9. A School of Violence and Spatial Desires? Austro-Hungarian ­Experiences of War in Eastern Europe, 1914–1918

Scholarly research on the war in Eastern Europe during and after the First World War has steadily intensified over the last few years. It is hard to think about the war in Eastern Europe during the First World War without taking into consideration the post-Brest-Litovsk order and the subsequent wars from the end of 1918 until 1921. After the widely known battles between 1914 and 1917, the fighting only stopped briefly with the Brest-Litovsk armistice in December 1917. Bolshevik Russia, while stumbling into a civil, independence and interstate war, lost some of its most important strategic and economic parts. It seemed that Germany stabilized its domination over Eastern Europe at the expense of Soviet Russia. This was only a short intermezzo: Germany and Austria-Hungary collapsed in autumn 1918, and so this imperialistic, some would even say 'colonial', experiment of the Central Powers in Eastern Europe went bust. Keywords: Austria-Hungary; Bolshevik Russia; Eastern Europe; First World War; Germany