Description
Book SynopsisThe belligerent country that literally started the First World War, the Habsburg Empire suffered grievously during the global conflict. At the end of the war, it was estimated that 1.2 million soldiers, out of 8 million men and 100,000 women mobilized from an empire of 52 million, perished in service. Among those who lived, the wounded, the disabled, and their dependents constituted at least several million people whose survival was endangered both during and after the war. How did the Habsburg Empire confront the scale of the casualties brought about by the First World War? What care and support were offered to disabled soldiers and dead soldiers'' surviving dependents? Victims'' State offers the first integrated account of how the Austrian half of the empire and the successor Austrian Republic responded to the needs of citizen-soldiers and their families from the nineteenth century to the interwar years. Ke-Chin Hsia traces the policies, ideas, and administrative practices developed
Trade ReviewAn exciting new interpretation of welfare practices in Habsburg Central Europe that spans the Imperial and Republican periods. Hsia's pioneering arguments demonstrate that innovative welfare practices rarely came solely from the state but developed as much from claims by socially diverse groups of actors and interest groups from below. Readers may be surprised to learn that in the multinational Habsburg empire, when it came to popular demands for welfare programs, nationalist concerns apparently took a back seat to more pressing social, economic, and regional interests. * Pieter M. Judson, European University Institute *
An impressive, original study of the neglected history of the emergence of the Austrian welfare state out of World War I and its centrality to the transition from the elite Habsburg Empire to the cohesive, democratic Austrian Republic, permanently transforming its politics and culture, an experience more similar to other European states than is usually recognized. Thoroughly researched and accessibly written, it is a major contribution to the history of Austria and of European welfare states. * Pat Thane, author of The Foundations of the Welfare State *
This meticulously researched study offers a new and compelling interpretation of wartime and postwar politics. Centering social welfare as an integral part of total war, Ke-Chin Hsia reconceptualizes links between imperial Austria and the postwar republic. He reveals continuities in late Habsburg and early republican welfare policies without defaulting to the nationalities prism. As such, the book is a pioneering 'next generation' work that extends the recent historiographical re-examination of the significance of 1918 in Austrian history. * Maureen Healy, author of Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire *
Ke-Chin Hsia's excellent book energetically addresses these strands of scholarship, as he explores the ebbs and flows of the making and unmaking of Austria's welfare mechanisms vis-à-vis war victims. [This study] is an ideal example of this tight and mutually informing and reinforcing relationship between state and society, as he pays attention to the war victims' own leverage in welfare reform-making. * Doina Anca Cretu, CEU Review of Books *
Without a doubt, Hsia's book pushes for further reflection on the story of welfare,...the book lives up to the promise outlined in the title and in its introduction. * Doina Anca Cretu, CEU Review of Books *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1 Government Poverty and Incentive Pensions in the Nineteenth Century Chapter 2 The Emergence of the War Welfare Field from Peace to War Chapter 3 A Social Offensive on the Home Front Chapter 4 The Last-Ditch Effort to Save the Monarchy Chapter 5 War Victims as a New Power Factor Chapter 6 A Republic with "the Correct National and Social Sensibilities" Chapter 7 "The Public's Interest in Invalids Has Waned" Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index
