The purpose of this article is to bring provincial and local perspectives into the research of urban space in the wartime Habsburg monarchy. Using the case of Olmütz/Olomouc, a midsize town in central Moravia, it analyzes how various social actors used public space and how they could appropriate its symbolic meaning in wartime. While local urban geography had long been contested by political, most often nationalist actors, World War I introduced fresh themes to the context of the city. Public rituals of loyalty repurposed and intensified some of the old traditions, even as organized and unorganized actors sought to “capture,” “invade,” and potentially “occupy” the same spaces to highlight their agendas in public demonstrations whose form owed much to the traditional public rituals. After October 1918, when the balance of power shifted between nationalist groups, the contest for urban space continued, along with ongoing political unrest, showing strong continuity of wartime practices into the immediate postwar era both in terms of political instability and in terms of the patterns of public ritual.

This article examines the role of associations as protest and riot brokers during the Badeni crisis of 1897 in Habsburg Austria. Drawing on concepts from political science, it demonstrates how these collective actors acted as crucial intermediaries between political leaders and local communities. Through meetings and rallies, associations facilitated the translation of parliamentary conflicts into street politics, while at the same time enabling demonstrations to escalate into violent riots. The article shows how civil society organizations deployed narratives to legitimize street politics and provided emotional framing and organizational capacity that individual activists often lacked. In doing so, associations expanded political participation in Habsburg Austria by bringing broader strata of society into the political arena, while simultaneously destabilizing it by fostering exclusionary violence. By conceptualizing associations as both protest and riot brokers, the article reinterprets the Badeni crisis not simply as evidence of national hatred but as a manifestation of mass political mobilization in a rapidly modernizing society.