Streetscapes of War and Revolution

Prague entered the First World War as the third city of the Habsburg Empire, but emerged in 1918 as the capital of a brand new nation-state, Czechoslovakia. Claire Morelon explores what this transition looked, sounded, and felt like at street level. Through deep archival research, she has carefully reconstructed the sensorial texture of the city, from the posters plastered on walls, to the shop windows’ displays, the badges worn by passersby, and the crowds gathering for protest or celebration. The result is both an atmospheric account of life amid war and regime change and a fresh interpretation of imperial collapse from below, in which the experience of life on the Habsburg home front is essential to understanding the post-Versailles world order that followed. Prague is the perfect case study for examining the transition from empire to nation statehood, hinging on revolutionary dreams of fairer distribution and new forms of political participation.

Claire Morelon is Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Manchester. She is the coeditor of Embers of Empire: Continuity and Rupture in the Habsburg Successor States after 1918 (2018). She has held research fellowships at the University of Oxford and the University of Padova.