This is one of those books where there is more to the study then the title suggests. While it's not news that the Austro-Hungarian state was a brittle structure, Healey takes one through the process of how the lack of a dynamic sense of Austrian citizenship and the increasing privation that Vienna's inhabitants were subjected to helped create an all-against-all mentality. An outlook that overwhelmed the ideal of patriarchal authority that animated the greater Austrian state; even if that state collapsed more from exhaustion than from violence.

Further, in the process of literally engendering the social conflicts that engulfed Vienna, Healy makes note of how these domestic conflicts drove the dynamic of post-war Vienna. Besides the soldiers who were unable to achieve psychological demobilization, and who thus brought the violence of the front back home to their families and communities, there was also a civilian population that never had the chance to decompress from the impact of the war, with dire consequences for the post-Habsburg Austrian state. ( )