Page - 585 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

I n autumn 1916, historical events appeared to abide by the seasons. Not only did the year pass, but the events also received a veneer of increasing gloom. Josef Redlich cited the dominant feeling as one of ‘tiredness’. And yet somehow everything remained balanced : successes and failures, hope and resignation. More than two years of war had left deep imprints, however. The memory of the ‘spirit of 1914’, when people had marched towards death with a feeling of joy, was no longer present. All of those waging war were struggling to deal with military, political and, above all, social problems. The national communities of fate were decomposing. If the war had initially exerted an inte- grating influence, strengthened the political and social fabric and turned domestic and socio-political tensions outwards towards the enemy, with the increasing duration of the war the integrating tendency was replaced by one of polarisation.1358 The faultlines were becoming visible. Here and there, they had already become blatantly obvious and gaped wide open. Polarisation, radicalisation and totalisation were variously dominant. These observations on the location of the historical events of the First World War, which were made for the first time by Andreas Hillgruber years ago, certainly also ap- plied to the Habsburg Monarchy. Still, the faultlines perhaps ran differently to those in Germany or France, also to those in Russia, and the trio of polarisation, radicalisation and totalisation also had a different weight than in the countries cited. The totality had a comparatively integrating effect, but polarisation and radicalisation became factors of state disintegration. In the long term, therefore, the tiredness could not retain its status as the dominant feeling, since tired people do not radicalise and polarise. Redlich had probably just chosen the wrong word : the mood that dominated the elites of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy was most accurately a feeling of hopelessness. The broad strata of the population supplemented this with disenchantment. Dissatisfaction had become clear ; strikes and food demonstrations had already taken place. In the War Surveillance Office, the central authority that vigilantly registered all those remarks that were either of a nationalist nature or were directed against the Monarch or the military and state leaderships, the number of notifications and reports multiplied. And yet : the ‘autumn’ had only just begun. The ‘winter’ was around the corner. Let us attempt, however, to determine more precisely where the standstill had occurred in the course of the First World War. The culmination point of the war had long since been passed ; it lay approximately a year in the past, in autumn 1915. However, the so-called ‘critical year of European history’  – 1917  – had not yet begun. Europe found itself somewhere in between, at a