| This dissertation studies the conduct and experience of the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Serbia during the First World War by focusing on the metropolitan community of its capital city, Belgrade. On the one hand, it analyzes how the Military General Government of Serbia went about achieving its aims of securing peace and order in the occupied territory and exploiting its economic resources to support the Monarchy's struggling war effort. On the other hand, it examines how the occupied population maneuvered the occupier's policies in an effort to secure its own material and spiritual well-being. By examining the implementation of occupation policy in the context of everyday life on a local level, the study reveals that the occupying regime used a combination of coercion and persuasion to manage a hostile population whose interests stood diametrically opposed to its own. It thus revises the existing interpretation that the Austro-Hungarian occupation was a mere extension of the repressive conduct of war against Serbia during the invasions of 1914-1915.;The true subject of this study is the interaction between occupier and occupied, and its effects on the wartime community in Belgrade. Despite their antagonism, these two populations did not simply stand in opposition to one another, as some historians have suggested. Instead, their interaction was characterized by a more complex network of professional and personal relationships. Furthermore, the experience of occupation created tension within the Serbian community over the moral and economic disparities in which the varying nature and degrees of interaction resulted.;The more coercive measures of the occupier, such as the strict regulation of daily activity, censorship, surveillance, and economic exploitation, did provoke defiance in the occupied population. However, its more persuasive measures, which aimed at restoring a sense of normality in the lives of the occupied population and meeting some of its material and spiritual needs by providing employment in the occupier's administration, establishing schools and entertainment venues, and facilitating religious and secular celebrations, managed to secure the compliance and in some cases, the cooperation of the population. Ultimately occupier and occupied reached a modus vivendi , and the Military General Government succeeded in averting active resistance to its absolute rule in occupied Serbia. |
