The Habsburg Empire
Such a complex history — and the Habsburg kings, historians, and peoples would have it no other way. One could go back to the 11th Century and Radbot of Klettgau who built the Habsburg Castle in Switzerland. The family came to rule Austria in the 13th Century; it was a duchy within the Kingdom of Germany which was rolled into the Holy Roman Empire. You see how a thousand years of histories and millions of peoples from a dozen nationalities/ethnicities/geographies are involved. What we do remember is the end: World War One and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the merciless maelstrom of the 20th Century.
This selection scratches the surface, of course. I am drawn to the history and literature of the Empire because it had such grand concerns (half of modern Europe) and great writers (Banffy, Zweig, Musil, Freud, among many). It also had supremely romantic figures — Empress Elisabeth of Austria, Queen of Hungary, Sissi, a Bavarian girl lifted to the heights of the imperium only to see the beginning of the end before her assassination in 1898, the longest serving Empress in Austrian history. All of History’s wheels-within-wheels seemed to operate in the Empire, all levels of art and science and literature and military tradition.
And we live with the shadows, the ruins, and the consequences of the Empire to these fraught days of the 21st Century.
The Austro-Hungarian Army and the First World War
The Austro-Hungarian Army and the First World War
This is a definitive account of the Austro-Hungarian Royal and Imperial Army during the First World War. Graydon A. Tunstall shows how Austria-Hungary entered the war woefully unprepared for the ordeal it would endure. When the war commenced, the Habsburg Army proved grossly under strengthen relative to trained officers and manpower, possessing obsolete weapons and equipment, and with the vast majority of its troops proved inadequately trained for modern warfare. Well over one million Habsburg troops mobilized creating an enormous logistical challenge of forging an army from the diverse cultures, languages, economic and educational backgrounds of the Empire's peoples. Graydon A. Tunstall shows how the army suffered from poor strategic direction and outdated tactics and facing a two-front offensive against both Russia and Serbia. He charts the army's performance on the battlefields of Galicia, Serbia, Romania, the Middle East and Italy through to its ultimate collapse in 1918.
Reviews
‘Instead of focusing on an individual front, campaign or battle, Tunstall deals with the travails of the Austro-Hungarian army on every front in which it fought, and across the entire course of the war. Steeped in archival research and measured in its judgements, Tunstall's work is indispensable for both students of the Great War and the Austro-Hungarian army.'
Richard L. DiNardo - author of Breakthrough: The Gorlice-Tarnow Campaign, 1915
‘This is a superb analysis of a still underappreciated aspect of the First World War by an eminent historian of the Habsburg military. Crisp analysis of both the military and the home fronts give the work breathtaking depth. Tunstall rights many of the still prevalent myths and misconceptions of Conrad and his paladins 1914-1918.'
Holger H. Herwig - author of The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary 1914-1918