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Differentiation or Indifference? Changing Perspectives on National Identification in the Austrian Half of the Habsburg Monarchy

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Nationhood from Below

Abstract

On 27 July 1916, a group of Italian-speaking Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war in Russia ceremonially blessed the Italian flag. Giuseppe Bresciani, a young barber from Riva del Garda, a town at the northern end of Lake Garda in the Italian-speaking part of Habsburg Tyrol, described the event in his war diary. At six o’clock in the evening, in the festively decorated largest square of the Kirsanov prison camp, the Italian tricolour was lined up alongside the banners of the ‘unredeemed’ territories of Trento, Trieste, Fiume, Istria, Dalmatia and Friuli. For Bresciani, it was a symbolic moment for the affirmation of his own sense of national belonging:

Behind that large and splendid standard of Italy, I, as first-born son, saw follow the banner of Trentino and the applause, the cries of ‘Long Live Trentino’ echoed from 3,000 breasts — my eyes moistened. On foreign soil, it fell to me to see the Trentine banner alongside the tricolour saluted by the cry of long live Italy, long live Trento.

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    Maarten Van Ginderachter (Associate Professor) & Marnix Beyen (Associate Professor) (Associate Professor) &  (Associate Professor)

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Cole, L. (2012). Differentiation or Indifference? Changing Perspectives on National Identification in the Austrian Half of the Habsburg Monarchy. In: Van Ginderachter, M., Beyen, M. (eds) Nationhood from Below. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230355354_5

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