Gendered Histories of Violence: Captivity, Hunger, and Emotion in Austrian Life-Writing, 1914-1924

This thesis examines how violence was narrated and made meaningful in diaries, letters, and memoirs of Austrians who lived through the First World War. Expanding the definition of violence beyond the physical, and treating it as a multi-layered concept, this thesis focuses on two forms of violence that have often been marginalised in both contemporary and historiographical accounts—captivity and hunger—and investigates how gendered norms shaped representations of suffering. Rather than quantifying violence, the study explores how individuals conceptualised their experiences within cultural frameworks of masculinity and femininity, treating subjectivity as historically situated and discursively produced.
This thesis asks how gendered ideals and norms influenced the narration of wartime violence, to what extent captivity and hunger were framed through discourses of masculinity and femininity, and how these accounts disrupted or reinforced notions of violence, vulnerability, and endurance. By widening the frame of gendered violence, this thesis highlights how embodied experiences of starvation and internment were mediated through cultural expectations of gender. Men’s accounts often reveal psychological suffering when captivity undermined conceptions of military masculinity, while women’s narratives of hunger foregrounded their physical vulnerability and the visible violence of starvation.
Drawing on under-researched autobiographical fragments translated into English for the first time, this study contributes a new understanding to the history of violence by conceptualising starvation and internment as gendered and emotional forms of violence, and to the history of emotions by revealing how emotional registers shaped its conceptualisation. Historiographically, it integrates Austrian experiences into broader First World War scholarship, showing how these personal accounts challenge established distinctions between soldier and civilian, home and front. By foregrounding these complexities, the thesis demonstrates that captivity and hunger must be understood as gendered forms of violence central to cultural memory of the war. In doing so, it reconsiders the relationship between violence, gender, and emotion in wartime and post-war Austria.