Page - 1016 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

1016 Afterword the years following 1989, when the Soviet Union began to dissolve, the states that were created on the soil of the Danube Monarchy after the First World War sought to find a connection to their past. Most certainly, the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the 1990s created new, but ultimately also old, individual political entities. The fact that during the Europeanisation of Europe, the question arose as to whether the Austro-Hun- garian Monarchy was a prefiguration of European unification, could not be avoided. Idealistic trimming aside, one can only hope that Europe does not follow the path of the Habsburg Monarchy ! There is much that clings to the final years of the Danube Monarchy : the fragility of a major power than has become almost ungovernable, the attempt to find a compro- mise between eleven nationalities, and the laboratory for apocalypses and the enormous creativity that was released in the years before and during the First World War. If we also wish to apply the term ‘historicisation’  – which is usually used in relation to the National Socialist period  – to the First World War, then this is appropriate to the extent that we can determine that the historicisation of the first great war of the 20th century has reached a decisive point. The focus here is not on problems of repeatability or some kind of direct reference. It is something else that marks this break : the last peo- ple who not only experienced the First World War in a state of unawareness, but who also took influential action or at least were aware of what was happening, are dead. They are no longer available to us as personal sources of information. There is also no-one left whom we could ask, and who could then give answers as to how things once were according to the popular oral history method. There is no-one left who can describe the emotions and the atmosphere that dominated when the war broke out, or at any other point during the war. Hunger, concerns, suffering and sorrow can also no longer be authentically attested to ; instead, attempts can only be made at best to put ourselves in their shoes. For later generations, the First World War is therefore slipping back into the shadows of the distant past, which now has almost no further connection to the present. A hundred years ‘afterwards’ are a long time, after all ! The theatres of the heavy fighting have become open-air museums. Some have been given additional places of remembrance in the form of public exhibitions, which extend from Verdun, Peronne and Ypres through to Gorlice, Gorizia (Görz), Bovec (Flitsch) and Kötschach-Mauthen. Wherever a country did not see such fighting directly, as was the case for Austria with the exception of the area around the Plöcken Pass, the First World War and the end of the Habsburg Monarchy can only be displayed in exhibitions. The Museum of Military History in Vienna is an outstanding example of this, and is without doubt the central place of remembrance for all the countries that formerly be- longed to the Habsburg Empire. However, there are very few memorials to the individ- uals who were influential at the time. Emperor Franz Joseph has his monuments. They were not explicitly erected for the ‘war emperor’, but for the monarch who had steered