The Resurrection and Collapse of Empire in Habsburg Serbia, 1914-1918: Volume 1

Jonathan Gumz is currently Assistant Professor of History at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and has held teaching positions at the United States Naval War College, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and the University of Chicago. His articles have appeared in the Historical Journal and the Historian. He was the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship for study in Vienna and a Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.

• 1. The summer of 1914: the Hapsburg empire meets Serbian warfare; 2. Eradicating national politics in occupied Serbia; 3. Legal severity, international law, and the tottering empire in occupied Serbia; 4. Food as salvation: food supply, the monarchy, and Serbia, 1916–18; 5. A levee en masse nation no more? Guerilla war in Hapsburg Serbia.

'This book effectively refutes the argument that Austria-Hungary's occupation of Serbia constituted an unrestrained war of national destruction. It also challenges recent scholarship that views wartime occupation practices in Eastern Europe through a lens of colonization that anticipated Nazi atrocities in the Second World War. Jonathan Gumz argues that unlike many of their peers elsewhere in Europe, Austria-Hungary's conservative military leaders in fact rejected total war policies that merged war and home fronts. Gumz clearly elaborates this traditional military culture, demonstrating its workings at both the casual village level in occupied Serbia and in the highest Imperial councils in Vienna. He elucidates the key conflicts that set the military against the imperial bureaucracies during the War, and that by 1918 had helped to destroy the regime's legitimacy among its citizens. Above all, his comparative approach produces important insights onto wartime practices, not only in Austria-Hungary but throughout Europe. This is military history at its best, broadly conceived, clearly applicable beyond specifically military situations, and above all, superbly grounded in archival research.' Pieter Judson, Swarthmore College