Carolina Seminar with Tara Zahra

For millions of Habsburg citizens, civilians and soldiers alike, the First World War was a war of both mobility and captivity. While soldiers were notoriously paralyzed in trenches on the Western front, the armies of the Central Powers and the Russian steamroller pushed each other back and forth across contested territory, sending civilians in flight. At least 600,000 Austrian civilians fled or were evacuated from the front during the war. State officials scrambled to address the crisis with an ambitious network of refugee camps scattered throughout the Empire’s interior. Austro-Hungarian troops meanwhile captured its own territory along its vast frontiers, and struggled to establish new regimes, extract resources and pacify local populations. This war of movement was a prelude to captivity for at least 2.7 million Austro-Hungarian soldiers whose service ended in Prisoners of War camps, mostly in Russia. They shared the experience of internment with thousands of civilians, enemy nationals, and soldiers who were interned within the Empire, and with the hundreds of thousands of refugees who began to experience the refugee camps created to care for them as a form of imprisonment. The Austro-Hungarian Army and bureaucracy saw this mobility as an opportunity as well as a crisis. It was an occasion to extend an imagined civilizing mission toward captive lands, soldiers and citizens.