This article takes a comparative approach and deals with the issue of the death penalty in Austria and Czechoslovakia after the First World War. Whereas both successor states strived for progressive reforms that would delimit them from the discredited old regime, each of them found a different response to the experience of extreme violence and massive use of the death penalty during the First World War. While Austria abolished the death penalty by law in 1919 and anchored this abolition into its constitution in 1920, Czechoslovakia, despite expectations to the contrary, gradually embedded this punishment within the process of national state consolidation in the post-war chaos. This article argues that this difference was not only a result of an actual dominance of retentionists or abolitionists, but it had its deeper roots in the relation of the new states to the vanquished empire and the values of the regime change. Austrian Social Democrats, alongside other politicians, saw a way out of the state collapse and the post-war legal nihilism through laying down the state's new foundations and by the abolishing the death penalty, which they regarded as unjustifiable. In Czechoslovakia the death penalty was dismissed as a means of national repression under the Habsburgs but it proved useful in maintaining military discipline in the Czechoslovak Army and managing its peripheral regions where the state had little representation. It also served as a penal instrument to control the skyrocketing criminality that occurred amidst the post-war chaos. While the misery of defeat called for a fresh start in Austria, the death penalty turned out to be irreplaceable for securing the national independence and future prospects in victorious Czechoslovakia.

本文采用比较的方法，探讨一战后奥地利和捷克斯洛伐克的死刑问题。尽管两个继承国都在努力进行渐进式改革，以将它们与声名狼藉的旧政权区分开来，但对于第一次世界大战期间极端暴力和大量使用死刑的经历，每个国家都有不同的反应。奥地利于 1919 年依法废除死刑，并于 1920 年将这一废除纳入其宪法，而捷克斯洛伐克尽管有相反的预期，但逐渐将这种惩罚嵌入到战后混乱中的民族国家巩固过程中。本文认为，这种差异不仅是保留主义者或废奴主义者实际占主导地位的结果，但它更深地植根于新国家与被征服帝国的关系以及政权更迭的价值观。奥地利社会民主党与其他政治家一道，通过奠定国家的新基础和废除他们认为不合理的死刑，看到了摆脱国家崩溃和战后法律虚无主义的出路。在捷克斯洛伐克，死刑被认为是哈布斯堡王朝统治下的民族镇压手段，但事实证明，死刑在维持捷克斯洛伐克军队的军事纪律和管理国家很少有代表性的周边地区方面很有用。它还充当了一种惩罚工具，以控制在战后混乱中发生的暴涨的犯罪行为。虽然失败的痛苦要求奥地利重新开始，