One Empire or Two States? Dualism and States of Emergency in Austria-Hungary Before and During the First World War

ABSTRACT

Much has been written about Austria-Hungary under the state of emergency during the First World War. Historians have analysed many aspects of wartime government, among them the political, bureaucratic, and constitutional background since 1867. Emphasis has been placed on the legal regulations that underpinned the state of emergency and their wartime implementation, institutional responsibilities, and the different kinds of hardship emergency decrees imposed on the Habsburg Empire’s diverse population, including the targeting of particular nationalities and political ideologies. Much of this scholarly work, however, focuses solely on one or other of the two halves of the monarchy without looking at their differences and similarities. This article therefore analyses: To what extent did one of the main characteristics of Austria-Hungary as a state, namely its dualism, influence planning for and implementation of the wartime state of emergency? While in both halves of the Monarchy parliamentary legislation transferred authority to the government in the event of a state of emergency, in Austria there were fewer safeguards against the military’s abuse of power. The more significant limitations on the military’s authority in wartime Hungary and the greater powers reserved to its Parliament and judicial system were not sufficient in themselves to reduce the repressive nature of emergency rule or its negative impact on the lives of ordinary citizens.

KEYWORDS:

• Austria-Hungary
• First World War
• state of emergency
• dualism

Introduction

Much has been written about Austria-Hungary under the state of emergency during the First World War. Historians have analysed many aspects of wartime government, among them the political, bureaucratic, and constitutional background since 1867. Emphasis has been placed on the legal regulations that underpinned the state of emergency and their wartime implementation, institutional responsibilities, and the different kinds of hardship emergency decrees imposed on the Habsburg Empire’s diverse population, including the targeting of particular nationalities and political ideologies. Much of this scholarly work focuses solely on one or other of the two halves of the monarchy without looking at their differences and similarities. Studies of wartime Austria (Cisleithania), in particular, draw attention to the exceptional harshness of military rule there, with the implication that emergency measures in Hungary (Transleithania) were somehow less draconian or less onerous on ordinary people.¹ Mark Cornwall is among the few experts who conclude that the two halves of the Empire were ‘equally authoritarian’ in their approach to emergency measures during the war.² The availability of these numerous and excellent analytical and archival-based studies enables me to focus on one question that has hitherto been neglected: To what extent did one of the main characteristics of Austria-Hungary as a state, namely its dualism, influence planning for and implementation of the wartime state of emergency?

Even before the outbreak of war in 1914, the Habsburg Monarchy was beset by centrifugal forces. Historians broadly agree that the most significant long-term threat to the Empire was nationalism and nation-building efforts, which grew as the nineteenth century progressed.³ However, there was another source of division in the domestic realm, namely the complex structure that dualism imposed on the overall state. Alongside the usual hardships that emergency rule can bring to a state’s civilian population, in the Austro-Hungarian case, dualism created a unique situation: two different constitutional frameworks that resulted in conflicting power-political interests and thus diverging emergency decrees and diverging forms of implementation. Since 1867, when a settlement or Ausgleich transformed Imperial Austria into Austria-Hungary or the Dual Monarchy, the empire was divided. There were only three jointly administered offices of state: the common Ministries for Foreign Affairs, War (heading the joint army), and Finance. The latter was responsible for the budget of the first two, and from 1878 also administered the former Ottoman territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Even the monarch Francis Joseph I, who reigned from 1848 to 1916, became ‘divided’, serving as Emperor in Austria and, after being crowned in June 1867 in Budapest, King in Hungary. However, measures designed to come into force during a state of emergency affected areas of governance that were not the responsibility of the monarch or the common ministries. In so far as they touched on the rights of ordinary citizens, including personal liberty, protection against arbitrary arrest, the right to due process, inviolability of the home and private correspondence, freedom of association and assembly, and freedom of the press, emergency measures were the domain of the offices of state that were divided between Austria and Hungary, namely the separate Ministries of the Interior, Commerce, Agriculture, Religion, Education, and Justice. Thus, as I argue in more detail in the first part of this article, on administrative grounds alone, a joint state of emergency implemented in all parts of the Habsburg Monarchy was, in effect, rendered unlikely from 1867 onwards.

In the second part of the article, I take the argument further by showing how dualism was a further factor, alongside the Allied naval blockade, in the collapse of living standards and trust in the Monarchy between 1914 and 1918. The attempt to impose a state of emergency on the dualistic state resulted in legal uncertainty, economic imbalances and, ultimately, the total loss of the Habsburg Empire’s political legitimacy in the eyes of many Austrian and Hungarian citizens. In this sense, I follow the historian Pieter M. Judson’s argument that by 1918

the Habsburg dynasty and its empire had been severely discredited in the popular mind, most often because its representatives had failed to feed the people, and its military governors—especially in the Austrian half of the Dual Monarchy—had crudely abandoned the civil protections of the Rechtsstaat (complaints that were also made to some extent in the other combatant empires).⁴

My focus, however, will be more on the (complex and troublesome) relationship between the two halves of the Habsburg state, drawing us away from the usual focus in the historiography on the nationality question as the key reason for the (supposedly inevitable) downfall of the Empire. One argument is that the main institutions involved in Vienna in planning and implementing the state of emergency did not treat their counterparts in Budapest as equal partners. There was a constant attempt to dominate and criticise what the joint War Ministry saw as a subordinate part of the Monarchy. At the same time, in Budapest, there was a corresponding unwillingness to cooperate in the joint implementation of measures that might otherwise have been regarded as absolutely necessary. This was the case even though the mutually antagonistic positions adopted by the press and among politicians and ministers in the two halves of the Empire were often accompanied by strong and efficient forms of cooperation among officials operating at the lower levels of the state bureaucracy.

Because of its focus on Austro-Hungarian dualism, the article adopts a slightly different timeframe to several other contributions to this special issue. In particular, it ends in October-November 1918 rather than continuing into the post-war era when dualism ceased to be relevant. It is true that at least one of the successor states, Czechoslovakia, used emergency legislation that it had inherited from the Habsburg era to tackle significant threats to its internal security after 1918 including, in 1919–20, ‘socialist and nationalist uprisings in Slovakia, Subcarpathian Ruthenia, and the former duchy of Těšín’ and frequent ‘Czech-German riots … in [the] cities and provinces’ of Bohemia and Moravia.⁵ But this legislation came from the Austrian half of the former Monarchy only. It thus has no direct bearing on the subject of this article, which is the impact of dualism on the practical workings of the wartime Habsburg state of emergency regime and the latter’s failure to gain political legitimacy among the broad mass of the population in the critical period leading up to the Empire’s dissolution in 1918.

Dualism and the Planning of the State of Emergency

The state of emergency implemented in the Austrian half of the Monarchy (Cisleithania) in 1914 had its legal background in the 1867 Constitution (the Dezemberverfassung). The latter granted comprehensive civil liberties, but under its last article, Article 20, empowered the Emperor and the government to suspend some of them for a finite period of time and over a limited area of territory in case of emergency. In 1869, a corresponding Law on Government Authority for Announcement of Emergency Decrees (Befugnisse der Regierungsgewalt zu Ausnahmsverfügungen) laid out the exact conditions under which a state of emergency could be declared, namely ‘threat of war, internal unrest as well as developments threatening the constitution or endangering personal security on a widespread scale’. In these cases, the so-called Gesamtregierung or Gesamtministerium, the Austrian ministers headed by the Minister-President were enabled, via decree, to impose a state of emergency. This meant, in practice, that they could suspend civil liberties, albeit only for a limited period and over a limited area, and issue emergency decrees (always referred to in the common language of the state bureaucracy, German, as Ausnahmsverfügungen). The government was thereby ‘enabled’ to declare a state of emergency without first consulting or informing the Austrian Parliament. However, it was also required to provide a set of grounds for the state of emergency, as well as details of all decrees passed, to the Lower House of the Parliament (Abgeordnetenhaus des k.k. Reichsrats) as soon as reasonably possible.⁶ This kind of legislation did not enable the government to issue laws during an emergency, i.e. to usurp the legislative function of the Parliament. Rather, it could only issue decrees of limited duration. Nonetheless, the government was empowered to suspend existing laws, or limit them, particularly those relating to civil liberties. Joseph Redlich, an internationally renowned lawyer and professor of law at Vienna University, as well as a delegate to the Austrian Parliament from 1913, concluded in his 1927 Carnegie study on Austrian pre-war and wartime politics: ‘This [was] the basis for the extensive dictatorial power of the government and its bureaucracy in this country during the war, likewise considered necessary in all European states’.⁷ What is also important to mention, though, is that authority over the state of emergency rested legally in the hands of the civilian government (the Cisleithanian ministries) and not those of the joint army or the joint ministries. However, the military later dominated its planning and implementation.

Before 1914, the Austrian government imposed states of emergency on a handful of occasions. More often than not, this was in response to large-scale industrial strikes and riots.⁸ One example occurred in 1884 when the government, headed by Minister-President Eduard Taaffe, proclaimed a state of emergency in two towns in Lower Austria, Korneuburg and Wiener Neustadt, because of labour unrest. Guarantees of secrecy of correspondence and freedom of the press were both suspended. Or, as the corresponding emergency decree stipulated, as soon as an individual became suspected of conducting ‘activities that endanger public safety and social order’, their letters could be opened, and articles they had written could be banned from appearing in print.⁹

Emergency decrees such as the one mentioned above were usually addressed to subordinate administrative institutions. It was therefore local courts, police, and post offices that were expected to execute the exceptional measures. During pre-war states of emergency, it had already become clear that officialdom at the lower levels was not always willing or able to apply emergency decrees in the desired manner. They were often too strict or over-zealous in their application, whether due to personal antipathy towards labour leaders, striking workers, and unwanted city dwellers, or because of more abstract political motives, such as anti-Slav or anti-Italian nationalism. Nonetheless, before 1914 emergency decrees targeted only a limited number of people for a limited period of time. It was only during the war that abuse of power on the part of local officials grew to impose additional hardships on all citizens, thereby significantly accelerating the collapse of Habsburg rule.

Even before the war, officials in Vienna had made some effort to ensure that subordinate offices were well-informed about their duties and the wide range of responsibilities and tasks they would be expected to fulfil in case of a wartime emergency. Although not expressly mentioned in the 1869 Law on Government Authority for the Announcement of Emergency Decrees, officials in the joint War Ministry in Vienna were charged with compiling manuals instructing civilian officials on how to behave in the event of war (in German legalese Orientierungsbehelfe). As a wartime state of emergency was initially envisaged for limited areas only (the frontline and the staging areas close to the endangered frontiers with Russia, Serbia or Italy), it is understandable why the government in Vienna initially raised no objections – or at least no opposition is evident in the archival sources. Although discussions on how to compile these manuals had already started in 1869 when the law was passed, it was not until 1906 that the first manual was printed and handed over to the relevant offices. Before 1914 four main manuals were printed: one for Austria in two versions, one for Bosnia-Herzegovina, and a draft for the Kingdom of Hungary.¹⁰

The manual that was put into effect for Austria (Cisleithania) during the war was issued in 1912. For the most part, it was the product of guidance from the joint War Ministry, an institution which was neither empowered to proclaim a state of emergency nor to issue decrees as its minister was not part of the Austrian (or Cisleithanian) government. The 1912 manual had two versions. The so-called A version was to be used by Zentralstellen (government ministries and higher military commands), while the B version was aimed at selected, subordinated ‘commands and offices’ located all over Cisleithania.¹¹ The manuals contained orders for various war scenarios (B for the Balkans, R for Russia, and I for Italy) in areas close to the corresponding frontier districts. Both versions, A and B, were printed only in German. This might have been suitable for the A version, which was primarily directed to departments of ministries and the highest military commands based in Vienna, where German was commonly used as an administrative language. But this was less the case for the B version, which was to be handed over to local officials, among them heads of provincial administrations (Landeschefs/Statthalter), provincial tax offices, post and telegraph directorates, as well as gendarmerie commands in those parts of the Empire where German was less routinely used.¹² According to provincial laws, most provinces had German at least as one among other recognised administrative languages, which meant that provincial offices had to employ a sufficient number of German speakers. But on a lower level, in institutions such as the police and post office, this was often not the case, as officials were hired according to language quotas that reflected local demographics. Three Austrian provinces did not even recognise German as a provincial language, among them Dalmatia, Gorizia/Nova Gorica, and Istria, all of which would have been close to or on the frontline in any war with Italy.¹³

Interestingly, the archival sources do not reveal any complaints from the provinces over the lack of translated versions of the war manuals. Nor do ministerial bureaucrats in Vienna seem to have considered translations useful. Admittedly, as the lingua franca in Cisleithania, German was assumed to be understood by at least some officials in all provinces. However, the fact that the Monarchy’s linguistic diversity was rarely mentioned in the manuals is remarkable. Seemingly, a policy of silence on this issue was also adopted for the planning of the state of emergency. This was because it was feared that as soon as language use was mentioned, one linguistic group would claim to be marginalised, leading to complaints being addressed to ministers in Vienna or raised in the Austrian Parliament.¹⁴ However, already in the first weeks of the war, language diversity challenged all involved. For example, in October 1914, the censors in the Austrian port of Trieste already had to deal with 1,000 telegraphs and 6,000 letters per day. And this correspondence was in many languages, not just those recognised in the Triestine area (Croatian, German, Italian, Slovene).¹⁵

As mentioned above, an additional manual was drafted for Hungary, again under the guidance of the joint War Ministry. The internal debates in the War Ministry clearly demonstrate an intention to administer the state of emergency on similar lines in both halves of the Monarchy. However, this plan failed to take into account the realities of Hungarian politics. In fact, as Albert Apponyi, a long-serving member of the Hungarian Parliament, rightly concluded: ‘In the Hungarian self-conception, Austria-Hungary was a confederation of two states; in the Austrian it was a federal state’.¹⁶ This remark is important because it reflected a widespread conviction in Cisleithania, evident in particular among the military authorities, that as far as Transleithania was concerned, the War Ministry was also in charge of whatever it chose to define as military issues simply because it was a joint institution, and would therefore be allowed to correspond about military matters in the same way with the Hungarian as with the Austrian government. This stance did not correspond with the conviction of any of the Hungarian governments before 1914. In the overall debate in Hungary on the state of emergency, it became apparent that the common ministries, the War Ministry included, were not seen as legitimate and equal partners but rather as unauthorised, interfering, and ‘foreign’ bodies.

Part of the problem was that the communications addressed by successive War Ministers to successive Hungarian governments were often read in Budapest as orders rather than appeals for cooperation between equals. When general staff officer Anton Lehár was sent on his first assignment to the Hungarian capital, he concluded with an observation that can also be found, between the lines, in many military autobiographical sources:

After all, we were not in an occupied country, but in the equal Kingdom of Hungary. The Alt-Österreicher (i.e. those bent on pursuing the old, centralized unity of the pre-1867 Austrian Empire), who sometimes wanted to overlook this fact, have intentionally or unintentionally caused a lot of discontent.¹⁷

Admittedly, the joint War Ministry had certain rights in Hungary, but only in relation to maintaining the military facilities of the joint army and not when it came to planning for states of emergency or issuing emergency decrees. As the latter touched upon civil liberties, it was a matter for the Hungarian government alone. Hence, while the War Ministry and Cisleithanian governments, for the most, cooperated in a frictionless manner, the same cannot be said for relations between the War Ministry and Transleithanian governments. When it came to planning for a state of emergency in Hungary, it is important to note that for a long time, its constitution did not even contain an emergency article comparable to Article 20 of the Austrian Constitution.¹⁸ By seeking to apply the Austrian model in Hungary, officials in the joint War Ministry were, at best, acting in ignorance and, at worst, seeking to stir up trouble between Vienna and Budapest in the interests of the former. At any rate, as part of their planning for a wartime state of emergency, they sent orders and deadlines to the Hungarian government, compiled drafts of manuals and despatched them to Budapest, and afterwards complained when they were rejected.

The first attempt by the joint War Ministry to outline the basis for a state emergency in Hungary can be traced back to 1886. War Minister Artur Maximilian von Bylandt-Rheidt sought the cooperation of the then Hungarian Minister-President, Kálmán Tisza. The reply from Budapest gave cause for hope. In order to make the regulations as homogeneous as possible, Tisza asked for details of the status quo in Cisleithania. An outline of the Austrian plans was handed over promptly.¹⁹ A reply from Hungary arrived two years later, containing the draft of a law enabling the government to implement emergency decrees on a constitutional basis (Gesetzesentwurf mit einer Ermächtigung zur Erlassung und eine Regierungsverordnung zur Kundmachung von Ausnahmeverfügungen). The War Minister returned the draft with his comments immediately. There was no response. Six years later, in 1894, the Hungarian Minister of Territorial Defence (Honvédség Minister) let it be known that he had been ordered to follow up on negotiations. He considered a revision of the earlier draft necessary. Further delays followed this correspondence. From Vienna’s point of view, Budapest was deliberately stalling on the issue.²⁰ When, in 1905, the Independence Party, which rejected dualism and the union with Austria, achieved a majority in the Hungarian Parliament and thus the ability to reject laws which it saw as impinging on national autonomy, negotiations between the joint War Ministry and the Hungarian government became even more difficult. All attempts at compromise were met with failure.²¹

In November 1906, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf became chief of general staff and changed military planning in a way that was now much more focused on preparations for all possible war scenarios in tandem. This was the so-called modern way of conducting general staff duties and followed a model already practiced in many other European countries. All kinds of military guidelines, decrees, and handbooks were now amplified with explicit clauses on war scenarios.²² Against this background, the pressure on Hungary to finally prepare for a state of emergency became more intense. Indeed, in two of the war scenarios, B for the Balkans and R for Russia, the frontlines and staging areas would have stretched over Hungarian as well as Austrian soil. As emergency decrees were initially planned only for the fighting zones and staging areas, it made sense for the joint War Ministry to push the Hungarian government towards establishing a constitutional basis for suspending existing laws comparable to that in force for Austria since 1867.

A legal basis for state of emergency decrees in Hungary became even more urgent when the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (1908) resulted in a partial mobilisation of Habsburg troops, especially on Hungarian soil in the South, thus magnifying already existing concerns on the part of the War Ministry.²³ Conrad demanded that at least a couple of ministerial decrees be prepared and published. He insisted that the Hungarian government do this even without a constitutional basis and without a debate in the Parliament beforehand.²⁴ What was probably not sufficiently anticipated in Vienna was the likelihood of a backlash in favour of constitutional rights in Hungary. In 1907, the Hungarian Minister of Interior Gyula Andrássy (upon agreement with his fellow ministers) had addressed Minister-President Sándor Wekerle. He demanded that authority to issue decrees should be granted to the government in the event of an emergency, but everything should be concentrated exclusively in the hands of ministers. In no way should the joint military be involved in the Hungarian state of emergency, as was the case in Austria. Andrássy argued that otherwise, an ‘Enabling Law’ would never successfully pass the Parliament. The Hungarian government was thus not opposed in principle to preparations for a state of emergency, including the handing of decree-issuing rights to ministers and the civil administration. However, it was anxious, especially in the case of a war with Serbia, to ensure that no decrees coming into force in southern Hungary or Croatia-Slavonia could result in the handing of exclusive decree-making powers to the joint Army High Command.²⁵

However, after the Hungarian Council of Ministers approved a draft ‘Enabling Law’ in 1909, which met these stipulations, and handed it over to Francis Joseph,²⁶ it was immediately passed on to the War Ministry.²⁷ There, the draft was described as flawed and incapable of meeting the requirements of military preparedness.²⁸ A revised version was sent to the Hungarian government with the remark that it should be finalised in cooperation with the War Ministry.²⁹ The steps demanded in Vienna fell on deaf ears in Budapest. An internal note from the War Ministry showed that at least the highest military authorities were well aware of Hungary’s domestic political situation insofar as something openly demanded in Vienna would never get through the Hungarian Parliament.³⁰ This latest attempt by the joint War Ministry to assert its voice ended when the government changed again in Budapest, and the newly appointed Hungarian Minister of Justice declared the revisions unacceptable.

During the First Balkan War in 1912, battles took place in Serbia close to Hungary’s borders. Against this background, the Honvédség Minister, Samu Hazai, finally succeeded in forcing a government decision on an ‘Enabling Law’. Article LXIII of the Constitution was approved on 21 December 1912 and allowed the government in a war emergency, at the latest at the same time as military mobilisation took place, to suspend fundamental laws on a time-limited and territorially-restricted basis.³¹ The highest authority would be given to the government, which would hand over ‘exceptional powers’ to so-called government commissioners who would only be responsible to the Hungarian government, not to any of the joint ministries in Vienna. Thus, in the Hungarian state of emergency, as officially in the Austrian equivalent, government authorities were given expanded powers. Government commissioners were to be appointed by the Hungarian government, then sent to the respective places on Hungarian soil for which a state of emergency was proclaimed, and had to implement the emergency decrees in cooperation with the joint army’s representatives located there (rather than in Vienna).³² According to Mark Cornwall, this meant that the ‘Magyar oligarchy’ was able to ‘block the level of military interference so characteristic of Austria’ during the war. In other ways, though, its state of emergency measures were just as draconian.³³

Before Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on 28 July 1914, no further changes were made in either half of the Monarchy with respect to legal provisions for wartime emergency governance. On the same day, Hungarian Minister-President István Tisza enacted the first emergency decrees. As early as 1 August 1914, these measures, which were initially to be applied only in the areas bordering the fighting fronts, were extended to the entire territory of the Kingdom of Hungary (including Croatia-Slavonia).³⁴ In Austria, the government headed by Minister-President Karl Graf Stürgkh had already proclaimed a state of emergency three days earlier, on 25 July 1914.³⁵ Although pre-war plans, including the three manuals, stipulated that emergency decrees would mostly only be valid for the duration of the wartime mobilisation, apply solely in restricted areas close to the frontline and the rear, and be gradually dismantled, in practice as soon as the war started they were extended to all Austrian territories as well as to the frontline and staging areas in Hungary. The majority of them remained in force until the war’s end.³⁶

Dualism and the State of Emergency in Wartime

Dualism not only cast a shadow over the relationship between Cisleithania and Transleithania through the state of emergency planning in peacetime; it also influenced the implementation of emergency decrees in wartime. Following the proclamation of states of emergency in Austria and Hungary in late July 1914, the unsettled question of whose decrees might be valid in which half of the Dual Monarchy became the first point of dispute. Already in 1909, joint War Minister Franz Xaver von Schönaich informed the Hungarian Minister-President Sándor Wekerle of a plan to set up a joint institutional authority in case of war to coordinate the handling of all emergency matters and to locate this authority in Vienna. The War Ministry, as a joint institution, was declared to be the most suitable place to house such a body. It would also have seconded two officials from the Hungarian Ministries of Interior and Trade, both able to speak German.³⁷ Wekerle’s answer was not long in coming. As the plan had been that these bureaucrats should sign decrees on behalf of their respective ministers, he politely but firmly noted that the Hungarian Constitution would not permit such a shift of power from a minister to a subordinated official. Concerning the suggestion that cooperation between Austria and Hungary might come through the joint War Ministry in Vienna, he insisted that Hungary had other plans in the event of war. From the moment of mobilisation, an office was to be set up at the Hungarian Ministry of Trade’s General Directorate of Posts and Telegraphs, which already had a direct telephone line to the War Ministry. Two senior officials, one each from the Hungarian Ministries of Trade and Interior as well as a representative of the Croatian-Slavonian provincial government would be working there. They would have the authorisation from their ministers (or for Croatia-Slavonia, from the Ban) to respond to queries from Vienna at any time and without delay.³⁸ This was declared unacceptable by the joint War Minister.

Finally, the Hungarian government set up a commission, but larger in scope. The Hungarian War Surveillance Commission (Hadifelügyeleti Bizottság, HB) started its work on 24 July 1914 at the Honvédség Ministry, headed by the senior civil servant Ludwig Karátson von Ivanda.³⁹ In addition to the officials mentioned above, an official from the joint Ministry of Foreign Affairs was also delegated to the HB (the only representative of a joint institution).⁴⁰ A Honvédség officer headed the HB’s press censorship commission.⁴¹ From the beginning, the Hungarian government made it clear that the commission would have no decision-making powers. Rather its sole purpose would be to facilitate communication between the different institutions involved in implementing emergency measures.⁴² The HB worked along these lines until the war’s end. Due to the limited nature of its responsibilities and because of its restricted legal status, it did not meet the same level of public criticism as its Austrian counterpart.⁴³

The Austrian institution that ultimately supervised the implementation of emergency measures was set up on 27 July 1914 and was housed within the joint War Ministry. The War Surveillance Office (Kriegsüberwachungsamt, KÜA) was headed by an army officer of general’s rank, in the first instance Leopold Schleyer von Pontemalghera. He oversaw a body comprised of delegates from most Austrian and all joint ministries. Alongside the War Ministry, the joint Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the joint Ministry of Finance, and the Austrian Ministries of Interior, Justice, Commerce, Finance, Territorial Defence, and Railways sent one representative each. These officials were authorised to make decisions about issues related to the emergency decrees in the name of their respective ministers. This arrangement was supposed to guarantee quick action, and the respective ministers only had to be informed afterwards. At first, all outgoing decrees were signed by Schleyer and not by the ministerial delegates, even though the latter had helped to draw them up. This procedure gave many of the institutions addressed by these orders the (false) impression that the KÜA was run by the military alone. There was also a Hungarian presence at KÜA headquarters: a liaison officer, in the first instance Radivoj Nikolich, followed later in the war by Béla Barkóczy-Klopsch, both of them from the Honvédség Ministry. They were charged with arranging regular communication with the Hungarian government and the HB, and with ensuring that outgoing decrees were to be implemented in as coordinated a manner as possible.⁴⁴

However, there were some inconsistencies regarding the KÜA’s remit and responsibilities. Despite the failure of pre-war negotiations with the Hungarian government, the War Ministry still informed Budapest in 1914 that the KÜA’s responsibility would extend over Austria, Bosnia-Herzegovina and ‘in matters concerning the portfolios of the joint ministries … [over] the lands of the Holy Hungarian Crown’.⁴⁵ Tisza responded immediately: ‘[When it comes to] [i]ncluding the lands of the Holy Hungarian Crown … I can only consider this to be a typo and I have the honour to ask Your Excellency to correct this without delay …, since I would otherwise have to take a firm stand against such a violation of the Hungarian government’s prerogatives’.⁴⁶ Both sides, in fact, had a case. The joint War Ministry did not think that it was making a bid to interfere in Hungarian domestic affairs; instead, it was asserting the right of delegates from the joint ministries to make decisions for both halves of the Monarchy when it came to matters touching on their own areas of responsibility (War, Foreign Affairs, Finance). Notes to this effect were exchanged regularly during wartime.⁴⁷ Despite persistent quarrels between the highest state authorities and ministries in Vienna and Budapest, the KÜA and the HB in fact cooperated in an almost frictionless manner. There was a steady exchange of information. The HB sometimes requested assistance from the KÜA, directives were often issued based on joint decisions, and the two institutions borrowed from each other’s measures. The HB regularly asked the KÜA to forbid news reports to be published in Austria that had already been suppressed in Hungary or to instruct subordinate offices accordingly.⁴⁸

And yet Tisza also had a case, given that, under the dualist system, the execution of emergency decrees was much more challenging for the Hungarian government than it was for the Austrians. The Hungarian Parliament convened without interruption throughout the war, while in Austria it did not meet for three years from the spring of 1914, and therefore months before the war broke out. The Austrian parliamentarians were forced to gather their information through unofficial channels. Thus, they regarded the KÜA as working in ‘secrecy’ because they had never officially been informed of its remit.⁴⁹ Had the Parliament been allowed to meet, the Austrian government would have been obliged, according to the emergency laws, to furnish details about the promulgation of the state of emergency and the duties undertaken by the KÜA. The Hungarian Parliament, by contrast, was kept regularly informed about the implementation and organisation of the state of emergency and the role of the HB. The Austrian situation did not change before Francis Joseph’s death in November 1916. One of his successor Charles’ first interventions was to allow the Parliament to convene again in the spring of 1917. This was only one part of Charles’ efforts to reform the emergency administration that had been established since the start of the war. He also loosened press censorship, and Conrad was dismissed as chief of the general staff. One of the first debates on the Austrian Parliament’s schedule in May 1917 concerned the legal basis of the KÜA and its responsibilities. Deputies questioned whether a general should head this institution, not least as it suggested moves towards a military dictatorship.⁵⁰ In fact, the Army’s High Command (AOK) had secretly been given authority (Weisungsrecht) over the KÜA in 1915, including the right to instruct civil servants, i.e. those who supposedly acted in the name of their respective ministers.

This unconstitutional position lasted until August 1917, when the KÜA was disbanded and its remaining responsibilities transferred to a successor institution, the Ministerial Commission at the War Ministry (Ministerialkommission beim Kriegsministerium, MK-KM).⁵¹ While the latter had many of the same powers as the KÜA, it was headed by two bureaucrats equally, a military figure and a civilian.⁵² In one of its first reports to the Monarch’s Chancellery, the MK-KM admitted that its predecessor had, in fact, operated without any legal foundation. It had not even been established by emergency decree but had only been mentioned in a manual. The restoration of legality in August 1917 finally meant that the military would no longer be able to intervene directly in civilian matters.⁵³ The newly appointed military head of the commission, Albert Schmidt von Georgenegg, put it bluntly in his diary: ‘No more strict orders to be given to civil authorities’.⁵⁴

Although neither the AOK nor the War Ministry gained authority over the state of emergency in the Hungarian half of the Monarchy decrees issued there targeted and restricted civil liberties to the same extent as in Austria.⁵⁵ Despite attempts by the joint War Ministry to ensure that decrees were coordinated and as homogeneous as possible across the two halves of the empire, differences were to be found in all spheres. Due to limited space, I will focus on only one example, press censorship, because it exemplifies the different approaches to the state of emergency in Austria and Hungary. For contemporaries, it was also the most apparent expression of divergence because of the appearance of so-called white spots (weiße Flecken), where censors banned articles in whole or in part.⁵⁶ Newspapers printed in Austria were full of them, whereas they rarely appeared in Hungary.⁵⁷

‘White spots’ occurred when individual passages of a press text were censored at such a late stage that the pages were already typeset. Since resetting the typeface was not an option, the place was pasted over and appeared to the reader as if something was missing – a white space. Sometimes this was just one or two words, and sometimes it stretched over an entire page or more. This was an outcome of a general policy of pre-publication censorship (Präventivzensur) for the whole press in Austria, which had no equivalent in Hungary. If it occurred at all in Hungary, preventive censorship was seen as an occasional measure to punish newspapers and journals that did not show sufficient ‘restraint’ in their reporting.⁵⁸ This divergence in practice was only ‘discovered’ in Vienna a few weeks after the outbreak of the war, when the HB informed the KÜA that preventive censorship had been ordered for a particular magazine. The news came as a surprise. Before, it was assumed that in Hungary – as in Austria – all periodicals were subjected to preventive censorship. The joint War Ministry immediately denounced Hungarian censorship measures as insufficient. War Minister Alexander Ritter von Krobatin demanded that the HB extend preventive censorship over all periodicals and also asked that he be informed of any further deviations immediately.⁵⁹ The HB replied that it would act only on the instructions of the Hungarian Minister-President, Tisza. The latter favoured as free a press as possible to enable the government to monitor political tendencies at an early stage via this open ‘intelligence service’.⁶⁰ András Mihályhegy concludes his study of the emergency regime in Hungary with the words: ‘Despite the introduction of censorship, the state power apparatus did not succeed in bringing the press wholly into line’.⁶¹ This, ultimately, was in line with what Tisza had emphasised.

Tisza acknowledged that he had already been forced to impose preventive censorship on several occasions but maintained his opposition to its general introduction.⁶² Lajos Thallóczy, historian and civil servant, delegated from the joint Ministry of Finance to the KÜA, commented in his diary on 18 September 1914:

Today’s discussion was … about the Hungarian newspapers bringing reports on the siege of Belgrade. His Majesty heard about it and is very angry because they [the Hungarians] are allowed to write about issues that even he does not know about. So they are angry … that the Hungarian press is treated differently [and] want it [censorship] to be directed from here [in Vienna].⁶³

The press also took up the censorship question. The Budapest-based German-language Pester Lloyd reported in September 1917 on the debate in the Austrian Parliament: ‘Professor [Joseph] Redlich demanded an explanation of why censorship in Hungary differs so greatly from the system in Austria’.⁶⁴

Not mentioned so far are those restrictions targeting the economy on a large scale, particularly labour mobilisation, price-setting, and the provision of essential goods to the military and the civilian population. Emergency regulations were approved in these areas from the first day of the war, albeit without the direct involvement of the KÜA and its Hungarian equivalent. In general, government decrees concerning war services (Kriegsleistungen) in both halves of the Monarchy led to restrictions on all kinds of business and economic freedoms, including the raising of maximum working hours, bans on changing employers, and prioritisation of companies delivering goods and services to the military when it came to the allocation of raw materials and labour. All of this had a negative impact on the living standards of ordinary citizens, with manpower losses and constant shortages of essential goods helping to fuel inflation.⁶⁵ Eventually, virtually all raw materials, finished goods, and services somehow fell under the category Kriegsleistungen on the grounds that they were of interest to the war effort. Peacetime rules regarding commercial contracts and procurement were suspended to allow the military to claim advantages it would not otherwise have been legally entitled to. Emergency decrees concerning Kriegsleistungen also regulated compensation claims for services rendered and goods requisitioned by the military. Like other emergency decrees, they were initially intended to be in force only for a couple of months but lasted for a lot longer.⁶⁶

In Hungary, emergency economic decrees were approved by the government and executed by government commissioners. In Austria, authority was transferred to the military. For example, companies categorised as vital to the war effort (kriegswichtig) were put under strict military control. A point of dispute between Austria and Hungary was that in some of these companies, Austrian decrees were imposed even when they were on Hungarian soil. To take another example, in Austria, women were exempt from decrees concerning Kriegsleistungen, while in Hungary, they were not.⁶⁷ Therefore, two different legal environments appeared in the Empire regarding the handling of the war economy.

What both states had in common, however, was that from the first day of the war, the institutions responsible for implementing emergency measures at a local and regional level found themselves facing impossible workloads. Many civil servants and government workers had been mobilised, which resulted in growing staff shortages. On top of this, those left behind had to learn to perform new tasks and procedures. On average, the KÜA employed 50 people (sometimes even more), including a growing number of women. Altogether, they worked on 45,000 cases in the first nine months of the war, mostly concerning Cisleithania. The overburdening of personnel from the highest institutions down to low-level government offices located throughout the Monarchy, and the tendency to hire inexperienced or under-qualified staff to replace those conscripted into the army, resulted in many inconsistencies and errors in implementation. This can be illustrated by taking two examples from the sphere of censorship of private correspondence. On the one hand, the military chaplain and Roman Catholic priest Modest Klacskó remembered his duties in a military hospital in Kraków in Austrian Poland thus: ‘My main pastoral activity was daily visits to the wounded and the dying, … and organization of letter censorship … in German, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, Polish, as needed’.⁶⁸ On the other hand, in the military censorship office in the Hungarian town of Novi Sad, the excessive workload and lack of language skills among the personnel resulted in a decision to effectively destroy, as opposed to censor, all letters written in Cyrillic, having what can only be assumed was a detrimental effect on soldiers’ morale. Usually letters were blackened so that the censored passages were illegible, and then forwarded. In the case of Novi Sad, it took months for the KÜA to work out what was happening and why letters were not being forwarded at all.⁶⁹

What made the situation worse was that state employees intentionally often did not implement the emergency decrees or manipulated them according to their material self-advantage or political prejudices.The files of the KÜA suggest that only in a few cases did a state official’s failure to carry out orders properly have consequences. The same applied in the Hungarian half of the empire. A joke soon circulated calling the censors the ‘morals brigade’, because more and more women were working in these offices and were believed to overreach their brief by imposing a rigid line on sexual morality rather than simply targeting sensitive political and military information.⁷⁰ More problematic still were the cases where censors made decisions that appeared to favour or disadvantage particular nationalities. Not only actual or suspected irredentists might be singled out for discriminatory treatment, but also moderate nationalists who supported the continued existence of the Habsburg Empire. Using files from the KÜA, Alessandro Livio has uncovered stark evidence that Italian speakers, even those who clearly favoured the Habsburg cause, were much more likely than German speakers to find themselves under suspicion.⁷¹ Likewise, Matthew Stibbe has shown in his study of civilian internment in Austria that Ruthenians (western Ukrainians) were targeted over other nationalities as being necessarily russophile.⁷²

In Hungary, too particular nationalities were more often singled out than others. Irina Marin points to the example of the retired high-ranking joint army general Nikolaus Cena, an ethnic Romanian, who was denounced and arrested in his Transylvanian hometown. The Hungarian authorities accused him of ‘subversive behaviour’, a phrase used by the joint military to cover various offences ranging from espionage to merely speaking out against the Monarchy, the Emperor or the military regime. Cena’s case resulted in a dispute between the AOK and the local Hungarian civilian authorities, the latter often suspecting Habsburg Romanians of acting disloyally. Even the general’s rank, and the support he received from the joint War Ministry, did not prevent him from being arrested and imprisoned for several months.⁷³ Although these and other national animosities had roots stretching back long before the twentieth century, they were magnified during the war. Emergency decrees also enabled police officials to remove ‘nuisance persons’ and so-called ‘urban scum’ (Großstadtgesindel) from their districts, which they had found more difficult to do in peacetime. Now they could simply arrest suspects and expel them into the interior without giving a reason. This happened in the port of Trieste, for instance, where – according to the arrest lists – scores of ‘habitual criminals’ and ‘work-shy’ persons were expelled to camps in the Austrian interior on security grounds, alongside others suspected of harbouring irredentist (pro-Italian) sentiments.⁷⁴ Many of the political deportees were victims of (anonymous) denunciations. Locals accused other locals, neighbours turned on one another, and even family members exploited the emergency situation to settle old scores.⁷⁵ Nationality did not always play a role, but very often it did. Patterns of denunciation and the impact on those targeted did not vary much regardless of where they took place in the Monarchy. As Mark Cornwall for Croatia-Slavonia and Heiner Grunert for Bosnia-Herzegovina have recently demonstrated, so-called ‘Serb traitors’ were not only targeted by ‘state norms’ as subjects of ‘legitimized discrimination’ but were also exposed to the danger of malicious accusations from non-state actors.⁷⁶ Two nationalities, however, were far less frequently targeted than others: ethnic Germans and ethnic Hungarians, the so-called Magyars. Within the military, meanwhile, and with some notable exceptions, Slovenes and Croats were less likely to be regarded as ‘unreliable’ than Serbs, Czechs, Romanians, Ruthenes and Italians.⁷⁷

The many regulations and their inconsistent implementation resulted in growing legal uncertainty in both halves of the Monarchy, undermining the overall Habsburg state’s claim to be offering Gerechtigkeit (justice) based on professed ethnic neutrality. As the Austrian Social Democrat newspaper Die Arbeit put it in 1917:

… [C]itizens today have no way of knowing whether any action they might take transgresses some regulation or even worse offends against the law. […] Even in peacetime, one had to be blessed with good parents to find one’s way through the jumble of laws, patents, ordinances, decrees, and other regulations which in their entirety constituted Austrian law. Since the outbreak of the world war, however, where one decree chases the other, free activity in so many areas has been subject to arbitrary restrictions.⁷⁸

Legal uncertainty and failure to investigate or discipline state officials accused of discrimination towards or abuse of particular nationalities was a negative consequence of what Pieter M. Judson has recently described as ‘the Austrian government’s clear abandonment of the Rechtsstaat during the first two years or so of the war, and the military’s imposition of a dictatorship that viciously persecuted members of some language groups for no legitimate reason. All this ‘undermined traditional shared beliefs that the empire fairly represented the common interests of all linguistic groups’.⁷⁹ What Judson concludes for Austria can also be applied to Hungary where parallel developments can be observed. Here Romanians and Serbs were treated similarly to Ruthenians, Czechs, and Italians in Austria. This vicious persecution of members of particular nationalities led to a drastic shift in attitudes towards the Habsburg state as the war continued, including among previously ‘moderate’ critics of the Empire. Stibbe, for instance, has shown that many hitherto loyal Italian-speaking subjects of the Monarchy, when writing their memoirs after 1918, mentioned wartime internment and deportations as marking a turning point in shaping their national consciousness and in convincing them that they would always be seen as ‘enemies’, ‘spies’ or ‘irredentists’ by their German-speaking neighbours. One case among many would be Alcide De Gasperi, before 1914, a loyal member of the Austrian Parliament who later came to side with Italy, acquired Italian citizenship after the war, and even served as Italian Prime Minister between 1945 and 1953.⁸⁰

Aliaksandr Piahanau likewise uses the example of the Roman Catholic priest and pro-Nazi dictator of Slovakia during the Second World War era Jozef Tiso to argue, convincingly, that some politicians (as well as officers and rank-and-file soldiers) might have also changed their opinion towards the joint army and the Habsburg state during the war. Tiso was multi-lingual, spoke Hungarian, German, and Slovak, and thus was considered suitable for deployment on all frontlines. He joined the army at the very beginning of the war, expressing his view that it would be Austria-Hungary’s ‘just war’. However, his experiences after 1914, including the poor treatment of Slovak soldiers, led him to change his mind as the war continued.⁸¹

Conclusion

As a result of the dualist settlement in 1867 and the promulgation of two constitutions, pre-war preparations for states of emergency in Austria and Hungary took place in separate legal and political contexts. However, efforts were made, particularly by the joint War Ministry, to put in place some mechanisms to ensure rough parity between the two systems and plan for coordination and communication in the event of an actual military state of emergency. Yet it was not only in relation to the mechanics of emergency rule that Austria and Hungary failed to find common ground; more important was the question of who had the authority to act if the normal rule of law was suspended. While in both halves of the Monarchy parliamentary legislation transferred authority to the government in the event of a state of emergency, in Austria there were fewer safeguards against the military’s abuse of power, not least as the Parliament there was already suspended from the spring of 1914. Even so, as Cornwall has already argued, and as this article has reiterated, the more significant limitations on the military’s authority in wartime Hungary and the greater powers reserved to its Parliament and judicial system were not sufficient in themselves to reduce the repressive nature of emergency rule or its negative impact on the lives of ordinary citizens. True, in neither half of the Monarchy were governments able to enact permanent laws without the approval of the respective parliaments. In other words, in contrast to Germany in 1914 (and again in 1919–23 and 1933) there were no ‘Enabling Acts’ (Ermächtigungsgesetze) in the twentieth-century meaning of the term, entailing a whole sale shift in law-making powers from the legislature to the executive. As for the implementation of decrees, although this was sometimes hampered by disputes over sovereignty at the highest levels of the government and the military, the two institutions set up to manage the state of emergency at the very beginning of the war, in Austria the KÜA, and in Hungary the HB, cooperated in most cases without hindrance.

The inadequate safeguards in Austria against military dictatorship were nonetheless made worse by dualism. That the emergency decrees restricting the daily life of the population, imposing censorship, or exempting women from war service, differed in the two halves of the empire, did not go unnoticed or unobserved by the general public, although much less in Austria due to the more rigid censorship. Whereas the war effort at the fighting fronts was presented as a common enterprise, this narrative was less easy to uphold when it came to sacrifices on the home front. In particular, living standards were not the same throughout the Empire, but varied noticeably between the two halves of the Monarchy, as well as between different nationalities living in the same provinces. As Judson has recently put it, it was not only nationalism that led to the downfall of the Monarchy. Instead, in the final four years of the Austro-Hungarian state, dualism presented a further obstacle to maintaining the regime‘s legitimacy. Alongside material shortages, legal uncertainty, and the unequal treatment of nationalities, it aggravated the sense that the state of emergency was being mishandled by the very powers – whether dualist, Austrian or Hungarian – that were supposed to offer protection and justice to all of the Emperor’s imperial subjects.

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This research was funded in part by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) [10.55776/V555]. For open-access purposes, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright license to any author-accepted manuscript version arising from this submission.

Notes

1. For examples, see Bihári, “A Forgotten Home Front”; Cornwall, The Undermining of Austria-Hungary; Healy, Total War and Everyday Life; Livio, “The Wartime Treatment”; Marin, “World War I and Internal Repression”; Lukan, “Die politische Meinung der slowenischen Bevölkerung”; Moll, Burgfrieden; Rachamimov, “Arbiters of Allegiance”; Olechowsky, Die Entwicklung des Preßrechts; Spann, “Zensur in Österreich”; Stibbe, “Krieg und Brutalisierung”; and Überegger, Der andere Krieg. While this article relies a great deal on the arguments developed in these ground-breaking works, the bulk of the sources cited were collected for my MA and PhD dissertations, reworked and jointly published in Scheer, Die Ringstraßenfront.

2. Cornwall, “Disintegration and Defeat,” 183.

3. The most up-to-date interpretation is offered by Judson, The Habsburg Empire.

4. Judson, “Where our Commonality is Necessary … ,” 5, 14. The Rechtsstaat refers to the idea of a state based on the rule of law.

5. Orzoff, Battle for the Castle, 62, 65; and Heimann, Czechoslovakia, 51, 55.

6. Koller, Ausnahmsgesetze und Verordnungen, 10.

7. Redlich, Österreichische Regierung und Verwaltung, 83.

8. Scheer, Die Ringstraßenfront, 13.

9. Österreichische Nationalbibliothek/ALEX Historische Rechts- und Gesetzestexte online/Reichsgebsetzblatt - https://alex.onb.ac.at/ALEX, Reichsgesetzblatt für die im Reichsrathe vertretenen Königreiche und Länder, 1884, 15. Verordnung des Gesammtministeriums, 30 January 1884, 15.

10. Österreichisches Staatsarchiv-Kriegsarchiv (henceforth ÖStA-KA), Kriegsministerium (henceforth KM), Präs, 75-6/1, War Minister’s Note, 19 January 1906.

11. k.u.k. Kriegsministerium, Orientierungsbehelf über Ausnahmsverfügungen.

12. ÖStA-KA, Mil. Impressen, Karton 493, Orientierungsbehelf über Ausnahmsverfügungen für die im Reichsrate vertretenen Königreiche und Länder, Ausgabe B, J-25 a, Wien 1909, 1.

13. Hugelmann and Boehm, Das Nationalitätenrecht, 150–1. See also Brix, Die Umgangssprachen in Altösterreich, 60–1.

14. Scheer, Language Diversity and Loyalty, 31–3.

15. Klabjan, “Od Trsta do Sarajeva in nazaj,” 762–3. See also Rachamimov, “Arbiters of Allegiance.”

16. Apponyi sat in the Hungarian Parliament for the entire period 1872–1918, with one short break only. The citation appears in Miskolczy, Ungarn in der Habsburger-Monarchie, 149.

17. ÖStA-KA, Nachlasssammlung (henceforth NL), B/600:1, Anton Lehár, Geschichten erzählt, Vol. 2, 47.

18. Szábo, “The Functioning of the Hungarian Political System,” 153–67.

19. Galántai, Der österreichisch-ungarische Dualismus, 146. See also ÖStA-KA, KM, Präs, 76-30/20, Hungarian Minister-President to War Minister, 4 July 1886.

20. ÖStA-KA, Reichskriegsministerium (henceforth RKM), Präs, 75-11/10, War Minister to Hungarian Minister-President, 24 December 1910.

21. Miskolczy, Ungarn in der Habsburger-Monarchie, 179. See also ÖStA-KA, RKM, Präs, 75-6/15, War Minister to Hungarian Minister-President, 14 August 1906.

22. All branches of the general staff dealt with war scenarios, including consideration of language skills among officials – see Scheer, Die Sprachenvielfalt in der österreichisch-ungarischen Armee, 150.

23. ÖStA-KA, RKM, Präs, 75-11/10, War Minister to Hungarian Minister-President, 24 December 1910.

24. ÖStA-KA, RKM, Präs, 75-11/3, 1909, Chief of general staff to War Minister, 24 October 1908. For the War Ministry’s insistence on a Hungarian ‘Ermächtigungsgesetz’, see Suppan, “Ausnahmezustand in Erwägung,” 261.

25. Galántai, Hungary in the First World War, 73–4. ‘Enabling Law’ here did not mean the same thing as the Enabling Acts of the twentieth century, with their wholesale surrender of legislative powers to the executive.

26. Suppan, “Ausnahmezustand in Erwägung,” 256.

27. ÖStA-KA, RKM, Präs, 75-11/10, War Minister to Hungarian Minister-President, 24 December 1910.

28. ÖStA-KA, RKM, Präs, 75-11/10, Report of the War Ministry, 1910.

29. Galántai, Hungary in the First World War, 76.

30. ÖStA-KA, RKM, Präs, 75-11/3, 1910, 5th Department to 10th Department of War Ministry, 9 December 1909.

31. Galántai, Hungary in the First World War, 76. See also ÖStA-KA, Militärkanzlei Franz Ferdinand (henceforth MKFF), Mb 11–13, Vortrag des KM bei der MKFF, 9 October 1912; and ÖStA-KA, KM, Präs, 75-3/3, note dated 8 February 1913.

32. Galántai, Der österreichisch-ungarische Dualismus, 145–6; and Galántai, Hungary in the First World War, 75. On the Hungarian government commissioners’ work, see ÖStA-KA, KM, Präs, 75-3/3, note dated 8 February 1913.

33. Cornwall, “Disintegration and Defeat,” 183.

34. A list of the emergency decrees announced from 28 July 1914 onwards can be found in Galántai, Hungary in the First World War, 78–9.

35. In Bosnia-Herzegovina the provincial Parliament was suspended in July 1914, civil rights guaranteed under the provincial constitution of 1910 were put on hold, and the joint military administration headed by governor Oskar Potiorek put the province under strict and exclusive military rule. See Imamović, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 255–6; and Grunert, “The Habsburg State.” Also ÖStA-KA, KM, 10. Abt., 5-8/7, 1914, Orientierungsbehelf für Ausnahmsverfügungen für Bosnien-Herzegowina.

36. ÖStA-KA, Mil. Impressen, Karton 493, Orientierungsbehelf über Ausnahmsverfügungen für die im Reichsrate vertretenen Königreiche und Länder, Ausgabe B, J-25a, Wien 1909, §1(1).

37. ÖStA-KA, RKM, Präs, 75-1/12–1, War Minister to Hungarian Minister-President, 24 March 1909.

38. ÖStA-KA, RKM, Präs, 75-11/12–2, Hungarian Minister-President to War Minister, 29 March 1909.

39. ÖStA-KA, Kriegsüberwachungsamt (henceforth KÜA), no. 12, Telegraph to War Surveillance Office, 26 July 1914.

40. ÖStA-KA, KM, Präs, 18-8/2, letter to Hermann Diamand, 8 August 1917.

41. See ÖStA-KA, Militärkanzlei Seiner Majestät (henceforth MKSM), 30-2/16, report of Honvédség Minister at Military Chancellery of the Monarch, 12 April 1918; and ÖStA-KA, KÜA, no. 8168, note dated 28 October 1914.

42. See ÖStA-KA, MKSM, 9-4/1, report dated 9 September 1917; ÖStA-KA, KM, Präs, 18-8/2, letter to Hermann Diamand, 8 August 1917; and ÖStA-KA, MKSM, 30-2/16, report of Honvédség Minister at Military Chancellery of the Monarch, 12 April 1918.

43. ÖStA-KA, MKSM, 30-2/16, report of Honvédség Minister at Military Chancellery of the Monarch, 12 April 1918.

44. ÖStA-KA, KÜA, no. 2378, note dated 24 August 1914.

45. ÖStA-KA, KM, Präs, 83-9/2, fol. 2, 1914, informational report.

46. ÖStA-KA, KM, Präs, 83-9/1, 1914, Hungarian Minister-President to War Ministry, 4 August 1914.

47. ÖStA-KA, KM, Präs, 16-48/2, Hungarian Minister-President to War Minister, 15 July 1915.

48. Many traces of this cooperation can be found in the files of the KÜA. For some examples see ÖStA-KA, KÜA, no. 236, note dated 30 July 1914; ÖStA-KA, KÜA, no. 103437, HB to KÜA, 14 April 1917; and ÖStA/KA/KÜA, no. 103485, HB to KÜA, 18 April 1917.

49. Redlich, Österreichische Regierung und Verwaltung, 88.

50. ÖStA-KA, KM, Präs, 18–8, War Ministry report, 17 June 1917.

51. ÖStA-KA, KM, Präs, 16-60/1, Comment of the Army High Command, 30 August 1917.

52. ÖStA-KA, KM, Präs, 16-60/1, Ministry of Interior, 30 July 1917.

53. ÖStA-KA, MKSM, 9-4/1, report about organisational changes to the KÜA, 9 September 1917.

54. ÖStA-KA, NL, B53:8–12, Albert Schmidt von Georgenegg, 8. Tagebücher,Tagebuch Nr. 6, entry for 16 August 1917.

55. ÖStA-KA, MKSM, 30-2/16, Honvédség Ministry to the MKSM, 12 April 1918.

56. Scheer, Die Ringstraßenfront, 108–9.

57. Hauptmann and Prasch, eds., Dr. Ludwig Thalloczy, 147.

58. ÖStA-KA, KÜA, no. 8168, note dated 28 October 1914.

59. ÖStA-KA, KÜA, no. 1558, note dated 16 August 1914.

60. ÖStA-KA, KÜA, no. 8777, note dated 17 October 1914.

61. Mihályhegy, “Ambivalente Gefühle,” 293.

62. ÖStA-KA, KÜA, no. 8168, note dated 28 October 1914.

63. Hauptmann and Prasch, eds., Dr. Ludwig Thalloczy, 301.

64. N. N., “Die Lage in Österreich: Die Aufhebung des Kriegsüberwachungsamtes,” Pester Lloyd, 12 September 1917, 6.

65. See Bihari, A Forgotten Home Front.

66. Decree of the Honvédség Ministry, 25 July 1914, in Reichsgesetzblatt, no. 171/1914.

67. Grandner, Kooperative Gewerkschaftspolitik, 38. See also Schmied-Kowarzik, “Die wirtschaftliche Erschöpfung”; and Scheer, “Die Kriegswirtschaft,” 439.

68. Lipusch, ed., Österreich-Ungarns katholische Militärseelsorge, 441.

69. ÖStA-KA, KÜA, no. 9135, 8 November 1914.

70. For one study that mentions this episode, see Busch, Major Kwaplitschka, 146.

71. Livio, “The Wartime Treatment of the Italian-Speaking Population.”

72. Stibbe, “Krieg und Brutalisierung.”

73. Marin, “World War I and Internal Repression.”

74. Stibbe, Civilian Internment, 108.

75. For examples involving the Vienna police, see Scheer, “Denunciation and the Decline of the Habsburg Home Front”; and for a regional case study highlighting many instances of family denunciation, see Moll, Der Deutsch-Slowenische Nationalitätenkonflikt.

76. Grunert, ”The Habsburg State,” 262. See also Cornwall, “The Road to Pragmatism,” 222.

77. Cornwall, “Disintegration and Defeat,” 174.

78. N.N., “Rechtsverwirrung,” Die Arbeit, 24 January 1917, 1–2, here 1.

79. Judson, “Where our Commonality is Necessary … ,” 13–14.

80. Stibbe, “Krieg und Brutalisierung,” 101–2.

81. Piahanau, “A Priest at the Front,” 721–41.