by Simon Winder
The Habsburg engagement in Mexico may have been a longstanding one, but the Austrian branch of the family, even if many of its members were raised in Spain, bailed out from any serious interest in the New World very early on, leaving the money and the headaches to their Spanish cousins. This changed in the 1860s when Napoleon III came up with the ingenious idea of setting up Franz Joseph’s younger brother, Maximilian, as emperor there. The more anyone reads about Napoleon III the more horrifying he becomes – his sheer childishness and role as a sort of Lord of Misrule in the mid-nineteenth century caused quite as much damage as Bismarck. Indeed it could be argued that the chaotic, hyperactive yet ineffectual nature of France in this period made Bismarck possible and necessary.
In any event, the Mexican adventure was a Napoleon III classic: it stemmed from what seemed a fair certainty that the United States was breaking apart. While quietly pleased about this, most European countries remained neutral, but Napoleon III saw an opportunity to carve out a French empire in Mexico and cut a deal with the Confederate States of America which would give him an entirely new and grand field of operations. The frivolity of packing off thousands of baffled rural conscripts to fight and get killed in Mexico now seems breathtaking, but we have the advantage of knowing that Napoleon misjudged every aspect of the situation, a French-backed Mexican monarchy being almost the single most offensive thing possible if you happened to be a rapidly recovering, angry and reunited United States. Prussia’s increasingly threatening stance meant that Napoleon had to withdraw most of his troops so that they could be beaten at home at the end of the decade, leaving Maximilian with almost no support and eventual execution.
Maximilian does seem to have been a rare example of a smart Habsburg (indeed there was a persistent rumour that his real father was Napoleon I’s son, the short-lived Duke of Reichstadt – which would explain it) and he had carved out a pleasant life for himself developing the port of Trieste, ruling bits of Italy, running the Habsburg navy and designing a palace on the Adriatic which he never lived to see completed. Still only in his late twenties and fresh from a fun trip to Brazil, it must have seemed at least plausible that he could make his own empire, even if he must have been in part aware that Napoleon III only saw him as a bit of class with which to dress up some inept piracy. His reign lasted three years, political disturbance meaning that he was never crowned, and by any stretch it was all a fiasco. All that remains of his reign is Mexico City’s Paseo de la Reforma, built by an Austrian engineer at Maximilian’s instigation – and formerly if briefly known, in honour of Maximilian’s wife Charlotte (briefly Carlota), as the Paseo de la Emperatriz, plus some superb uniforms and (an unintended by-product) Manet’s famous paintings of his execution. In the matchless History of the Army Museum in Vienna, there is a set of Prussian-style metal helmets for Maximilian’s bodyguard, but with the spikes replaced by the Mexican eagle-snake-cactus combination and the whole lot given a coating of gold-plate. These gorgeous objects (together with a genuine Imperial sombrero) make it appear, perhaps rightly, that more time was spent designing Habsburg gewgaws than in working out how to rule an enormous, fractured and ancient country with no interest in an Austrian emperor with a Belgian wife backed by French troops.
This regrettable and needless incident robbed Franz Joseph of a useful brother, drove their mother, Sophie of Bavaria, into a depression from which she never recovered and tipped Maximilian’s widow into lunacy. At the time Franz Joseph was recovering from the humiliation of his armies by the Prussians at Königgrätz and the loss of Italy, but Maximilian’s execution began the long, strange process by which Franz Joseph found himself through bad luck, longevity and his own dreary personality shedding entire generations of Habsburg support as his endless reign lumbered along. Close relatives shot themselves, became transvestites, were assassinated or died of typhoid, while the droningly diligent uniform-obsessive continued his decades upon decades of bureaucratic routine at the Schönbrunn and Hofburg palaces, a routine varied by equally boring hunting trips, all the way to the middle of the First World War.
Possibly the tedium of Franz Joseph was a clever response to the intractable issues that surrounded him. Maximilian’s exploits at least had a freshness to them, whereas Franz Joseph was doomed to spend his life dealing with a mass of nationality issues which could never be resolved but only kept in play. If he had spent more time trying to get to grips with the Wallachians’ burgeoning sense of Daco-Romanian romanticism it is not clear how helpful this would have been. The obscurantism and almost gleeful provinciality of the Hungarian gentry had been an annoying constant in Habsburg life ever since they had been unwisely released from Turkish bondage in the wars after the relief of the siege of Vienna. But it was only a limited help to Franz Joseph that Slovak, Romanian, Croat and Serbian hatred for the Hungarians meant that he never had to deal with a united front against himself. As the empire was only held together by the existence of the monarch, wearing a variety of different crowns, Franz Joseph and his ever more ankylosed regime had to be just as suspicious of German nationalism as Romanian, leaving German-speaking Bohemians and Austrians in positions of exposed and doubtful privilege.
It has been endlessly argued whether the sheer length of Franz Joseph’s reign held the empire together – much like wallpaper holding together an otherwise shot and mouldering plaster wall – or whether a more normal change of regime, with Franz Ferdinand taking over in 1900 or so, could have saved it. This is unknowable, but just as Wilhelm I’s long and latterly dotard reign can be seen as a disaster for Prussia (Bismarck’s semi-dictatorship would patently have ended the moment Wilhelm’s son had been allowed to take over), it is hard not to think that Franz Joseph’s very existence, supervising Central Europe from early railway-building to the invention of the aerial bomber, was unhelpful. His reign saw the amazing process whereby cities such as Prague and Pressburg (Bratislava) became filled by a new, non-German-speaking working class. Literacy no longer meant writing in German (or Latin in Hungary) but instead in the local and increasingly national language, with figures such as Smetana and even Dvoák having through sheer will-power to make themselves capable of writing in Czech. These are among the most dramatic events of the nineteenth century – a process which continues to unravel unpredictably and sometimes violently today. In the light of the many disasters lying in wait for the descendants of these first nationalists, it is hard not to feel that the Habsburg empire was, right up to its very end, a worthwhile organization, smashed to pieces by a world war it did not want.
I enjoy Austro-Hungarian nostalgia as much as anyone and have had great flurries of reading Joseph Roth and Stefan Zweig, mentally putting away my hussar’s uniform for the last time while humming a melancholy air, my tears dropping with tiny plops into an espresso. When I first visited Vienna in the early 1990s it was still a time-warped cul-de-sac, an ageing and bitter place only just beginning to feel the implications of the Iron Curtain’s disappearance. By 2009 it had become again what its geographical location naturally made it – the point at which German, Italian, Hungarian and Slav criminals intersect, with the European Union as a soft, unmoustachioed version of the empire. This seems in the end a very happy development with enough historical twists and turns to make the Habsburgs seem very distant rather than regretted. Walking around outside St Stephen’s Cathedral, though, it was hard not to imagine the pleasure of seeing troops in really beautiful uniforms (approved by Franz Joseph) using canister shot to clear a path through the tour groups and farting breakdancers.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Lambs and ladybirds » Jigsaw country »
Hunting masters » Ruritania, Syldavia and their friends »
An absence
Lambs and ladybirds
The doubtful pleasures of German unification were symbiotically linked to the explosion in German things – objects and drinks of previously only local interest which could now be spread through new transport systems to create a network of tastes and brands which we
still have to live with today.
My least favourite example of these is marzipan – a highly specialized material which I can just about manage under the controlled circumstances of an English Christmas cake, but which otherwise has some of the untouchable qualities of cat faeces. This is all just unacceptable personal prejudice, of course, but there seem to be a number of uses of sugar that waste everyone’s time and money and warp the lives of those obliged to make them. But setting aside such grim materials as nougat and Edinburgh rock, and the horrors of dragées, the real disaster is Lübeck marzipan and its high temple, the Neideregger shop. Neideregger is a classic example of a business that used simply to be a local problem, but which as the nineteenth century progressed was able to manipulate railways and press advertising to pump its products into a far wider world. My already vexed relationship with Thomas Mann took a further bad turn when I read one of his letters from after his family’s move from Lübeck to Munich, where he excitedly recounts the arrival of a box of Neideregger marzipan to brighten his Christmas.
The shop is a temple to a particular kind of kitsch, perhaps one-third jokey and two-thirds felt to be artistic. Giant models of the Brandenburg Gate, the Eiffel Tower, the Houses of Parliament, all made of hundredweights of marzipan, crowd the windows, while inside there are row upon row of miniaturized marzipan fruit, farm animals, lobsters and so on. I have a robust capacity for sugar but the idea of even the smallest taste of marzipan potato makes me feel on the verge of some systemic shutdown. I feel a mad pleasure in handling the marzipan cauliflowers or tiny baskets of marzipan fish, while feeling the erratic throbs and lurches of my internal organs keenly aware of nearby danger.
In the end, after a surprise encounter in a Lüneberg sweetshop, convulsed with self-hatred, I bought a marzipan lamb with a facial expression of such happy imbecility that it had to be brought home. Here, in the manner of W. G. Sebald, is a photo of him admiring a little matchbox portrait of Kaiser Wilhelm II:
For the past few months the children have taken turns hiding him in ludicrous locations around the house (on the toilet, in the fridge, inside a cereal packet – he had a long stint on the car dashboard where he went sort of melty). He has had some family educational value though as an example of evolution in action – through a brilliant genetic stroke a lamb avoids all risk of being eaten by being born made of marzipan.
Anyway, marzipan is just one of the many unwanted objects that leaked through the arteries of Germany’s new markets. There were so many of these: the absolutely impossible card-game of Skat, invented in the early nineteenth century in Altenburg and making that appealing town oddly prosperous ever since; the flood of nutcracker dolls and garden gnomes from Thuringia which had only ever been a local menace before; the almost inedible Nuremberg gingerbread (although I may have, to be fair, been unlucky in my encounters with it). This spread has not led to uniformity; for example, there remains today a clear demarcation line between wine and non-wine Germany. Equally you can tell when you move away from the Worms-focused pretzel belt, or the central zone from Saxony to Hesse where you can be confident of decent street bratwurst. This irrepressible localism is, of course, one of the keys to Germany’s charm – the marzipan and gingerbread might be universal but there is in parallel always an insistence on local beer, local wine, a specific kind of cake. The evolutionary model works for all kinds of things and some thrive and go national, but some never get anywhere. Bremen, for example, has a very odd black-and-white sort of cake which seems to have been made up in the hope of emulating the stranglehold of Nuremberg gingerbread, but which has been justly shunned, outside a handful of desperate-looking bakeries east of the cathedral.
The innumerable different forms of high-intensity alcohol were also for the most part an industrial creation of the nineteenth century – previously small and local and suddenly able to be made on a national scale, making schnapps as characteristic a mass German product as pianos or guns. As a timorous but insistent enthusiast for these sorts of drinks I have tried so many that I have really lost track, beyond noticing whether they leave a burning or a sticky sensation. Long evenings have gone by in one of the snug bars at the Kaiser Friedrich III in Bremen working through the landlord’s astonishing selection, most startling perhaps the little-known but enjoyably named Prussian Mouthful, which at that point in the evening struck me as so hilarious that I wanted immediately to change the name of this book to A Prussian Mouthful, before being dissuaded, perhaps wrongly. It tastes like something that might be used to clean rust from girders and can be recommended to nobody.
Many years ago I triumphantly returned from then Soviet-ruled Latvia with a bottle of Riga Black Balsam, the unwanted invention of a German chemist in the eighteenth century and a rather cursed gift to my parents (who were hardened and happy Scotch, Calvados and Cointreau drinkers). We would occasionally tip out a bit into a small glass (it looks rather like medium heavy crude) while we discussed whether or not it needed to be mixed with something else, or whether or not its unalluring viscosity meant it had gone off and was now actively dangerous. My own kitchen is now littered with briefly opened then shut bottles of Korn, Kummel, Aquavit and so on and it is understood that it would be unwelcome if I were to rub my hands together and suggest we unbend with a spot of some horror leeched from plums. The last straw in what I had thought of as a harmless, high-proof drinking adventure was a Bavarian Obstler (in a salt-fired stone bottle) which when opened filled the air with an unbearable smell exactly like the fluid ladybirds squirt everywhere when frightened.
What is curious about all these drinks is that they are so nationally specific. They have in many cases moved from being a local problem into a national one, but have gone no further. This is partly of course to do with twentieth-century history – it would be very odd if any of Germany’s neighbours chose to mark a special occasion with the help of a swift Prince Bismarck. But the rest of the world is not needed, given the enthusiasm with which Germans themselves drink the products of a simple industrial process involving doing things to grain and perhaps a few unlucky fruit. Proudest of all German liqueur brands is Jägermeister (Hunting Master), an alcoholic herb and root drink emitted by factories in Wolfenbüttel, where there is also a richly comic corporate shop where you can buy Jägermeister sports clothing, camping equipment, bathrobes and so on. Jägermeister was a relative late-comer, having only been sold since 1934. New drinks can be invented any time, but it adds an extra layer of oddity that something so gormless should have a quite accidentally Nazi element – a curious example of ordinary things happening at less than ordinary times.
Jägermeister is the only German liqueur ever found in airport shops, which will be stuffed with rubbish like raspberry-flavoured Bacardi or Wild African Cream, a sort of Bailey’s in a fake leopardskin bottle, but shuns such classics as Prince Bismarck, suggesting that even Germans going abroad want to leave this stuff behind. As so often, I sometimes wonder whether, just as Germans are all in fact happily tucking into dishes loaded with nam pla or vindaloo paste while I’m the one left with the sausages, so Germans are washing down their baltis with glasses of Chilean shiraz or a Nastro Azzuro while I’m the one left choking on the Prussian Mouthful.
Jigsaw country
I have never found mountains particularly interesting. Through various accidents they have not really featured much in my life. I once climbed Scafell Pike – England’s very own highest mountain – via an indirect and rather remote and challenging route and, my lungs burning, cheeks heaving and so on, I scrambled to the summit and found my momentary be-the-best-that-you-can-be mood fatally undermined by uncontrollable swarms of children, some of them virtual toddlers, the elderly, abandoned supermarket trolleys, the sick and the infirm who crowded the top (‘summit’ seems too strong a term here). It then struck me that it might have been a more intelligent use of life to have simply stayed true to the family creed and stayed in the attractive hotel with a book and a few drinks – that civilization lies in libraries
and bars rather than on some shale-heaped lump with a culturally null view.
This feeling was reinforced after taking a steam train up the Brocken, a mountain outcrop in Saxony-Anhalt. With the whistle blowing and the smell of burning coal and the chugging of the engine and the merry waves of passers-by this was certainly enjoyable (for about four minutes) but as we approached the top the same sense of futility overwhelmed me. Surely mountains are the enemy: the dreary, semi-sterile protrusions which dot the landscape and make it uninhabitable. This is particularly stark in the case of the Brocken because it looks something like a hideous tumour covered in dirty ice, while from the peak you can look down on a happy landscape of farms and small towns, which are admittedly helped out by the water pouring down the Brocken’s sides. The Brocken has always had an association with witchcraft and the uncanny, but these are the enjoyable fantasies of people sitting in pubs down on the distant plain. The only real pleasures of the peak were trying to work out why people would want to stay in the hotel there and admiring the enormous battery of electronic equipment perched on the original 1930s transmission tower. The German obsession with ensuring that all road signs be pure pictograms has resulted in a unique red-edged monstrosity here that had to convey the information in a single image: that it was dangerous to get too close to the transmission tower as under specific conditions huge, oddly shaped blocks of ice clinging to the tower might come loose and crash on top of you causing hideous maiming or death. Wandering around the freezing footpaths, tensed against flying, irregular yet lethal ice-shapes, and admiring the foxes rooting in the hotel bins, I felt an absolute wish not to bother with mountains any more.