo of the monument to Tegetthoff on Vienna’s Praterstern.

However, other Austrian commanders could be portrayed in a less flattering manner. In particular, Count Ferenc Gyulai, a Hungarian nobleman who commanded the losing Austrian army at the Battle of Magenta, was often blamed for failing to attack the French before they united with the Sardinians, for which reason the Austrian army suffered defeats at Magenta and Solferino.63 Count Clam-Gallas, who commanded the right wing of the Austrian army at Magenta, was first to retreat, while the center and left wing of the army under other commanders “held each other brilliantly”: “his Hungarian regiments failed and his instructions did not prove workable. Repelled by the French, he retreated so quickly from the line of attack that he completely lost touch with the undefeated parts of the army.” At Solferino, “again it was the Hungarian regiments of the Clam-Gallas corps in the center that did not hold out.”64 It is difficult to say whether the specific blame placed on the Hungarian regiments here resulted from the personal beliefs of the compilers, but it was hardly an official practice or policy of the Viennese Ministry to generate a negative perception of Hungarians. A Hungarian aristocrat Tassilo Graf Festetics de Tolna, and Franz Graf von Thun und Hohenstein of non-Hungarian origin were also criticized for their actions at Königgrätz. The textbook claimed that, “against the orders of Benedek, [they] took part in the struggle against the Prussian center, weakened their forces, and left their basic positions,” and “the third Prussian army therefore struck the right flank of the Austrians without hindrance and stormed Chlum, and thus the battle was lost.”65

Nevertheless, the “heroic struggle” of the whole Austrian army was never subject to critique. In the victorious Battles of Custozza and Lissa, it were “the combative troops, the good spirit of the officers, the precise execution of the supreme commands, the cooperation and mutual support, and proper management” that “brought about the success.” In “the bloody but unfortunate battles of Magenta and Solferino,” the Austrian troops also “performed miracles of bravery and devotion.”66 At Königgrätz, the Austrian artillery likewise “performed miracles of bravery”:

Particular fame was earned by the “Battery of the Dead” under Captain von der Groeben, which did not leave the place until Groeben himself, a second captain, and 52 of 60 artillerymen had died. The survivors saved the only gun that still had its equipment. On the battlefield, near a grove between the villages of Chlum and Lipa, a beautiful monument has recently been erected representing Austria, with the inscription: “To the Heroes of the Battery of the Dead.” 67

An amazing and breathtaking story is also narrated about an episode of the sea battle at Lissa:

One of the Austrian wooden ships, the “Kaiser,” also performed miraculous bravery. When this ship was surrounded and attacked by four enemy ironclad ships, Commodore Petz, who was in command of the ship, fired all the cannons to the right and left, with great force against the Italian ironclad in front. The shock was terrible for the wooden ship too: one of the masts broke and smashed the engine’s chimney; the sails that had fallen on the chimney began to burn. But the crew put out the fire and the ship escaped danger. But one of the enemy ironclads with which the “Kaiser” had fought—it was called “Afondatore” and had the commander in chief of the Italian fleet on board—was so badly damaged that it sank after returning to the port of Ancona. The Austrian fleet hardly lost a ship. Hardly has world history (before the World War) recorded a case when such wonderful success would have been achieved with so little means as in this one.68

Should the schoolchildren have questions about why the Austrians were still defeated in particular battles after all their “heroic resistance,” the teacher was ready to provide reasonable explanations, which he could find in the textbooks used at the teacher training colleges:

In this war [of 1859], the French had the advantage over the Austrians that they already had “rifled” cannons, i.e. guns the barrels of which were provided with shallow indentations in the form of a helix, which gave the bullets a greater speed and enabled the French to shoot much further than was possible with “smooth” cannons. Nevertheless, the Austrians were long contesting the victories of their enemy at Magenta and Solferino; moreover, at Solferino, one Austrian wing under Field Marshal Lieutenant Benedek beat the opposing Sardinians.69

 

A similar explanation was provided for the defeat in the Prussian war of 1866: it was Austria’s defeat that was characterized as the sad consequence of the Prussian military reform (general conscription), better armaments of Prussia (the Dreyse needle-guns), and the inadequate aid given by the small German states to Austria.70 It is interesting that the author of a history schoolbook in Czech identifies additional causes of the Austrian defeat: the excellent Prussian military leader (Helmuth von Moltke the Elder) and general compulsory schooling in Prussia.71

The Outcomes and Consequences of the Wars

Although Austria’s defeats in war in the period between 1859 and 1866 were by no means obscured, but rather were accurately stated, all narratives about the wars in question end on an optimistic note. First, the war indemnity which Austria had to pay was moderate. Second, Austria did not lose any territory to Prussia. Third, in 1878, Bosnia and Herzegovina were “handed over to Austria for administration,” and as “New Austria,” they partially replaced the loss of land which Austria suffered in the war years of 1859 and 1866.”72 Fourth, with the Peace of Prague, “the antagonism which had developed between Prussia and Austria with regard to German affairs came to an end,” and “it became evident how valuable an alliance could be for both parties.”73 “In alliance with the German Empire, which was strengthened through personal meetings of the monarchs and expanded to include Italy,” Austria now asserted an influential position in the European state system.74 And last but not least, Francis Joseph “was now freed from the perpetually threatening danger of war” and “was able to devote all his energy to the internal development of Austria,” which resulted in a great progress “in all branches of popular welfare.”75 After the war against Prussia in 1866, the emperor promulgated the December Laws (1867).76 “A great boom in trade and industry, in the arts and sciences” is referred to as a direct consequence of these laws. For instance, the frigate Novara circumnavigated the earth in 1857–1859 and established trade connections with overseas cities and countries. Numerous roads and railways were built, with the Semmering, Brenner, West, Northwest, and Francis Joseph Railways being of particular importance.77 In his textbook for soon-to-be teachers, Tupetz also suggested a very encouraging summary of the war years:

Avoiding war and all bloodshed, a prince of peace in the noblest sense of the word, Emperor Francis Joseph I found himself obliged to draw the sword to protect his empire against foreign enemies; in the wars which Austria was forced to wage, the Austrian armies acquired new laurels for their imperishable wreath of glory. […] the victory which Field Marshal Archduke Albrecht, the son of the victor of Aspern, achieved at Custozza in 1866, the victory of Admiral Wilhelm von Tegetthoff, who unfortunately died early, at Lissa in the same year will live on forever in the memory of all Austrians.78

 

Narratives in Languages Other than German

The discussion above offers a good general image of the wars in which the Austrian monarchy fought during the period of neo-absolutism as these wars were narrated in history textbooks in German. I would also like to provide a few samples of narratives in Czech and Romanian for comparison. Let me note, however, that it is not my intention to present a comprehensive analysis of the peculiarities that were typical of narratives in textbooks in other languages of the monarchy. I offer only a few examples as interesting illustrations of some of the differences in these narratives.

From the textbook on the world history by professor Samuil V. Isopescul, designed for the lower classes of secondary schools and published in Romanian, the reader would similarly know that although Emperor Francis Joseph I was “not fond of wars,” he was still forced to wage many wars during his long reign. Isopescul considers Count Cavour, who was “pursuing with great energy the plan of the unification of Italy,” to have been the aggressor in the Italian war of 1859, and he claims that “King Victor Emmanuel, supported by Emperor Napoleon III, declared war on Austria in 1859.” The Austrian army was defeated near Magenta, “although it had fought with the greatest heroism.”79 Isopescul particularly stresses the personal courage of Emperor Francis Joseph, who “exposed himself to fire like every other soldier.”80 In a way similar to that in the German textbooks, Isopescul praises the glorious Austrian victors Archduke Albrecht and Admiral Tegetthoff, providing a few sentences of biography on each and describing in some detail the battles at Custozza and Lissa.81

As for the schoolbooks published in Czech, one also finds emphasis on reverence for Emperor Francis Joseph and praise for his personal courage during the war period. For example, in Šembera-Koníř’s textbook on world history, which was written for first-year students in the municipal schools, one reads that, even as a young man, he “showed special affection and dexterity for military service,” and he “went to Italy to get a vivid picture of war preparations and achievements, which were directed against the enemy by Field Marshal Count Radetzky at the head of the Austrian army.”82 In 1859 and 1866, he waged bloody wars, during which “our people gloriously defeated Italy on land at Custozza (under Archduke Albrecht) and at sea near Lissa (under Admiral Tegetthoff), but he had bad luck against the Prussians.”83 The reference to “our people” distinguishes the narrative in this textbook. It made the Bohemian children perceive the Habsburg citizens as one solidary Austrian people, which was definitely the aim of the Habsburg government. The images of shared triumph and shared defeat contributed, without doubt, to the cohesion of the residents of the Habsburg lands. In the textbook by Šembera-Koníř intended for the second-year and third-year students in the municipal schools one finds praise of the worthy emperor, who “showed great bravery and fearlessness,” accompanied by a portrait of him as a young man, as well as praise of “our” brave army.”84 The reader also finds a cautious critique of the “indecisive” General Benedek, who, unlike in the German narratives, is portrayed here as a commander lacking in bravery who was incapable of making bold decisions.85 The narrative also notes that, after the defeat at Königgrätz, the Prussians occupied Prague, a detail omitted from the German narratives. Šembera-Koníř underlines: “Although this war did not last long, it was terrible, and all the horrors took place in Bohemia. The loyalty of the Czech nation proved excellent in these difficult trials, which the noble monarch himself acknowledged when he visited Bohemia after the war.” 86 Thus, Šembera-Koníř emphasizes the outstanding loyalty and merits of the Czech people, although he regards the latter as an integral part of the whole Austrian people. “The outstanding loyalty” of the Czech nation is also stressed in the schoolbook by Š. M. Konečný.87 The narrative on the war period concludes with a comment that later Austria was compensated for the loss of the Italian territories, when it acquired Bosnia and Herzegovina.88

The cult of wars and military heroes was widely employed by the Habsburg government in its effort to forge state loyalty and patriotic thinking in imperial Austria. It was propagated through various institutions, channels, and means. History classes in schools and history schoolbooks served as ideal means of spreading this cult. Narratives about wars led by the Austrian monarchy with a relevant focus and emphasis occupied a solid place in history textbooks in the different languages of the monarchy. While it was possible to select triumphant military conflicts from the remote past to be presented to schoolchildren and ignore clashes in which Austria was defeated, this approach was hardly applicable to relatively recent wars that could not be “hushed up.” For this reason, the narratives about the Austro-Sardinian war of 1859 and the Seven Weeks’ War of 1866 found a due place on the pages of Habsburg schoolbooks, even though the Austrian army was crushingly defeated in those wars and the Austrian monarchy suffered territorial losses and the loss of its supremacy in the German Confederation.

However, the Ministry of Culture and Education in Vienna kept a stern eye on the focus of narratives about the wars to ensure that the image of the great Fatherland under its good ruler and heroic army was by no means challenged. The discussion I have offered above of the narratives in history textbooks published between 1860s and 1910s mostly in German but also in Czech and Romanian shows that no serious discrepancies between the narratives about the wars waged by Austria between 1859 and 1866 can be discovered in the textbooks designed for students at the secondary schools and teacher training colleges in Cisleithania. Although the recent literature considers the wars in question among the hardest and most humiliating for Austria, during the late period of Francis Joseph’s rule, the ways in which these wars were presented in schoolbooks strongly contributed to the cult of the brave Austrian military and the heroic image of Austrian warriors, regardless of ethnicity and language. The authors of schoolbooks did not distort historical facts and did not deny the military defeats suffered by the Austrian Empire, but their narratives are clearly biased and one-sided, and they were clearly intended to foster patriotic feelings, in accordance with the instructions of the ministry. One can find clichés such as “the miracles of bravery” performed by the Austrian soldiers and sailors and stories about glorious battles fought under the leadership of brilliant Austrian commanders, accompanied by portraits of Archduke Albrecht and photos of the monument to Admiral Tegetthoff. The latter were glorified as new heroes of the Austrian army, but in close connection with the hugely popular Radetzky and Archduke Karl. This established continuity among military heroes who were famous not only for their deeds in battle, but also for their patriotism and their loyalty to the dynasty.

Although in the conflicts in 1859 and 1866 it was Austria who officially declared war, in the narratives in question, it was claimed that the major aggressors were Victor Emmanuel II of Sardinia, Napoleon III, and the Prussian government. The wars were lost because of “unfortunate” circumstances, but with modest war indemnity losses and no territorial losses. Moreover, the outcomes of the wars led to the long-awaited monarchy’s reorganization and its “finest achievement,” the Constitution of 1867. The personal bravery and achievements of Francis Joseph were particularly stressed, and a portrait of an emperor as a young man full of energy decorated most of the textbooks. The narratives in Romanian paid specific attention to the high virtues of the emperor, while those in Czech emphasized the alleged loyalty of the Bohemians to the emperor during the hostilities.

Thus, this discussion offers insights into one more episode in the Habsburg state efforts to promote a patriotic agenda and present the Austrian army as a powerful and cohesive force guarding the multinational Fatherland, a force of which every citizen should have been proud. History schoolbooks can be considered an effective means of disseminating the cult of Austrian wars, since large masses of schoolchildren absorbed their narratives under the oversight of state-certified teachers, and these narratives could certainly strengthen patriotic feelings and influence the political views of children as they grew older, much as they could also contribute to the formation of their identities as imperial Austrians. This, in its turn, may offer further insights into the phenomena of military culture, popular patriotism, and dynastic loyalty, which are widely discussed in the recent secondary literature.

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* This study was financially supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, project no. 19-59-23005 The Habsburg Monarchy: new trends in research of economic, sociopolitical and national development of the Central-European composite state.

Zsuzsanna Varga
Eötvös Loránd University
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 10 Issue 3  (2021):444-465 DOI 10.38145/2021.3.444