Hostname: page-component-68c7f8b79f-fcrnt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-12-29T23:03:41.985Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Politics of Urban Space in the Wartime Habsburg Monarchy: Olmütz/Olomouc, 1914 to 1919

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2025

Jiří Hutečka Open the ORCID record for Jiří Hutečka [Opens in a new window]
Jiří Hutečka*
Affiliation:
Institute of History, University of Hradec Králové , Hradec Králové, Czech Republic
*
Email: jiri.hutecka@upce.cz
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to bring provincial and local perspectives into the research of urban space in the wartime Habsburg monarchy. Using the case of Olmütz/Olomouc, a midsize town in central Moravia, it analyzes how various social actors used public space and how they could appropriate its symbolic meaning in wartime. While local urban geography had long been contested by political, most often nationalist actors, World War I introduced fresh themes to the context of the city. Public rituals of loyalty repurposed and intensified some of the old traditions, even as organized and unorganized actors sought to “capture,” “invade,” and potentially “occupy” the same spaces to highlight their agendas in public demonstrations whose form owed much to the traditional public rituals. After October 1918, when the balance of power shifted between nationalist groups, the contest for urban space continued, along with ongoing political unrest, showing strong continuity of wartime practices into the immediate postwar era both in terms of political instability and in terms of the patterns of public ritual.

Keywords

World War IHabsburg monarchyhome fronturban spacepublic ritualloyalty

Information

Type
Article
Information
Austrian History Yearbook , First View , pp. 1 - 16
Check for updates
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Regents of the University of Minnesota

In recent decades, numerous historians have noted that the appropriation and contestation of public space were an inherent part of developing civil society in towns and cities of the late Habsburg monarchy.Footnote 1 Streets and squares, statues, and images each became stages loaded with “historical, mythical, or symbolic significance.”Footnote 2 This gave meaning to protests and demonstrations, which, in turn, attached significance to the spaces themselves.Footnote 3 In Moravia as well as in Bohemia, this contest increasingly revolved around national issues and the competing interests of activists promoting national agendas. They used various symbols and rituals to “stake out territorial claims on a nationally disputed soil.”Footnote 4 Because these practices had fully developed by 1914, it was only logical for them to transfer into the war years when there was both the need and opportunity for dynamic changes in terms of the actors, agendas, and meanings that were involved.

This article presents a case study of these dynamics from below, focusing on how streets and squares were politicized during and because of the war. It operates under the assumption that loyalty is a multilayered analytical category, reflecting a complex set of relations between social actors and the state.Footnote 5 In peacetime, loyalties could be manifold and, far from being exclusive, they could run parallel or be supportive of each other. In wartime, they were increasingly defined by the simple demands of sacrifice and survival, concerns that the Habsburg state increasingly failed to satisfy, diminishing significantly individual loyalty to either the state or the dynasty.

A number of excellent works already exist on how urban communities in Central Europe experienced the mobilizations, shortages, and general discontentment of World War I.Footnote 6 Several of them, starting with Maureen Healy’s seminal work on Vienna, included emphasis on the way public space became a stage of propaganda as well as protest.Footnote 7 Perhaps naturally, however, these works have mostly focused on state capitals. A number of works have covered provincial cities in Germany over the years,Footnote 8 while researchers of the Habsburg Empire have picked up the topic of smaller urban areas only recently.Footnote 9 This is especially true for the Bohemian Lands, where Claire Morelon has done an excellent job in her book on the use of public space in wartime Prague, and this article owes a lot to her thought-provoking analysis.Footnote 10 However, its subject is a provincial capital and one of the largest cities of the monarchy. In comparison, there is very little known about everyday experience in regional cities and small towns. At the same time, Czech historiography has done little to look beyond the study of economic and political developments of urban polities.Footnote 11 It has only recently dug into the issue of the spatial context of wartime industrialization and protestFootnote 12 or public representations of loyalty.Footnote 13 Therefore, by choosing a rather small yet important regional community with the potential for ambiguous loyalties, this article provides fresh insight into how the abovementioned processes developed within this specific context of wartime home front experience. For this purpose, I have chosen Olmütz/Olomouc,Footnote 14 an ethnically mixed garrison town with a strong German-speaking elite but a growing Czech presence encroaching from the countryside. As such, it has the potential to serve as a microcosm for the monarchy’s broader conflicts while offering insight into the way the war stamped its mark on a provincial urban setting.

City at War

Before World War I, Olomouc was a rather sleepy provincial town living off its official titular glory as the “Royal Capital of Moravia,” a title the city magistrates insisted upon in all their paperwork despite the fact that Brünn/Brno had been the real capital since the Thirty Years’ War. An archbishop’s seat since 1777, this former fortress town was predominantly Catholic with a small but vibrant Jewish community of about a thousand souls, as well as a few hundred Protestants. Catholicism served as a unifying factor in communal identity otherwise divided along language lines. According to the 1910 census, the town population consisted of 19,551 people, with 63 percent speaking German and 32 percent Czech.Footnote 15 The local economy revolved around trade in products from the rich surrounding agricultural region of Haná, as well as the service industry tied to the various church and government offices, plus the several-thousand-strong military garrison quartered in the numerous barracks throughout the city.Footnote 16 The town lacked any substantial industrial base, the few larger businesses along with a working-class social element being located in the suburbs, which until 1919 were independent municipalities.

The economic structure was reflected in local politics. For decades, the city council was a stronghold of old patrician families representing the local branch of the German Progressive Party (Deutsche Fortschrittliche Partei). Karl Brandhuber, in office since 1896, was only the fifth elected mayor since the introduction of municipal elections in 1851. Politically supported by the majority of local Jews, these German-speaking elites faced a growing challenge from the Czech nationalists from the early 1880s, when migration from the countryside as well as from the suburbs brought an increasing number of Czech speakers into town, with their own elites soon demanding proper representation. However, the curial system of municipal elections, high electoral requirements, and restrictive policies on property ownership within city limits ultimately kept municipal politics in the hands of the extant ruling class of German-speaking burghers. In fact, Czech political parties did not even care to run candidates in municipal elections after 1884, as they stood no chance of success.Footnote 17 As a result, the streetscape of Olomouc was a natural choice for any challenges to the established order. The mass rallies celebrating František Palacký’s birthday in 1898, or Tábor lidu organized in support of equal voting rights in 1905, were good examples of Czech activists mobilizing the population from the surrounding area to encroach onto what they themselves perceived as “German space.”Footnote 18

Municipal elites were very much aware of the importance of public space in promoting their own political messages, often using their power to stamp these on the physical space of the town. Probably, the best example was the series of artistic depictions of Emperor Franz Joseph promoting the self-image of a kaisertreu community, one that is deeply loyal to the House of Habsburg. Thus, the local Civic Rifle Association (Bürger- und Schützenkorps, an upper-middle-class social club) sponsored a stained-glass window in the city’s parish church of St. Moritz (sv. Mořice) in 1898, depicting the emperor’s strong connection to Olomouc by commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of his coronation at the archbishop’s palace in December 1848. In 1898 as well, the city council had a monument to Franz Joseph installed in the Oberring/Horní náměstí (Upper Square, the city’s main square with the town hall and the Holy Trinity Column at the center). It depicted Franz Joseph suitably dressed in military uniform, accentuating the strong military tradition of the town, one that the city council liked to emphasize.

The statue soon became a centerpiece of social life and a traditional meeting point for various public gatherings and rituals, many of them heavily militarized in a town where military garrison represented more than 15 percent of the peacetime population. Military bands playing patriotic and popular songs were a staple of any rally or parade. They added outward expression to the fact that many social, cultural, and economic activities in Olomouc revolved around the military even more than was common in otherwise already militarized public life of the monarchy, a tradition that dated back to the eighteenth century.Footnote 19 As in most garrison towns of the era, “life wrapped around army hierarchy” in Olomouc,Footnote 20 so much so that a young Sigmund Freud—who spent a brief spell in the city as a regimental surgeon during military maneuvers in 1886—complained about how “everything suffers from the presence of the military” that constantly skews social hierarchies as well as the quality of services “in this shithole.”Footnote 21 Even local businessmen feared their “daughters disappearing with their dowry (and sometimes with more)” through marriages with “officers who are perhaps not even German,” while ever more “Poles and Czechs” in uniform endangered the German essence of Olomouc through their growing presence.Footnote 22

Schools were another area where imagery promoting the ties between the city and the House of Habsburg found fertile ground. In 1892, the German school board commissioned an interior decoration of the ceremonial hall in the city center’s new Realschule building. The paintings covering the room from floor to ceiling combined the themes of science, human progress, economic growth, and regional traditions with those of patriotic loyalty to the throne, with the imperial order presented as the living embodiment of the achievements of modernity rooted in tradition. The choice of a German high school was no accident, as schools were a highly contested space in the brewing national conflict.Footnote 23 Opening ceremonies were often an opportunity to, respectively, show off success in strengthening the ramparts of “German Olmütz” or, alternatively, in making the city ever more multilingual and one day maybe even Czech.Footnote 24 Counting schoolchildren became an obsession before 1914, in particular on the part of the Czech nationalist press, and school buildings became perhaps the most important symbols of spatial appropriation across the cityscape. In 1905, the Národní dům was built not far from the main square, serving as a bastion for Czechdom in a city dominated by the military, the Catholic Church, and the German-speaking elites. Buildings and monuments, as well as public rituals, were inherently tied to the contested identities in a process that easily transferred into wartime.

This contest for both physical and symbolic space was given new dynamics when the war broke out. It inhibited some of its sharpest tendencies and accentuated others, while at the same time creating new lines of contention. “It is war!” wrote the local press, “War with all its sights, gravity, all its exceptionality, its overload of events.”Footnote 25 And overload it was on all fronts, including space. In a manner not dissimilar to other cities like Prague, the streets were immediately militarized with posters, checkpoints, military police, visual propaganda, and other representations of war.Footnote 26 The city was suddenly teeming with soldiers as the prewar garrison ballooned to anywhere between six and twelve thousand soldiers stationed in the area at any given time.Footnote 27 Already on 2 August 1914, two days after the general mobilization, “the city streets experienced traffic so heavy it is beyond belief, pulsating crowds of people congregated around the many barracks.”Footnote 28 Hundreds of reservists set up camp in the streets with their luggage, the army having no place to put them in for the time being. While the initial chaos lasted about three weeks, the army units leaving for the front were immediately replaced with prisoners of war, the wounded, and Galician refugees. Their arrival by the thousands combined with hundreds of newly stationed military officers led to a crisis in the real estate market, while the arrival of the wounded almost overwhelmed the city’s creaking infrastructure.Footnote 29 Up to 9,000 beds were made available in schools, libraries, convents, meeting halls, gyms, and private houses.Footnote 30 At the end, almost half a million wounded and sick men would pass through the city’s hospitals during the war. A number of “barrack-style” hospitals had to be built in 1915 to accommodate them.Footnote 31 Before that happened, the army appropriated dozens of buildings, and while many of these were ultimately returned to their original use, some remained in military hands for the duration of the war.

As the list of buildings appropriated for the war effort included schools, it is not surprising that new lines of conflict emerged about this highly symbolic space. It put the city council, which arguably supported the German nationalist position more often than not, in a difficult position, as it came under pressure from the army to make space available “immediately,”Footnote 32 and from both nationalist camps, arguing over whose space would be given over first. The schools and school boards of both language groups saw the military intrusion as “occupation” and pressed the city council to make the soldiers leave.Footnote 33 Overall, the army spent almost 174,000 man-days and accommodated thousands of horses in public buildings during 1914 alone. The city actually ended up suing the provincial governor’s office in Brno for the accumulated damages, with no success.Footnote 34 However, the issue went beyond financial compensations, as the symbolic status of school buildings meant nationalists invariably interpreted “the occupation” in national terms, even though most schools were in fact taken over by the army at one time or another. In extreme cases like the recently built Reálné gymnasium, which never saw a student before 1919 because the army kept repeatedly requisitioning the building throughout the war, Czech nationalists saw the prolonged military presence as a conspiracy by the municipal elites to keep the cityscape free of further Czech intrusions.Footnote 35

The economic context of urban space changed in wartime as well. Traditional markets, a highlight of prewar city economic and social life, were “devastated by price maximums” and scarcely frequented by producers by early 1916.Footnote 36 The regulated, increasingly rationed economy brought redistribution infrastructure in the form of warehouses, licensed bakeries and food stores, or soup kitchens built according to class in 1915 and 1917.Footnote 37 Queuing in the public space, often for hours, became a new centerpiece of life in the city, accompanied by quarrels and even violence erupting over access to basic needs. Streets went dark because of the lack of fuel and were eerily silent because the church bells were confiscated in 1916.Footnote 38 The local press, both German and Czech, described the city as a truly depressing place by 1917, reflecting the overall mood. Spaces once dedicated to lively economic exchange increasingly turned into spaces filled with desperation and anger. By 1918, even the main square, the Oberring itself, was primarily a place where people were forced to negotiate their day-to-day survival. It was these gatherings where protests were to be found when feelings of dynastic loyalty finally ran out. Until then, the same spaces were very much a stage where the city was performing its kaisertreu identity with full wartime vigor.

Spaces of Loyalty

While life in the city came under the pressure of wartime realities, the city streets themselves were acquiring new meanings. On the purely symbolic level, this process was closely tied to the efforts of the city council to further promote imperial loyalty and patriotism by stamping references to the ongoing war onto urban space. As a nod to the wartime alliance with Germany, the crossroads at the western edge of the town, along with an avenue, were named after Kaiser Wilhelm II in mid-1915.Footnote 39 In 1917, the city council further decided to rename one of the streets connecting the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Platz (Kaiser Wilhelm Square) to the Oberring after the new Emperor Karl I.Footnote 40 These efforts reflected both the practice of displaying loyalty in public space typical for many a Habsburg town during the war and the long-standing position of Olomouc’s German-speaking elites. These aligned themselves with the state as much as possible because they saw it as the best guarantee of their political power. They were far from alone. The magistrates of some of the German-dominated suburbs followed suit, sometimes to the extent of renaming the whole community. Thus, in September 1916, the municipal council of Powel/Povel asked the imperial Ministry of the Interior to rename their town “Hötzendorf” in honor of the imperial Chief of the General Staff and had to be reminded “there may already be more places of the same or similar name.”Footnote 41 Because urban space was increasingly a stage for desperate negotiations of everyday existence, one may doubt the success of such acts of wartime propaganda, especially in the later stages of the war.

The Olomouc main square became the central stage for rituals of loyalty early in the war. In the first days, farewell parades of the local regiments usually began there, often embellished with further spectacle. Thus, for example, on 6 August 1914, at seven o’clock in the morning, the whole garrison stood at attention in the square, taking part in a field mass. After the mass, the band played local songs as well as the imperial anthem, the “Kaiserlied,” which the crowds cheered with “Hoch” and “Sláva.”Footnote 42 Individual units leaving for the frontlines were a staple public event throughout the war, emphasizing the militarized nature of wartime Olomouc. The entire population from the whole region would flood the streets to say goodbye to their loved ones, causing traffic stoppages. “Accompanied by the sound of music” on their way to the train station, the troops marched “under the colors of the regiment and of Moravia … literally drowned in flowers and bouquets.” “Emotional scenes then played out” at the station, while “the public gave the departing soldiers heartfelt farewell.”Footnote 43 While the press and apparently the public, too, showed increasingly less enthusiasm for elaborate farewells going into 1916, the practice died hard and individual units were still given somewhat somber send-offs in late 1917.

Express rituals of loyalty appeared as another form of wartime public ritual in the Oberring almost immediately upon mobilization. Later in the war, these mostly revolved around an official public performance reflecting the discourse of sacrifice,Footnote 44 such as an unveiling of a Wehrmann in Eisen (Warrior in Iron) in May 1917Footnote 45 or an exhibition of war artifacts in February 1918.Footnote 46 However, as early as Sunday, 28 July 1914, in the evening, the main square witnessed the most common form of displaying loyalty collectively in public—a rally. Upon hearing of the declaration of war on Serbia, crowds gathered around the Franz Joseph monument in the Oberring to proclaim, “glory to the emperor” and shout “down with the Serbs!” A procession through the city streets followed, with the people singing “the Austrian anthem, the Prince Eugene and Radetzky Marches as well as German songs.”Footnote 47 Already at this moment, we can see a hint of the confrontational potential at the heart of these gatherings as well as the understanding of the city as a space to be “conquered” or “occupied”: As a Czech-language newspaper stated, “the crowd had apparently thought about aiming for the Národní dům too, only to balk at the idea in the last moment.”Footnote 48

The nationalist overtones competing with displays of loyalty became even more apparent two days later, on 30 July 1914, when supposedly enthusiastic crowds appropriated the Oberring again, this time following the call of the German Christian Socialist Party. At first, all went seemingly well with the display of patriotic unity: “The Imperial Anthem thundered with sublime, sacred voice, the Czech anthem following in the Slavic tongue. The Czech speaker, speaking from the pedestal of the emperor’s monument, received a bipartisan ovation.”Footnote 49 Here, however, the national perspectives disagree. While the local Jewish-German press saw a show of unity in songs of both languages being sung, Czech progressive-nationalist papers interpreted the rendering of “Kde domov můj” (Where My Home Is) as “an act of defiance,” even though the Czech patriotic song was not banned from public space (yet).Footnote 50 A conflict might well have been the situation on the ground, as some scuffles erupted after a section of the crowd moved in front of the Národní dům and the police ended up arresting seventeen people, mostly youths from both camps. A day later, the police apparently decided it was better to be safe than sorry and applied a tactic of preventive arrests to anyone appearing to congregate around the Franz Joseph monument. Not surprisingly, this apparent bid to keep the Oberring neutral and the semblance of unity alive backfired, only making everyone angry at the city council.Footnote 51

In the early months of the war, a pattern was quickly established in the way public space was used to show the loyalty and patriotism of the citizens: “A torchlight procession was organized in Olomouc yesterday evening,” wrote a Czech newspaper on 29 August 1914, “to celebrate the victories of ours as well as of German troops. Crowds of people with torches, singing and shouting “Hoch!" flowed from the Oberring through the streets and city squares, only to return to the monument of our sovereign and disperse.”Footnote 52 The triumphant parades through the city heavily borrowed from prewar practices of military processions, so-called Zapfenstreich or čepobití (military tattooFootnote 53), organized on occasions such as the emperor’s birthday on every 18 August. Traditional processions to celebrate Catholic holidays and patron saints were also a likely inspiration, adding the power of traditional, quasi-religious spectacle to the weight of the performance.Footnote 54 As was the case in peacetime, the local regiments supplied their bands, and the path of these processions took the crowds through what participants obviously considered to be the key symbolic spots of the city’s “patriotic” streetscape.

Sometimes just a few hundred souls, sometimes—according to the press—“huge crowds of people” “up to thirty thousand strong” usually met in the Oberring in front of the Franz Joseph monument.Footnote 55 At its feet, speeches were given, usually in German, but sometimes—especially early in the war—in Czech as well.Footnote 56 The crowd would then cheer and slowly move out of the square, usually through Brandhuber-Gasse/Brandhuberova ulice (Brandhuber Street), named after the sitting mayor. The procession then continued via Elisabeth-Strasse/Eliščina třída (Elisabeth Avenue) to Franz Josef-Platz/Náměstí Františka Josefa (Franz Joseph Square), progressing on to meet further symbols of imperial, regional, or spiritual power. First on the list was the district governor’s office located on the latter square and then the garrison headquarters one block away down on Franz Josef–Strasse/Třída Františka Josefa (Franz Joseph Avenue). Sometimes, a stop at the living quarters of the garrison commander would be added, as would, on at least one occasion, the nearby archbishop’s palace.Footnote 57 More speeches and cheering were an option at these stops, especially at the district governor’s office. Then, the crowd would turn back, and either through Brandhuber-Gasse again or through the parallel Verlorene-Gasse/Ztracená ulice (Lost Street) would arrive back at the Oberring. Here, the procession might make a stop either in front of the city hall or under the windows of Mayor Brandhuber’s living quarters at the corner of the square. While on some occasions the procession would be organized in reverse and cover either the avenues west of the city centerFootnote 58 or even the train station more than a mile away to the east,Footnote 59 it would always ultimately wind up back at the Franz Joseph monument. Only on a few occasions, such as during the highly organized mass celebrations of the Battle of Gorlice-Tarnów in May 1915, would the crowd go on to “stamp” its ritual power on selected, mostly German-speaking suburbs such as Neustift/Nové Sady, signifying the loyalty and unity of local German-speaking populations across municipal boundaries.Footnote 60 From the mapping of more than ten various processions that took place in the city between July 1914 and the summer of 1918, it is clear that the emperor’s monument served as a centerpiece to these communal displays of imperial loyalty.

In terms of the crowd composition, most of these processions were highly organized rituals that directly reflected their social purpose of reinforcing the feelings of unity, patriotism, and “proper” social hierarchy that the elites and middle-class core of participants would like to see embodied in urban space. Sometimes, in a throwback to traditional Catholic processions and the cult of the saints, “the portrait of our sovereign was carried at the head of the procession.”Footnote 61 Mirroring the ideal hierarchy of Olomouc’s urban society, “thousands of people from the city as well as the surrounding communities … [were led by] two military bands as well as the band of Olomouc railway workers …, followed by the members of the city council and representatives of all the local civic as well as military institutions … along with Bishop [Karel] Wisnar and the whole cathedral chapter, with all the professors as well as students of the local schools right behind.”Footnote 62 In this particular case, a “Polish group” of Galician refugees and “a unit of railwaymen and a formation of children protected by soldiers” took part in the torch- and lantern-lit procession, too.Footnote 63

As in every public ritual, the processions were an ideal representation of “the world as lived and the world as imagined, fused under the agency” of a single performance, mirroring “the general conceptions of the order of existence,” including the social order.Footnote 64 In this context, that meant imperial and local elites, along with the Catholic clergy, leading the people. The presence of students of both languages, as well as the Galician (“Polish” in the sources) refugees and working-class railway workers, was a further expression of imperial unity. This unity was generational as well, as children were included under the ostentatious protection of the Habsburg military, guarding them as the embodiment of the future.Footnote 65 The victory celebrations organized by the local elites therefore reflected their perception of the world and, as noted by Claire Morelon in her research into the role and rituals of civic militias (Schützenkorps), embodied the social order and “staged an ordered representation of the town’s social structure.”Footnote 66 Fulfilling the key social function of a ritual, this ordering reassured participants of the sense of stability and “normalcy,” doing so in what they perceived as “their” space. The streets and squares of the city not only served as a stage; they were integral to the ideal world order as perceived by both the organizers and the participants.

Visual and sonic experience also played an important role in the rituals of loyalty across urban space. Torches or paper lanterns were the instrument of choice to add to the spectacle. However, this practice all but disappeared during 1916, the reason not being so much a lack of occasions for lavish celebrations as the dire supply situation, with candles and even torches becoming highly sought-after items worth bans on public use.Footnote 67 Reflecting the prewar tradition of celebratory occasions, the city council had the city hall decorated with imperial flags as all the other public and church buildings, “to reflect the joy that the last few days have brought us.”Footnote 68 It often called upon the businesses as well as private households to decorate their windows with candles, emperors’ portraits, and flags that, in the words of Nancy Wingfield, were “asserting multiple German loyalties.”Footnote 69 Imperial colors of black and gold, with the red, white, and black of the German Empire or the black, red, and gold tricolor of the German national movement often thrown in as well, along with the occasional national flag of other allies to Austria-Hungary such as the Ottoman Empire or Bulgaria. Sometimes, citizens had to be reminded what the right tricolor was, so as not to decorate their houses with different, even enemy colors.Footnote 70 Overall, in the early stages of the war, the citizenry responded with enthusiasm, and many accounts describe the streets as a sea of colors. Olomouc even served as a paragon of a “well-decorated town” in a 1915 report of the Moravian provincial government.Footnote 71 There was no doubt about social pressure to not skip on this patriotic duty when “almost all the houses in Olomouc were decorated with flags,” as it may well have been interpreted as disloyalty, in particular when Czech-speaking dwellers were involved.Footnote 72

With the blue, white, and red pan-Slavic tricolor gradually eradicated from the public space by early 1915 and the state bureaucrats cleansing everything from school schedules and advertisements to ribbons on children’s caps,Footnote 73 the local Czech-speaking populace could technically find alternative expressions of their patriotic feelings in gold and red, the colors of Moravia. However, rituals of loyalty on the streets of Olomouc generally tended toward a show of imperial or pan-German patriotism, or both, and the colors associated with Moravia are mentioned only on a few occasions in the sources. Similarly, “singing ‘Wacht am Rhein’ [Watch on the Rhine] and ‘Heil Dir im Siegerkranz’ [Heil to Thee in Victor’s Crown],” along with “acclamations to both the Emperor Franz Joseph I, to the Kaiser Wilhelm, and to Generals Hindenburg and Conrad von Hötzendorf,” all but replaced “Kde domov můj” (Where My Home Is) in the musical repertoire of the crowd early on.Footnote 74 They accompanied the key musical number of every celebration, the “Kaiserlied,” usually sung at the beginning as well as at the end of a procession, along with other military patriotic tunes such as the Prince Eugene song and the Radetzky March, which made up the musical background of most patriotic functions of the late Habsburg monarchy.Footnote 75

The kaisertreu image of a city loyal to the state and the dynasty, promoted by the city elites before the war, spread across the urban landscape from day one. However, it was increasingly tied to a (pan)-German nationalist message through ritual invocations of the Central Powers alliance, something the Habsburg state had originally frowned upon as late as 1914.Footnote 76 The composition of the crowd changed too, with German youths and high school students dominating the proceedings by the beginning of 1915 and their worldview giving many celebrations a distinctly German nationalist flavor. To some extent, the wartime Oberring became a replacement symbolic space for the local German nationalist activists who, lacking their own Deutsches Haus, successfully appropriated the space along with the attendant rituals, not just to show off their loyalty, but their idea of what the monarchy and its war effort should stand for, too.Footnote 77

The last large-scale effort to mobilize the people of Olomouc for a patriotic ritual came—under the auspices of the court, the army, the church, and the city council—on 15 December 1917. On that day, Emperor Karl I visited the city. His visit literally revolved around symbolic spaces. These were invariably tied to the official discourse of the war effort, representing centers of imperial and local power, places of symbolic importance both sacral and temporal, and spaces representative of sacrifice. Thus, on a “beautiful winter day worthy of an emperor,” soldiers of the garrison and schoolchildren lined the streets leading from the train station to the city center in an obligatory show of loyalty.Footnote 78 Local associations lined up at the Oberring, while police agents were thickly interspersed in the crowds to quell any disturbance or worse.Footnote 79 Karl I arrived by train at 9 a.m. to the welcome of the honor guard, the garrison commander, the mayor of the Hodolany suburb where the train station was located, and the deputy mayor of Olomouc (the mayor being unable to attend as he was recovering from surgery). The sovereign responded with a brief speech starting in Czech before switching to German. Then, he boarded a carriage which took him through the enthusiastic crowds to the garrison church of St. Mary of the Snows for a prayer with the archbishop and other local dignitaries. After a quick inspection of the recently renovated church, the imperial cortege moved to the Oberring, which was “filled to the brink with colossal masses of people.” At the foot of the Franz Josef monument, the emperor met the local associations, visited the city hall, briefly greeted the crowds from a balcony, and boarded the carriage again, moving to the archbishop’s palace, where his uncle’s coronation took place in 1848. Here, the Archbishop of Olomouc, the garrison commander, and “numerous representatives of the civic life including many ladies” awaited him. After distributing medals among those present, the emperor’s entourage moved to the suburbs. Here, the emperor, accompanied by the garrison commander and a soldiers’ choir, paid their respects to the war dead at the ever-expanding military cemetery in Černovír, adjacent to the Garrison Hospital No. 6. After giving a brief speech and “obviously satisfied with the proceedings,” the emperor headed back to his train, accompanied by the sound of the few remaining bells in town and cheers of the crowds.Footnote 80

This was perhaps the last time in the history of Olomouc when the city experienced a collective ritual of dynastic loyalty. However, it was a tough sell to make the public forget the harsh realities of the crumbling economy. In a letter written after visiting his family on leave, a soldier compared the situation in Olomouc to that of Vienna, calling the city magistrates “tyrants” who spent money and effort on useless pomp, such as the emperor’s visit, while the citizens starved.Footnote 81

In the grim mood of 1918, the moments of consensus became few and far between. On 16 August 1918, the streets were still festively decorated one last time, a procession with military bands took place, and crowds once more gathered at the feet of the Franz Josef monument on the Oberring to hear patriotic speeches to celebrate the emperor’s birthday. As noted by a local daily, “we have not experienced an atmosphere of such beauty for a very long time,” as if the public ritual was now primarily a break from the harsh realities.Footnote 82 That reality was happening almost in parallel, in the same sacred space, in the form of more or less spontaneous protests of the disgruntled population.

Spaces of Protest

For most of the war, Czech nationalists remained focused on the alternative centerpiece of their political, social, cultural, and increasingly economic life—the Národní dům. During the war, there was little effort on their part to “invade” the German/official public space directly, with the exception of some incidents involving Czech high school students. The biggest threat to the “German nature” of urban space in Olomouc therefore emanated from the economic crisis brought by the war. In the eyes of the German press, this forced many German-speaking house owners in the city to put their real estate on the market, with well-off Czech-speaking buyers especially from the surrounding countryside “threatening the German space in consequence of their all-encompassing plans to Czechize it.”Footnote 83

In the meantime, however, urban space became increasingly contested by another group of actors—the disaffected population of the city and its surroundings. Olomouc did not experience many large-scale disturbances and protests during the war as it lacked any substantial working class. The few protests that happened in town often originated in the suburbs but invariably made inroads into the key symbolic spaces within the city limits. Thus, “to everyone’s consternation,” the first ever “demonstration of 150 women from the countryside” took place in October 1915 in front of the district governor’s office in Franz Joseph Square, the gathering demanding improvement of the supply situation in the suburbs.Footnote 84 Later, the monarchy’s home front became a true battlefield in the war for food and political life had been reinvigorated with the reopening of the Cisleithanian parliament (the Reichsrat) in May 1917. The resultant activism, which was becoming ever more politicized, was reflected in the plan by Czech Social Democrats from central Moravia to organize their 1918 May Day manifestation in the Oberring. Aiming to promote “worldwide peace, democracy, national self-determination, an eight-hour workday, and the economic and social demands of the working people,” they wanted their meeting in Národní dům to be followed by a “parade to the Franz Joseph Square and then back to the Upper Square [Oberring],” following the pattern of processions set up by the loyalist city elites. It was not to be—the city council concluded that this intrusion was one step too far, and citing fears of riots, it banned the parade. “You have banned our parade,” warned the socialist press, “but you cannot stop [censored] ideas of socialism from spreading.”Footnote 85

While the city magistrates may have thought they succeeded in stopping revolution from spreading outside the walls of the Národní dům, they could and would not stop the population from occupying the streets in the name of food. By mid-1918, the Oberring was effectively taken over by crowds queuing for various foodstuffs each time a rumor spread that they were available. The queues in front of F. Deutsch Confectioners in particular had the tendency to turn violent, with up to a thousand people queuing in the hope to get access to sweets, sugar, or both.Footnote 86 The first protest meeting that the square witnessed happened on 15 June 1918, when several hundred women demanded their flour rations at the city hall. In their invasion of this space, they probably took inspiration from a crowd of 800 “women from the suburbs,” who protested against the dire supply situation two weeks earlier in front of the district governor’s office, actually threatening the powers that be with looting if their demands were not met. The situation led the exasperated mayor to complain to the provincial governor’s office in Brno that he had long expected the situation to get out of hand and that this was a sign of things to come. He also felt blamed for failings that were not his own, such as the dysfunctional government supply structures.Footnote 87 Karl Brandhuber was right. The city council was perceived as the ultimate authority in matters of food supply in 1918, and the disgruntled public was desperate enough to let the mayor know.

Showing up at the city hall and taking over the Oberring as the most central public space of the city, one that was perceived as “theirs” (that is belonging to city officials, the urban elites, the “haves” in opposition to the “have-nots” from the social and spatial periphery, who made up the crowd), was the ultimate nonviolent protest. As impromptu gatherings gave way to more organized and disciplined mass meetings, we can also see a strong gender dynamic in their depiction in the sources, reflecting the discourse of “the mob” in the modern mind.Footnote 88 Crowds of women are portrayed as ad hoc gatherings, depicted as emotional, unstable, and protesting about welfare, while perceptions of the organized rallies were defined by discipline, tight organization, and rational demands and only included women as a token to group unity. While the former protests give rise to “consternation” or fears about social stability, the latter are ascribed with the potential to bring revolutionary change.

The ultimate challenge to the German-speaking elites’ dominance over the public space in Olomouc came not from the crowds of women asking for bread or hungry people in the queues negotiating their day-to-day existence in the Oberring while venting anger at each other as well as at the outnumbered police. It came from the outside. Local Czech-speaking bourgeois elites and national activists fully embraced not just the “light coming from the east” in the form of revolutionary peace prospects but the idea of national self-determination and independence in particular.Footnote 89 Late in the evening of 28 October 1918, a telegram arrived from Prague with the news of the declaration of Czechoslovak independence. The national revolution then arrived to the streets of Olomouc in the early morning of 29 October 1918, when “students of the Economic School marched through the city streets.” A few hours later, this impromptu invasion of the urban space transformed into a wholesale remapping during the “national holiday” when “masses of enthusiastic people met in front of the Národní dům” to cheer “with endless joy” the speakers announcing Czechoslovak national independence.Footnote 90

The city streets quickly flooded with crowds of people arriving from all over the town as well as from the suburbs with “Slavic colors.” Even “the statue of the emperor was decorated with flags and ribbons” in blue, white, and red.Footnote 91 At 2 o’clock in the afternoon, “an endless crowd about 25,000 strong left the Národní dům with cheers and songs and flags carried up front, followed by a [Czechoslovak] military band, the leaders of the [Czech] District National Committee, officers and soldiers with national insignia, then the intelligentsia, students, workers, and the youth in tow.” In a final act of occupation of the old regime’s stomping ground, the triumphant procession—after covering very much the same street space as the loyalist and German nationalist “triumphs” of the previous years—“arrived in front of the ancient town hall of Olomouc at quarter past four in the afternoon.” The nationalist press was very clear about the symbolic nature of this “ancient space”: “A place of so many speeches in the past, most of them anti-Czech.” The collective ritual concluded with a mass “oath of allegiance” to the new republic at the foot of the Franz Josef monument, giving the space a whole new meaning.Footnote 92

It would be easy to interpret these events as a mere occupation and takeover of urban space previously dominated by the old ruling elites. However, the structure of the crowd points to a deeper process of adoption taking place as well. The triumphant crowds, in their celebration of Czechoslovakia, appropriated not only the space but also the form of the ritual, repurposing it to their own needs. They adopted the means of representation encapsulated in the structure of the procession itself, reflecting the ideal of the new Czechoslovak society that matched that of the old regime almost group by group, betraying strong continuities between the sociopolitical worlds of the monarchy and the nascent republic.

When observing a second mass demonstration on 3 November, this time supposedly 40,000 strong, the press described the procession as “slightly different from the previous ones,” “starting with a cavalry troop, then a musical band of reservists, followed by the bands of the national associations and the Sokols. Railwaymen came next, with officers and soldiers, then baráčníci [members of Vlastenecko-dobročinná obec baráčnická, a Czech national benevolent society] in folkloric costumes, then the war invalids, still more musical bands,” and “associations from the surrounding villages.”Footnote 93 The process of adoption and repurposing was even more clear when, on 18 December, the city celebrated the arrival of Tomas Masaryk in Czechoslovakia with a traditional military tattoo, with “a military band marching through the main avenues and finishing with a concert in front of the city hall.”Footnote 94 At least partially, the same people—military bandsmen of the local units, who were mostly stationed in Olomouc throughout the war—were performing the same ritual in the same space, only to celebrate new statehood. The sonic impression has changed though, with the bands now accompanying the ritual with “Kde domov můj” (the future national anthem), “Hey slované” (a pan-Slavic anthem), “Lijepa naša domovino” (Croatian national song), “Moravo, Moravo” (Moravian patriotic song), or “La Marseillaise” (both for its revolutionary message and because of the Francophile inclinations of Czech elites).Footnote 95

In the new political situation, the old rituals lived on. They were a display of loyalty to the social and political regime, but at the same time, they stamped new meaning on the very same urban space. Even the spatial itinerary was almost identical to the kaisertreu era. Now, under the very windows of the German-speaking elites, these new political actors were using a familiar symbolic language of representation to further the message of “joyful awakening of the Czech Olomouc.”Footnote 96 Contemporaries were fully aware of the symbolic meaning of space and ritual. As the Czech socialist press concluded with pride: “A mighty throng of people covered in national colors marched through Olomouc to the sound of music, reminiscent of the triumph [in ancient Rome].”Footnote 97 Symptomatically, the German press abstained from any mention of specific spaces thus “conquered,” content to provide a dry report of “the procession moving through the streets in Olomouc” as if trying not to rub more salt into the wounds of its readership.Footnote 98

The temporary effect of the mass gatherings was ultimately made permanent when various imperial symbols, especially eagles from the official buildings’ facades, were removed over the following few days and weeks in scenes of “tragedy, comedy, farce, satire, cheers, elation, tears, all the passions brought about by the death throes of the monarchy … Austria is no more!”Footnote 99 Czech national activists took it upon themselves to purge the streetscape of any signboard whose owner was slow to keep up with the times and rename their establishment, use Czech signboards, or add Slavic colors to them. Their aim was “to stop the German language from occupying Czech stores” and “to advance the cleansing of public space in general.”Footnote 100 Some were perhaps too radical in their approach, prompting the newly established Government Commission—which ruled the city after the city council was made to resign on November 11, 1918—to halt any further unlicensed challenges to the linguistic nature of the streetscape.Footnote 101

On 30 December 1918, the same administrative body voted to accept a series of sweeping changes to the street nomenclature, making Olomouc a Czechoslovak city. When the German members of the Commission protested against being outvoted, they appealed to what they perceived as a desecration of their space.Footnote 102 Dr. Richard Fischer, the High Commissioner, had little sympathy for their position: “No more is the German nation running things as it used to under the Habsburg rule … you’re just hoping to get away from [Czechoslovakia], but Olomouc will never ever be the German town it used to be ….”Footnote 103

The path of turning Olomouc—at least on the surface—into a republican city was completed in late March 1919. The Franz Joseph monument, covered in a black cloth ever since some soldiers tried to pull it down in late December,Footnote 104 was “finally removed, loaded onto a big truck and, accompanied by a large crowd making jokes, taken away” from Masaryk Square, formerly known as Oberring or Horní náměstí. “It did not end well for him,” noted the Czech press, which already declared the statue to be unsuitable for any public space “even as a historical monument.”Footnote 105 The German press tried, perhaps in vain, to put a positive spin on the event, claiming that “it would be false to see [the removal] as violence against the German nation,” as these statues are or will soon be removed in Austria as well.Footnote 106

The end of the war did not, however, mark the end of repurposing and reappropriating urban space in Olomouc. Two months before the statue of Franz Joseph was taken down, crowds massed on the main square in a less-than-positive mood. Almost as if to emphasize the continuity of contested space, “throngs of people, women foremost, have gathered … in front of the city hall … protesting against the dismal supply situation. It seemed impossible to prevent a riot.” The crowd dispersed only after repeated pleas by the members of the Government Commission, but the situation in the city center remained tense.Footnote 107

Three days later, the same issues brought about 10,000 working-class protesters from all over the area into the streets again, this time to attend a Tábor lidu organized by the regional branch of the Socialist Council, an umbrella organization of Czechoslovak socialists of all hues. The intention was to protest high prices, price gouging, and the overall economic crisis.Footnote 108 It began with a meeting in the Národní dům and the surrounding streets, but the event soon escalated into a full-fledged demonstration that—again borrowing the established pattern of public ritual—moved to Masaryk Square (the former Oberring). Here, the “huge masses” claimed the space for themselves with the agenda of socialist challenge to the new republican regime. From the same balcony from which speakers were blessing the troops leaving for the front or declaring loyalty to either the Habsburgs or the Czechoslovak state, words now sounded about “patience running out …. If the government does not take a hard action against those who suck the blood out of the working people, we will meet here again and will use our power to redress the situation … and to establish a socialist government!” With the example of Russia and Germany invoked in speeches and the Red Banner fluttering above the city hall balcony, the cheering crowds slowly dispersed into the surrounding streets, singing revolutionary socialist songs and imbuing the same old space with a meaning of their own.Footnote 109

Conclusion

Public space in Olomouc was radically altered by the war. It lost its traditional economic function while becoming the site of mass queuing. Barracks and train stations were transformed into places of mass gatherings, especially early in the war. Schools, long the focus of national conflict in Moravia, became the subject of a bitter contest of several actors—the nationalists, the city council, and the military. And finally, the very streets and squares of the city became a stage for performances designed to show and promote loyalty to the state and the war effort. As public rituals, they reflected the ideal notions of the world in both their spatial layout and the composition of the crowd. When these rituals of loyalty gradually gave way to rituals of protest in 1917, both these patterns were repurposed almost to the last detail, showing a strong continuity in worldview in the lead-up to the national revolution.

The 28 October 1918 revolution was as much a declaration of national independence as it was a victory of Czech-speaking middle-class elites and their vision for the future. However, wartime notions of social revolution in whatever form were hard to die.Footnote 110 As a result, borderline anti-system protests carried over well into the transition period, still built on the “failed promise” of wartime social contract where the state became the ultimate provider in exchange for the society’s sacrifices and loyalty.Footnote 111 In a striking show of spatial continuity, the crowds chanting socialist slogans at the proxy representatives of the Czechoslovak Republic did so from the pedestal of the veiled Franz Joseph monument, which only a few months earlier had itself stood witness to the declaration of Czechoslovak independence.

The contenders for urban space were no longer limited to local elites or middle-class nationalists of any camp. With the so-called “War Absolutism” and the suspension of municipal elections in 1914 (for the duration of the war) limiting any traditional avenues to address grievances, the increasingly desperate population was given agency, but not a stage to perform it. At the same time, though, the everyday practice of wartime survival, with an ever-increasing number of people negotiating their food supply on a daily basis out on the streets, made them acutely aware of urban space, while public performances of loyalty showed them the template for powerful symbolism. An ever-increasing spiral of politicization of urban space was the result, setting up a pattern that continued beyond the immediate end of World War I.

Acknowledgments

My thanks go to the editors of the Austrian History Yearbook and anonymous reviewers as well, for their poignant and inspiring suggestions that greatly helped to improve the final version of the article. In addition, I would like to express my gratitude to Michael Viktořík and Tamara Scheer, who were kind enough to read through early drafts of this text and offer many valuable comments.

Funding

Work on this article was supported by the Czech Science Foundation (GAČR) under the Grant “Urban Community at War: Olomouc/Olmütz as a Case Study of the First World War Home Front, 1914–1919,” Reg. No. 22-01907S, administered by the Philosophical Faculty, University of Hradec Králové.

References

1 Agnew, Hugh LeCaine, “Demonstrating the Nation: Symbol, Ritual, and Political Protest in Bohemia 1867–1875,” in The Street as Stage: Protest Marches and Public Rallies since the Nineteenth Century, ed. Reiss, Matthias (Oxford, 2007), 86–103 Google Scholar; Horel, Catherine, Multicultural Cities of the Habsburg Empire 1880–1914: Imagined Communities and Conflictual Encounters (Budapest, 2023), 341–87Google Scholar. Gary Cohen’s seminal work on Germans in Prague shows the importance of public space on the municipal level in Bohemia; see Cohen, Gary B., The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague, 1861–1914 (Princeton, 1981), 93–102 Google Scholar.

2 Matthias Reiss, “Introduction,” in The Street as Stage, 9.

3 For an example from nineteenth-century Bohemia, see Agnew, Hugh LeCaine, “The Flyspecks in Palivec’s Portrait: Francis Joseph, the Symbols of Monarchy, and Czech Popular Loyalty,” in The Limits of Loyalty: Imperial Symbolism, Popular Allegiances, and State Patriotism in the late Habsburg Monarchy, ed. Cole, Laurence and Unowsky, Daniel (New York, 2007), 86–112 Google Scholar.

4 Wingfield, Nancy M., Flag Wars and Stone Saints: How the Bohemian Lands Became Czech (Cambridge, 2007), 30 and 39Google Scholar.

5 Osterkamp, Jana and Schulze-Wessel, Martin, “Texturen von Loyalität: Überlegungen zu einem analytischen Begriff,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 42, no. 4 (2016): 553–7310.13109/gege.2016.42.4.553CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 See, for example, Davis, Belinda J., Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (Chapel Hill, 2000)Google Scholar.

7 Healy, Maureen, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I (Cambridge, 2004)Google Scholar; Cronier, Emmanuelle, “The Street,” in Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin 1914–1919, ed. Winter, Jay and Robert, Jean-Louis (Cambridge, 2007), 57–104 Google Scholar.

8 Chickering, Roger, The Great War and Urban Life in Germany: Freiburg, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, 2007)Google Scholar; Hatlie, Mark R., Riga at War 1914–1919: War and Wartime Experience in a Multi-Ethnic Metropolis (Marburg, 2014)Google Scholar; Schwark, Thomas, Heimatfront Hannover: Kriegsalltag 1914–1918 (Hannover, 2014)Google Scholar; Standt, Volker, Köln im Ersten Weltkrieg: Veränderungen in der Stadt und des Lebens der Bürger 1914–1918 (Göttingen, 2014)Google Scholar; or , Maren Ballerstedt, , et al., Magdeburg im Ersten Weltkrieg, 1914 bis 1918: Eine Grossstadt an der Heimatfront (Halle, 2014)Google Scholar.

9 Dohle, Oskar, Mitterecker, Thomas, eds., Salzburg im Ersten Weltkrieg: Fernab der Front – dennoch im Krieg (Vienna, 2014)10.7767/boehlau.9783205793441CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mick, Christopher, Kriegserfahrungen in einer multietnischen Stadt: Lemberg, 1914–1947 (Vienna, 2010)Google Scholar; Fahey, John E., “Przemyśl, Galicia: A Garrison Town Before, During, Between and After War (1873–1953),” Revista Universitaria de Historia Militar 9 (2016): 212–29Google Scholar.

10 Morelon, Claire, Streetscapes of War and Revolution: Prague, 1914–1920 (Cambridge, 2024)10.1017/9781009335331CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Most works are structured around the history of regional and municipal politics, the legislature, the economy, and sometimes social protest. See Fasora, Lukáš, Malíř, Jiří, and Smutný, Bohumír, “Ve víru velké války 1914–1918,” in Dějiny Brna 6 vols., ed. Fasora, Lukáš and Malíř, Jiří (Brno, 2020), 4:1001–71Google Scholar; Pokludová, Andrea, Kladiwa, Pavel, and Kafková, Renata, Lesk a bída obecních samospráv Moravy a Slezska, 1850–1914, 2 vols. (Ostrava, 2007–2009)Google Scholar. Somewhat exceptional in its holistic approach is the recent history of the town of Zlín; see Valůšek, David, Jemelka, Martin, and Kučera, Rudolf, “První světová válka: 1914–1918,” in Dějiny města Zlína, 2 vols. (Zlín, 2023), 2:116–79Google Scholar.

12 See Kučera, Rudolf, Rationed Life: Science, Everyday Life, and Working-Class Politics in the Bohemian Lands 1914–1918 (New York, 2016), 130–6210.2307/j.ctvpj7gzw.8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 E. Densford, Kathryn, “The Wehrmann in Eisen: Nailed Statues as Barometers of Habsburg Social Order during the First World War,” European Review of History/Revue Européenne d’histoire 24, no. 2 (2017): 305–2410.1080/13507486.2016.1257571CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 As a rule, this article uses both language versions of local and street names at first appearance. Afterward, Czech nomenclature is used for towns and suburbs, while German is used for the city streets, as German was the dominant language in Olomouc at the time. The exception is street names after December 1918, when the new Czechoslovak nomenclature was introduced.

15 An additional 704 people registered for another language of the monarchy and 470 were foreigners. Nešpor, Václav, ed., Statistická ročenka hlav. města Olomouce, 6 vols. (Olomouc, 1925–38), 6:10 Google Scholar; and Der Statistischen Jahrbücher der königlichen Hauptstadt Olmütz, 5 vols. (Olmütz, 1888–1911), 5:533.

16 Pokludová, Kladiwa, and Kafková, Lesk a bída obecních samospráv, 2: 45–46.

17 Ibid., 48 and 67.

18 Ibid., 320–21; Bařinová, Kristýna, Život je mnoho. Cesta olomouckého starosty Richarda Fischera (Olomouc, 2022), 73 Google Scholar.

19 Michael Viktořík, Hinter den Wällen der Festungsstadt. Ein Beitrag zu Alltagsleben, Organisation und Einrichtung der Festungsstadt im 19. Jahrhudert (am Beispiel der Festung Olmütz) (České Budějovice, 2018), 140–58; for the argument about the Habsburg monarchy as a militarized society, see Cole, Laurence, Military Culture and Popular Patriotism in Late Imperial Austria (Oxford, 2014), 308–910.1093/acprof:oso/9780199672042.003.0008CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Carmichael, Cathie, The Habsburg Garrison Complex in Trebinje: A Lost World (Budapest, 2024), 5 10.1515/9789633867716CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Letter to Josef Breuer, September 1, 1886, in Sigmund Freud, Briefe: Auszüge, available at https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/freud/briefe/chap006.html. On Freud in Olomouc, see Jiří Fiala and Kamila Holásková, Sigmund Freud v Olomouci roku 1886 (Olomouc, 2018), 26–29.

22 “Fabriken oder Kasernen?” Deutsches Nordmährerblatt, April 4, 1914, 3. I would like to thank Kevin Hoeper for pointing this article out to me. The city council did not agree with the assessment, and it spent the prewar decades building ever more barracks in a bid to attract a greater military presence, which it saw as a boon to the local economy, even though local businessmen in numerous trades repeatedly complained of the army as unfair competition. See Radim Macháň, “Soužití města a armády na přelomu 19. a 20. století” (PhD diss., Ostravská univerzita, 2009), 132–206; also, Viktořík, Hinter den Wallen der Festungsstadt, 140–48.

23 On nationalist activism and schools in the Bohemian Lands, see Zahra, Tara, Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1948 (Ithaca, 2008)Google Scholar; Judson, Pieter M., Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria (Cambridge, 2006)Google Scholar. On educational policies and politics in Moravia, see Pokludová, Andrea and Kladiwa, Pavel, The Czech-German Compromise in Moravia: The Cisleithanian Laboratory of the Ethnicization of Politics and Law (Bern, 2023), 111–8610.3726/b21115CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Kladiwa, Pokludová, and Kafková, Lesk a bída obecních samospráv, 127.

25 “Olmütz und der Krieg,” Mährisches Tagblatt, August 3, 1914, 4.

26 Morelon, Streetscapes of War and Revolution, 22,

27 For example, in March 1915, the district governor’s office reported to the governor’s office in Brno that there were 12,000 soldiers in the city; Státní okresní archiv v Olomouci, Archiv města Olomouce (SOkA Olomouc–AMO), Registratura 1874–1920, box 468. See also Nešpor, ed., Statistická ročenka hlav. Města Olomouce, 6:11.

28 “Olmütz und der Krieg,” Mährisches Tagblatt, August 3, 1914, 4.

29 On the wartime refugee crisis in Moravia, see Densford, Kathryn E., “Fellow Citizens, Unwanted Foreigners: The Refugee Crisis in Wartime Moravia,” in World War I in Central and Eastern Europe: Politics, Conflict and Military Experience, ed. Devlin, Judith, Falina, Marina, and Newman, John Paul (London, 2018), 42–59 Google Scholar.

30 Draft of a phone report to the governor’s office in Brno, SOkA Olomouc–AMO, Registratura 1874–1920, box 494, September 30, 1914.

31 Hudský, Jaroslav, Klášterní Hradisko 1914–1918. Střípky z historie c. a k. vojenské nemocnice, jejích poboček a ostatních nemocnic a lazaretů v Olomouci během Velké války (Olomouc, 2012)Google Scholar.

32 Report of a phone call from the garrison HQ to the city council, SOkA Olomouc–AMO, Registratura 1874–1920, box 494, August 28, 1914.

33 19. Výroční zpráva ústavu hraběte Pöttinga v Olomouci za dvacátý školní rok 1914–1915 (Olomouc, 1915), SOkA Olomouc–AMO, Školství, M5–40 Ústav hraběte Pöttinga, box 1, 16.

34 Damages report to the city council from November 22, 1915, SOkA Olomouc–AMO, Registratura 1874–1920, M1–1, box 457; and administrative action against the governor’s office, suing for reimbursement, August 20, 1915, ibid.; for the case being dismissed, see the city council meeting protocols, April 17, 1916, SOkA Olomouc–AMO, Knihy, Protokol zasedání městského zastupitelstva, file 2096.

35 “Umístění české reálky v Olomouci,” Pozor, September 21, 1918, 3.

36 Report by Karl Brandhuber to the city council, meeting protocols, October 18, 1915, SOkA Olomouc–AMO, Knihy, Protokol zasedání městského zastupitelstva, file 2095.

37 On Olomouc soup kitchens, see SOkA Olomouc–AMO, Registratura 1874–1920, M1–1, box 491.

38 On the social impact of the confiscations, see Morelon, Claire, “Sounds of Loss: Church Bells, Place, and Time in the Habsburg Empire During the First World War,” Past & Present 244, no. 1 (2019): 195–244 10.1093/pastj/gtz006CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 City council meeting protocols, October 18, 1915, SOkA Olomouc–AMO, Knihy, Protokol zasedání městského zastupitelstva, file 2095.

40 Ibid., meeting protocols for June 8, 1915.

41 The provincial governor’s office in Brno/Brünn to the district governor’s office in Olmütz/Olomouc, January 14, 1917, SOkA Olomouc–AMO, Registratura 1874–1920, box 4, folder 5. The name of the community was ultimately changed to “Hötzendorf bei Olmütz.”

42 “Polní mše,” Pozor, August 6, 1914, 2.

43 “Z rušných dob,” Našinec, January 5, 1915, 4; “Odjezd vojínů na bojiště,” Pozor, July 2, 1915, 4; “Nové vojenské oddíly na bojiště,” Pozor, January 4, 1915, 2; and “Abmarsch ins Feld,” Mährisches Tagblatt, September 16, 1915, 5.

44 On the discourse of sacrifice, see Healy, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire, 36–38.

45 “Všeobecný slavnostní den stavění brance Olomouce ve svátky svatodušní,” Pozor, May 19, 1917, 4.

46 Report on the opening of the exhibition, February 12, 1918; SOkA Olomouc–AMO, M 1–3 Okresní úřad Olomouc – venkov, Presidiální spisy, box 1; see also “Die Kriegsausstellung des Landsturm-Infanterie-Regimentes Olmütz Nr. 13. Die Eröffnung,” Mährisches Tagblatt, February 11, 1918, 4.

47 “Grosse patriotische Kundgebungen in Olmütz,” Mährisches Tagblatt, July 29, 1914, 4.

48 “Manifestace pro válku,” Pozor, July 29, 1914, 4.

49 “Demonstrationen,” Mährisches Tagblatt, July 31, 1914, 3.

50 “Demonstrace,” Pozor, July 31, 1914, 4. For the debate on “Kde domov můj” and other songs being sung as part of military rituals, see Tamara Scheer, Language Diversity and Loyalty in the Habsburg Army, 1868–1918 (habilitation thesis, Universität Wien, 2020), 177–79.

51 Ibid., and “Demonstrationen …,” Mährisches Tagblatt, July 31, 1914, 3.

52 “Pochodňový průvod,” Pozor, August 29, 1914, 2.

53 A traditional military procession through the city streets, led by a military band or bands, with stops at important locations, practiced on the eve of various important occasions such as the emperor’s birthday and name day.

54 Similar transfer of traditional patterns is shown in Cole, Laurence, Horejs, Marlene, and Rybak, Jan, “When the Music Stopped: Reactions to the Outbreak of World War I in an Austrian Province,” Austrian History Yearbook 52 (2021): 159 10.1017/S0067237821000023CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55 The figure is an estimate for “the largest celebration the city has ever seen,” which was the mass rally celebrating the reconquest of Lemberg/Lwów in June 1915. “Oslava dobytí Lvova,” Našinec, June 24, 1915, 4; also “Die Siegefeier in Olmütz,” Mährisches Tagblatt, June 24, 1915, 4.

56 “Die Siegesnachricht!” Mährisches Tagblatt, August 28, 1914, 4.

57 “Die Wiedereinnahme Przemysls. Eine grosse patriotische Kundgebung in Olmütz,” Mährisches Tagblatt, June 4, 1915, 5.

58 “Oslava znovudobytí města Lvova v Olomouci,” Pozor, June 23, 1915, 4; and “Pochodňový průvod městem,” Pozor, June 24, 3.

59 “Oslava pádu Varšavy and Ivangorodu v Olomouci,” Pozor, August 5, 1915, 4.

60 “Na oslavu vítězství spojenecké armády v západní Haliči,” Pozor, May 5, 3.

61 Ibid.

62 “Pochodňový průvod …,” Pozor, June 24, 1915, 3.

63 “Oslava dobytí …,” Našinec, June 24, 1915, 4.

64 Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), 112 Google Scholar.

65 Hämmerle, Christa, “An der ‘Schulfront’. Kindheit – staatlich instrumentalisiert,” in Kindheit und Schule im Ersten Weltkrieg, ed. Stekl, Hannes, Hämmerle, Christa, and Bruckmüller, Ernst (Vienna, 2015), 112–36Google Scholar; also, Lenderová, Milena, Halířová, Martina, and Jiránek, Tomáš, Vše pro dítě! Válečné dětství 1914–1918 (Prague, 2015)Google Scholar.

66 Morelon, Claire, “Respectable Citizens: Civic Militias, Local Patriotism, and Social Order in Late Habsburg Austria (1890–1920),” Austrian History Yearbook 51 (2020): 208 10.1017/S0067237820000156CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

67 “Zákaz osvětlení hrobů na Dušičky,” Pozor, October 20, 1916, 4. The main argument for the ban, in place “for all commemorative occasions,” was “the need to save on fats.”

68 “Patriotische Kundgebung der Mittelschüler,” Mährisches Tagblatt, May 5, 1915, 5. “Imperial colors … covered the archbishop’s palace as well as the canons’ houses,” “Oslava haličského vítězství,” Našinec, May 5, 1915, 3.

69 Wingfield, Flag Wars and Stone Saints, 58.

70 Such as using the black, gold, and red of Belgium by mistake. See “Zur vorgestrigen Beflaggung unserer Stadt,” Deutsches Nordmährerblatt, June 5, 1915, 4.

71 Ordinance of the governor’s office in Brno to improve decoration during victory celebrations, September 2, 1915, Öesterreichisches Staatsarchiv (OeSTA) – Allgemeine Verwaltungsarchiv Wien (AVA), Kriegsministerium – Präsidiale, box 1789, file 18245.

72 The Czech nationalist press sometimes pointed out that “many houses, Národní dům in particular, were covered in festive lightning,” in an apparent effort to dissipate any notions of the local Czech-speaking elites’ disloyalty; “Oslava pádu Varšavy …,” Pozor, August 6, 1915, 4.

73 See communication between the Moravian governor’s office in Brno and the central government offices in Vienna from 1915 and 1916, OestA – Kriegsarchiv, Kriegsüberwachungsamt, box 80, files 43657 and 43828; and OestA – AVA, Ministerium des Innern, Präsidiale, box 2058, file 5127.

74 “Die Wiedereinnahme Przemysls …,” Mährisches Tagblatt, June 4, 1915, 5; “Oslava vítězství nad Rusy,” Pozor, December 19, 1914, 4.

75 For a detailed analysis of the prewar repertoire, see Eva Vičarová, Rakouská vojenská hudba 19. století a Olomouc (Olomouc, 2002), 121–29; on the symbolic importance of the Radetzky March, see Cole, Military Culture and Popular Patriotism, 67–68.

76 For example, “Die Wacht am Rhein” had been banned from public space before the war for its pan-German context and it was merely “tolerated” because of the German ally during the war. Scheer, Language Diversity and Loyalty in the Habsburg Army, 223–24.

77 On the issue of the Deutsches Haus, see “Drei deutsche Gastwirtschaften wollen sperren?” Mährisches Tagblatt, June 14, 1917, 4; or “Z německé společnosti,” Pozor, July 16, 1917, 4. See also Ference, Anja Edith, “Německý dům v meziválečné Olomouci – spojka mezi německými spolky a ústřední institucí pro péči o německou kulturu,” Historica Olomucensia 45 (2013): 101–19, esp. 104–6Google Scholar.

78 Školní kronika, SOkA Olomouc–AMO, Školství M 5–148, Národní škola Olomouc – Pavlovičky, manuscript. For schools as vehicles of producing loyalty in Olomouc, see Puš, Ivan, “(Na)řízená loajalita? Obraz školství v Olomouci za první světové války prizmatem školních rad,” Slezský sborník 121, no. 1 (2023): 5–17 Google Scholar.

79 Outline of the security detail, December 2, 1917, SOkA Olomouc–AMO, M 1–3 Okresní úřad Olomouc – venkov, Presidiální spisy, box 1.

80 Every major local newspaper covered the visit extensively. All the quotations above are from “Kaiser Karl in Olmütz,” Mährisches Tagblatt, December 17, 1917, 1–2.

81 Gefreiter Jaroslav Nejedlý to the municipal supply office, April 22, 1918, SOkA Olomouc – AMO, Registratura 1874–1920, box 480.

82 “Kaisers Geburtstag,” Mährisches Tagblatt, August 17, 1918, 4.

83 “Verluste für das Deutschtum,” Mährisches Tagblatt, July 22, 1918, 4.

84 “Deputace venkovských žen v Olomouci,” Pozor, October 12, 1915, 4.

85 For the socialist perspective of the affair, see “první květen v Olomouci,” Hlas lidu, April 20, 1918, 4, and “První máj v Olomouci,” Hlas lidu, May 4, 1918, 2.

86 “Na frontách v Olomouci panuje neobyčejně čilý ruch,” Pozor, February 13, 1918, 4; “Fronty jsou zakázány!” Pozor, March 22, 1918, 4; “Na frontách v Olomouci bývá každý den rušno,” Pozor, April 15, 1918, 4; “Aprovisace v Olomouci,” Pozor, August 26, 1918, 3.

87 Report on the protest, including the angry telegram of Mayor Brandhuber from June 15, 1918, Zemský archiv v Brně, Moravské místodržitelství, box 409, file 11569. On “the politics of blame-games” between municipal authorities and the state, see, for example, Pojar, Vojtěch, “Nedostatek potravin za první světové války a legitimita komunálních elit v Praze,” Hospodářské dějiny 28, no. 2 (2013): 177–225 Google Scholar.

88 James Jasper, The Emotions of Protest (Chicago, 2018), 178.

89 The progressive-nationalist press has welcomed Lenin’s “Decree on Peace” with a cry “Ex oriente lux!” “do nového roku,” Pozor, January 1, 1918, 1.

90 “Národní svátek v Olomouci,” Pozor, October 29, 1918, 6.

91 “Červenobílý převrat,” Pozor, October 30, 1918, 1.

92 “Radostné vzkříšení české Olomouce,” Pozor, October 30, 1918, 2.

93 “Druhá oslava samostatnosti československé v Olomouci,” Našinec, November 5, 1918, 3; “Die tschechische Volksversammlung am Oberring,” Mährisches Tagblatt, November 4, 1918, 4.

94 “Oslava příchodu presidenta Masaryka na českou půdu v Olomouci,” Hlas lidu, December 19, 1918, 4.

95 “Druhá oslava samostatnosti …,” Našinec, November 5, 1918, 3.

96 “Radostné vzkříšení …,” Pozor, October 30, 1918, 2.

97 “Obrovské manifestace v Olomouci,” Hlas lidu, November 6, 1918, 4.

98 “Die tschechische Volksversammlung …,” Mährisches Tagblatt, November 4, 1918, 4.

99 “Der sinkende Doppeladler,” Mährisches Tagblatt, November 2, 1918, 2.

100 For the Czech press supporting these actions, see “Rakouští orlíci byli už téměř všude odstraněni,” Pozor, November 24, 1918, 3; “Očista olomouckých ulic,” Pozor, December 6, 1918, 3.

101 City council meeting protocols, December 16, 1918, SOkA Olomouc–AMO, Knihy, Protokol zasedání městského zastupitelstva, sign. 2098.

102 “Übernennung von Gassen und Plätzen,” Mährisches Tagblatt, December 31, 1918, 5.

103 City council meeting protocols, December 30, 1918, SOkA Olomouc–AMO, Knihy, Protokol zasedání městského zastupitelstva, sign. 2098.

104 “Socha císaře Františka Josefa,” Našinec, December 18, 1918, 3.

105 “České občanstvo olomucké nemile nese,” Pozor, December 14, 1918, 4; and “Pomník France Josefa,” Pozor, March 21, 1919, 3.

106 “Der Denkmal des Kaisers Franz Josef vor dem Olmützer Rathause,” Mährisches Tagblatt, December 17, 1918, 5.

107 “Demonstrační protest proti lichvě,” Pozor, January 13, 1919, 3.

108 On the economy of the transition period, see Šmidrkal, Václav and Stergar, Rok, “Food Shortages during the Post-Habsburg Transition in the Bohemian Lands and Slovenia,” Austrian History Yearbook 55 (2024): 243–5310.1017/S0067237823000875CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

109 “Proti lichvě!” Pozor, January 16, 1919, 3; “Obrovský projev pracujícího lidu proti drahotě v Olomouci,” Hlas lidu, January 18, 1918, 1; “Die grosse Kundgebung der Arbeiterschaft gegen die Teuerung,” Mährisches Tagblatt, January 16, 1919, 3–4.

110 Heumos, Petr, “‘Dejte nám brambory, nebo bude revoluce.’ Hladové nepokoje, stávky a masové protesty v českých zemích v období 1914–1918,” in První světová válka a vztahy mezi Čechy, Slováky a Němci, ed. Mommsen, Hans, Kováč, Dušan, Malíř, Jiří, and Marková, Michaela (Brno, 2000), 207–32Google Scholar.

111 Hutečka, Jiří, “Wartime Provisioning, the People, and the State in Habsburg Central Europe during World War I,” Střed/Centre 16, no. 1 (2024): 94 Google Scholar.