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Soldaten zwischen zwei Uniformen: Österreichische Italiener im Ersten Weltkrieg by Andrea Di MicheleSalka Klos

2020; Modern Humanities Research Association; Volume: 28; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/aus.2020.0014

2222-4262

Matthew Stibbe,

European history and politics

Reviews 220 Gender and generation also guide the engagement with Barbara Honigmann’s work in the final chapter. Seemann discusses Honigmann’s use of the autobiographical mode and of ‘narrative simplicity’ (p. 226) for the development of an ethics of representation and remembering in the post-Holocaust setting of her texts. She furthermore suggests that these narrative and stylistic modes connect to specifically female Jewish writing traditions centring on relationality. Particularly intriguing is Seemann’s suggestion that Honigmann employs ‘narrative simplicity’ to reflect on post-Holocaust generationality. Seemann’s reading of Soharas Reise (2002) frames the novel as a story of female and religious emancipation and as an affirmation of ‘multi-cultural Jewish community’ (p. 251). Seemann’s study offers remarkably rich, thorough and well-informed analyses, which are anchored in an impressive range of biographical, sociocultural and theoretical contextualizations. The perceptive close readings attest to the author’s formidable knowledge of both the chosen authors and the larger contexts in which they write. Seemann does not explain why she limits her insightful explorations to literary works and scholarship published well before the mid-2000s and how this decision relates to the claims about ‘newness’ that introduce the study. Nevertheless, her outstanding knowledge of these chosen works produces readings and approaches that promise to enrich more recent writing by and discourse on the authors considered in the study. This monograph therefore provides key resources for all those interested in central writers, topics and narrative devices in post-unification German-language Jewish literature. Maria Roca Lizarazu University of Birmingham Soldaten zwischen zwei Uniformen: Österreichische Italiener im Ersten Weltkrieg. By Andrea Di Michele. Trans. by Salka Klos. Schriftenreihe des Österreichischen Historischen Instituts in Rom, 4. Vienna, Cologne and Weimar: Böhlau, 2020. 245 pp. €35.00. ISBN 978–3-205–23283–4. This impressive book is a German translation of an Italian study published in 2018. The author, Andrea Di Michele, not only tells the story of the just over 110,000 Habsburg-subject Italian men who served in the k.u.k. army during the First World War, but also places their experiences within the context of broader themes: the war on the eastern front, including the huge number of captives taken by both sides; the abuses committed by k.u.k. officers against soldiers on their own side suspected of disloyalty because of their national background; attempts by the tsarist regime in Russia to recruit non-German and nonHungarian Habsburg prisoners for the Allied cause; and the extraordinarily difficult and varied homecomings that prisoners of war held in Russia had, whether before, during or after the 1918–20 civil war. The fate of the soldiers in question had little to do with their own sense of dependency on or obligation towards a particular nation, state or dynasty. Reviews 221 Before 1914, Italian nationalism, whether of the ‘moderate’ or overtly irredentist, anti-Habsburg kind, was largely the preserve of educated town-dwellers. For peasants, what was more important was the immediate locality, or in many cases the valley, from which they came. Furthermore, the spatial separation and huge economic, cultural and demographic differences between Cisleithania’s two main Italian-speaking areas, namely the Austrian Littoral with its vast commercial and naval port at Trieste, and land-locked Trentino, with its many small towns and villages, militated against the establishment of a solid supraregional national identity for Austrian-subject Italians. Even the Reichsrat deputies from the two areas could not agree a common platform, with Alcide De Gasperi, the Trentine leader of the Catholic People’s Party, dismissing his Triestine counterparts as ‘gente di mare’ (sea folk) and the ‘adriatische Camorra’ (p. 156). Alongside the complex web of local politics and communal/family attachments, the fate of Habsburg-subject Italian soldiers was determined by international developments. Italy’s decision to remain neutral in August 1914, in spite of its formal adherence to the Triple Alliance with Germany and AustriaHungary since 1882, and worse still, its entry into the war on the Allied side in May 1915, made all Italian-speakers in the Dual Monarchy suspect. With very few exceptions, they were not allowed to serve on the Italian front, but were dispatched...