Fighting Hardship, Keeping Hope
The Transylvanian Home Front During the Great War
Summary
of the Transylvanian home front in the years of World War I. They concern: daily
food and the difficulties in supplying the population with basic goods; the collection
of economic resources for the war; war propaganda and the role of the Church as
an instrument for promoting it; the situation of denominational schools and higher
education during the war years (the case of the Franz Joseph University in Cluj); the
role of the press and other media in the Transylvanian Saxon communities; urban
daily life during the war (the case of the city of Sibiu); the perception of the war in
Romanian parish chronicles as a less studied source pertaining to the home front
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the editor
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- Table of Contents
- Foreword (Ana Victoria Sima)
- The Romanian Civil Society in Transylvania During World War I (Sorina Paula Bolovan / Marius Eppel / Ioan Bolovan)
- The Daily Bread in Times of War. Food on the Transylvanian Home Front (1914–1918) (Cecilia Cârja / Ion Cârja)
- Transylvanian Communities and the Great War: A Case Study on Resource Mobilisation through the Romanian Churches (Diana Covaci)
- The Franz Joseph University of Cluj at the Time of the Great War (József Lukács)
- Schools Under Siege. Romanian Elementary Education in Transylvania (1914–1918) (Mirela Popa-Andrei)
- The Great War and the Humble: The Home Front Reflected in Transylvanian Romanian Parish Chronicles (Ana Victoria Sima)
- The Precariousness of Everyday Life in Sibiu in Connection with the Great War (Daniela Stanciu-Păscărița)
- War Propaganda and the Orthodox Church in Transylvania: Between Culture Wars and the Rural Culture of World War I (Ionela Zaharia-Schintler)
- The Avidity for News Among Transylvanian Saxons During the Great War (Marian Zăloagă)
- About the Contributors
- List of Tables
- List of Figures and Illustrations
Foreword
At the end of July 1914, the news of the general mobilisation, decreed in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, swept like a storm through all the provinces of the Monarchy, reaching even its most remote corners. Published in the press, posted in the streets and on village lanes, announced in episcopal circular letters, and read in churches, the mass mobilisation order also reached Transylvania, sowing panic, confusion, and many tears. At the time, the province had a population of just over 5,500,000 inhabitants – Romanians, Hungarians, Saxons, and other ethnic minorities. Transylvania had a predominantly agrarian economic profile and was a region of small-scale, self-sufficient agriculture, with few industrial centres, some Saxon burgs, and small towns/markets inhabited mainly by Hungarians and Jews. The rest of the population, predominantly Romanians but also Hungarians, Saxons, and other ethnic groups, lived in rural areas.
For everyone, the war was a distinct chapter marked by deprivation, insecurity, and individual and collective trauma. Almost one million soldiers were recruited during the period 1914–1918, and more than four and a half million civilians remained at home, their lives irrevocably changed by the “war of the world”. The civilian population had to face the hardships of the war from its very beginning, but as the conflict continued, its economic burden became increasingly unbearable. Especially in the countryside, successive conscription, war loans, collections, forced requisitions, and abuses by the authorities led to the disruption of daily life and changes in the religious outlook, habits, and customs. In other words, the war brought about a profound social re-organisation of the communities remaining behind the battlefront, which led to a re-definition of family roles, accelerated communication between those at the front and those at home, and altered the moral attitudes and conduct of civilians. The situation became even more critical for the Transylvanian Romanians, especially after Romania entered the war. In 1916, they became the target of many suspicions regarding their possible fraternisation with the Romanian Army and their lack of loyalty to the Austro-Hungarian imperial authorities.
The small towns and burgs of Transylvania were also not spared from difficulties. The conscription of men led to a decrease in agricultural production and, consequently, in the food supply for the urban population. War loans, inflation, and requisitions were also carried out in Transylvanian towns, which affected the ←7 | 8→functioning of those communities and their forms of socialisation. Therefore, the Transylvanian home front was multidimensional: civilians, whether they were Romanians, Hungarians, Saxons, or other ethnic groups, whether they lived in rural or urban areas, or came from different social backgrounds, experienced the Great War collectively, as the war gathered and standardised millions of individual experiences.
This volume brings together nine studies analysing some of the lesser-known sides of the Transylvanian home front in the years of World War I. The main discussed topics concern economic, social-cultural, and educational aspects, as follows: the issue of daily food and the difficulties of supplying the population with essential goods; the collection of economic resources for the war; war propaganda and the role of the Church as an instrument for promoting it; the situation of denominational schools and higher education during the war years (the case of the Franz Joseph University in Cluj); the role of the press and other media in the Transylvanian Saxon communities; urban daily life during the war (the case of the city of Sibiu); the perception of the war in Romanian parish chronicles as a less studied source concerning the home front.
All these studies reveal not only particularities of the Transylvanian home front, but also several similarities with other home fronts in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and beyond. Transylvania was not a theatre of operations, except for a few months in the south of the province in the summer and autumn of 1916. However, this did not exempt it from the proximity of the front, often turning it into a transit area for troops, refugees, and prisoners, forcing civilians to come into contact with the “stranger” and the alterity they represented.
It is also worth mentioning that, as on other home fronts, the mobilisation of men in the theatres of operations and the material needs of everyday life in Transylvania led to the massive participation of women and children in agricultural work, which made them significantly more visible in the communities behind the front. For Transylvanian women, leaving the domestic world that existed until then was a double-edged reality. On the one hand, it gave them the role of protagonists in the community. On the other hand, it brought them into the position of victims of war through their constant interaction with civilian and military authorities, soldiers, and prisoners, which led to a series of changes in their attitudes and behaviour.
Concerning war propaganda and its promotion in Transylvania, the findings reveal the major role played by the Church and the School, as state institutions, in the dissemination of official orders and decrees. Far from being a particularity of the Transylvanian Romanian world, the support offered by the Church to the ←8 | 9→State in times of war is also attested in other provinces of the Austrian Monarchy, as well as in France and Italy.
Of particular significance in the context of this volume are the studies on the war economy and the material vicissitudes experienced by the Transylvanian population. They refine and reconfirm the findings of other research on the profound consequences that the war had on the predominantly agrarian communities, whose existence, deeply rooted in the village world, was transformed.
Focusing particularly on the Romanians, the present volume briefly discusses aspects concerning the Saxons and the Hungarians without claiming to exhaustively examine the entire subject matter concerning the Transylvanian home front. From this point of view, the volume is intended as an invitation to read and continue this research by focusing on all ethnic groups in the province. Only such an integrated perspective can provide a more complete and complex picture of the war in a multi-ethnic area like Transylvania.
I cannot end these lines without thanking, most sincerely, the translators Ioana Claudia Popa and Carmen Veronica Borbely for their meticulous work. I would also like to thank the Peter Lang Publishing Group for the guidance and patience during the publication process.
The Romanian Civil Society in Transylvania During World War I*
Abstract: World War I profoundly shattered the consciousness of its contemporaries due to its large number of victims and its numerous economic, political, and demographic consequences. No wonder historians and demographers have given it ample attention, attempting to reconstruct all the implications it had for the population. From the beginning of the conflagration, the Church dedicated itself to supporting the families whose men were fighting on the front. The Orthodox and Greek-Catholic metropolitan circulars persistently highlighted the need to raise funds for those who suffered because of the war. In the summer of 1916, the local branch of the Ștefania Association for the Protection of Mothers and Children was established in Arad, in parallel with the popularization, in the local Romanian milieus, of the initiative to set up an orphanage for the children of the Romanians who had fallen on the front. Obviously, the state of exception during the war influenced the decisions and attitudes of the State and the Church towards the morality of the citizens and parishioners. World War I challenged the Church to find solutions to the issues the parishioners faced during those years, and these problems and interventions were undoubtedly quite extensive.
Keywords: World War I, Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, Transylvania, Romanian Churches
Introduction
For most people today, the name Transylvania designates a part of Romania that consists of a few regions which shared, over the centuries, an almost identical destiny: historical Transylvania or Ardeal (which was an autonomous principality from the mid-16th century until 1867, when it was annexed to Hungary, first under Turkish suzerainty, and then under Habsburg rule after 1699), Banat, Crișana, and Maramureș. These territories that are regarded as components of Transylvania in the broader sense were successively conquered by the Kingdom ←11 | 12→of Hungary (starting from the 11th–12th centuries), partially by the Turks (after 1541), and entirely by the Austrians (after 1699). Until World War I, Transylvania was ruled almost exclusively – both at the level of central power and that of the local administrative units – by Hungarians, Germans, and Szeklers. Romanians, who formed the autochthonous population that represented a majority from a demographic point of view, had been gradually eliminated, starting in the 14th century, from political, economic, and cultural entitlements in the state in which they lived. According to the Census of 1910, the total population of Transylvania included 5,225,618 inhabitants. Concerning the ethnic composition of Transylvania, Romanians predominated (2,827,419 – 53.7 %). They were followed by Hungarians (1,662,180 – 31.6 %, although it must be said that Jews had been almost exclusively recorded as Hungarians because the criterion of the mother tongue, or the most frequently used language, was employed for assigning the citizens to various ethno-linguistic communities), Germans (564,359 – 10.7 %), Slovaks, Ruthenians, Serbs, Roma, and so on, all of the latter amounting to about 5 %.1
Our research is based on the premise that the Romanian civil society in Transylvania had its origins in the joint efforts of several generations, which included individuals, but also associations that had managed, in time, through constant and complex actions, to maintain the national individuality of the Romanians in Transylvania, as well as to educate the masses in a liberal-democratic and national spirit. The actions of the Romanian bourgeois elites in 19th-century Transylvania showcased a strategy advanced by all the institutional components of any modern civil society: the civic and political education of the masses in order to turn groups of citizens into actors on the stage of the community’s public life. All the cultural, economic, religious, professional, youth associations, institutions, etc. developed after the Revolution of 1848, that is, after the emergence and consolidation of the Romanian civil society in Transylvania, were supported exclusively by private donations and through membership fees. They were forms of association based on ethnic, social, and professional criteria. They relied on volunteering and the people’s desire to become involved in the community, promoting material, social, cultural, and, not least, national progress. In short, the massive integration of most of the Romanian social categories in Transylvania in the dialogue of society-culture-nationality, achieved through ←12 | 13→hundreds of associations, is irrefutable proof of the political-national dynamism of all the socio-professional structures of the Romanian nation in Transylvania, from the second half of the 19th century until around the outbreak of the First World War.2
World War I profoundly shattered the consciousness of its contemporaries due to its large number of victims and its numerous economic, political, and demographic consequences. No wonder historians and demographers have given it ample attention, attempting to reconstruct all the implications it had for the population. Despite a fairly rich production in this respect, the social problems concerning the rural communities, the families, and matrimonial behaviour in Transylvania during those years have remained largely outside the historical research conducted in Romania or have scarcely retained the historians’ attention.
Details
- Pages
- 240
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9783631890790
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9783631890806
- ISBN (Hardcover)
- 9783631844427
- DOI
- 10.3726/b20232
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2022 (December)
- Published
- Berlin, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Warszawa, Wien, 2022. 240 pp., 1 fig. b/w, 8 tables.
