Between September 17th – 19th, 2015, the Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences in collaboration with the Institute of International Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Charles University in Prague and the Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena, organized the international conference „Beyond Defeat and Victory. Physical Violence and the Reconstitution of East-Central Europe, 1914–1923.“ The goal of the conference was to advance the current study of violence during and in the aftermath of the First World War. Its title was inspired by the currently discussed concepts of the „culture of victory“ and „culture of defeat“, which strive to characterize the situation in the victorious and defeated states during the First World War.

The keynote lecture, „The Vanquished. Europe and the Violent Aftermath of the Great War“ was given by Robert Gerwarth (University College, Dublin) at the Austrian Cultural Forum. He focused on the influence that the disintegration of the great European empires had on the postwar violence that erupted in most of the lands of the former Russian, Ottoman, and Habsburg empires. He saw the main explanations of this escalation of violence in the widespread Culture of Defeat, the pervasive fear of Bolshevic revolution and the fall of the multiethnic empires, which ushered in the idea of a nationalist state, something that had been difficult to achieve within the intricate ethnic relationships of Central and Eastern Europe. The subsequent discussion focused on the question of the continuity and discontinuity of various forms of violence from the pre-war era. Several discussion participants argued that massive pogroms and other forms of collective violence could be observed during the pre-war era in Europe as well as in the colonies, and that the postwar era thus represented a qualitative, rather than a quantitative, change.

The following program was divided into two days and five distinct thematic panels. The first panel was devoted to the question of Violence and Gender. In the first paper, NANCY M. WINGFIELD (Northern Illinois University) pointed to the continuity of dealing with the phenomenon of prostitution during the Habsburg monarchy and in the successor states, primarily at the level of everyday police practices. Similarly to before 1918, in the successor states the category of prostitution was also constructed through gender, social, and supposedly objective categories, with no regard to the practices itself. JUDITH SZAPOR (Montreal) turned the attention to women as the perpetrators, and not the victims, of violence, based on the example of three activists from the right-wing, conservative, and antisemitic movement – the National Alliance of Hungarian Women (MANSZ). In their interpretations, red terror was the manifestation of a wider social movement after the war, characterized by gender, social, and racial transgressions that threatened the status quo. EMILY R. GIOIELLI (Budapest) focused on violence against women in the internment camps in Horthy-era Hungary, during which around 50,000-70,000 people were imprisoned between the years 1919 and 1926. They mostly fit into two groups: “suspicious” foreigners and their families and Jews. Sexual violence against women at the internment camps, which included mandatory invasive gynecological exams, was used to punish and discipline interned persons and their family members. In his paper on sexual violence during the time of the white terror in Hungary, BÉLA BODÓ (Missouri State University) first examined the discussion three theories of violence as his main approaches – designated biological theories, social/cultural explanations, and multi-factor narratives. In his paper, he used the example of sexual violence and anti-Jewish riots and pogroms to elaborate the latter approach when he pointed to the significance of the dynamics of the situation in which the violence occurred, the cultural context of violent behavior, or the influence of the environment that in certain kontext perpetuates and dynamizes violent practices.

In the second panel, “Popular Violence,” the first to speak was GRZEGORZ KRZYWIEC (Warsaw), who focused on anti-Jewish and anti-leftist riots in Warsaw in December 1922, in which thousands of young students participated. Krzywiec interpreted these ‘December Events’ (wypadki grudniowe) in terms of the actors’ experience with violence, since most had participated in Poland’s war with Bolshevic Russia. MILOSLAV SZABÓ (Bratislava) focused on the „robberies” that accompanied the disintegration of the Habsburg monarchy in Slovakia. These violent acts were often targeted against Jews, and in some cases shared similarities with anti-Jewish pogroms. However, the new Czechoslovak state interpreted these riots (peculiarly) as the way in which a nationalist revolution and the end of an old order unfold. VÁCLAV ŠMIDRKAL (Prague) focused on the manifestations of popular violence in the Czech lands after the founding of Czechoslovakia in 1918. Although violent crime was also on the rise in the Czech lands, the self-limiting effects of the „culture of victory,“ together with the export of violent potential to the Těšín region or to Slovakia, prevented a mass escalation of physical violence.

Both panels pointed out the differences in the forms, intensity, and ways of dealing with violence in the „victorious“ and „defeated“ states, with Czechoslovakia and Hungary seemingly at opposite ends. The third panel, entitled „Mastering Violence in the Cultures of Victory,“ followed this direction and the accompanying discussion focused on various forms of dealing with violence in the victorious states in Europe immediately after the First World War. JAKUB BENEŠ (Birmingham) pointed to the phenomenon of the so-called green cadres, often composed of escaped soldiers and local farmers, which was active in the last months of the war in the mountainous areas of the monarchy, especially in the Crown Land of Croatia-Slavonia or several regions in Moravia. Beneš understood green cadres as a spontaneous peasants’ movement and pointed to its connections with previous traditional rural revolts, the forms of which were applied again in the crumbling monarchy. ONDŘEJ MATĚJKA (Prague) used the example of the activities of the American YMCA to reveal how American engagement in Central Europe contributed to the stabilization of the young Czechoslovak army, which, in the Americans’ eyes, was supposed to serve as one of the pillars of the defense of Central Europe from the Bolshevic threat. JOHN PAUL NEWMAN (Maynooth) focused on the blending of the cultures of victory and defeat in interwar Yugoslavia. Using the example of the Southern provinces of Serbia, where a harsh nationalizing campaign was primarily carried out by war veterans after the First World War, he pointed to the fact that the culture of defeat and the culture of victory existed side by side in a single state. The subsequent discussion then revolved around this point; individual speakers spoke about the limits of the analytical potential of these concepts.

The last day of the conference commenced with the panel „Paramilitaries and Militaries.“ MATHIAS VOIGTMANN (Marburg) introduced German paramilitary units deployed in the Baltics (Die Baltikumer) as a distinct „fellowship of violence“ (Gewaltgemeinschaft) that was constituted and maintained based on its experience of using violence in everyday life. CHRISTOPHER GILLEY (Hamburg) focused on the phenomenon of independent warlords, who co-determined everyday reality in Ukraine after 1917. He summarized the existing literature on this phenomenon and argued, together with Sheila Fitzpatrick, that membership in and the leadership of these units represented a specific reaction to an uncertain revolutionary situation, as well as the means to reinvent oneself in the new order. BORUT KLABJAN (Primorska) analyzed the escalation of violence in the newly drawn up Italian-Yugoslav border between the years 1918–1920. He noted the various phases of escalation and de-escalation of violence depending on the development of the international situation, and pointed to several common signs that connected the perpetrators of the violent outbursts. The panel was concluded by GERGELY BÖDÖK (Eger), who presented a thorough prosopographical investigation of the so-called „Lenin Boys,“ i.e. paramilitary units that formed the backbone of the red terror in Hungary in 1919. He showed that these were primarily people from Budapest, of Hungarian nationality, and with a low-level education. The subsequent discussion focused on the question of whether a generation was an appropriate category to explain the inner coherence of the Gewaltgemeinschaft, the continuity in the symbolic representation of Ukrainian warlords, who often presented themselves as following in the old Cossack tradition, and the question of the share of religious confessions within the perpetrators of the Hungarian red terror.

The central theme of the last panel was the representations of violence. WINSON CHU (Milwaukee) focused on the representations of the violence of the Polish-Soviet conflict in the work of Josef Roth. Chu revealed that Roth’s texts contain many old anti-Polish stereotypes and are more sympathetic to the Soviet army, which they tend to characterize as disciplined, effective, and, therefore, victorious. In his presentation, PAUL HANEBRINK (New Jersey) provided a summary of the origin and actions of Judeo-Bolshevism as a figure that served to mobilize anti-Semitism, and led to many instances of violence against Jews in the various countries of East-Central Europe. MACIEJ GÓRNY (Warsaw) focused on the role of Austro-Hungarian psychiatrists, who had significant leeway during the First World War to conduct questionable electroshock therapy on psychologically disturbed soldiers in order for them to return to the front more quickly. The last speaker was HANNES LEIDINGER (Vienna), who devoted his paper to the possibilities of studying suicide as a social phenomenon connected to the wartime and postwar era. The discussion that followed emphasized the specific situation at the end of the war, which was characterized by an enormous amount of physically and psychologically damaged returnees, whose reintegration into society was one of the biggest challenges for the defeated, as well as the victorious, states.

Lastly, JOHN HORNE (Dublin) provided a summary of the conference. He pointed to the parallels that connect the situation in East-Central Europe to the other parts of Europe, such as occupation or the phenomenon of prisoners’ camps. He compared the situation in Europe between the years 1917–1923 and immediately after 1945, and argued that while Europe was more or less peaceful after 1945, the aftermath of the First World War was much more chaotic. He also strongly emphasized the significance of the turning point of 1917, which, according to him, created a wholly new concept of violence as a tool that wasn’t used to force the enemy to capitulate, but to totally annihilate him. Horne also pointed out that the concepts of the culture of victory and defeat are still valid, although they can’t fully describe the situation in entire states. According to him, the year 1918, unlike the year 1945, didn’t mean total victory for any of the warring parties, which was also the reason that the victorious powers organized their triumphant military parades in Paris and London, and not Berlin or Vienna. For this reason as well, the culture of victory or defeat as analytic concepts can never encompass the whole society, because in many cases they existed side by side or in mutual hierarchy. However, he pointed out that despite this fact, many victorious states share a number of similar traits in the interwar period, such as mutually coordinated commemorations of victory, or the phases of social demobilization that occurred in many victorious states in the second half of the 1920s.

Thus, the whole conference was an opportunity to think about the influence of victory and defeat not only on the origin and spread of violent practices, but also on the stabilization and destabilization of the victorious, as well as defeated, interwar states. Many debates critically examined the usefulness of the concepts of the cultures of defeat and victory, and the conference thus undoubtedly contributed to the clarification of some of the main issues of European history of the 1910s and 1920s.

Conference Overview:

Keynote Lecture
Robert Gerwarth (University College Dublin): The Vanquished: Europe and the Violent Aftermath of the Great War

Rudolf Kučera (Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences) – Ota Konrád (Institute of International Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University): Concept of the Conference

Panel 1: Violence and Gender
Chair: John Horne, Trinity College Dublin

Nancy Wingfield (Northern Illinois University): Gendered Violence against Women in Postwar Habsburg Central Europe

Judith Szapor (McGill University): Violence, Racial Degeneration, and National Regeneration in Postwar Hungary – A Gendered Perspective

Emily Gioielli (Central European University): The Virgin Mary in Horthyland: Gender, Violence and Mass Incarceration in Counter-Revolutionary Hungary

Béla Bodó (Missouri State University): Sexual Crimes and Militia Violence in Hungary, 1919–1921

Panel 2: Popular Violence
Chair: Jochen Böhler, Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena

Grzegorz Krzywiec (Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences): “Throw Down a Challenge to the International Jewry”: Antisemitic Riots of December 1922 in Warsaw as a Case Study of Early Post-War Nationalist and Juvenile Violence

Miloslav Szabó (Institute of History, Slovak Academy of Sciences): Ethnic or Social Riots? Public Violence in Slovakia in the Aftermath of World War I and the Dicsourse of the Czechoslovak Revolution

Václav Šmidrkal (Masaryk Institute, Czech Academy of Sciences): “What a Republic It Was!” Collective Violence and Regime Change in the Czech Lands After 1918

Panel 3: Mastering Violence in the Cultures of Victory
Chair: Milan Ristović, University of Belgrade)

Jakub Beneš (University of Birmingham): The Green Cadres 1917–1923: Rural Violence as a Factor in the Reconstitution of East Central Europe

Ondřej Matějka (Charles University in Prague): “Guide Through a Tempestuous Sea”? The North American YMCA as an Actor of Demobilization in Czechoslovakia 1919–1921

John Paul Newman (The National University of Ireland Maynooth): Cultures of Victory and Defeat in Interwar Yugoslavia

Panel 4: Militaries and Paramilitaries
Chair: Robert Gerwarth, University College Dublin

Mathias Voigtmann (Herder Institute Marburg): The “Baltikumer” – German Freikorps in Latvia in the Year 1919 as a Special School of Violence

Christopher Gilley (University of Hamburg): Pogroms and Imposture: The Violent Self-Formation of Ukrainian Warlords, 1917–1922

Borut Klabjan (University of Primorska): Physical Violence in the North-Eastern Adriatic, 1918–1920

Gergely Bödők (Esztherházy Károly College): The Elite of the Red Terror – Who were the Lenin Boys?

Panel 5: Representations of Violence
Chair: Joachim von Puttkamer, Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena

Winson Chu (University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee): “A Little Murderous Party”: Poland and the Culture of Defeat in the Works of Joseph Roth

Paul Hanebrink (Rutgers University): Security, Anti-Jewish violence, and the Idea of Judeo-Bolshevism in East-Central Europe, 1914–1923

Maciej Górny (Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences): “Carrot and Stick”: Austro-Hungarian Psychiatrists’ Perspective of the Great War

Hannes Ledinger (University of Vienna): Suicide and Suicide Discourses: The Austrian Example from the Eve to the Aftermath of the First World War

Conclusion: John Horne (Trinity College Dublin)