Whether victorious or not, Central European states faced fundamental challenges after the First World War as they struggled to contain ongoing violence and forge peaceful societies. This collection explores the various forms of violence these nations confronted during this period, which effectively transformed the region into a laboratory for state-building. Employing a bottom-up approach to understanding everyday life, these studies trace the contours of individual and mass violence in the interwar era while illuminating their effects upon politics, intellectual developments, and the arts.

This book analyses the process of 'reshaping' liberated societies in post-1945 Europe. Post-war societies tried to solve three main questions immediately after the dark times of occupation: Who could be considered a patriot and a valuable member of the respective national community? How could relations between men and women be (re-)established? How could the respective society strengthen national cohesion? Violence in rather different forms appeared to be a powerful tool for such a complex reshaping of societies. The chapters are based on present primary research about specific cases and consider the different political, mental, and cultural developments in various nation-states between 1944 and 1948. Examples from Italy, France, Norway, Denmark, Greece, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary demonstrate a new comparative and fascinating picture of post-war Europe. This perspective overcomes the notorious East-West dividing line, without covering the manifold differences between individual European countries.

This book analyses the process of 'reshaping' liberated societies in post-1945 Europe. Post-war societies tried to solve three main questions immediately after the dark times of occupation: Who could be considered a patriot and a valuable member of the respective national community? How could relations between men and women be (re-)established? How could the respective society strengthen national cohesion? Violence in rather different forms appeared to be a powerful tool for such a complex reshaping of societies. The chapters are based on present primary research about specific cases and consider the different political, mental, and cultural developments in various nation-states between 1944 and 1948. Examples from Italy, France, Norway, Denmark, Greece, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary demonstrate a new comparative and fascinating picture of post-war Europe. This perspective overcomes the notorious East-West dividing line, without covering the manifold differences between individual European countries.

Paths out of the Apocalypse uses violence as a prism through which to investigate the profound social, cultural, and political changes experienced by (post-) Habsburg Central Europe during and immediately after the Great War. It compares attitudes toward, and experiences and practices of, physical violence in the mostly Czech-speaking territories of Bohemia and Moravia, the German-speaking territories that would constitute the Republic of Austria after 1918, and the mostly German-speaking region of South Tyrol. Based on research in national and local archives and copious secondary literature, the study argues that, in the context of total war, physical violence became a predominant means of conceptualizing and expressing social-political demands as well as a means of demarcating various notions of community and belonging. The authors apply an interdisciplinary understanding of violence informed by sociological and psychological theories as well as by rigorous empirical historiographical approach. First, they examine the most severe kind of physical violence - murder - against the backdrop of shifting scientific and media discourses during the war and its immediate aftermath. Second, the authors use numerous cases of collective violence, ranging from less serious everyday conflicts to massive hunger demonstrations and riots, to unravel its 'language', thus deciphering the attitudes and values shared among an ever-growing group of perpetrators. Paths out of the Apocalypse thus fundamentally rethinks some key topics currently debated in the scholarship on early twentieth-century Central Europe, the First World War, violence, nationalism, and modern European comparative social and cultural history.