From the time of their establishment the Serbs of Southern Hungary215 were, on religious and social grounds, bitterly hostile to the Hungarian State and to the Magyar people. These feelings were deliberately fostered by the Austrian authorities, who saw in the Serbs serviceable local tools to be used against Hungarian factiousness.216 This role was assigned, in particular, to the Serbian Frontier Regiments,217 which consequently became the apple of the Court’s eye; its best soldiers for foreign wars, its most reliable agent for the preservation of the unity of the Monarchy at home.
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We need not consider the position in Lombardy or the Netherlands. In Galicia history had brought about a position as between Poles and Ruthenes very similar to the German-Slovene relationship in the Hereditary Lands. The Poles of West Galicia formed a fully integrated nation, with a large class of nobles, greater or smaller, weaker, indeed, than the Alpine Germans in that it had only a small native middle-class, trade and industry being mostly in the hands of the Jews, while the official classes had also been non-Polish since the Partition, and in that its peasantry was brutalized and oppressed, but still accustomed to regard itself as a Staatsvolk. In East Galicia the Poles had imposed their culture on the Ruthenes as the Germans had on the Slovenes. The entire Ruthene aristocracy had Polonized, and cultural life on its higher levels was dominated by the Polish Church, the Roman Catholic. The national church of the Ruthenes, the Greek Catholic, was ill-endowed and intellectually unpretentious, and outside its priests, the Ruthene people consisted almost entirely of peasants.
The Roumanians of the Bukovina had, during their Moldavian past, evolved their own land-owning aristocracy: the upper class of Boyars, and the humbler Masils and Ruptaşi, to whose ranks the Russians, during their occupation of the country from 1769 to 1774, had added a third category of ‘Slactici’. At least the big men were, however, thin on the ground in 1780, for a high proportion of them had emigrated, rather than submit to Austrian rule.218 They had, indeed, been allowed to retain their lands, from which they drew rentals as absentee landlords, greatly to the detriment of the peasants, for the estates were sub-leased and sub-subleased, and every intermediary got a cut of some kind out of the unfortunate cultivator. The non-noble Roumanian people consisted of peasants, with a few village priests and monks of the Greek Orthodox Church, for here, as in Galicia, the secular ‘middle-class’ occupations were almost entirely in Jewish hands.
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There was another national hierarchy in Dalmatia. The ‘dominant culture’ was Venetian, and the towns largely Italian or Italianized,219 while the non-assimilated Morlak-Croat and Serb peasants lived, for the most part, under exceedingly backward conditions. In Bosnia, the landowning aristocracy was composed of the Moslem ‘begs’, and although the begs constituted only a small minority even among the Moslems, the humblest follower of Islam took precedence over any giaour.
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The differences between the levels of cultural and material development achieved by the various peoples of the Monarchy did not, of course, reside solely in the fact that some of them possessed aristocracies and hautes bourgeoisies of their own, while others stopped short on the peasant-village priest level. Travellers, both Austrian and foreign, who toured the Monarchy in these years, and set down their impressions of its peasantries (the classes above the peasant level are usually treated as broadly homogeneous, except for such special cases as the Polish or Hungarian small nobles, or the Galician and North Hungarian Jews), accepted this truth as candidly as though they were modern anthropologists investigating the lives of Central African or Polynesian natives. Thus the gypsies are invariably treated as practically sub-human, especially that sub-species of them which resided on the outskirts of every Transylvanian village, doing the jobs which no one else would touch, such as that of scavenger and public hangman.220 These, writes Damian, lived in such degradation that the authorities did not attempt either to tax them or to press them into military service.221 Bendant found them ‘indolent and vicious’, and ‘the women, especially, very disgusting’.222 The Transylvanian Vlachs (or rather, the male of the species: the women are usually described as hard-working and decent) come off little better. Damian writes of them that
… they are still some centuries behind the other inhabitants of the province in the development of their physical, moral and intellectual standards. One finds many of them who have hardly anything human about them except a human form, and even that is distorted and disfigured by goitres and other deformities. This physical barbarousness is coupled with an addiction to drunkenness and to sensual licence. Industry and diligence are no less foreign to them. Most of them laze about behind their sheep, others lounge round the country as carters.223
Bendant, writing rather later, is no kinder to the unfortunate Vlachs:
… of an aspect rather lively but of a brutal and perverse character … filthy and ill-clothed … immoderately addicted to drinking brandy…. Their national character is crafty, vindictive, pilfering and superstitious, with no fixed principles of morality or religion. To which, when we add that they are destitute of arts and civilisation, their condition must evidently be abject, and we need not wonder if the Hungarians, as well as other nations, treat them like slaves.224
The features of the life of the Polish and Ruthene peasant which strike observers most forcibly are the extreme squalor in which he and his wife live – a one-roomed clay and wattle hut, without windows or chimney,225 shared by the poultry all the year round and by the family horse and cow in winter – his invincible sloth, and his (and her) inordinate addiction to strong liquor, of which he (and she) consumed fabulous quantities. Damian writes:
When a Galician peasant goes to market, he calles in on the way at various Jewish taverns and takes a drink on credit. On the way back he repeats the visit and drinks away half, sometimes all, of what he has made at the market. He drinks 20–30 glasses of schnapps at a sitting. His wife is not a hairs-breadth behind him. On Sundays after Mass they foregather in the tavern and drink schnapps all day, without a crumb of bread, until sundown, when they stagger home.226
‘Altogether,’ writes Damian, ‘idleness and stupidity are still the chief characteristics of the Polish people.’ And on this point, too, Damian’s description, drastic as it is, is borne out by other testimony. An official in 1780 calculated the average annual consumption of spirits by a peasant family in Galicia at 122 quarts; 50 for the head of the family, 40 for its other members and 32 for ‘feasts, solemnities, etc.’ A quart cost 6 kreuzers, which was the calculated value of a day’s haulage robot performed with two animals. One consequence of this was that the peasants were in permanent debt to the Jewish innkeepers, to whom, however, they seem to have borne no ill-will, regarding them rather as fellow-sufferers under the yoke of the landlord, the ultimate recipient of the money.227
The descriptions of the Southern Slavs of Hungary, Croatia and Dalmatia are usually kinder. The note of really venomous contempt which we find in almost all travellers’ observations on the unfortunate ‘Vlachs’ does not recur in their accounts of the Serbs, Croats and Morlaks, who are usually credited with some attractive qualities: they are frank and hospitable, the men doughty fighters, the women pre-maritally chaste. But these peoples, too live under the most primitive material conditions imaginable; they, too, consume vast quantities of strong liquors and in their case, too, the need to satisfy this craving is the only inducement, other than compulsion, which can persuade their males to do a hand’s-turn of work; practically all their other needs are taken care of by their women-folk, who spin, cook and even reap the fields (a sickle, with which the reaping was done, was regarded as an unmanly implement). The Magyar peasant is only a little better, especially in respect of industry: his own country-men, while claiming him to drink less than the Slovaks, and to be prouder, more intelligent and cleaner in his habits than they, admit him to be more indolent, less hard-working; all he asks of life is a weather-proof cottage, a sheepskin bunda and a sufficien
cy of bread and fat bacon, and if he has these, he will not stir for more. Risbeck robustly lumps together all the peoples of Hungary, except some of the German colonists and the Court-polished aristocracy, as ‘still in a barbarous state’.228 Of the ‘lesser’ peoples of the Monarchy, only the Czechs come off better, and that largely ex silentio; travellers regard Bohemia as a German land, and only perhaps remark that some of its inhabitants speak ‘Sclavonian’, without finding any noteworthy distinction of mores or standards between them and the local Germans.
These testimonies agree too closely not to carry conviction, especially when we find them repeated almost exactly decade after decade. Bendant, writing in the 1820s, while favourably impressed by conditions in West Hungary, found the Magyar herdsmen of the Alföld ‘as rude and savage as the animals among which they dwelt’.229 The Englishman, Russell, notes of his journey through Silesia in 1824 that ‘the nearer one approaches to the frontier of Poland, the further he recedes from the industry and diligence of the pure German portions of the province; instead of Saxon activity and liveliness, he encounters Polish misery and servility’.230 Similarly, when passing southward through Styria, ‘instead of the substantial dwellings in the other parts of the province, nothing can exceed the misery of the peasantry’.231 The Slovene peasants seen by him lived in log cabins of one room, with one small window and no chimney. In Carniola they lived on ‘black broth, thick with vegetables, still blacker bread, and sometimes a scanty platter of small, rank, watery potatoes’.232
Hain, at the end of the 1840s, has exactly the same hierarchy. He, too, concedes the Czechs’ industry, and brackets them top with the Germans and Italians. The Magyars, Slovenes, Slovaks, Poles and Ruthenes come in a middle category, the Serbs, Croats and Roumanians last. The Southern Slavs are ‘idle and negligent, and work only with the most miserable implements … The Morlack, while brave and hospitable, dislikes work so passionately that only the threat of hunger can overcome his indolence’.233 The East and South-East of the Monarchy has no conception of the diligence and unresting endeavours with which agriculture is carried on in the Alpine Lands and Lombardy.234
It is more striking still that Bruck makes exactly the same points in the memorandum submitted by him to the Emperor in 1860.235 Of all the peoples of the Monarchy, he allows only the Germans, the Italians and the Czechs some willingness to work, whence the areas inhabited by them are relatively prosperous. But ‘in nearly all Hungary and Croatia and Slavonia, in Galicia and the Bukovina’, all development is held back for lack of satisfactory labour, ‘because a few hours’ work a day, or a few days’ work a week, are often sufficient to satisfy the modest needs and claims of the family. The rest of the time is spent in brutish sloth, or in the tavern.’
There is, indeed, no need to labour the point. The same gradations, if perhaps less steep, were perceptibly present in the inter-war years, and it would be surprising if they had vanished altogether even today.
There was one virtue which a member of such a ‘backward people’ might possess which made him a valuable ‘subject’, however unsatisfactory he was in other respects. He might be a good fighter. Such were, in particular, the Serbs and Croats, and we find them praised by travellers and esteemed by authority for that reason. Others of these peoples were not commonly credited even with this redeeming quality.
These observations obviously do not justify a God’s eye classification of the peoples of the Monarchy into better and worse. None of the writers whom we have quoted had a true anthropologist’s eye. All of them were, consciously or unconsciously, applying the criterion of social utility: how far were the objects of their observations profitable members of the community, in virtue either of military prowess, or of ability and willingness to benefit themselves, their masters, and the State by plus-values produced by their diligence, sobriety and thrift, stimulated by appreciation of the rewards of those qualities. And when that criterion was applied, the Germans and Italians unquestionably towered above the other peoples of the Monarchy. If not naturally more intelligent, certainly not more artistic, they had learnt to use their brains. They were, by comparison, industrious, methodical, dependable, sober and clean. They appreciated material comfort and did not mind working for it. They were unreluctant town-dwellers, skilful artisans, enlightened farmers, men capable of rising in the world.
These were the qualities (apart from that of usefulness as cannon fodder) which made a people valuable ‘subjects’ to a Monarch, and from the Habsburgs’ point of view the Germans were, of course, far more important than the Italians. The latter were peripheral, and not numerous in the Central Monarchy, where the Germans, on the other hand, constituted the largest single nationality, which further enjoyed the unique advantage of being represented in practically every Land of the Monarchy, in most of them, in numbers sufficient to make them locally important: in the Central Monarchy, it was only in Galicia, the Bukovina, Croatia and Carniola that their numbers were insignificant in 1780.236 They were even more easily the most numerous and important people of the Habsburgs’ subjects if we take into account their indirect subjects in the German Empire; and this we must do. It was true that by this time the titles of German King and Emperor had, as we have seen, become mere shadows; nevertheless, they were still the loftiest of all those to which the Habsburgs could aspire and those most dearly cherished by them, and it was to the maintenance of their Imperial position that their world policy was nearly always primarily directed. While this did not in the least inhibit them from ruling over non-Germans, such rule was always in some sense a secondary objective, valued chiefly by the criterion of how far it contributed towards the real goal, and those peoples were essentially instruments or auxiliaries. There was still something of partnership in the relationship towards the Reich of the German King and his German subjects.
This apart, the prestige of the Austrian Court attracted to it a steady stream of ambitious young men from the smaller Principalities, desirous of taking service with it, so that if the Monarch ran short of native officers, civil servants or professional men and intellectuals, he could draw on a well-nigh inexhaustible reservoir of serviceable material from the Reich. The recruits so obtained were not few in numbers, and in quality probably superior, man for man, to the native products. We shall see in the ensuing pages how much Austria owed to them.
When all this is considered, it is not in the least surprising that when Maria Theresa and her advisers created their centralized administration in the Hereditary and Bohemian Lands, and also their centralized army, they should have made the language of the services German. If there were to be such central services, efficiency demanded that they should be conducted in one language, and as things stood, that language could be no other than the German. And when German (Austro-German and other) writers claim, as they are fond of doing, that Maria Theresa’s measures, and even those of her son, did not constitute ‘Germanization’ in the later sense of the term, they are justified up to a point. Neither the Empress nor her son was a German nationalist in the sense that either would have derived any Treitschkeian satisfaction from a feeling of having advanced the ethnic frontiers or enhanced the glory of the German Volk as such. The German language and culture were for them simply vehicles for the consolidation of the Monarchy and the efficient conduct of its affairs, and they were quite uninterested in the ethnic origin of their servants, provided they did their work efficiently and loyally. For that matter, it was not even a hundred per cent Teutonic culture that their non-German subjects were being asked to accept, for their countless forebears who had acquired it in earlier times had brought to it their own contributions, which had made of it something which differed in many respects – often strongly to its advantage – from what the worthy and efficient, but stolid and unprepossessing Teutons could have evolved from their own stock, unlightened by this cross-fertilization.237
It is particularly easy to understand when we remember that when the reforms were first introduced, Austria had not yet acquired G
alicia, and had only just lost, and still hoped to recover, Silesia; it was thus far more Germanic than it was destined to become a few years later. Silesia was, indeed, the place of origin of the chief author of the reforms, Count Haugwitz.
Nevertheless, the linguistic Germanization of the services, especially taken together with the Germanization of much of the educational system which was its necessary accompaniment, did amount to the imposition of a Germanic culture on the public and much of the social life of the Lands in which it was introduced, and once national feeling awoke among the other peoples of the Monarchy, none of them would gladly submit to having its affairs conducted in a language, and its general cultural life adapted to a pattern, which was not its own, least of all if the language and the pattern were those of a people living in political association with them. This would be galling even if the spirit of the State and of its servants was one of complete national neutrality; if either the Monarch or his servants departed from that neutrality, the relationship would become intolerable. And we may remark that it was putting a great strain on the Germans themselves to place their national culture in this favoured position, and to ask them to regard it as not their own.
The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918) Page 13