….Austria-Hungary in the Inter-war Historical Discourse.
"The breakdown of Austria-Hungary had many prophets, and it had been popularly considered an anachronism a long time before it actually collapsed. At the beginning of the 20 th century this hodge-podge of peoples and territories, ruled by the oldest living emperor in Europe, and having neither a proper name nor a common language, seemed an exception among the other states of Europe – probably more evidently than it seems to the modern historians. An English journalist trying to present a mosaic of the monarchy's problems to his compatriots in 1913 warned them that "the Austrian problem is a problem sui generis, not to be solved on principle or in the light of theory."[1] Indeed, it was neither easy to govern Austria-Hungary, nor support its political ambitions with a convincing, up to date doctrine.
Thus, when the monarchy finally fell in 1918 it seemed that history gave its clear-cut verdict, and all that remained of the monarchy was memories, sentimental imagery, purely academic investigations and eventually the political phantasms of eccentrics. Nevertheless, the downfall of the Habsburg Empire obviously provoked the imagination and curiosity of numerous authors and it provided historians an opportunity to demonstrate, analyze and explain a historical event of a large scale.
In this paper I shall elucidate on some interpretations of the history of Austria-Hungary as a state produced in the inter-war years, that is, by authors who witnessed the break up of the monarchy. I shall focus my attention on the writings of former citizens of the monarchy, who were predestined to take up this topic for a variety of reasons. Some of them were political, some were purely sentimental; while some authors presumably simply explored a temporary rise of the interest of the public for the recent historical developments, others attempted to legitimize their political past. Hence, their interest in debating and interpreting the history of the monarchy was relatively the strongest in that time, and they managed to establish a number of themes, concepts and explanations with which the future generations of historians, often coming from the West, had to deal…"
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checks out some 10/15mm railroad tracks for wargaming.