The end of World War I was a moment of world-historical importance. The collapse of the once-powerful Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman Empires brought the catastrophic conflict to a close and paradoxically opened the way to renewed conflagration as the peoples of radically reconfigured Central and Eastern Europe struggled to revise a settlement imposed upon them by the victorious Allied powers.

Germany and Soviet Russia’s centrality to that revisionist effort, which ultimately precipitated World War II, often push the histories of the region’s smaller participants into the background. Overshadowed by grand narratives of the period that portray them primarily as pawns or bit players in great power politics, their rich histories thus remain little known to outsiders.

The First Austrian Republic is one of those lesser-known states. Once the center of power in a massive, multinational state comprising fifty-five million inhabitants, the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s dissolution in 1918 transformed Austria into a polity of six million people, of which one-third lived in Vienna, the former imperial capital. With the exception of its ignominious demise at the hands of Nazi Germany in 1938, this republic’s fascinating story has drawn relatively little attention from outsiders.