Page - 436 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

436 Factory War and Domestic Front, 1915 The Command of the South-Western Front and the Army High Command also col- luded in suggestions to alter the political division of the Austrian half of the Empire and to introduce a district constitution. The police force was to be nationalised in gen- eral, and the municipalities at least partially lose their autonomy. The state was to obtain influence over the seminaries and monitor the clergy. As with the teachers, the clergy was also to be made impenetrable to any ‘extreme national and subversive influence’, on the model of the Imperial and Royal officer corps.1044 At the beginning of June 1915, the Army High Command demanded that the en- tire civil service of Bohemia be examined with regard to its patriotic sentiments. On 17 July, the application was extended to the whole of Austria. The Command of the South-Western Front kept pace with the Army High Command. The civil servants should not only be examined for the requirements of the war, however. The civil service was to be rebuilt completely anew after the war and ‘de-politicised’. The officials were to be deprived of the active and passive right to vote, in order  – as the Command of the South-Western Front claimed  – to prevent civil servants from aligning themselves with national and socialist parties or representatives of the civil service from coming into parliament and lobbying there. Since the officials were measured against the officer corps, complete de-politicisation was also demanded for the latter. The Command of the South-Western Front wanted furthermore to consistently and completely elimi- nate any influence on the part of politicians and political parties over administrative processes, promotions and transfers.1045 Civil servants, like the officer corps, should be submitted to a trial in front of an honorary board. The independence of judges should be rescinded. Finally, it was also proposed that the German language not only be culti- vated more strongly but also formally made the official language of the state. It does not require much imagination to recognise in the sum total of the ideas emerging among the most senior commanders of the Imperial and Royal Army during the war a type of substitute for the imperial reform that had not been obtainable during peacetime. Em- peror Franz Joseph did not want to commit himself completely to this. He was perhaps not entirely in the picture regarding the thoughts of his cousins Friedrich and Eugen, but he did take one step in the direction pursued by the two of them : with the imperial decrees of 10 and 11 October 1915, he ordered the substitution of the designation used for the Austrian half of the Empire. Subsequently, it should no longer be known as ‘the Kingdoms and Lands Represented in the Reichsrat’, but simply Austria.1046 A particular problem was now thrown up by the Army High Command when it demanded the establishment after the war of a border protection zone against Russia, Serbia, Montenegro and Italy. In this way, influences from these countries and above all any cooperation between nationalist groups on both sides of the border were to be made impossible. This new military border was to be 25 kilometres deep. As a precur- sor to this, on 30 September 1915 an application was made to limit the acquisition of