Austria-Hungary and World War I

In his reflections on the outbreak of the First World War, written in the winter of 1918-19, Leopold Baron von Andrian-Werburg, Hugo von Hoffmannsthal’s friend and in 1914 Austria-Hungary’s envoy to Warsaw, maintained that “we,” the Austrians, “began the war, not the Germans and even less the Entente—that I know.” ¹ Despite the fact that it was Austria-Hungary that triggered the Third Balkan War and thereby provoked the outbreak of the Great War, historians interested in the origins of World War I have tended to focus on the system of international relations or on Germany’s role before and during the July crisis. Even today, it seems to be received wisdom among scholars in Germany and elsewhere to consider the Habsburg Monarchy as the weak-willed appendix of the powerful German Reich. It is highly probable that the Cold War experience of superpowers favored such an approach, but even more important has been the controversy over Fritz Fischer’s theses which stimulated numerous studies on all aspects of German history before and during the Great War. In 1976, Fritz Fellner published a still unsurpassed analysis of the so-called “Hoyos mission” intended to encourage research on Austria-Hungary’s part in the July crisis. ² Roughly two decades later, a number of studies have shed new light on the domestic and foreign policy of the Habsburg Monarchy in the last decade of its existence. Unfortunately, the results of these scholarly efforts have not yet reached a broader audience outside the Central European academy and small circles of specialists elsewhere; neither the public nor the international scholarly community are aware of them. ³ But now there is hope because there are books and articles that will bridge the gap between research and reception, quite a few of them in English. ⁴