Disability, Internal Colonization, and (De-)Nationalization Fantasy: Plans for Warrior Homestead Colonies in World War I Austria

Several remarkable publications appeared in Imperial Austria in 1915 and 1916. They proposed warrior homestead colony (Kriegerheimstätte) as the best long-term solution to provide for Austrian disabled veterans and their families. On top of sometimes very elaborate designs for the suggested homestead and its buildings (in some cases complete with artistic renderings), they also offered detailed discussion over legal matters as well as economic feasibility. The timing of their publication was especially important: the pamphlets cleared censors within a short period of time and in the midst of horrendous casualties (over two million in the first 12 months of hostilities), deteriorating material supplies on the home front, repeated and disastrous battlefront setbacks, and the opening of the southwestern front against the erstwhile ally Italy.

This paper describes and contextualizes these warrior homestead colony plans, which cast disabled veterans as the vanguard of Imperial Austria’s political and social renewal. I argue that the Habsburg military saw warrior homestead colony as a means to combat nationalist agitation as well as a concrete method to consolidate the military’s postwar domestic control. I also argue that the plans reflected German nationalists’ attempt to revive their prewar resettlement projects, which aimed at Germanizing or “defending” territories contested by competing nationalists, by marrying old political agenda with new social policy needs. The totalizing war and its horrible losses made internal colonization attractive as the panacea for the perceived internal threats, and prompted the convergence of the military’ and the German nationalists’ lines of thinking. The convergence also suggests that the relations between the supposedly a-national military leadership and the German nationalists need to be examined more closely.