In the Shadow of the Great War: Physical Violence in East-Central Europe, 1917–1923

In the Shadow of the Great War is a collection of short essays that deal, in the broadest sense, with the legacy of the Great War in East-Central Europe. More specifically, they are concerned with violence as an aspect of this legacy, and how violence and its repercussions left an enduring stamp on the region, including on states such as Poland that might be included among the war's victors. Methodologically, most of the essays are woven with the framework of existing national histories, though some, such as Maciej Górny's contribution, on “war neuroses” make explicit transnational comparisons across the region. In addition, “violence” is understood quite broadly, to mean literal violence (essays on German paramilitaries and the Baltic, warlords in Ukraine), but also topics such as its transformation into stories and narratives that shaped perceptions beyond national boundaries (the British Labour Party and counterrevolutionary violence in Hungary, Joseph Roth's journalism about Poland) and discourses around suicide (Austria).Readers of The Polish Review are most likely to find two contributions of particular interest. The first is Winson Chu's article on the Austrian novelist Joseph Roth's reportage from Poland in the immediate postwar period, “A Little Murderous Party.” Written for a German audience (he was employed at the time by the German press), Roth covered several key events, including the Polish-Soviet War and the Silesian uprisings. Chu shows that his coverage of Poland was generally hostile and unflattering. In his coverage of the Polish-Bolshevik War, for example, he wrote disparagingly about ill-disciplined Polish soldiers and, especially, their participation in pogroms. At the same time his writing about the Bolshevik armies was shockingly credulous, displaying them as models of soldierly comportment. Chu argues that Roth's hostility to Poland was deeply rooted in his hostility to all nationalism, which had destroyed his beloved Habsburg Empire. Perhaps more importantly for readers of this publication, Chu notes the unfortunate similarities between Roth's writings and the gathering hatred and contempt for Poland in post-World War I Germany—hatred and contempt more commonly associated with the right than the left, but potentially fed, in this case, by this resolutely cosmopolitan writer.The essay by Maciej Górny, one of Poland's most accomplished historians (and author of a recent polemical work, Polska bez cudów: Historia dla dorosłych) will also be of interest to Polish Review readers. As noted above, his contribution concerns war and psychiatry in the Habsburg Empire and some of its successor states, including Poland. Górny begins by noting the extraordinary psychological toll taken on the Habsburg Empire's troops right from the outset of the war (those who are familiar with the devastating opening battles in Galicia will not be surprised by this), as evidenced by the suicides of high-ranking officers and the sheer numbers of men who required treatment for severe psychological disorders. Among the points Górny makes is that dominant trends in medical science can't always be determined by focusing on the “center,” in this case Vienna. In Vienna, the reigning orthodoxy was that “healthy” and normal men were predisposed to tolerate war, so “treatment,” such as it was (including electroshock therapy) was meant to dispel weakness and remedy what was seen as predominantly a moral failing. But psychiatrists in other parts of the empire often looked for alternate sources of knowledge; Krakόw's Przegląd Lekarski, for example, showed a cosmopolitan and open-minded interest in different ways of conceptualizing and treating “war neurosis.” Górny also shows that psychiatrists frequently merged their views on the nature of the psyche with their ideological rankings of the hierarchy of the Empire's nationalities. The highly influential Julius Wagner-Jauregg, for example, tended to see only deceit and weakness among the Empire's Slavs. After the war, Górny shows, psychiatrists in the Empire's successor states continued to apply psychological qualities to ethnic groups, though now they emphasized their own nation's innate toughness. One Czech psychiatrist wrote in the postwar era that Czechs were innately brave, noting that “the Hussites” had been “invincible fighters” (p. 138).All of the essays in this volume contain helpful bibliographies and will give specialists in the fields of the relevant national histories, as well as of the postwar period in general, a good sense of some of the work currently being done. Historians will also find here a wide variety of methodological approaches that they may wish to incorporate into their own work, even if it is centered on a different geographical region. Emily R. Gioielli's essay, for example, “The Many Lives of Mrs. Hamburger: Gender, Violence, and Counterrevolution, 1919–1930,” illustrates how the British Labour Party, in publicizing a horrific case of torture carried out in Hungary, reinforced highly traditional views of women's proper roles within society—including left-wing ‘progressive’ society. Béla Bodó’s contribution, meanwhile, “Toward an Interactional Theory of Sexual Violence: The White Terror in Hungary, 1919–1921” shows how the aforementioned theory, which illuminates the process by which restraints and norms are eroded, can provide a convincing explanation for why so much of the so-called “Bloodlands” were plagued by brutality of various sorts.Overall, the collected essays fulfill the overarching goals that the editors set out to achieve: to highlight the difficult and messy transition from “wartime” to “peacetime” throughout the region, with no clear caesura marking the transition, as it did in northern France; and to show that states that might be considered “victorious,” like Poland, faced enormous challenges not particularly different from those of defeated states. And this is a point whose significance extends well beyond the region explored in this particular volume.