2026/01/01 by Hannah Riedler
paper · doi:10.1017/s0960777326101787
This article examines how the Viennese press represented Eastern Galicia in the immediate aftermath of the Habsburg Empire’s collapse, until the conclusion of the Paris Peace Conference. Formerly part of the Austrian half of the monarchy, Eastern Galicia became a contested space of war, international diplomacy and violence against minorities. Drawing on a corpus of Viennese daily newspapers from different political milieus, the article combines quantitative analysis of reporting frequency and prominence with qualitative analysis of the interpretive frameworks through which the region was discussed. The article argues that Eastern Galicia generated little symbolic ‘phantom pain’ in post-imperial Vienna. Although the press reported on military conflict, Bolshevik threats, pogroms, refugees, diplomatic negotiations and economic resources, it rarely framed Eastern Galicia as a lost Austrian territory or asserted continuing emotional or political ties to it. Instead, reporting drew heavily on older representations of Galicia as impoverished, backward, unstable and culturally distant. These inherited imperial hierarchies facilitated the rapid discursive externalisation of the former crown land: Eastern Galicia was transformed from an internal imperial periphery into a foreign region whose loss could be accepted and, in some accounts, welcomed as relief from imperial burdens.