The Brusilov Offensive by Timothy C. Dowling

Abstract

AUSTRIAN STUDIES l6 (20 8) 217 14 December 1913, a publisher was to play the role of a 'Seismograph' rather than presuming to be a judicious 'Seismologe' (p. 47) ? an argument that Kraus accepted. Despite Kraus's suspicions and his polemics against Werfel and others, Wolff persisted in publishing Kafka and the Expressionists in his series 'Der J?ngste Tag'. Prefaced and annotated by the knowledgeable Friedrich Pfafflin, the edition also contains an essay on Kraus written byWolff in the late 1950s, which beautifully rounds off the relationship between this gentleman publisher and one of his more difficult authors. Neither of these volumes will fundamentally alter our view of Kraus. Instead, each will alert us to the often contradictory ways inwhich personal and public contexts contribute to his work. Whereas in Nottscheid's edition the letters themselves are comparatively tame and the real drama is in the annotations and the contextualizing afterword, Pfafflin's edition is much more of a 'Leseausgabe' which provides a continuous and dramatic story through the letters themselves. Despite their different approaches, both editions convey the storyof ambivalent alliances that thisEinzelg?nger forged with other avant-garde figures. Moreover, both reveal a great deal about the ambivalent reactions Kraus must have triggered in his contemporaries, touching on the issue of why (asWolff puts it in his late essay on Kraus) 'die Kraus-Hasser sich zumeist aus Kraus-Liebenden rekrutierten' (p. 212), and one wonders whether this is not already true for some of his correspondents. Goldsmiths College, University of London Andreas Kramer The Brusilov Offensive.By Timothy C. Dowling. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. 2008. 208 pp. $24.95; ?1^ 99. isbn 978 The campaign waged by the Russian general Aleksei Brusilov on the Eastern Front from June through to September 1916 destroyed theHabsburg Army as a fighting force and made him a national hero, both at the time and later in the Soviet era, as one of the few Russian military commanders who was not an aristocrat. The Brusilov Offensive also cost Russia nearly one million casualties, while Austria-Hungary lost 1.5 million soldiers, of whom 400,000 were taken prisoner. Driven back to the Carpathian Mountains, theHabsburg forces never truly recovered from the series of crushing defeats inflicted on them. While theWestern Front continues to dominate Western European and American perceptions of the First World War, for entirely understandable reasons, it isuseful to have a corrective in the shape of a monograph devoted to the contribution of thatother equally important theatre, especially as theBrusilov Offensive itselfwas partly conceived to relieve pressure on theWestern Allies. Timothy C. Dowling's laudable aim is,as he puts it,toprovide a comprehensive view of the Brusilov Offensive 'bybringing together sources inGerman, Russian and English'. His German primary sources, given the destruction of many key Imperial German records, are drawn exclusively from the Austrian State Archives. He is able to deliver a blow-by-blow account of the failures of tactical 2l8 AUSTRIAN STUDIES l6 (20 8) leadership that led to the wholesale annihilation of the Habsburg Fourth Army and the desperate attempts of the German High Command to shore up weakened and demoralized Austro-Hungarian units ? the metaphor used at the timewas thatGerman officers and soldiers would provide 'Korsettstangen', corset stays, to steady the line. Although his secondary references inRussian are of an older vintage and much of his German secondary material dates from the FirstAustrian Republic, Dowling follows more recent US and Austrian research in seeing Brusilov's tactical innovations on the one hand and the incompetence of Habsburg generals on the other as largely to blame for the collapse, rather than the desertions and unwillingness to fight of unreliable Slav regiments on theHabsburg side. (See, for example, John Schindler, 'Steam-rollered inGalicia: The Austro-Hungarian Army and the Brusilov Offensive, 1916', War inHistory, 10 [2003], 27-59 or Graydon A. Tunstall, 'Austria-Hungary and the Brusilov Offensive of 1916', The Historian, 70 [2008], 30-53.) Throughout the 1920s and 1930s former Habsburg officers, led by Conrad von H?tzendorf himself in his monumental, five-volume autobiography Aus meinerDienstzeit (1921-25), waged an unremitting desk-top campaign of self-exculpation. Dowling's focus on Brusilov...