Reviewed by: Intellectuals and World War I: A Central European Perspective ed. by Tomasz Pudłocki and Kamil Ruszała Orel Beilinson (bio) Tomasz Pudłocki and Kamil Ruszała (Eds.), Intellectuals and World War I: A Central European Perspective (Kracow: Jagiellonian University Press, 2018). 355 pp. ISBN: 978-8-32334-500-8. As I write this review in early 2021, the article "Making Sense of the War (Austria-Hungary)," in 1914–1918: International Encyclopedia of the First World War remains unwritten. The call for papers suggests 3,750 as the maximum word count for this entry. Can such a short article cover the entire spectrum of thought and ideas about the war promulgated by intellectuals and politicians, authors and ecclesiastical figures, political parties and civic associations, in an empire that spans so many states in contemporary Europe? The volume edited by Tomasz Pudłocki and Kamil Ruszała, Intellectuals and World War I: A Central European Perspective, exposes the sheer diversity of stances undertaken by intellectuals working in Central Europe during the war, a diversity that complicates writing a broad overview. The nineteen chapters comprising the volume are distributed unevenly among the three parts: "Challenges of Great War: General Studies," "Case Studies," and "Beyond the War Years." In the chapter [End Page 258] opening the first part, Pieter M. Judson offers a revisionist view of the Habsburg Empire during World War I that will be well known to the many historians who follow his work. In this view, the sources of the imperial collapse do not reach back to some irresolvable national conflict that colors the entire Habsburg nineteenth century, a view that is by now common wisdom thanks to the work of Judson and others, perhaps best crystallized in his 2016 book.1 Instead, Judson locates the sources of the collapse – more immediate and short-term than a decline – in the military dictatorship and the havoc that war wreaked on the Habsburg channels of power. In this imperial regime, political nationalists were well integrated within the empire's very structure and they employed its symbols and institutions to pursue nationalist goals. Judson's next point is also the subject of much current work in the field, which stresses the continuities of this postimperial transition. Judson's perspective, which stems from discussions on nationalism and revolves around political culture, is neatly complemented by Maciej Górny's chapter, "First Write, Then Shoot: East Central European Intellectuals and the Great War." The capacious title belies a narrow scope. Górny is interested in the work of intellectuals who subscribed to "national characterology" during the war, and concludes that East-Central Europe should not be treated "as an exceptional front of the war" (P. 44). The fact that regional intellectuals participated in "the war of the spirits" was not unique, though Górny identifies the continuation of this war beyond 1918 as distinctive to East-Central Europe. The chapter therefore attests to the power of continuities, as hinted at by Judson, but also shows that during the war, intellectuals continued what they had begun in prewar time. Indeed, though it is of less interest to Górny in this chapter, many of the national mythologies employed by the intellectuals for the international audience were already being propagated in Britain before the war. From Judson and Górny, we thus learn about the war's tantamount importance and immediacy. Whatever lines of thought or political organization had sprouted before the war, much of the actual collapse of the empire and the eruption of national hostilities emerged during the war. Moreover, East-Central Europe was less of an exception in the European landscape than previously assumed. This cumulative conclusion was not embraced by all contributors. Viktoriia Voloshenko's chapter, "Intellectuals [End Page 259] and (Anti)Military Propaganda in the Popular Literature for Ukrainian Peasantry before World War I," begins by asserting, "As everybody knows, … all conflicts begin a long time before the first shot" (P. 45). The author's starting point is the early twentieth century, which sets a very limited historical time frame for the discussion of Dnieper Ukraine in the Russian Empire as compared to a more longue durée perspective...
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Dec 7, 2021
Open Access
Zoheb Mashiur 