“Looking Like the Other Guys”: the 1914 Mobilization as a Masculine Experienc

Abstract

The article analyses the key motivations of Czech-speaking soldiers of the Austro-Hungarian army at the beginning of the Great War, finding an important connection between their masculine identity and contemporary gender discourse. While loyalty of Czech soldiers to the Empire is often questioned, it is obvious that many of them were loyal to the image of war as a masculine enterprise: they considered the wartime society divided into the gendered spaces of war (the “front”) and peace (the “home”). By deliberately submitting themselves to the social pressure of collective behavior, and relying on the brevity of war, they hoped that it would bring them all the social capital attached to the hegemonic discourse of masculinity : status, power, access to resources and women. Although this motivation was usually not put in the foreground, their personal accounts make it clear it has played an important role in making them to follow the mobilization orders in July and August 1914.