1. The summer of 1914: the Hapsburg empire meets Serbian warfare; 2. Eradicating national politics in occupied Serbia; 3. Legal severity, international law, and the tottering empire in occupied Serbia; 4. Food as salvation: food supply, the monarchy, and Serbia, 1916–18; 5. A levee en masse nation no more? Guerilla war in Hapsburg Serbia.
This book examines the Habsburg Army's occupation of Serbia from 1914 through 1918, arguing that it was different from other great power colonial projects.
Jonathan Gumz is currently Assistant Professor of History at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and has held teaching positions at the United States Naval War College, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and the University of Chicago. His articles have appeared in the Historical Journal and the Historian. He was the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship for study in Vienna and a Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.
'This book effectively refutes the argument that Austria-Hungary's
occupation of Serbia constituted an unrestrained war of national
destruction. It also challenges recent scholarship that views
wartime occupation practices in Eastern Europe through a lens of
colonization that anticipated Nazi atrocities in the Second World
War. Jonathan Gumz argues that unlike many of their peers elsewhere
in Europe, Austria-Hungary's conservative military leaders in fact
rejected total war policies that merged war and home fronts. Gumz
clearly elaborates this traditional military culture, demonstrating
its workings at both the casual village level in occupied Serbia
and in the highest Imperial councils in Vienna. He elucidates the
key conflicts that set the military against the imperial
bureaucracies during the War, and that by 1918 had helped to
destroy the regime's legitimacy among its citizens. Above all, his
comparative approach produces important insights onto wartime
practices, not only in Austria-Hungary but throughout Europe. This
is military history at its best, broadly conceived, clearly
applicable beyond specifically military situations, and above all,
superbly grounded in archival research.' Pieter Judson, Swarthmore
College
'Gumz challenges orthodoxies on the Austro-Hungarian occupation of
Serbia by describing an evolution from brutality to a pragmatic
symbiosis. By 1917 Serbia developed into a vital source of food
purchased on such advantageous terms that consideration developed
of extending postwar Habsburg rule over a Serbia not merely
pacified, but content. Was this an anomaly? Or is it time for a
fresh perspective on occupation during the Great War?' Dennis
Showalter, Colorado College
'This brilliant account of the Austrian war against Serbia between
1914 and 1918 fills a huge gap in our understanding of the way the
Great War reconfigured the boundaries between front, home front and
occupation. Gumz shows authoritatively how the Austrian army
marched through Serbia right back into the nineteenth century, by
trying to do the impossible: to separate battle front and home
front in the midst of total war. Their failure to do so is at the
core of the failure of the Habsburg empire to survive the war.' Jay
Winter, Yale University
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