Page - 1017 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

Afterword 1017 the fortunes of his empire through 68 years. For Emperor Karl I, a few busts have to suffice, and he only attracted greater attention again in connection with his beatification in 2004. The prime ministers of the war era are buried in various local cemeteries and family vaults. Archduke Friedrich, Army Supreme Commander from 1914 until the end of 1916, is buried in Mosonmagyaróvár. Several military commanders, particularly Field Marshal Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, were given honorary graves. Roads and squares were also named after individuals such as Conrad, Archduke Eugen or Count Viktor Dankl. This continues to be, or is once again, a thorn in the side to some people. The treatment of the war memorials of the First World War, which are in fact the most important and most widely distributed group of remembrance sites, has in the interim long become entirely separated from the aspect that was the determining factor in their being erected as substitute graves. They are part of the political veneration of the dead, and are accordingly subject to shifting trends. What began to be constructed already during the war as a symbol of mourning was conceivably treated differently after 1918. And if an attempt is made today to bring to mind the memorial culture, then elements emerge that may in some cases perfectly reflect the political changes, but which no longer have anything in common with the original intention behind the memorials, namely as places of mourning. In Italy, the fortresses commemorating the dead in Friuli and the Julian March, the majority of which were erected during the Fascist era, continue to be symbols of na- tional remembrance. The slogan ‘Trento è Trieste’ has in this way retained its validity. The areas around the memorials, most of which cover the ground on which the battles raged, are a sacred zone. In the memorials erected later, those who fell in the Imperial and Royal Army are also remembered, and are thus symbols of death as a levelling force as well as of the final victory. Those who fell in Italy were not described as heroes, however, but simply as ‘caduti’ (‘the fallen’). In Slovenia, Fascist memorials mingle with those with a Slovenian nationalist ten- dency, which are in fact Yugoslav memorials. However, in the interim, they now provide an expression of a history linked to the Habsburg Empire and its final war while being a symbol of national identity in equal measure. In Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia, and to an equal extent in Transylvania in Romania, however, the memorials that commemorate the fallen Austro-Hungarian troops are rare. If they were not already erected during the war, there was subsequently no need to find an expression for what had happened before and for the soldiers who had fought for the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in the form of an honorific commemora- tion. For this reason, memorials such as the one in Kotor, which is dedicated to the men who were executed for their part in the sailors’ uprising of 1918, are far more prominent. However, they too are no longer a matter for national sentiment, in extremely clear con- trast to Hungary, where remembrance of the war through memorials is far more preva-