Page - 502 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

502 South Tyrol : The End of an Illusion (I) the claims, rights and needs of the other, non-German peoples, must unconditionally be withdrawn.’1183 It was only in terms of the representation of the relationship with Hungary that the Easter Demands did not go beyond the goals of the German Na- tional League. Parallel to this, the radicalisation on the streets began. Now, what was expressed in the Easter Demands  – and it should again be em- phasised that at this point in time, this was only a radical German minority  – had nothing in common with what was happening on the streets of Vienna, except for the fact that different events pointed to one and the same problem : the aims and the purpose of the war were at issue. On 11 May 1916, the severe rioting mentioned above took place in Vienna as a result of food shortages. Shops were looted. At first, the police did nothing ; only in the 14th and 16th districts were fire hoses used in order to disperse the people. However, several days later, the unrest spread to other districts.1184 The radicalisation progressed. The ‘Easter Demands’, like Friedrich Naumann’s bestseller Mitteleuropa (Central Europe), were systematically dissemi- nated by their radical proponents in Bohemia and Moravia and among the other non-German nationalities in order to show the direction in which German domi- nance should go.1185 In the same way as the German radicals and the organisations within the German National League were convinced that the war would bring about a far-reaching change in the political structures of Central and Eastern Europe, it was also understandable that the demands for dominance by the Germans in the Monarchy within the framework of a reshaped Central Europe were met with the counter-demand : destroy the Monarchy ! The Czech opposition, if it had not been incarcerated in prison, as Kramář had been, went into exile. Tomás Masaryk was joined by the Russophile Josef Dürich, along with Edvard Beneš and members of the secret Czech organisation ‘Maffia’. The southern Slav émigrés, who had suffered a severe setback at the point at which Italy had been promised a series of territories in the Treaty of London that were of ne- cessity equally coveted by a Yugoslav movement, were gradually able to re-form. They became more radical at the moment when, following the occupation of Serbia and Montenegro, the émigré community was strengthened by an influx from those coun- tries. The émigrés from Austria and the radical opponents of the Monarchy who had fled via Albania and Corfu met and from then on worked together to pursue their political agenda abroad. For the Entente powers, it was certainly difficult to differentiate between the in- dividual groups of émigrés, and to process the large amount of information. Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, southern Slavs, deserters and Austro-Hungarian politicians on for- eign trips mixed up truths, semi-truths and untruths, passed on any tepid rumour that was heard and in some cases, even provided protocols of meetings of the Hungarian Reichstag (Imperial Diet). All this had to be evaluated and classified. Espionage went