This workshop, funded by the AHRB, is a preliminary investigation of how the male generation that passed through the First World War coped with the wartime sacrifice and the transition to peacetime conditions. The focus is on the states of East-Central Europe (largely identical with the regions of the ex-habsburg Empire), approaching that area in a way that complements the recent work of cultural historians on ‘demobilization’ in Western Europe in the 1920s.