Episode 13, Tamara Scheer: Diversity and Language in the Austro-Hungarian Army

In this episode, Tamara Scheer, Lecturer in East European and Contemporary History at the University of Vienna, talks to us about ethnic and linguistic diversity in the Habsburg military in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Following Austria-Hungary’s political formation in 1867, its broad ethnic diversity was recognised as key to its legal and institutional cohesion. Nowhere was this more pronounced than in the armed forces, which began implementing measures that could better reflect the linguistic diversity of its soldiers, particularly as the Empire’s borders expanded southeastwards. However, such measures also highlighted persistent socio-political imbalances between the Dual Monarchy’s Austrian and Hungarian portions.