© Kurt Bednar

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kurt Bednar was born in 1950 and has roots in Czech Republic. He married into a Minnesota family and graduated twice from the University of Vienna, in law (1974) and in his late passion history (2012). In 2017, he published in a book in German called "Paper War between Washington and Vienna, 1917-1918". Now, his new book "Transatlantic Relations and the Great War" is available.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Transatlantic Relations and the Great War explores the relations between the Danube Monarchy of Austria-Hungary and the modern US democracy and how that relationship developed over decades until it ended in a final rupture.

As the First World War drew to a close in late 1918, the Mid-European Union was created to fill the vacuum in Central and Eastern Europe as the old Danube Monarchy of Austria-Hungary was falling apart. One year before, in December 1917, the United States had declared war on Austria-Hungary and, overnight, huge masses of immigrants from the Habsburg Empire became enemy aliens in the US. Offering a major deviation from traditional historiography, this book explains how the countdown of mostly diplomatic events in that fatal year 1918 could have taken an alternative course. In addition to providing a narrative account of Austrian-Hungarian relations with the US in the years leading up to the First World War, the author also demonstrates how an almost total ignorance of the affairs of the Dual Monarchy was to be found in the US and vice versa.