ABSTRACT
It is common knowledge that millions were exterminated across Central Europe in genocides and massacres during World War Two, that tens of millions were expelled, resettled, evacuated, or fled across the region or from it during the war and in the latter half of the 1940s. This awareness of the human and demographic tragedy effectively overshadows quite similar developments during, and in the wake of, the Balkan Wars and the Great War. Indeed, the Second World War’s bloodbath and ethnic cleansing were on a larger scale, but not extremely so, hence the question arises why the tragedy of the Balkan, Caucasian, Eastern, and Sontig (Soča, Isonzo) fronts of World War One is so much neglected and forgotten. Perhaps, part of the answer is the fact that all of the main states (empires) which underpinned the political reality of Central Europe prior to 1918 were subsequently destroyed and replaced with radically novel ethnolinguistic nation-states after the Great War. On the other hand, the interwar nation-states that were equally obliterated or radically overhauled during the Second World War were mostly recreated (even if in somewhat changed territorial and political forms) after 1945. After 1918 there was no Austria-Hungary, Ottoman Empire, or Russian Empire left to commemorate the wartime tragedy of their inhabitants, while following World War Two, Central Europe’s nation-states, the non-national communist polity of the Soviet Union (with its component national in their character Soviet socialist republics), and the newly founded Jewish nation-state of Israel were at hand to ensure such remembrance and commemoration of the victims.
