Vanquished and Victorious: World War One Veterans in Austria and Czechoslovakia, 1918-1938

Recent research has revised earlier views about the role of veterans of World War One in paramilitary formations, radical nationalism and political extremism in inter-war Europe, yet there remain considerable gaps in our understanding of the role they played in the ’successor states’ of the Habsburg Empire. Vanquished and Victorious provides an innovative comparative investigation of veterans in Austria and Czechoslovakia, two states whose wider political development was of crucial importance to the question of stability in Central Europe after 1918. While differing in terms of how successfully veterans reintegrated into post-war society, this volume shows that both countries incorporated elements of ’cultures of victory and defeat’.

Rudolf Kučera is director of the Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences and associate professor of history at the Charles University in Prague.

Julia Walleczek-Fritz completed her PhD. at the University of Innsbruck and has participated in a number of international research projects. She currently works as a research project manager at the University of Salzburg.

Radka Sustrová has been a lecturer in Social History at Charles University in Prague since 2018 and currently holds a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Action Fellowship at the University of Vienna.