Römisches Institut der Görres-Gesellschaft
Tamara Scheer on language diversity in the Austro-Hungarian army
Dr. Tamara Scheer, a private lecturer at the Institute of Eastern European History at the University of Vienna, has presented a comprehensive study on language diversity in the Austro-Hungarian army from 1867 to 1918. It goes back to her habilitation thesis. Scheer holds the Venia Legendi for Modern and Contemporary History. In January 2020, she organised the conference at RIGG "Between crowns and nations: The Central European Priests' Colleges in Rome from the Risorgimento to the Second World War", the contributions to which have since been published in the Römische Quartalschrift.
The said study deals with twelve languages recognised in the Habsburg military. This diversity was not only a challenge in real military service, but also from a scientific-historical point of view, as countless archives had to be taken into account, some of them with very unusual source genres, in order to get to the bottom of the true circumstances of the language babel. Military history is by no means only interesting for the military, just as music history is not only interesting for musicians. When reading it, one penetrates deeply into the reality of life and culture of a vanished era, which exerts its own fascination.
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- Written by: Stefan Heid
- Category: Recommended reading