Research Goals and Objectives
This project aims to investigate the underexplored impact of military actions on the environment and lifeworlds of populations during World War I, with a particular focus on war-related displacement regimes in Eastern Europe. It will reconstruct various dimensions of the refugee experience, focusing on the environment, the body, and resilience within the militarized landscapes of Austrian Galicia, Congress Poland, and Romanian Wallachia, where the three empires clashed and provoked an unprecedented wave of refugees through the manoeuvre war’s repeated occupations and scorched earth policy. By examining these dynamics through an interdisciplinary lens that includes environmental history, military history, migration studies, medical history, gender studies, and sensory studies, the project will provide a comprehensive analysis of how the war affected both the environment and the people living in these contested regions. The project aims to critically scrutinize the existing research paradigms and findings in the following three conceptual areas, thus making an important contribution to the development of corresponding historiographical debates:
1) Environmental History of industrial war from the victim’s perspective. All three regions were characterized by different environmental zones (mountains, valleys, water massifs), multiethnicity of the population, and improvised displacement policies in the contested and occupied territories. The project will examine the physical and sensory experiences of refugees, the construction of individual and political bodies amidst the collapsing empires, and the role of military medicine and biopolitics. Additionally, the gendered nature of the refugee experience will be scrutinized, highlighting the contributions of women as refugees and caregivers. Visual sources, such as photographs, will be critically analysed to understand the portrayal and materiality of the militarized environment and the physical memories of demilitarized spaces and refugees’ bodies. This approach will offer new insights into the interaction between refugees and their environments, highlighting the often-overlooked role of refugees in shaping wartime and post-war landscapes. By incorporating these findings, the project aims to contribute to broader conceptual debates on environmental history and human-environment relationships during periods of conflict and thus contribute to the definition of a third wave of environmental history.
2) Transnationality of displacement biopolitics in World War I Eastern Europe. The project intends to fill significant research gaps by providing a transnational perspective on the environmental and social impacts of war-related refugee movements. It will compile and compare data from various regions of Eastern Europe affected by World War I, using digital humanities models to reconstruct refugee routes, environmental devastation, and epidemiological situations on the different fronts. The examination of these themes will not only contribute to the fields of environmental and medical history but also to migration studies, highlighting the interplay between war, displacement, and the long-term physical and psychological effects on civilian bodies. This research will offer a more nuanced picture of the war's aftermath and the often overlooked contributions and experiences of refugees.
3) Digital humanities potential through the research of displacement, war, and environments. The research aims to develop a digital unit that collaborates with researchers to process multilingual data, modelling war damage and demographic shifts on the Eastern Front during WWI. This unit will analyse migration patterns and biopolitical changes in Eastern Europe, using machine recognition to study refugee camp photographs and compare them with verbal sources. Additionally, it will create interactive GIS maps to visualize key outcomes like refugee routes and environmental impacts. The innovation potential lies in producing comprehensive insights through advanced data processing, machine recognition, and GIS mapping, offering a novel, multidimensional understanding of the complex history of the Eastern Front during WWI. The model proposed by the project group for digital handling of the vast source material could play an important role in research debates on the environmental history of war and migration.
The Eastern Front of the World War I created an environment of extreme conditions where the human body faced not only social and armed violence but also the violence of nature. According to theorists like Foucault and Douglas, the human body is a cultural construct and a habitual entity, which was unprepared for the harsh realities of war. Refugees, in particular, had to develop alternative adaptation strategies to survive the militarized environment. These former civilians, uprooted from their stable social spaces and infrastructures, were forced to reorganize their lives in hostile environments, where maintaining social practices and a culturally conditioned habitus (as conceptualized by Bourdieu) was impossible.
In the "grey zone" of the "in-between" and "aftermath" of the three collapsing empires (see Key visual), refugees played a crucial role in the demilitarization of war zones, such as Galicia und Poland from 1915 to 1917, Romania from 1916 to 1917, and the whole Eastern Front up to 1919. While existing research typically views the increasing radicalization of violence against refugees as a one-way street (as argued by historians like Schnell, Lohr, and Sanborn), Gatrell offers a different perspective by attributing agency to the refugees. However, Gatrell's focus is primarily on the Tsarist Empire and its inner territories, leaving a gap in the analysis of counter flows and the broader impact of refugees. For example, the reclamation of fields in front areas and the labour mobilization of refugees in various stages of the war illustrate how refugees helped shape the war landscape and influenced the policies of warring parties from below. Each spring, the military administration in Galicia, occupied by Russian armies, had to halt planned labour mobilization measures to allow civilians (refugees) to cultivate fields instead of building strategically important roads. Additionally, military doctors at the front were ordered to treat civilians and refugees to ensure the epidemiological safety of their own army, blurring the lines between military and civilian roles. After the end of hostilities, refugees were called upon to demilitarize war zones or took the initiative to do so themselves. Examining the role of civilians during and after the war allows for an understanding of who dismantled fortifications on the Eastern Front and filled in trenches. Furthermore, the wave of refugees during the World War I, along with the created taxonomies of biopolitics, not only contributed to the war effort but also became integral to the war itself. This perspective emphasizes the active role refugees played in the war and its aftermath, challenging the notion that they were merely passive victims. Their actions and interactions with the militarized environment reveal a dynamic interplay between human agency and the harsh realities of war, offering a more nuanced understanding of their experiences and contributions. These developments characterized migration regimes in interwar Eastern Europe and underscore the complexity and significance of refugees in shaping wartime and post-war landscapes.
