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Claire Morelon, "Streetscapes of War and Revolution: Prague, 1914–1920" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
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- [00:01]
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Claire Morellon about her book titled Streetscapes of war and Prague, 1914-1920, published by Cambridge University Press in 2024. Now, a lot obviously was happening it the years 1914 to 1920, right? We are talking about World War I here. And a lot was happening in Prague by the end of this period. It is the capital of a brand new country, Czechoslovakia. Yes, it doesn't exist, but obviously Prague still does, even though Czechoslovakia doesn't today. But that's not where Prague starts in 1914. We see it as a really big city, though not the capital of the Habsburg Empire.
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So.
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So just from those few facts alone, there is a lot of transformation happening during this period. And what this book helps us understand is to some extent, kind of what was happening on the big political, high up, diplomatic levels. But I think perhaps more interestingly to those of us who don't usually move in those circles, this book helps us understand what that was actually like, to be like a normal person living on the street, walking along, trying to get food. That's something I think so many of us can relate to. And this is such a key moment and place in time where so much is going on. And through this book we can get an insight into what that experience was like. So, Claire, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast to tell us about it.
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Thank you so much for having me.
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Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book? What sorts of questions are you asking? How did this whole thing develop?
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Thank you. Yeah, sure. So I'm a cultural and social historian of East Central Europe in the early 20th century and I particularly became interested in the First World War and in the experience, experience of people in the First World War in the east of the European continent. Because I felt like there was a big gap at the time, at least at the time I started this project, between the level of dislocation, of devastation, of disruption that the First World War had wrought on this part of the continent and the relative neglect of the historiography for this region. So I wanted to find out more, as you just said, about how was it for people who, you know, for ordinary people on the streets of cities at that time to experience such major changes as the First World War and then the new political changes that happened in the region after the First World War. So this gap has changed in the last 10 to 15 years. There's been a lot of more books that cover that region, but that was kind of the first impulse for me. And I was also interested in the way we frame basic chronologies of the region of East Central Europe. In many accounts, 1918 and the foundation of the new states in East Central Europe is presented as this clean new beginning. And that always struck me as kind of odd because it erased all the consequences of such a major conflict on societies. And I felt like things could not have been so new in 1918, given what had happened during the last the years, the four years before that. And after all, you know, people and societies did fight for four years for Austria, Hungary. So I was wondering, how did they endure the war and what happened in 1918 on the ground? Again, not the politician, not the high level, but very much on the ground. What did it look like? So that's what drove me to research and then write this book.
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Yeah, those are all sorts of questions that I think often come up for those of us looking back into the past going, wait a second, like the textbook definition of this, that maybe we learn in secondary school, like, the older we get, the more we're like, start and end dates that maybe is a little less exact than it might seem. And of course, these sorts of questions of kind of, what is the impact of World War I in east and Central Europe and where do things begin and end, as we've kind of mentioned, definitely has interest for Prague, but kind of could be looked at in a number of places. Right. This is a conflict that we call it a world war, but certainly impacts all of Europe. So why did you choose to focus on Prague? As a way of looking at kind of these questions of what changes and the impact of World War I and those sorts of things.
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A
So focusing on Prague and focusing on a city such as Prague was interesting for several reasons. For maybe three reasons. First, studies of Austria, Hungary in this period have long tended to focus on national groups. Right. So focusing on what happened to Czechs, what happened to Hungarians, what happened to Germans in Austria Empire, and the focus on space as a unit of analysis and not urban space specifically, enabled me to move beyond those narratives that are ethnically defined. You know, focusing, as I said, on specific group. I'm looking at the people who pass through the streets, who share a common space. It doesn't mean they share necessarily a very common, stable identity, but I think it implied a shared experience of the war to share a Space. So this was the first reason why I thought focusing on space and not on groups was interesting. Second, I think at the time of crisis such as the First World War, cities are kind of nodes where issues such as food shortages, the arrival of refugees, the protests that come during that period, become particularly visible, particularly tangible. So to understand the nature of a crisis such as the First World War, I think focusing on city, on a specific city is a good starting point. And Prague, I think it's particularly interesting finally, because it was one of those, as you mentioned, it's one of the new capital cities that emerges on the map of Europe in 1918. And in many ways it was a bit the poster child for the new post1918 order. Right. Czechoslovakia and Prague were models for those new nation state creations in many ways that were born out of the Paris Peace Conference. And yet there were cracks even in this facade of the Prague case. So I think the case of Prague shows that the question of how to navigate the extremely complicated transition from empire to nation state was just as central and just as difficult in the capital city as it was for other Central Europeans, as many historians have shown, who looked at local context all around the region. So I think looking at streetscapes, again, it offers a bit of a different image than official discourses, one where you could see the tensions, the continuities, again, the difficulty of that transition from empire to nation state.
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Yeah, I want to talk more about streetscapes. Can you tell us a bit about what you mean by this term and how you use it in your analysis?
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A
So streetscape very basically is a focus on the appearance of the streets and how they looked and how they felt to the contemporary observer, to someone who was on the street at that time. So what that encompasses then, it's both the built environment, but also the visual displays on the streets, the signs, the announcements, the posters, the traffic of vehicles and people, the gatherings, the demonstrations, the encounters that took place on the street. So it's a dynamic concept with just does not focus just on the representation of urban spaces, but also how they were used in the daily life of the city's inhabitants. And I think it's also a moment, that early 20th century moment, where streets have a particular significance. It's a moment of heightened presence of people in the street, where people perceive the street and the way it looks, its appearance as a source of information in itself. And this is something that really interested me in this book. People look during that period, look at the streets of their city to know what it Means to be at war, to know what the traces of the conflict are. Officials, Austro Hungarian officials track loyalty to the empire in the streetscapes. They look at the flags. Where are the flags? On which houses are flags hanging? After 1918 and after the foundation of Czechoslovakia, people look for signs of. Of revolution or of incomplete revolution in the streetscapes. You know, what has changed, what hasn't changed? And in a way, I think it was particularly important at that time, but I think it's something that you still see nowadays. You know, I read an article recently that said that in Britain there was a strong correlation between the visual signs of high street decline, you know, empty storefronts and voting for the far right. You know, and I think this idea that the perception of political transformation in the environment is very important is something that we need to take into account. People react not just to what they hear, they also react to what they see and how they perceive their environment to be. And this can be just as important as politicians discourses. So in that book I was really trying to show that a transformation as important as, you know, empire to nation state is something that takes place in the streets and that people take in through looking at their own streets.
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B
Yeah, I think, in fact, we have a really great starting point to kind of see what you mean by this in practice. Because when we look at, for example, the outbreak of war or the implementation of mobilization and drafting into the military, the focus is often on those kind of official declarations. Right. Like, outbreak of war is often declared as a big speech, especially in this time period. You know, draft notices. It's about the paper and the generals and officials saying kind of XYZ needs to happen. But of course, for those things to actually sort of trickle down beyond paper, things on the street have to happen. So what did those sorts of declarations mean for Prague streetscapes at the beginning of the war?
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A
Yeah. Thank you. So, yeah, I think you're right. It's a great example because, you know, people gather around the posters, for example, the mobilization posters. So we see those posters as something kind of stilted, or those declarations as something stilted. But again, it's very dynamic. People talk about the posters, talk about what that means, about who is going to go, who has to go and be drafted into the military. So all of this is very happening really in the streets of the city, very concretely in the urban space. What changes is that very quickly there is a new appearance of many more uniforms in the streets. And this changes a little bit the dynamics of the hierarchies between military and civilians. Who is a civilian and who is a military man is very clearly marked visually again in the streets of the city. And the importance that anything that has to do with the military and the fact that anything civilian becomes less important is very clearly marked again visually in the city.
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B
Yeah, that's something that I think we often overlook. But that really makes a difference. Right. If you're kind of going out to do your weekly grocery shop, like between one week and the next it's going to look very different in terms of uniforms and also in terms of kind of other aspects of I suppose, patriotism. Like it's not just soldiers walking around in uniform. Right. What other sorts of things are going to be visible?
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Yeah, so in terms of. It's also the reduced forms of entertainment. For example, this notion that the atmosphere of the city has to correspond to the gloominess of the time, that everything should correspond to what's going on at the front, that soldiers are suffering and that as a result civilian spaces should not be too merry. So all of this kind of shapes the new relationship to public space. To again, what's going on in the streets earlier closing times of cafes and pubs, again to kind of respect the seriousness of the hour are something that's going to transform obviously the lives of ordinary people throughout the city and to remind them that a conflict is going on and that they should adapt their own activities to this new reality. But also they are very much asked to participate in the war effort and to contribute, even if they're even just as civilians, to contribute to the fighting that's happening and that Austria Hungary is leading on several fronts throughout the war. So I focus very much on the patriotic efforts that develop during those years. In the book, my idea was to try to show that there was such a thing as Austro Hungarian patriotism in during the First World War, which sometimes has been put into question. There was this notion that only nation states could mobilize their populations for war effort and that those big multi ethnic empires were not able to do it. In the book I was trying to show that small patriotic actions were very much present in Prague streets during the war. So I define patriotism as this. Those low key elements of support for the war effort. The war in many ways completely transforms their relationship to the state. And using the term patriotism was a way to move away from an attention to loyalty to the state only or to the Habsburg dynasty, how much people liked Franz Joseph or connected with Franz Joseph and look instead at concrete acts of participation in war relief actions, for example, to show how people connected with the war effort itself, I borrowed from Melissa Stockdale the notion of social patriotism. She works on the Russian Empire. And this notion of social patriotism invites us to study how people participate in the war effort because they care for their own countrymen, because this is what mobilizes them, is this notion that they are part of a. Of a community and that they want to care for their own countrymen. And this sense of patriotism can espouse different forms of identity. You can feel very strongly as a Czech, for example, and still feel that you need to do your duty and to contribute to the Imperial war effort. So it was quite important for me to show that there was no contradiction here, that there was no opposition between, you know, national feeling and contribution to the Imperial war effort. The best example of that that I show in the book is the so called, which is a gymnastics, Gymnastics association created in the 1860s and which is very linked with Czech nationalism. The so called are actually banned by the Austrian military in late 1915 because they fear that they might be disloyal. But if you look again at their concrete actions, they were huge participants in the war effort for Austria, Hungary. They lent their practice halls to be turned into hospitals for wounded soldiers. They massively donated to war charities. They volunteered in high numbers, you know, as for. In hospitals again, or to train for military training. And they saw all of that as part of their civic duty. So I really wanted to move beyond the idea that it's only in nation states that you can see mobilization for the war effort and that only nation states are able to produce this kind of mobilization. I was trying to show that there are other ways that patriotism can move people to mobilize in wartime.
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This is really interesting to kind of make sure that we don't narrow our focus too much. Right. That we keep in mind these additional aspects that are beyond the soldiers and things, uniforms on the front. If we're thinking then beyond the visual. Another aspect of the streetscape you've kind of mentioned in some of the examples implicitly so far, which is people interacting with each other, people talking about things. You know, even just the simple one of kind of clustering around, declaration going, wait, what does that say? You know, the communication aspect is key too to the experience. So what of that was kind of allowed versus not, not like, was there information people weren't allowed to talk about or weren't even allowed to know? How did that aspect kind of operate in Prague's streetscapes?
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Yeah, so that's a very interesting aspect because it changes. In 1914, the nature of governance in Austria, Hungary, changes with the outbreak of the war. You have the introduction of emergency measures, which meant strengthening of press censorship, but also censorship of private letters and also the potential to be arrested for declarations that you make in public or, you know, in a pub having a drink with someone. And so this profoundly transforms the atmosphere in Prague. People grow suspicious of what they might say to each other, both in public and, you know, what they write in the letter becomes, you know, suddenly there's this awareness that what you write or what you say can suddenly lead you to prison very concretely, or to be denounced. Denunciations flourished. Denunciations to the police of, you know, my neighbor said that my neighbor has, you know, private meetings at nights where, you know, they lead conspiracies. All of this is flourishing, and the police is kind of leading investigations, following those. Those denunciations. So this also breeds this kind of gloomy wartime atmosphere where everyone is kind of watching each other. It also means that the fact that the press is heavily censored and that the reports from the battlefields in the press become increasingly unreliable and people are aware of that, mean that alternative sources of information become much more important for people. So rumors become a prime source of information. Again, people pay attention to what their acquaintances say about movements of the fronts, wounded soldiers and refugees who come from the zones of the front lines and bring new information about where the advance of troops are also considered as a prime source of information. People also find ways to avoid censorship in their letters by, for example, hiding letters inside nuts or objects to avoid censorship. So we see all sorts of creative ways of finding new ways of transmitting information. But what this all creates is a regime of uncertainty for many people. People don't know what's reliable information, what's not reliable information anymore. And this kind of breeds uneasiness with each other, but also with the state itself.
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B
This is very interesting to kind of see, especially as you said, how this sort of develops and changes over time. It's not just one moment. It's sort of this more general atmosphere. And of course, we often think about wartime, the atmosphere being worst on the very front lines. And of course, that's so obviously the case, especially in something like World War I, right? We all know the trenches were really bad. But it's not just in the trenches that there are impacts of deaths. There are impacts even of displacements, of people being forced to move from one place to another. How does that Impact even the people living in Prague, which, yeah, okay, it's not a capital city at this point, but it's a big city and yet it's not as far away from those things, even just in people's minds as we might think.
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Right, yeah, so that was interesting for me also. I kind of consciously studied a home front city, a city that is never threatened at any point in the war to be really part of the front line. So you could think in a way that we're far away from all of this. And I'm definitely not claiming, you know, that, that this, you know, obviously cities that are much closer to the front experience something very different or cities at the front experience, have a very different experience of the war, that's for sure. But still, in the case of a city like Prague, what you do have those traces of the conflict that come, that come through in the way of obviously, yeah, the deaths, the numerous deaths, of dealing with the death at the front line, but also the numerous wounded soldiers who come to Bohemia and Prague. And actually the fact that the city is never really threatened to be anywhere closer to the front line means that it receives a disproportionate number of wounded soldiers during the war, which again, makes sense. But it means it's a prime site for receiving wounded soldiers and refugees, especially refugees from the east, because the quite important advances of the Russian army on the eastern front means that many, many inhabitants from the eastern regions of the Austro Hungarian Empire come to the western regions of the empire and especially to Prague. So you have a huge number of, as I say, wounded soldiers and refugees who make their way to the city and who bring with them much of the reality of what the war is. They tell the people in Prague about their experiences and about what's going on at the front. So we shouldn't imagine those home front cities as completely sealed from the realities of war.
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Yeah, that's definitely an interesting reason to look at Prague specifically or as you said, kind of home front cities like that, because it does give us an interesting perspective that we might otherwise sort of be miss. One thing, however, that is not a huge surprise is that kind of, regardless of where one is in terms of the front line, this was a war that really, as we mentioned earlier, impacts the whole continent. And of course, one of the big ways that everyone's impacted is by shortages, shortages of all sorts of things. And this is something you discuss directly in the book around food. Right. What does that do to city space and streetscapes in Prague?
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Yeah, so maybe to connect to what I was just saying, the wounded soldiers, but especially the refugees, are welcomed as kind of signs of the war. And there is a lot of civilian mobilization to help those new populations. But refugees, especially towards the end of the war, are very much rejected as extra mouths to feed. Because in the context of a growing food crisis and, you know, growing food shortages, having more people coming into the city is perceived as, you know, threatening the food supply for the inhabitants. So you could see very much a positioning of refugees as the others, the outsiders who should not take advantage of the food supply of the of inhabitants in Prague. So it's quite important, I think, maybe to remind people of the magnitude of the hunger cris by the end of the First World War in Central Europe, in Austria, Hungary, it is a very severe experience of food shortages that civilian populations have to deal with. And there are several reasons for this. The first one is the occupation of the eastern part of the empire, as I was saying, which was a major agricultural land that is then destroyed as agricultural land by the war, the blockade, which means that there's no option to kind of purchase the missing grain somewhere else. The manpower shortages, which means that the harvests of the war years are not as much food being harvested during that time. And finally the priority of the limited food supply given to the military, which means that civilians are even worse off. The Austro Hungarian state was also very slow in reacting to this food crisis and in managing it and then providing for its citizens. So very concretely, by 1917, 1918, many inhabitants in Prague are hungry. Many inhabitants in Prague cannot rely on the official food supply or the system of rationing that has been put in place. They have to find alternative ways of feeding themselves. And all of this, as you were saying, will have very direct impact on the streetscapes, right? Because the absence of food is going to shape the streetscapes and the search for food is going to structure the hours of Prague inhabitants and how they structure their days. So food disappears from its usual locations. It's not in marketplaces anymore, it's not in shops anymore, and it reemerges in hidden formed in cellars or at train stations at the new hubs of the black market that is going to take place in Prague. So for ordinary inhabitants, finding food meant that you had to queue for hours in front of the right shop to try to, you know, again, listen to rumors about where food might be available and go and queue there for hours to try to obtain information. Except, you know, the transformation in your diets, the things that you were not going to find anymore. Except also that shortages in coal meant that, you know, you could not necessarily cook at home anymore, and that you might be. You might have to go to a place where they give out food, like common soup kitchens or those types of new places, even if that's not something you would have done before the war. But during the war, you might have to reduce your expectations of what a good meal was and change that. You might have to also grow vegetables on your balcony or try rearing some poultry on your balcony to try to make up for the fact that there is no food available in shops anymore. So all of this, this changes completely how people use the city, how they use their hours, how they use their days, and how they relate to where the city is. It also means that suddenly the countryside, which urban people were proudly looking down upon before the war, is suddenly this place that has food and that is perceived as the upper hand, so to speak. So there is a shift also of. Of the hierarchies between city and countryside that is taking place at the time. And people have to also go on long trips to the countryside. They take the train, and they try to go get potatoes all around Bohemia to try to be able to find food for their families. So it does really transform both the way they interact with their own city, but also the way they interact with. With the rest of the hinterland beyond the city itself.
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B
And it changes interactions in terms of. With their neighbors, with strangers, with even ideas of kind of how society is supposed to run. Right. If you're suddenly having to completely change and disrupt everything about your day just to figure out, like, what you're going to eat tomorrow, like, that doesn't create a lot of feelings of confidence in sort of the official way things get done. So can we see links between what you're describing of these changed streetscapes in this sense, with the sort of protests that come about after the war?
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A
Yes, absolutely. So for people, the fact that you cannot, you know, that the. The legal channels of obtaining food become less and less reliable, and that the people who have the upper hand are the black marketeers, the people who rely on the black market to get food, the people who act illegally, those are the people who are able to get food. Those are the people who are at the top of the social hierarchy in wartime. All of this kind of feeds into dissatisfaction with the state, the impression that the state is not resolving the major crisis in people's lives, and the fact that. That there is no enforcement of legality anymore, that what are called the Profiteers. So the people who act illegally to obtain food are the ones who get away with it. And the state is not acting for decent citizens, for the wives of soldiers who are away at the front fighting for their country. And meanwhile the wives are starving at home and nobody's taking care of them. And they see people who are taking advantage of the situation. So this is really the heart of the kind of moral economy of wartime suffering and wartime sacrifice that is going to then lead to protests against the government itself. So it starts, and what I do in my book is look at the protests from the year 1917 up till after the war in 1920, looking at how this evolves, and first of all, looking at where in the city the protests take place. And you could see a very clear move at the beginning from government buildings, people gathering in front of government buildings, having still the hope that the government can help solve that issue, can help solve their problems, can listen to their grievances about the way the management of the food supply is run, to protests where people just invest the main squares of the city, go to the city center, use more violence, and kind of make their voice heard more clearly. So there is this very important symbolic occupation of the city center, away from the working class suburbs, towards the the city center, going and occupying this and showing to the power that you're here and that your grievances have not been heard and that you're moving to the next stage. So there is a real transformation in that sense of those protests during those years. This movement also builds up over time because those protests are repeated. So people meet, many women, actually participate in the protests asking for better food supply. And they meet each other, they talk to each other, and then they organize to make further protests. And I looked at a lot of depositions from women who were participating in those protests during those years. And you can see they do mention where I met these. We met these women during the early protests and then, you know, we organized together for new protests. So all of this creates new networks of people who will mobilize for. For future protests. And it's interesting to see how this changes after 1918 and after there's a new regime and people don't continue to protest after 1918 and even protest even more. And the reason for that is because there is a new perception of the legitimacy of protest. People felt that as they were now living in a republic, so they moved from a monarchy to a republic. Being in a republic meant that they had a new claim to protest and to public space. So it was even more like their own space. They were entitled to make changes to the way the government was run. And this was happening by coming into public and discussing and. And protesting to the new government. So the first few years after the creation of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1918 are actually very rich in protests of all sorts, because there is a sense of entitlement, of making claims and sharing power with the new government. And again, this happens very clearly and concretely in the streets.
- [34:09]
B
So this is really interesting to understand because it takes us right back to the question we talked about at the beginning of, like, how much is there a firm sort of start and end between collapse of empire and establishment of republic? Right. Like, those start and end dates don't really make a lot of sense when we're looking at the streetscapes. They don't completely change or completely not change. Right.
- [34:30]
A
Yeah. And this is a big argument that the book is making, definitely trying to make us think about 1918 differently. Right. And this end date of the work, that doesn't really correspond to much concretely, when you look, again, at the streets, and not just not at the discourses, but at the streets very, very concretely, what is. What really interested me was also to see again how people were dissatisfied with the new regime and the way that the streets look like after 1918. So there is a lot of complaints about the fact that the transformation into a new regime, the move from monarchy to republic, the move from an empire to a nation state, is not visible enough in the street, that actually things are still the same. And people complain about that, that the civil servants are the same, that there is a lot of continuity, that the food shortages have not stopped, because they haven't, because they cannot. It's not something that can, you know, be stopped from one day to the next. So there is a big disappointment with what peace looks like. The fact that post war Prague still looks a lot like wartime Prague, and there's a sense of letdown, in a way, from all those new changes that were supposed to happen in 1918, once we were going to be free, and that actually none of this has come to pass and that actually there is a continuation of wartime practices. There are elements of continuity with the old regime in terms of institutions, in terms of personnel, in terms of habits. And so none of this could be easily transformed. And people want even more change. And this is also what's going to prop them to go into the streets and ask for more change as well.
- [36:35]
B
Yeah, that's very interesting to see. Kind of what actually is Happening for real people.
- [36:40]
A
Right.
- [36:41]
B
Not just in the textbooks or in the official proclamations. Given that this was obviously something you were really interested in, in figuring out, but because obviously it was a gap, right. Going in and asking these questions. You had to figure these pieces out and put it all together. Was there anything you came across in that process that especially surprised you, even if it's maybe a detail that we haven't talked about yet?
- [37:04]
A
So one thing that surprised me, and I guess this goes back to the main question I had at the beginning, is the fact that this experience did not leave as much of a mark in public memory than I thought it would. For example, the food shortages, which is a major feature of anyone who's lived through those years clearly, and the chaos that generated and the disruption of everyday life for everyone. This is not remembered as much as I would have expected it to be remembered. And I wonder how. It's another question, I guess, how do you just come back to normal and sort of forget about those experiences and how much. Yeah, this hardship is not necessarily something that's as remembered.
- [38:09]
B
Yeah, that's definitely a really interesting aspect to add into this. So thank you for including it in our discussion. Are these the sorts of questions you're continuing to work on? Obviously the book has been out in the world for a little bit. Is there anything you're working on at the moment or upcoming that you'd like to give us a sneak preview of?
- [38:25]
A
Thank you. So I'm actually moving on a little bit to the. After having said that everything changes in 1914, I'm actually moving on to the pre war period and working on a book on the reactions around the process of democratization in the Austrian half of the Habsburg Empire. So moving on a little bit away from questions of war and more looking at democracy and especially the introduction of universal suffrage in 1907. And I'm interested to see the forms of resistance to that that existed. Looking at things such as, you know, election, how elections took place in practice. Again, there's a link here which is the looking at what happens on the ground. So again, not just looking at, you know, big discussions around democracy, but more concretely, how do people vote, how does the first election with universal suffrage happen on the ground or demonstrations and how they're managed and how that happens on the ground. So I guess there's a link between the two projects, but it's moving on a little bit before the First World War, chronologically.
- [39:39]
B
Yeah, that makes sense and that sounds interesting. But of course, as you said, there is a clear link of interest in terms of what real people kind of experience in the everyday. So anyone who wants to learn more about that can read the book we've been discussing titled Streetscapes of war and Prague, 1914-1920, published by Cambridge University Press in 2024. Clare, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [40:00]
A
Thank you so much for having.
- [40:14]
C
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