Politics of Urban Space in Wartime Moravia: The Case of Olmütz/Olomouc

• In Event: Politics of Urban Space in the Late Habsburg Bohemian Lands

Abstract

Much research into how urban public space became a place of ever-increasing contestation in the Habsburg monarchy during the First World War has focused on either the imperial or regional capitals. The presented paper will focus on the provincial level, using Olmütz/Olomouc, the former ancient capital of Moravia turned into a garrison town, as a case study of the changes in the way the local population understood and approached public space and its symbolic meanings. While local urban geography had long been contested over by various political, most often nationalist actors, the war brought in fresh themes in the context of the city. Public rituals of loyalty re-purposed some of the old battlegrounds of nationalist conflict with ever heightening frequency, while both organized (both nationalist and socialist) and un-organized actors sought to “capture”, “invade” and potentially “occupy” the same spaces to highlight their agenda of disgruntlement or even outright opposition to the war effort in various forms of public demonstration. At the end, after October 1918, while the balance of power has shifted between nationalist groups, the contest for urban space remained, along with the ongoing political unrest, which shows strong continuity of wartime practices into the immediate post-war era.

Author

• Jiří Hutečka, U of Hradec Králové (Czech Republic)