National Indifference in the Heyday of Nationalist Mobilization? Ljubljana Military Veterans and the Language of Command

Abstract

<jats:p>In the accounts of life in Austria-Hungary at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, one reads about a world dominated by nations and nationalism. Both contemporaries and historians describe a nationality conflict in which politics, economy, literature, music, journalism, sports, and science were all placed in the “service of the nation.” According to Helmut Rumpler, it was a time when even the once-powerful state and its bureaucracy were forced to withdraw in the face of different nationalisms. Primary sources often paint a similar picture: A German from Celje/Cilli, Fritz Zangger, claims that in his home town even “the God of Germans and of Slovenes had nothing in common.” Contemporary newspapers described incessant nationalist conflicts between Czechs and Germans, Germans and Slovenes, Slovenes and Italians, or Croats and Hungarians. Minutes of parliamentary sessions tell us about obstructionism carried out by nationalist parties, and in the War Ministry the “Disciplinary Measures to Prevent National Endeavours from Invading” [the Military] (<jats:italic>Massregeln zur Verhütung des Eindringens nationaler Bestrebungen</jats:italic>) grew longer every year. Therefore, it is no surprise that descriptions of a different reality in which nationalism had hardly played a role, like those of the novelist Joseph Roth, were often dismissed as figments of a nostalgic imagination or depictions of a vanishing world.</jats:p>

National indifference and dynastic loyalty in comparative perspective: The demise of the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires revisited

“…Dynastic allegiance was much more widespread than what Jászi thought. Studies on the Habsburg military have shown how allegiance to the dynasty permeated not only the officer corps, but also the troops and wider populace across the monarchy (Cole, 2014;Deák, 1990;Sondhaus, 1990;Stergar, 2012). Dynastic patriotism was not just what Jaszi (1929, p. 449) considered, 'the faith of some ten thousand officers, aristocrats, priests, bureaucrats, and industrial magnates [which proved] powerless against the popular enthusiasm of the exuberant national individualities'.…”

Social Conflict, National Strife, or Political Battle? Violence and Strikebreaking in Late Habsburg Austria

“…27 Two protesters were killed during nationalist riots in Ljubljana in 1908. 28 Four people were shot in Vienna in 1911 during the hunger riot 29 and in the same year the army killed 26 in Drohobycz during an election rally. 30 Finally, suffrage protests in Budapest in 1912 saw the deaths of six people.…”

The textbook myth: Slovene peasants as heroes of the glorious past

“…In reality this myth does not have much to do with actual historical developments on the ground. What is more, new research on the creation and spreading of the modern national Slovene category of identification revealed that adherence to imagined Slovene national community emerged only several centuries after the peasant rebellions-that is, in the beginning of the 19 th century and reached the masses with the dawn of the 20 th century (Almasy, 2014;Čuček, 2016;Hösler, 2006;Kosi, 2013;Kosi & Stergar, 2016;Stergar, 2012). The relatively recent character of the modern Slovene category of identification also reveals that the Slavophone peasants, self-evidently presented as 'Slovenes' in simplified historical interpretations, did not necessarily understand themselves as being 'Slovenes' at all.…”