The Fiume Crisis

[An] excellent example of how modern historians are adding texture to our understanding of 20th-century Europe...The colorful story of Fiume has indeed been told before, but never with so many fresh and fascinating insights as Reill provides. -- Tony Barber * Financial Times * Reill's depiction of the local, enriched by massive research in Rijeka's archives (and some at the Vittoriale [degli Italiani]), is a delight...One of the pleasures of Reill's work is its inclusion of period photographs...Throughout the book, Reill paints deft portraits of people and events. -- R. J. B. Bosworth * Literary Review * A superb book, smartly conceived and beautifully written. With a genius for unearthing fascinating stories of local people, then using them to illuminate larger issues, Reill forces us to reconsider in profound ways how we conceive the history of the immediate postwar period in Europe. This history from below questions stale nationalist certainties and depicts vividly how communities worked to create their own options in a challenging postwar world. -- Pieter Judson, author of <i>The Habsburg Empire: A New History</i> The Fiume Crisis offers a fundamentally new way of thinking about war and postwar rebuilding. By zooming in to a specific city at the crossroads of many different pasts and multiple possible futures, Reill provides a fresh perspective on who makes history happen-bilingual cabbage sellers and young schoolteachers, emigre lawyers and seductive dockworkers-all those who tried to create a city that could escape the ravages of war and economic devastation. Their creativity and vision, triumphs and failures come alive in this breathtaking story. -- Alison Frank Johnson, author of <i>Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia</i> In this fascinating and important book Reill transforms our understanding of both the Fiume crisis and the whole geopolitical metamorphosis of Europe that followed World War I. She shows that the struggle over the city between Italy and Yugoslavia reflected a much deeper and more complex history of Adriatic identities in a Habsburg and post-Habsburg context. -- Larry Wolff, author of <i>Woodrow Wilson and the Reimagining of Eastern Europe</i> A magisterial account of everyday life in the multi-ethnic city of Fiume after the end of the Great War. Moving well beyond the familiar story of the soldier-poet Gabriele D'Annunzio and his occupation of Fiume, Reill succeeds in telling the fascinating story of how a city of considerable cultural complexity dealt with the challenges of being a small successor state in a post-imperial world. -- Robert Gerwarth, author of <i>November 1918: The German Revolution</i> A brilliant reevaluation of the nationalist myths and legends that have grown up around the history of Fiume under Gabriele D'Annunzio. Shifting our gaze away from his charismatic personality to the experiences of the citizens of Fiume, Reill demonstrates the persistence of imperial loyalties underpinning their quest for greater autonomy. This book forces us to question what we think we know about the relationship between nationalism and empire in the aftermath of the First World War. -- Tara Zahra, author of <i>The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World</i> In this gem of a book, Reill peels away the sensational stories that made Fiume notorious as both a diplomatic thorn in Woodrow Wilson's peacemaking and the prancing ground of proto-fascist Gabriele D'Annunzio, revealing a more thrilling, politically meaningful history. In the plucky polyglot city's colliding authorities, crazy quilt laws, and contradictory wants, Reill vividly captures the human comedy as well as the shoals on which hopes for the Great Peace to follow the Great War foundered. -- Victoria de Grazia, author of <i>The Perfect Fascist: A Story of Love, Power, and Morality in Mussolini's Italy</i> Reill offers a new interpretation of Fiume...Will surely be one of the most, if not the most influential monograph on Fiume in years to come...Impressive in its thoroughness. -- Agnes Ordasi * Hungarian Historical Review *