Page - 1014 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

1014 Afterword the Habsburg Monarchy no longer existed ; now, it was no more than a memory. It had been replaced by the ‘successor states’, of which (German-)Austria and Hungary would have to answer for what the Habsburg Monarchy had set in motion. They were taken into imperial custody and had no choice but to render an account to themselves and to others as to how the war had come about, and why its end brought the demise of a ma- jor European empire. Much time has passed since then. The accounts have continued to be given. Many issues have been possible to clarify and explain. However, questions still remain open, and the purpose of this book is to answer some of them. By now, a great deal has been written about the First World War and the final years of Austria-Hungary. However, it is far exceeded by the material concerning events in Germany, Belgium and France. Even so, it is possibly a banal observation that we should be mindful of the fact that without Austria-Hungary, the First World War is neither conceivable, nor can it be explained satisfactorily. Certainly, however, the way in which events unfolded respectively in turn deserves an equally separate description, since otherwise, both the intensity and the conclusions remain incomplete and the ap- proach taken towards a historic epoch is questionable at best. Ultimately, states, too, are individuals, and deserve to be described in terms of their very specific manifestations and mentalities. In the case of Austria-Hungary, it is by no means only the military events that should be taken into account, but also the overall political framework and the many-sidedness that caused this instable, fragile structure that the Habsburg Mon- archy had already been before the war to crumble. It was not a sudden end, but a process of dissolution, which was merely accelerated by the war, and which probably led to the most far-reaching changes in Europe in the modern age. It was already my wish twenty years ago to emphasise these aspects when I published a book about Austria-Hungary’s final war for the first time. At that time, I began the book with a quote from the great Swiss historian Werner Näf, who in 1930 began a lecture about the war with the words that already aimed to create a historic distance : ‘However far in the past and however frequently there had been talk of the “coming war”, when it did arrive in the form of a World War, public opinion in the world was overcome with the awareness of a monstrous, all-convulsing event, and every individual was forced to deal with it. Despite all the war psychosis of the months and years that followed, there was no thinking person who did not undergo an inner crisis. The con- flict and the hardships of the times were obstacles to striving for an objective insight into what happened ; one struggled to explain the experience of the war towards oneself, or at least to make it bearable.’ Initially, in naming those who were now ‘to blame’ for the World War, it had ap- peared to be insignificant how varied the causes of this war had been. The victors and the vanquished had a very different view of what had happened. And each side availed itself of the ‘terrible simplificateurs’ (J. Burckhardt). The longer-term causes, the role of