Violence and Crimes Beyond the Battlefields

2018 ◽  
pp. 146-186
Author(s):  
Jochen Böhler
Keyword(s):  
Central Europe ◽  
State Policy ◽  
Great War ◽  
Refugee Crisis ◽  
Border Conflicts ◽  
The Great War

Chapter 4 reminds the reader that the described conflicts were fought out on territories which had been already heavily affected by the casualties and destructions of the Great War. Postwar Central Europe witnessed epidemics, famine, and a massive refugee crisis. Between 1918 and 1921, Poland’s population was fighting for mere survival. In the meantime, it was menaced by the very men who were meant to protect it: its soldiers. The Polish Army was built from scratch. Desertion, insubordination, and rebellion of whole units was the order of the day. Bands of marauding soldiers harassed the civil population, killing hundreds of Jews. While the border conflicts were state policy put into practice, this wave of paramilitary violence beyond the battlefields was a mixture of cynical pragmatism (shortage of supply), opportunity (possession of arms), and mentality (a sense of superiority of “elite” units towards “ethnic aliens” in general, and Jews in particular).

How to Mobilize the Polish Nation

2018 ◽  
pp. 33-58
Author(s):  
Jochen Böhler
Keyword(s):  
Central Europe ◽  
The Political ◽  
Great War ◽  
Armed Struggle ◽  
Polish Society ◽  
Chain Of Command ◽  
Political Left ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Great War ◽  
Organic Change

Chapter 2 highlights the fragmentation within Polish society in partition times, during the Great War, and in its after-battles. While the political left prior to 1914 prepared for armed struggle, the right preferred a tactic of “organic change.” During the Great War, genuine Polish military formations became the incarnation of Polish independence. But they formed on opposing sides of the frontline, and were, in terms of numbers, insignificant, while most Polish soldiers served as cannon fodder in the ranks of the imperial armies. Following independence in late 1918, most peasants—80 percent of the Polish-speaking population in Central Europe—mistrusted the “national project” and did not follow the call to arms voluntarily. The Polish Army from the start had to struggle with a serious shortage of soldiers, armament, and provisions. A functioning united national army and chain of command needed years to materialize.

Urban Self-Identification in East Central Europe Before the Great War: the Case of Cracow

2006 ◽  
Vol 33 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 9-29
Author(s):  
Nathaniel D. Wood
Keyword(s):  
Central Europe ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Great War ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
Big City ◽  
Life Itself ◽  
Mass Circulation ◽  
The Great War ◽  
The City

AbstractAbstract: This article explores the development of urban and interurban identities in fln-de-siècle East Central Europe as alternative sources of identity that do not fit simply within standard national-historical narratives. The author focuses on Cracow as an example of this trend. Analyzing three popular illustrated newspapers from the city, he argues that thanks to popular press representations of the big city at home and abroad, as well as the experience of urban life itself, Cracovians began to develop distinct urban and interurban identities. The mass circulation press was a major vehicle in fostering and developing a shared sense of modem, urban identity among its readers. How were modem metropolitan identities created in East Central Europe in the decades before the Great War, and how were such identifications informed by tropes already in use elsewhere? In general, scholarship about East Central Europe for this period has focused on the question of nationalism and its relation to politics. Even in studies of urban centers, like Prague, Budapest, and Vienna, nationality issues have often had precedence.' This is not unwarranted, as national identification defined many of the terms of urban interaction in the ethnically diverse cities of the region. But what if strong urban and interurban identities also arose during this period, identities that overlapped with, and at times even supplanted, national ones? "Islands in a sea of rural, peasant settlements," the large cities of East Central Europe were qualitatively different from the landscape that surrounded them, as Ivan Berend has observed.2 It should come as no surprise that as their citizens became accustomed to life in the city, they recognized these differences. In their introduction to The City in Central Europe, Malcolm Gee, Tim Kirk, and Jill Steward

Remaking Mobility

2020 ◽  
pp. 193-212
Author(s):  
Peter Becker
Keyword(s):  
Central Europe ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
International Standards ◽  
Free Movement ◽  
Great War ◽  
Tight Control ◽  
Habsburg Monarchy ◽  
Individual Mobility ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Great War

Our modern passport system emerged after the Great War. It superseded the tight control of individual mobility during wartime, but did not come close to prewar conditions of open borders. The League of Nations had to play an ambivalent role. It was commissioned by the governments to manage the abolition of passports, but obstructed in its implementation. In the end, the League had to settle with an agreement on international standards for issuing passports and visas and for controlling travel documents at the border. The discussions at the conferences highlight the difficulties of coming to terms with the social, political, and economic legacy of the war. One of the legacies was the mistrust towards nationals and foreigners; its impact was strongly felt in Central Europe, where the successor states of the Habsburg monarchy established a strict border regime within a highly integrated region with free movement of people, goods, and capital.

scholarly journals The Great War: World war, total war

2015 ◽  
Vol 97 (900) ◽  
pp. 1029-1045 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annette Becker
Keyword(s):  
Great War ◽  
Refugee Crisis ◽  
World War ◽  
Old People ◽  
Total War ◽  
The World ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
The Great War

AbstractThe Great War was globalized and totalized1 by the inclusion of colonial and newly independent people from all over the world and of civilians, old people, women and children. The European war became a laboratory for all the suffering of the century, from the extermination of the Armenians to the refugee crisis, the internments, and the unending modernization of warfare.

The Great War in History

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jay Winter ◽  
Antoine Prost
Keyword(s):  
Great War ◽  
The Great War
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