Vienna is the essential starting point for any inquiry into the origins of the First World War. There the fires that consumed Europe and the world were lit, then fanned into a blaze. Both the long- and short-term causes of the ruinous conflict can be traced back to the Habsburgs’ peculiar worldview and fractious central European holdings. The short-term cause of the conflict, all agree, was the July Crisis of 1914, which followed the assassination of Habsburg archduke Franz Ferdinand in June by a Bosnian Serb named Gavrilo Princip. The escalating tensions in July, driven by the suspicion that the Russian-backed Serbian government had aided the assassination plot, exploded into war in August. The war’s long-term causes included imperialism: the competition among the European great powers, the United States, and Japan for new markets, raw materials, and naval bases, chiefly in Africa and Asia. Another long-term cause of the Great War was the existence of contending alliance systems: the Anglo-French-Russian Triple Entente and the German-Austrian-Italian Triple Alliance.
Those alliance systems, dangerous enough in themselves, became far more explosive when outfitted with aggressive war plans, mass conscripted armies, and modern armaments: dreadnought battleships, quick-firing field artillery, high-explosive shells, and machine guns. Indeed, the European arms races that began in the 1890s were themselves another powerful spur to war. The German Schlieffen Plan of 1905, which called for the rapid mobilization and offensive use of the German and Austro-Hungarian armies, was answered by equally aggressive French and Russian war plans. All of the plans were given force with massive military and naval buildups that had begun in the 1890s and made the mood of 1914, already dark and dangerous, even more so.
The generally reactionary attitude that prevailed in Europe during this period also contributed to the outbreak of war. The heart of Europe was commanded by moody, conservative monarchies: Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy. Without the safety valve of liberal governments, those regimes looked queasily at the new politics, culture, and manners of their time. Socialists, pledged to the abolition of monarchy, became the biggest party in the German Reichstag in 1906, prompting at least one German general to call for a “brisk merry war against the reigning confusion.” Conservatives in Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Italy had similar views—as did British and French conservatives, for that matter. War would permit martial law, union-bashing, and crackdowns on “subversive” parties; it would also harden a nation’s muscles, flush out the riffraff, devalue materialism and eroticism, and revive patriotism. This colossal naivete in the face of the looming bloodbath, which would leave sixteen million dead and twenty-one million wounded, still beggars explanation.
Austria-Hungary played an unlikely role in sparking the conflagration. It is often argued that Germany deliberately and paradoxically hastened the war’s outbreak because of the weakness of its Austro-Hungarian ally. As both statesman and historian, Churchill noted the dangerous absurdity that “the glory and safety of Europe hung upon its weakest link.”1 Austria was disintegrating in the modern “age of nationalism.” An essentially feudal power whose crown lands with their dozen nationalities were botched together in the sixteenth century, Austria-Hungary limped into the twentieth century under attack from its own peoples, who wanted federalism, home rule, or independence.
Germany’s nervousness about the future of Austria-Hungary was a major cause of the Great War. Churchill, in his own history of the Eastern Front in World War I, cited it as perhaps the cause: “This vicious, fatal degeneration made the peace and civilization of mankind dependent upon the processes of disintegration and spasms of recovery which alternately racked the Habsburg Monarchy.”2 Having gone to the brink of war with France and Britain in 1905 and 1911 over the issue of Morocco only to see the Austrians back out, the Germans seized on the July Crisis of 1914 as their last, best chance to push the Austro-Hungarians into a reinvigorating world war before the monarchy collapsed from its internal divisions or was swallowed up by the surrounding pan-Slav powers of Russia and Serbia.
A Mad Catastrophe is about Austria-Hungary’s fatal degeneration and its impact on European civilization. This is one area of the First World War that has been largely overlooked by historians. Most allude to Austro-Hungarian weakness but don’t plumb it in depth. Other historians have treated Austria-Hungary as a genuine great power and analyzed its military and foreign relations as if nothing extraordinary were amiss. A Mad Catastrophe fills in this neglected area by charting the decline of Austria-Hungary in the decades after 1866—when it had fought (and lost) its last great European war—and its stumbling course through the crucial years 1912–1914, when the Balkans were in an uproar and Vienna looked, hesitated, looked again, and then madly leaped into a great war that it had no hope of winning.
Austria-Hungary’s decision to enter the war in the first place was exceeded in its recklessness only by the Austro-Hungarian offensives of 1914, another neglected area amid all the scholarship on World War I. The Austro-Hungarian invasions of Serbia and Russia in 1914 had been planned for years, and their bloody, disastrous failure confirmed Austria-Hungary’s impotence, which had only been suspected before the war. Those guns of August in Serbia and Russia established the pattern for the rest of the war: an overextended Germany, a winded Russia, and a demoralized Austria-Hungary with its hands in the air.
Central to the origins of the war, Austria-Hungary played a no less crucial role in the war’s outcome. War plans in 1914 had been fixed for a decade. Germany was to destroy the French and British armies with a massive, enveloping “right hook” through Belgium (the first phase of the Schlieffen Plan), while Austria was to blunt and unhinge the Russian “steamroller”—an army of six million—with a quick, efficient mobilization and brutal jabs by four Austro-Hungarian field armies deployed in southern Poland and western Ukraine, a borderland the Habsburgs named Galicia. Austria’s exertions would, it was hoped, throw the slow-moving Russians back and buy time for Germany to win on the Western Front, then transport three million troops east to join two million Austrians for a final reckoning with Russia. Russia was not expected to survive such a contest. Its army was huge but hamstrung by a low level of education and shortages of everything from coats, boots, and medicine to rifles and shells. The Serbs were not even supposed to be a factor. The Austro-Hungarians would parry them with a “Minimal Balkan Group” of eight divisions while Austria’s forty other divisions dealt with Russia. Only then would Belgrade be beaten and carved up.
We know why the Germans failed to win in the west. We have books on the Marne and Ypres, as well as analysis of the Schlieffen Plan and its application by General Helmuth von Moltke the Younger, one of the chief architects and overseers of Germany’s war plans. But what happened in the east in 1914? We have only the foggiest view of the war there. How could the Austrians—still clinging to great-power status—have sent twenty divisions (not eight) against the Serbs and still have been defeated? And what happened against the Russians on the Eastern Front? History speaks of stirring Austro-Hungarian victories at Krásnik and Komarów in August 1914—but then, on the very next page, puzzlingly describes a chaotic Austrian retreat from those places, leaving all of Poland and Ukraine to the Russians and requiring a massive German rescue effort that doomed whatever hope the Germans had of winning the war in the west.
Austria-Hungary’s anxieties and pretensions as a fading great power were a chief cause of the war, and these same qualities were also the source of its defeat. The war began with gunshots in Sarajevo that struck down the Habsburg heir apparent and his wife. These murders should not have triggered a world war. Why they did had much to do not just with German aggressiveness but also with the same Austro-Hungarian blundering that was so much in evidence during the war itself. Even as Habsburg diplomats drafted the deliberately hard-edged ultimatum that would make war unavoidable, the Austrian military was making no preparations for hostilities. In fact, Austria’s generals and statesmen took vacations during the height of the July Crisis of 1914—hardly the b
ehavior one would expect from the indignant leaders of a wounded great power. When war came, due to Vienna’s prodding, the Austrians marched with the same lack of resolve, and deployed an army that was feeble in every important area: transport, artillery, shells, machine guns, rifles, and tactics.
The deficit in Austro-Hungarian leadership was at least as bad. Emperor Franz Joseph I, the darling of the Austrian tourist industry today, with his benevolent gaze and white mutton-chop whiskers, was an altogether malevolent force in 1914. Although not as senile as the Czech writer Jaroslav Hašek suggested in his novel The Good Soldier Svejk (“two wet nurses, breast fed three times a day and so gaga he probably doesn’t know there’s a war on”), the emperor had been in an alarming state of dotage for years. He proudly refused to abdicate in favor of his nephew, the fifty-year-old Archduke Franz Ferdinand, but he also refused to take his job seriously. An old man who had lost his way, he stranded the Habsburg monarchy in the middle of every vital crossroads it encountered in the years leading up to 1914.
Compared with the eighty-four-year-old emperor, the sixty-one-year-old general staff chief, General Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, was a Young Turk. Conrad was regarded as a brilliant strategist who would deliver victory against the big, ungainly Russians and then smack down the Serbs as well. Why he didn’t is another fascinating, neglected story. The Great War in the east was so unrelievedly ungreat because of Conrad. Even by loosened 1914 standards, his leadership and decisions were appalling, wrecking the Austro-Hungarian army in a matter of weeks.
Austria-Hungary’s spectacular self-destruction also doomed its German ally. Whatever hope Germany had of winning the Great War ended with the humiliating Austrian defeats of 1914. The smoldering residue of those defeats—a contested Poland, Galicia, and Serbia—piled up on Germany’s plate and made victory on any major front far more difficult than it would have been with even a mediocre Austro-Hungarian performance at the start of the war. A Mad Catastrophe adds the eastern face to a war generally regarded from the west, and helps explain the slide of Vienna and Berlin into unwinnable wars of attrition and eventual defeat.
Introduction
Never had an empire swooned so quickly. In 1866, the mighty Austrian Empire—the anvil on which British subsidies and seapower had hammered Napoleon into dust—was decisively beaten in the Austro-Prussian War. On the eve of this crushing defeat at the hands of Germany’s junior power, the Austrians had seemed practically invincible. Austria’s Habsburg dynasty ruled the second-largest empire in Europe (after Russia), encompassing an array of peoples from varying backgrounds and nationalities. For years the Habsburgs had also presided over the German Confederation, a league of thirty-six independent states, ranging from Protestant Prussia in the north to Catholic Bavaria in the south and bonded by a common culture and tongue. When the Kingdom of Prussia, the most industrialized and ambitious of these Habsburg subsidiaries, attempted to carve out the heart of the confederation and bring it under its own leadership with the backing of Italy, which coveted the last Austrian footholds south of the Alps, Austria rallied its loyal retainers—the majority of the German states—and declared war.
No one saw Austria’s defeat coming. Pundits like Friedrich Engels (who made a living analyzing armies before he turned to economies) had predicted an Austrian victory. War correspondents gaped in disbelief at the ineptitude of the Austrians, who saw their once magnificent army beaten at Königgrätz in July, driven from Italy in August, and forced to capitulate on the banks of the Danube as the Prussian statesman Count Otto von Bismarck and general staff chief Helmuth von Moltke the Elder dissolved the Austrian-led German Confederation, attached most of its states to Prussia, and prepared to besiege Vienna.
It would be hard to understate the psychological trauma of 1866. A whole idea was lost, the “Austrian idea,” which held (with a straight face) that the nationalities under the Habsburg scepter, whether German, Italian, Polish, Czech, or Hungarian, were as happy to be there as under any other arrangement, including a nation-state. Vienna had been fighting a rearguard action against the nation-state since the French Revolution of the 1790s, which had grouped nations like Italy and Poland—previously partitioned and occupied by alien great powers (including Austria)—into new states administered by their own peoples. The Congress of Vienna of 1815, which had terminated the Napoleonic Wars, restored those new nation-states, including the Kingdom of Italy and the Duchy of Warsaw, to Austrian, Russian, or Prussian rule. Thereafter, Vienna regarded the breakaway of any part of its empire—Germans to Germany, Italians to Italy, or Hungarians to Hungary—as nothing less than treason that threatened the survival and legitimacy of Austria.
That risk of dissolution was what made the defeats of 1866 so dangerous. Habsburg emperor Franz Joseph I had derived much of his prestige from his control of the great Italian port and hinterland of Venice and his presidency of the German Confederation. The exotic Italian outpost and the industrious German dependencies validated the multinational character of Austria. If the Habsburgs could hold here, they could hold anywhere. Once the emperor lost Venetia to the Kingdom of Italy in 1866 and the German states to an expanded Prussia (which renamed itself Germany in 1871), he was forced back on the largely Slavic, Hungarian, and Rumanian crown lands of the empire, where only trouble awaited in an increasingly assertive “age of nationalism.”
The nations of Austria—Germans, Czechs, Croats, Hungarians, Rumanians, Poles, and a half dozen others—began to question more vigorously the “Austrian idea” after Königgrätz. “I was born a German,” Austrian poet Franz Grillparzer mused, “but am I still one?” What use was there for a little German rump in multinational Austria when a vast German great power had formed just across the border? Anschluss—the idea of merging Austria with Germany, a cause that would gain traction and ultimately infamy in the first half of the twentieth century—already beckoned. The soul-searching was just as intense in the other, non-German nations of east-central Europe, which had been taught to trade their independence and national development for union under German Austrian tutelage in what one Austrian official called “a saucepan of the nations.” But the saucepan burned through at Königgrätz, and the small nations began to reconsider their options in view of Austria’s defeats and waning power.
None reconsidered with quite the daring of the Hungarians. A Turkic people, who had ridden out of the Ural Mountains with the Huns and settled the plains of the middle Danube in the ninth century, Hungary’s dominant Magyar ethnic group had always been insecure about its place in a largely Slavic and Rumanian land. The Magyars now seized on the weakness of Austria to magnify their power. Leading Hungarian politicians appeared in Vienna after Königgrätz to press a Faustian pact on the thirty-six-year-old Habsburg emperor Franz Joseph I. If he would recognize a Kingdom of Hungary, embracing not just the Magyars but the surrounding Croats, Slovaks, Germans, Ukrainians, and Rumanians as well, then Hungary—which had rebelled against Vienna as recently as 1848—would put those expanded resources at the service of the Habsburg monarchy.
Emperor Franz Joseph was a punctilious man who famously spurned the featherbeds of his palaces and slept on an iron army cot instead, rising each morning at first light to visit (briefly) his mistress of twenty years before beavering away at the mountains of paperwork thrown up by his German-speaking officialdom. Impelled by his beautiful (and untouchable) wife, Elisabeth, whose strong sympathy for the Hungarians may have had something to do with the fact that they were as keen to escape the clutches of her husband as she was, Franz Joseph duly conceded all of the Hungarian political demands. He had been nudged into the decision by his new foreign minister, Count Friedrich von Beust, who was a Saxon expat with little understanding of Austrian history or culture. Beust, who also held the post of Austrian prime minister, pressed the emperor to meet all of Hungary’s demands on the assumption that a quick resolution of the Hungarian problem would solve all of the other ones: “You manage your hordes,” Beust winked to Hungarian prime minister
Gyula Andrássy in 1867, “and we’ll manage ours.”
Contemporaries expressed surprise at this Habsburg eagerness to please, for the Hungarians, despite their vast pretensions, accounted for just one-seventh of the monarchy’s population, and their demands might have been easily dismissed. But Franz Joseph wanted a quick fix after the defeat of 1866, and he thought he was securing the monarchy’s future by agreeing to split its administration between two capitals (Vienna and Budapest), two “peoples of state” (the Germans and the Hungarians), and two monarchs (himself as emperor of Austria and himself as king of Hungary).
On paper, at least, the creation of Austria-Hungary from Austria contained a certain logic. The Hungarians would no longer seek to secede from the monarchy and would put their Hunnish talents to work repressing any who would. The division of the empire into a German-run “Cisleithania” and a Hungarian-run “Transleithania”—separated by the muddy Leitha River, which curled between Vienna and the Hungarian city of Sopron—superficially simplified the monarchy’s nationality problems by subcontracting the eastern ones to the Hungarians so that the German Austrians could focus on the western ones in a system of “dualism.”
But whereas the German Austrians had a relatively soft touch, officiousness tempered by irresolution, the Hungarians were officious, hard-nosed, and resolute. After the 1867 Ausgleich or compromise, which created Austria-Hungary, they pressed ahead with a hard campaign of “Magyarization.” Their saucepan of the nations had a single flavor: paprika. Whereas the Germans viewed the “people of state” label as license merely to patronize Cisleithania’s Slavs by requiring them to interact with Habsburg officialdom in the German language, the Hungarians viewed theirs as license to abolish Transleithania’s other nationalities: Slavs and Rumanians would be “de-nationalized” by prohibitions on their churches, schools, languages, and cultures. It became a treasonable offense to refer to Franz Joseph as “emperor” inside the borders of royal Hungary. “King” was preferred; “monarch,” “sovereign,” and “crown” were acceptable.
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