Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw in Postwar Europe

Abstract

examples from the Balkan War to make arguments about the nature of the special Serb sacrifice for the creation of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. In the third section, John Paul Newman, Petra Svoljšak, and Christoph Mick explore the ways in which Croatian, Slovene, Polish, and Ukrainian veterans and families struggled — and generally failed — to develop an effective voice to commemorate sacrifices that had often been made for the Habsburg state, and thus went unrecognized and unrewarded in Yugoslavia and Poland. All three authors detail the many problems faced by disabled or impoverished veterans who had fought for the ‘wrong’ side, and often did not qualify for state benefits, meagre as those were. Despite their attempts to organize themselves in statewide interest groups or to work in tandem with nationally privileged veterans’ groups (something that only occasionally worked), disabled and impoverished veterans not only faced hostility from nationalists, but also the inability of insolvent states in the 1930s to expand their meagre welfare programmes. In a final chapter in this section, Laurence Cole analyses the ways in which local people and communities in the Tyrol — both North and South — attempted to commemorate their war dead and war sacrifice, while avoiding the hostile attention of the Italian Fascist and Austrian Corporatist regimes. By including among his research the most local of efforts, Cole’s article suggests useful ways to approach open questions posed by this volume about so-called ‘silent commemorations’. Those attempts — when they involved semi-public efforts — often memorialized intimately human issues of comradeship and death, rather than assigning any grander nationalist or imperial significance to the actions of the war’s dead and its survivors. In some cases, Germanspeaking communities examined by Cole in the South Tyrol were able to commemorate wartime sacrifice in this way even under the watchful eye of their Fascist rulers. Both the editors and Berghahn books are to be congratulated on having produced an exceptional collection of essays for three reasons in particular. First, these essays address common questions in a highly coherent fashion. Secondly, despite their common focus, the essays offer a range of creative and sometimes new approaches to a difficult set of questions that are only now beginning to be addressed by historians. Third, this collection offers an excellent attempt to go beyond the imperial fragmentation of 1918 that created several often mutually antagonistic historiographies, and to relativize the meaning of 1918 for the region. Thus the volume helps the reader to understand several critical and influential continuities that survived the official end of empire.