Page - 296 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

296 The First Winter of the War bankruptcy assets. This was a fantasy image, against which, however, evidently no-one would have raised any objections or emphatically pointed out the realities. In Germany, however, the debate on war aims made even bigger waves. There the discourse on Poland had also flared up completely, and after the Russians had been forced back in the battles and engagements from Łódź to Gorlice there also developed a dispute with Austria regarding who should receive which part of the Polish cake. The German Empire claimed above all the industrial region bordering Silesia. That was all it claimed, however. This accorded with the German debate on war aims, during which the annexation of a new Polish kingdom by the German Empire had admittedly been discussed. The majority of the position papers on German war aims, however, had ar- gued that Poland be attached to the Danube Monarchy.706 What was this compared to what German foreign politicians and, above all, the industrialists, or even German intellectuals wrote about in terms of desires, hopes and, ultimately, demands ? The an- nexation of Belgium by the German Empire seemed to be taken completely for granted, whilst the reduction in the size of France and the acquisition of British colonies and dominions should merely be the logical consequence of what was still regarded as a certain German victory in the west. A first compromise was reached with Austria-Hungary on 10 January 1915 regard- ing the Polish question. In the Treaty of Poznań (Posen) a partition of the Polish terri- tories conquered up to that point was agreed, according to which the German Empire, however, received the more valuable parts with more industry. With this, an unmis- takeable annexation signal had been set for the war and its outcome. Further measures could not be applied, since Russia’s power was by no means broken. Yet a start had been made and the justification for it did not even sound so absurd : the loss of human life of any given belligerent had already reached the hundreds of thousands. The annexation of conquered territories was therefore regarded as a self-evident means of motivation and compensation for the enormous sacrifices. The posing of questions regarding war aims could also be a distraction, however, since the much-cited public interest was no longer focussed on immediate wartime events, military victories or failures but instead on ephemeral questions in which the imagination knew no limits. In this way, the war continued to be seen as a manageable military and foreign policy problem that fuelled dreams. In August 1914, Andrian had devoted at least one part of his reflections to the effects of territorial acquisitions on the internal structure of the Habsburg Monarchy. Yet this factor increasingly dropped away and even Forgách made practically no reference at all to the domestic aspects. Perhaps it was a type of occupational disease that those re- sponsible for foreign policy did not have a good eye for the internal situation. The only problem, which was then handled in a sweeping way, was the question of the decline or otherwise of the Monarchy. Forgách, the enemy of Serbia, referred to the necessity