Italy, Yugoslavia, and the Controversy over the Adriatic Region, 1915–1920: Strategic Expectations and Geopolitical Realities in the Aftermath of the Great War

The extremely successful Cambridge Apostle Ferenc Békássy stunned his British friends and colleagues when he returned to Hungary at the beginning of World War I to fight on the side of the Central Powers. This article is an attempt to reconsider Békássy’s reasons in light of historical and political events as well as in light of his poetic works. In particular, his long, dramatic poem“Adriatica”, which is also the title of a volume published in 1925 by Hogarth Press, reveals the importance Békássy placed upon the Adriatic region not simply for its geographic beauty but, more importantly, for its cultural and historical significance as a bridge between modernity and classical times, between East and West, North and South.

By utilizing practical examples from the Abteilung fur Psychatrie [psychiatric ward] at the Landeskrankenanstalt [province hospital] in Carinthia, Austria, in the wake of the two World Wars, this article seeks to explore the stories of hospitalized women and girls after armistices and peace treaties. Whereas the dialectics of conflict and resulting post-conflict traumas became increasingly accepted by medics for combatants during that time frame, this was not necessarily the case for comparable traumatic experiences of female civilians. Instead, for these patients, the Freudian definition of hysteria prevailed as a stereotypical ‘feminine’ symptom. Accordingly, post-war transitions from 1918 and 1945 onwards, with critical, sometimes even unstable, material and political infrastructures, consolidated a decidedly gender-related notion of trauma. This monopoly of trauma diagnoses, reserved for male patients, hence even resulted in misogyny towards institutionalized women, especially when they were refugees or displaced persons. As this study attempts to show, the mapping of mental illness or normality was heavily determined by sex, class, or ethnic background and in most instances served as an administrative tool for socio-political ends. The research for this contribution is based on archival work conducted for an ERC Advanced Grant, entitled “EIRENE — Post-War Transitions in Gendered Perspective: The Case of the North-Eastern Adriatic Region.”