A Mad Catastrophe

by Geoffrey Wawro

  One diplomat jotted down the startling observation that “the German element, always the strongest glue in Austria, has now become the most powerful element of its decomposition.”20 The Germans, fearing their eclipse in Austria, hotly defended their language and culture and abandoned traditional liberal parties in favor of völkisch ones like Georg von Schönerer’s Pan-Germans, who asserted that nationalism “is more important than dynastic patriotism.”21 For the first time, even German Austrians began to argue for the partition of the Habsburg monarchy into national states. Schönerer spoke of his “German heart” and called the German (not the Austrian) kaiser “our emperor.” German deputies in Badeni’s Reichsrat cheered every time the name Hohenzollern was mentioned, support for the ascendant Prussian dynasty being a pointed rebuke to the Habsburgs. Subversive ideas such as this strangled the old multinational ethos of the Habsburgs.

  The growth of Vienna mayor Karl Lueger’s Christian Social Party reflected the new tone.22 Austria’s Pan-Germans, who had weakened after the fall of Bismarck in 1890 and the indictment of Schönerer in various scandals, rebounded under Lueger during Badeni’s tenure as prime minister. With all of his adoring references to the German Reich, Schönerer had been an alien on the Austrian scene. Lueger threw all that out, expressing loyalty to the Habsburgs, but kept the popular bits: anti-Semitism and contempt for Austria’s majority Slavs. Where the cosmopolitan flavor of Vienna had previously been a point of pride, with Viennese dropping words from around the empire into their daily speech, it now suggested mongrel decadence to German chauvinists. Could a real German still refer to the waiter who brought drinks in the café as piccolo, the Italian word for “boy”? And casually use a Polish word, chai, to order tea? Could the Hungarian word for “other” still be dropped into everyday speech, as in “Geh’n wir auf die maschik Seite” (let’s cross to the other side)? Could a German still describe a sour business deal as meschuge, Yiddish for “crazy”?23 Austria’s vibrant Jewish culture, in particular, found itself under attack. Yiddish receded as anti-Semitism—“the socialism of fools”—expanded. Books such as Die Judenfrage (The Jewish Question) pointed to a Jewish plot to subvert and destroy the monarchy: two-thirds of the newspapers in Cisleithania were in the hands of Jewish editors, and according to the anti-Semites the situation was worse in Hungary, where “Judeo-Magyars” dominated the press, professions, art, commerce, and industry, serving as “staff officers of public opinion.”24

  Tolerance and even admiration for diversity became passé as bigoted German nationalism developed into a pulsing force in Austrian politics. Feeling this German pressure, the Slavs—with the Czechs in the forefront—asserted their own interests, threatening to dismantle the German administration and ambience of Cisleithania. Austria’s leaders wrung their hands but did little else, Badeni making the obvious but overlooked connection between these internal hatreds and the military security of the empire: “A country of nationalities cannot wage war without danger to itself.”25

  Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who bulked larger as the emperor aged, worried most about Austria’s Hungarian nationality. He was appalled by Franz Joseph’s massive new round of “national concessions” to the Hungarians in 1903, which the archduke interpreted as nothing less than a death blow to the monarchy’s already impaired military.

  The Habsburg army served a social and political function in Austria-Hungary as nowhere else. With every male in the monarchy liable for military service, it was potentially a “school of the state” that would de-nationalize the empire’s dozen nationalities, teaching them to speak German, revere the emperor (whose portrait hung everywhere), and value their status as multinational “Austrians.” It was precisely that unifying function that the Hungarians attacked, by slashing military budgets—even in times of crisis and rapid technological change—and creaming off as many recruits as they could for the Magyar-speaking Honvéd or national guard instead of the regular army.26 The k.u.k. army had been withering away for years because of Hungary’s boorish refusal since 1889 to permit the synchronization of the empire’s annual recruit contingent with population growth on either side of the Leitha. Thus, even as the empire’s population exceeded 50 million, the army still recruited based on a census of 37 million. In 1900, only 1 man out of every 132 was a soldier in Austria, compared with 1 in 65 in France, 1 in 94 in Germany, and 1 in 98 in Russia. This yielded an army half the size of France’s or Germany’s and one-quarter the size of Russia’s. Even Italy drafted and trained more men per 100,000 inhabitants than Austria.

  Hungary’s refusal to allow increases in the recruit contingent or budget meant that artillery—the new queen of the battlefield in an age of quick-firing guns and chemical explosives—could not be increased. Here too the Austrians lagged, with just one (obsolete) gun per 338 troops compared with one gun per 195 troops in Germany and France.27 This shortfall would have massive repercussions in 1914, when the Dual Monarchy would find itself outgunned and outclassed by its rivals.

  Finally, in 1903, the Hungarians made a great show of granting an additional twenty-four thousand recruits per annum, but at a breathtaking price. Hungarian emblems would now be affixed to Austro-Hungarian units raised in Hungary, a blow to the notion of the “joint army”; Austrian officers serving in Hungarian staffs and regiments would be “repatriated” to Austria, as if it were a foreign land; Hungarian would now be the official language of Austro-Hungarian military schools and tribunals located in Hungary; and the Honvéd would finally be permitted to have its own artillery. That last privilege had been scrupulously withheld by Vienna since 1867 so that Austrians would have the upper hand in any civil war with Hungarians. Adding insult to injury, Austrian taxpayers would henceforth have the privilege of paying not only for their own Austro-Hungarian regiments but for one-fourth of Hungary’s as well—52 of 196 Hungarian infantry battalions, 28 of 108 Hungarian batteries, and 28 of 108 squadrons of Hungarian cavalry—at an annual cost to Austrians of 40 million crowns, a sum that surely would rise every year. This insult was only compounded by the fact that Hungary shouldered so little of the Dual Empire’s military burden; with three times the population of the little Balkan kingdom of Rumania, Hungary paid about the same to the Austro-Hungarian common army every year as Rumania did for its own.28

  All objective observers laid the decline of the Austro-Hungarian military at Hungary’s door. The rulers in Vienna were no exception, and following the 1903 concessions those outside the emperor’s drowsy and rather credulous inner circle began planning to do something about the Hungarian impediment. Quietly, the forty-two-year-old Archduke Franz Ferdinand added a Plan U—as in Ungarn (Hungary)—to the raft of Austrian war plans in 1905. If the Hungarians continued their obstruction of every Austrian effort to revive the monarchy, a large Austrian army would stream into Hungary by rail and the Danube, seize Budapest, and install a Habsburg military governor. Of the five Austro-Hungarian corps situated in Transleithania, only one—IV Corps, recruited around Budapest—was expected to fight for Hungary in a civil war. The rest were manned with Croats, Rumanians, Slovaks, Ukrainians, and Serbs and were expected to fight for the emperor. According to the French embassy, a civil war “like 1848,” when Austrian troops had invaded Hungary and crushed a revolution there, was avoided in the early 1900s only because the Hungarians knew that they would lose a military contest and the Austrians feared that the Italians would seize the opportunity presented by an Austro-Hungarian civil war to invade contested Habsburg territories like Trieste, Trentino, and South Tyrol.29

  The humiliation of the 1903 army concessions was such that Franz Joseph’s prime minister, war minister, and general staff chief all submitted their resignations (all were refused). The French embassy spoke of the “emperor’s utterly inert, stupid and despairing soul”: how else could the “disastrous arrangement” with Hungary be explained? “The emperor treats the biggest, richest, most populous half of his monarchy as if it were nonexistent,” the embassy marveled. “Unless this measure is repea
led, the consequences will be enormous.”30 The language and flag concessions—which everyone assumed the Hungarians would deploy as precedents to finish off German altogether the next time around—emboldened the Czechs to demand their own Bohemian flags as well as the Czech language of command, which the emperor—illogically—refused even to discuss. Czech nationalists pretended not to notice; now Czech recruits defiantly answered zde (here) instead of hier when officers called the roll.

  The collapse of the multinational army, traditionally held together by the German language, was accelerating. Fluency in German had previously been demanded from all officers, with all recruits obliged to memorize eighty German words of command. Supplementing this agreement to give the Hungarian language pride of place in Hungary’s military schools and tribunals, the emperor had made the most stunning concession of all: freeing Hungarian officers from the obligation to learn and speak German. Henceforth they could palm that job off onto their NCOs. Franz Ferdinand’s military secretary wrote a withering (anonymous) critique of this appeasement—this Militärpolitik—and the archduke applauded from his Bohemian country house at Konopischt: “Outstanding! Publish immediately. I will bear all of the costs.”31 Now military leaders in Vienna spoke of an Armeefrage, a wide-open “army question,” since everything seemed to be in play: language, flag, hymns, and even armament, the Hungarians having finally won the right to procure their own artillery. Worse, as Colonel Karl Bardolff—one of Franz Ferdinand’s closest advisors—noted, each of these exhausting negotiations with the Hungarians revealed just how far the Austrians were falling behind the other European armies: their trained companies of infantry were smaller, they had fewer machine guns per battalion, and they possessed less artillery.32 Funds and men were so short that a new Austro-Hungarian corps district, the XVI in Dubrovnik, was manned not with fresh battalions but with cooks, musicians, clerks, and scrapings from the other fifteen corps. In 1910, the Hungarians tried to block construction of two Austro-Hungarian dreadnoughts, relenting only when the emperor promised to build a third battleship in the Hungarian shipyard at Fiume (Rijeka).33

  In 1907, Emperor Franz Joseph finally discovered a way to pressure the Hungarians, or thought he had. He would grant universal male suffrage in both halves of the monarchy with an edict from the throne, thus empowering—at last—the non-Hungarian, potentially pro-Austrian elements in Transleithania. But the Hungarians would simply ignore the emperor’s edict for three years and then, in their 1910 parliamentary elections, refuse to implement it, confining Transleithania’s vote to wealthy, educated Magyars. Cisleithania introduced universal male suffrage immediately, and the results were an unexpected disaster for the throne. Social Democrats took 86 of the Reichsrat’s 516 seats, and petulant blocs of Slavs and Germans took the rest, paralyzing the parliament with their quarrels. The Reichsrat, previously divided between centralizers and federalists, now divided along class and ethnic lines. Social Democrats attacked the privileges of the crown, the rich, and the church. Most deputies joined one of more than twenty “national clubs” inside the chamber. By 1913, the Austrian Delegation that met annually with a Hungarian Delegation to coordinate policy and ratify budgets had degenerated into a spoils system, with seven Germans, seven Poles, four Czechs, five Social Democrats, seven from the Christian Social Party, three Croats, three Slovenes, two Ukrainians, two Italians, and so on, until the forty seats were filled.34 On the Hungarian side of the Leitha, the delegation was not so diverse, as the dominant Magyars stamped out every effort by the Rumanians and other subject nationalities to speak their own languages in school or public offices as “contradicting the cardinal principles of Hungarian national policy.” The more chauvinistic among the Magyars, such as Count Albert Apponyi, spoke proudly of a cultural “policy of colonization.”35

  Opening the first Reichsrat elected with expanded suffrage in 1907, Franz Joseph implored the deputies to “be more conscious of their duties to the imperial state” than to their various peoples, but there was little hope of that in the age of nationalism.36 Under pressure from Austria’s Germans, the emperor had repealed Badeni’s enlightened language law in 1899, and a new outbreak of German-Slav violence forced the mass resignation of the emperor’s cabinet in November 1908. Martial law followed in Prague, where twenty thousand Czech and German rioters pummeled each other for two days, the Czechs swarming out of the Czech-speaking departments at the essentially segregated Charles University, the Germans from the German ones. Three hundred were killed and six hundred wounded—breathtaking carnage in peacetime.37 Similar outbreaks over the education issue followed in Laibach (Ljubljana), Troppau (Opava), Vienna, and Brünn (Brno), where furious crowds of Austrian Slavs tore down Habsburg flags and bellowed Russian and Serbian anthems. The American embassy in Vienna judged this latest internal crisis “of interest from the international standpoint, as showing the extremes that racial feeling has reached in various parts of Austria.” The empire was imploding, and the emperor was forced to quarter his most reliable troops—Bosnian Muslims—in the streets and squares of towns like Ljubljana to stop the attacks on German schools, theaters, and clubs. As the Austrian novelist Robert Musil put it, German institutions in non-German areas had come to annoy everyone: the towns “had a past and even had a face, but the eyes did not go with the mouth, or the chin with the hair.”38

  And so the fabled Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy supplanted representative institutions to govern the monarchy.39 To absorb the growing numbers of college graduates, revenue-depleting jobs abounded in the state service. Debarking in his hometown of Klagenfurt, Robert Musil took in “the provincial headquarters, schools and universities, barracks, courthouses, prisons, bishops’ palace, assembly rooms and theater, together with the people needed to run them.” It was “a vast apparatus of imperial administration,” consisting mainly of “German burgher stock transplanted centuries ago to Slavic soil,” and the transplants bloomed from one end of the monarchy to the other.40 The costs of this patronage—2 billion crowns per year on bureaucrats, about five times what the emperor spent on the military—utterly overwhelmed the state budget, the Habsburg civil service alone consuming more than a quarter of total state revenues in 1913. Addressing the Austro-Hungarian delegations in December 1911, Franz Joseph’s war minister revealed that Hungary alone (which was forever protesting the size of the Habsburg army) employed 320,000 civil servants—more Hungarian bureaucrats, in other words, than there were soldiers in the entire Austro-Hungarian army.41 The coming mass war would require effective mass administration, and Austria-Hungary was ill equipped for the challenge. General Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, who would direct the Austrian war effort in 1914, raged before the war against Austria-Hungary’s self-defeating culture of “memos, permission slips, stamps, petitions, minutes and reports.”42 Position, title, rank, and form were always cherished above efficiency, leading to the empire’s legendary bumbling, which was bad enough in peace and would be ruinous in war.

  The Habsburg army was supposed to operate more efficiently and bridge the empire’s increasingly virulent national differences. It didn’t. A polyglot like Conrad, who became chief of the general staff in 1906 and spoke seven of Austria-Hungary’s fifteen languages, was the exception and not the rule in an army that historically had prided itself on its “supranational” tolerance and élan. In Hungary, languages other than Magyar were simply banned. In Austria, foreign military attachés noticed that the multilingual ideal was rarely attained in practice; theoretically, the men in a Slovenian regiment, for example, would speak Slovenian among themselves but be commanded in German. The troops therefore learned a few dozen phrases in German, but officers in such a regiment were expected to be fluent in Slovenian in order to explain complicated matters and build esprit de corps with their men. In reality, the largely German officer corps would lean hard on cheat sheets like Military Slovenian: A Handbook, which contained useful phrases including “Shut your mouth,” “Don’t speak unless spoken to,” “Wait for me in my office
,” “No smoking in the stables,” and “Do you still not understand?” Regimental officers had to know the language of their men, or at least these fragments of it, but staff officers didn’t. This led to comical scenes at maneuvers—not so comical in war—when staff officers would gallop up to line troops and bawl questions in German (“Where is the enemy, in what strength?”) and the line troops would stare back uncomprehendingly.43

  These linguistic controversies augured badly for an empire founded on the idea of regional and ethnic cooperation. With most Austro-Hungarian officers really just knowing their native languages plus German—the army’s own statistics revealed that fewer than 10 percent of them could speak languages like Slovenian, Ukrainian, or Rumanian—the notion that they were eager citizens of their Ruritanian world was a myth. At least as disturbing as the lack of fluency in so many important languages were the demoralizing politics involved in the ones they did speak. Hungarian officers in the common army, for example, were unofficially exempted from the requirement to attain fluency in other languages, so desperate was the emperor to have proofs of “loyalism” from the Magyars. This enraged Austrian officers, who were not released from the obligation and who hated having to wrestle in their spare time with Czech or Polish grammar or the Ukrainian alphabet.44 Czechs furnished a high proportion of officers in the army but rarely made general; they were also routinely denounced for speaking Czech among themselves, or even to ladies in the café. An army that would punish an officer for writing a postcard in Czech had clearly lost whatever supranational élan had characterized it in the past.45

  Language was just another of the many problems facing the Habsburg military. The Hungarians, determined to curb the power of Vienna, had kept the army so small since 1867 that it was ludicrously over-officered. With 20,000 officers for an army of 335,000 in 1913, it had the highest ratio of officers to troops of any great power, and these officers were changing. In the first place, they were graying, which meant senescent commanders and a huge apparatus of well-paid retirees who drained funds from the active-duty army. Pensionopolis was Habsburg army slang for that bloated corps of retirees.46 In 1910, for example, there were thirty-three active three-star generals and three times as many living in retirement. Among two-stars, the situation was just as bad: 91 active, 311 retired. Among one-stars, the retiree-to-active ratio was four to one.