Fear, not aggression or unrestrained militarism, propelled the Central Powers to war in the summer of 1914. Rulers in both countries believed that they faced an imminent existential threat. Defensive motives stood behind belligerent actions. At the centre of the crisis was Europe’s weakest and most under-armed great power, Austria-Hungary. Guided decisively by Berchtold and the young hawks in the Foreign Ministry, its leaders feared internal subversion and were convinced of their neighbours’ hostile intentions. Alienated from the international order and overwhelmed by a sense of dire threat and the conviction that war alone offered an escape, these men were intensely dangerous. Alek Hoyos, the chef de cabinet at the heart of decision-making, expressed the attitude most clearly when, after letting slip to an acquaintance in mid-July that ‘the war was as good as agreed’, he added, ‘if the world war comes out of it, it makes no difference to us’.151 In Germany, Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg, who guided Reich policy in July 1914, was also disillusioned with multilateralism and sufficiently ruthless to consider a ‘preventative war’, but he did care deeply about avoiding global conflagration. He disastrously miscalculated the risk he faced. Despite their warnings, he underestimated Russian and British willingness to fight. Yet his greatest mistake was to place Germany’s fate unconditionally in the hands of the desperate and despairing men in Vienna. At the end of July it was this, not military urging for mobilization, which made retreat impossible.
Despite all the blame subsequently heaped upon them, the Central Powers’ soldiers played only an indirect, albeit important, role in bringing about the conflagration. Both Conrad and Moltke, through their urgent calls for preventative war, prepared the path to the catastrophe by impressing on the civilian officials who guided policy in the July crisis the need for aggressive action as the only escape from a nightmare strategic situation. Yet, once faced by the reality of war, both proved hesitant. Conrad was indecisive. Moltke was clearly scared. Falkenhayn was more aggressive, as were his underlings: the mood in the Prussian War Ministry when the ‘State of Imminent War’ was declared was euphoric: ‘everywhere beaming faces, handshakes in the corridors, each congratulates the other’.152 Yet between them, Bethmann and Moltke delayed mobilization to the point at which the Russian military’s premature, aggressive and secret preparations made invasion appear imminent. For public opinion, this was crucial. The leaders of Austria-Hungary and Germany, having failed in their bid for localized war and triggered instead a general conflagration, were beholden to their peoples. Bethmann at least was hopeful: ‘if war comes and the veils fall, the whole nation will follow, driven by necessity and peril’.153
2
Mobilizing the People
ASSASSINATION
On Monday, 29 June 1914, Vienna’s morning newspapers carried doleful reports of the previous day’s assassination of the imperial heir and his wife. Their front pages were edged with thick black borders, and the tone was one of shock and deep bereavement. ‘One simply cannot grasp the monstrousness of it,’ lamented the Reichspost. ‘Our heir to the throne, the man on whom the peoples of the Habsburg Monarchy had placed all their hopes, their entire future, is no longer.’1 The gutter press thought the murder ‘an appalling calamity’, and the Christian Socialist workers’ Arbeiter-Zeitung considered it a ‘breathtakingly hard misfortune’.2 To any foreigner unfamiliar with the Empire’s internal condition, sipping his Melange and flicking through the eulogies that morning, it must have appeared that Franz Ferdinand had been universally loved and admired. He was, gushed the metropolitan elite’s paper, the Neue Freie Presse, an ‘exceptional figure’, whose demise was to be lamented: ‘The Monarchy has lost something great.’3
The uniformly glowing newspaper obituaries to the archduke belied a complex popular reaction to news of the assassination. Franz Ferdinand’s demise elicited a very wide range of emotional responses in Austria-Hungary. Significantly, however, belligerence was not generally among them. The desire of the Habsburg Foreign Ministry and military hawks for war was not widely shared. Central to understanding how the war could take place and why it was subsequently fought with such tenacity is a shift in popular opinion in July and early August 1914. The Austro-Hungarian and German peoples underwent a remarkable but rarely recounted emotional journey during that summer of crisis, culminating in acceptance and even belief in the necessity of conflict. The Habsburg heir’s violent death was the starting point. Its ability to incite popular passions has long been dismissed, for, notwithstanding the obligatory panegyrics of the Viennese press, Franz Ferdinand had not been popular in the capital. He was known as crass and boorish, and people had worried what he might do when he finally grasped the levers of power. German nationalists feared his reputed pro-Slav tendencies; others believed (probably more accurately) that he would cause upheaval by attempting to recentralize authority. His insistence on the divine right of kings did little to recommend him to the capital’s Socialist workers.4 Yet contrary to what has often been claimed, citizens were anything but indifferent. When, five days after the murder, the bodies of the archducal couple passed through Vienna, people did turn out in large numbers. Journalists recounted how they crammed into the Hofburgpfarrkirche (the Church of the Imperial Court) to see the funeral bier in the morning and, late in the evening, tens of thousands lined the route to the city’s western rail station, whence the bodies were to be transported to their final resting place at Artstetten Castle.5 The majority came out of curiosity, rather than from any real sense of loss. One onlooker from out of town found to his surprise that ‘no-one in the masses of people packed solid around me expressed any special signs of grief or sorrow, and, indeed, there was much laughter and telling of jokes’.6
This curiosity, morbid fascination with a celebrity death, and not belligerence, was what really defined Vienna’s mood in the first week of July. The same observer was right on the mark when he described a city ‘agog with excitement’ at news of the assassination.7 The pictures that came out of Sarajevo made for compulsive viewing. Readers of popular illustrated journals could ghoulishly follow the final hours of the archducal couple, from the scene of the first, failed bomb attack, through their fateful departure down the steps of Sarajevo’s city hall (a photograph, it was stressed, taken just ‘minutes before the catastrophe’), to the dramatic apprehension of the killer Gavrilo Princip (or someone thought to be him) by gendarmes and exotic-looking Bosnians in fezzes, just after he had fired the fatal shots.8 Newspapers drew in even those unsympathetic to the monarchy by playing up the human tragedy. The heir and his wife were a little too middle-aged to move many hearts, but they left behind them three young and photogenic children. First to recognize this lucrative angle was Prague’s Národní Listy, which needed to catch the attention of a Czech nationalist audience unlikely to weep many tears over a dead Habsburg. Already on 30 June, it carried on its front page a large sketch of twelve-year-old Princess Sophie and her brothers, Princes Maximilian and Ernst, eleven and ten respectively, underneath the headline ‘Sarajevo Tragedy’.9 The Viennese press soon caught on, however, and devoted much space to the orphans’ plight. The imperial house’s care for them and their distraught reactions on learning of their parents’ deaths were earnestly discussed. The morbid pathos reached excruciating levels when it was put about that Franz Ferdinand’s last words to his mortally injured wife were ‘Sophie, stay living for our children . . .’10
The other major topic of conversation was, of course, who was behind the assassinations. Right from the start, the newspapers suspected a plot with origins in Serbia. Although investigations had only just begun, already on 30 June, the Reichspost, a paper close to Franz Ferdinand, published a report claiming Serbian involvement to have been officially proven. That same evening, angry demonstrators gathered outside the Serbian embassy singing and shouting ‘Down with Serbia!’ They burned a Serbian flag before being moved on by police.11 Several nights of patriotic and anti-Serb protests followed. On 1 July a patriotic crowd marched to the Hofburg, the imperia
l residence, singing and shouting ‘Up Austria!’ before trying and failing to get close enough to the Serbian embassy to protest. On the next evening, when the bodies of the archducal couple arrived in Vienna, the protestors were more determined and the mood was uglier. A whistling and boisterous crowd several thousand strong faced off police near the embassy, and a few even succeeded briefly, at around half past nine in the evening, in breaking through the cordon surrounding it. Although they were eventually persuaded to depart, more demonstrators arrived a couple of hours later and fighting broke out. Street cobbles were prised up and hurled at the patrolmen; one police horse lost an eye. The cordon had, however, been reinforced, and the crowd was unable to penetrate it. Eventually, the protestors gave up and marched instead to the Bulgarian embassy to cheer Bulgaria and shout ‘Down with Serbia!’ A small number headed for the Russian embassy, around which the police had, with foresight, already placed a guard. Only at one in the morning were the streets again quiet. This was not the last of the trouble, however. Only on the following evening did violence reach its peak when demonstrators returned, singing patriotic songs and armed with sticks, stones and fireworks. They confronted 500 patrolmen and 200 mounted police. The fighting was bitter. The police launched mounted charges in order to clear the streets, but again only at one in the morning did this ‘patriotic’ riot finally end.12
The aggression of these crowds was not representative of public opinion in Vienna. The people taking part in the protests came from various walks of life, but they were all young men. While the Neue Freie Presse noticed some workers and apprentices, and blamed much of the rioting vaguely on ‘half-grown boys’, the core of the demonstrations was in fact, as another of Vienna’s papers observed, made up of ‘numerous students, office workers and members of the educated classes’.13 The singing of the patriotic hymn ‘The Watch on the Rhine’ alongside the imperial anthem may also suggest that hard-line German nationalists were among them. The numbers actively involved were relatively small, usually from 600 to 1,000 people. This was true even at the last major demonstration outside the Serbian embassy on 3 July. Then, although tens of thousands were passing through the streets near the embassy and one paper estimated the crowd at 15,000, those actually participating in the rioting totalled perhaps 800 people.14 Nonetheless, their violence was to some extent the prelude to a wider shift in mood, reflected in newspaper commentary, which took place in the second and third weeks of July. Public anger grew, fuelled by the Serbian press’s arguments that Austria-Hungary, through its misguided policies in the Balkans, had only itself to blame for Franz Ferdinand’s assassination, and by the release of evidence uncovered by the official investigation implicating the Serbian authorities in the murder. Hostilities did not yet appear likely; the Habsburg Foreign Ministry encouraged newspapers not to unsettle people with this possibility prematurely, and as late as 15 July the Hungarian Minister President, Count Tisza, told the Magyar parliament that although war with Serbia was possible, it was neither desirable nor probable.15 In upper- and middle-class circles, however, a wish for some sort of decisive response, even if not necessarily armed conflict, increased. By 19 July, as the government was preparing its ultimatum, even the formerly moderate Neue Freie Presse was demanding ominously that ‘relations with Serbia must be clarified’.16
Beyond the Habsburg metropolis, Franz Ferdinand’s murder caused disquiet. The archduke was certainly not short of enemies among nationalists and Socialists in the Crownlands. The Polish Socialist Ignacy Daszyński, for example, later described him vitriolically as ‘in our circles the most disliked, bah, the most hateful personage. A clericalist, fierce reactionary, enemy of the Poles . . . the archduke personified for us the threat for the future.’17 Yet in the far-flung corners of the realm, where people had seen little of the heir and were less conscious of his faults, his violent death frequently came as a shock. Czas, the Polish conservatives’ paper, was probably more sincere than its Viennese counterparts when it started its first report on the assassination ‘Tragic news stuns the state and its population.’18 In Lwów’s public parks, unlike in Vienna’s Prater, the music did stop when accounts of the murder reached the city, and in Prague the Czech National Theatre broke off a performance, announced the news from the stage and sent its audience home.19 In Carniola, loyal Slovene subjects lined the track when the train carrying the couple’s bodies to Vienna passed through on 2 July. At stations, the train was mobbed by tearful crowds.20 Everywhere, there were Habsburg subjects who, like the Czech Jan Vit, at least rued the archducal couple’s ‘tragic death’.21 Some were seriously shaken. Aleksandra Czechówna, for instance, a good Catholic and patriotic Pole who moved in Cracow’s theatrical circles, had met the archduke once a few years previously when he visited her home town, and admired his deep religious faith and the sacrifices that he had made for his wife. She was horrified by the ‘terrible crime’. He had been, she confided to her diary, ‘the nicest and, one can say, ideal man whom one couldn’t help but adore’.22 Others in the Monarchy’s borderlands had justified worries about the murder’s political consequences. Miecisław Schwestek, the Polish stationmaster of Zbaraż, a small town in the north-eastern corner of Galicia, remembered that ‘the news of the tragic death of the archducal couple made a frankly dreadful impression on us’. Living just half an hour from the Russian frontier, he had every reason to keep an eye on international events, and knew how strained relations between Austria-Hungary and Serbia had become. ‘Supposing that the initiative for the assassination came from Serbia, we predicted the outbreak of war between these states and feared that this entanglement might trigger the outbreak of a world war.’23
Above all, the assassination markedly increased racial tensions right across the Habsburg Empire. This began, unsurprisingly, in Sarajevo, which was rocked on the day after the murder by anti-Serb riots. Shops, private residences and Orthodox Church buildings were all attacked. During the following twenty-four hours, unrest spread to other towns in the region, and on 1 July martial law was declared across Bosnia-Herzegovina.24 It also jumped to nearby Dalmatia and Croatia, which had their own Serb minorities. In Agram (now Zagreb), there were protests over several days, similar in some ways to the Vienna riots but with the significant difference that they were directed not only against a foreign power, but above all against Habsburg Serb subjects. Thus on 1 July around 500 people, many of them students, carried a Croatian flag and a huge portrait of Franz Ferdinand through the city’s streets. When they became bored of chanting ‘Down with King Peter!’ (the Serbian monarch) and ‘Down with the murderers!’, they wrecked a café and threw stones at Serb property. In Ragusa (today Dubrovnik), disturbances on 4 and 5 July were similar in sentiment but were caused mainly by peasants from outside the city. Some forced the mayor to take down the Serbian flag flying at half mast next to the Croatian tricolour on the town hall, while others stampeded through the premises of Serb nationalist associations, broke into a Serbian school and destroyed signs with Cyrillic writing. Troops only restored peace with difficulty on the second day, when two people were injured and fifteen arrested. By 8 July, such violence was so widespread that the Emperor’s representative in the neighbouring Kingdom of Croatia, the Ban, authorized his officials to use all necessary means to enforce public order.25
It was not only Serb minorities that were affected, however; other Habsburg South Slavs faced discrimination and persecution. For people across the Empire, it seemed scarcely credible that a gang of teenage students armed with nothing more than a few hand grenades and Browning pistols could alone have murdered the heir to the throne, the second most important man in the realm. Conspiracy theories swept the land. The Habsburg authorities, unable to believe their own incompetence, were no less gripped. The Austrian Interior Ministry sent a coded telegram to all Crownland heads on 2 July warning that more Serb assassins had entered the Monarchy. There were house searches in Prague and arrests of Serb students, alleged spies and sympathizers all across the Empire, from Ljubl
jana to Lwów.26 In ethnically mixed areas in the centre and south, Habsburg South Slavs found their neighbours eyeing them nervously. We know most about Styria, a Crownland which lay 400 kilometres from Sarajevo and was inhabited by Germans and Slovenes, not Serbs. Here, the reporting of the local German press on the assassination was from the start hysterical. Newspapers, regardless of their political affiliation, surmised that a network of spies and activists buried deep in Habsburg society and controlled from Belgrade was at work. Nationalist agitators were alleged to have led astray the Slovenian population. Its clergy was regarded with particular suspicion. So too were Slovenian ‘Sokol’ gymnastic clubs, which were accused, no less unjustly, of having celebrated the heir to the throne’s demise. One paper even reported completely mendaciously that on the same day as the Sarajevo assassinations, South Slav activists had attacked another archduke in the Styrian town of Marburg as part of a devious plot to extinguish at one stroke the entire Habsburg dynasty.
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