Over a century ago, Austria-Hungary collapsed and a generation of writers wrote about what it was like to have your whole world melt away.

When it comes to history writing, one of the most recognizable frames is the story of the “rise and fall.” Although broad and often misused, it is undeniably a trope that deeply interests the public imagination. So much so that nowadays one doesn’t need to look far to find anxieties over our own alleged fall. Discussions on “decline” and even “collapse” have become more commonplace online.1 And more generally, across all published literature, mentions of doom and gloom have reached new heights, irrespective of political leanings.2

But despite the cultural climate, catastrophes are hard to imagine, and even the doomsayers themselves usually say such things half-heartedly. This is because so few people alive and born in the Western world have experienced anything truly like it. Personal memories of war have also faded for most. Limited by experience, historical perspectives help to fill in the gaps of our imagination.

When we think of collapse, the immediate example that comes to mind is the Soviet Union. Even within the highest levels of American intelligence, its sudden end came as a complete surprise.3 Anthropologist Alexei Yurchak characterized the feeling for the average Soviet person as “everything was forever until it was no more.”4 The shock was explored further by Adam Curtis in his 2022 documentary series TraumaZone. In it, the viewer is carried through the experience year by year of “what it felt like to live through the collapse of communism and democracy” during the 1990s, told through archival footage of everyday people and their misfortune.5

The former Soviet Union is just one leading example. Both “decline” and even “collapse” carry so much weight because the last century was so strongly defined by them, particularly the first half. Political philosopher Hannah Arendt correctly noted that the first half of the twentieth century spawned “homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth.”6 In such a short amount of time and without precedent, so many states and ways of living were swept away, and forced to start over. Today, these realities have left us with many ghosts: past ways of living that were suddenly cut short but persist as haunting memories, still affecting the present in very real ways.

One such ghost, often forgotten but lasting an exceptionally long time when it was real, is Austria-Hungary. Both Austria and Hungary were ruled by the Habsburg dynasty for what certainly felt like forever, centuries upon centuries, finally merging as a dual monarchy in 1867.7 Its emperor, Franz Joseph, reigned from 1848 to 1916, which only added to the perception of its eternal stability. But in the last year of World War I, the country collapsed and a generation of writers reflected on what they once took for granted permanently being no more.

Because its capital Vienna was a cosmopolitan city long famous for its literary tradition and art, the language to describe this loss came naturally. The result was a corpus of writing unlike any other, uniquely about the experience of coping with a world lost. As historian Eric Hobsbawm observed:

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