As it was, the rather more formally instituted second-crowned head of Italy – Pope Pius X – refused to recognise the full legitimacy of the Italian state, following in the traditions of his predecessors, though perhaps more ritualistically than in the past. Pius X’s predecessor but one, Pius IX, had declared himself a prisoner in the Vatican in the 1870s, unable to step outside its bounds. Though Italian, just as all popes had been for the last 400 years, Pius IX did not celebrate the creation of an Italian state. Rather, he viewed the Kingdom of Italy as an occupying power in what had formerly been papal territory. Since then, the conflict between church and state had been kept alive in Rome by bull-headed anti-clericals on the one hand and by a stubborn papacy – bolstered by a claim of spiritual infallibility – on the other, with fierce partisans on either side. In 1899, the deliberately provocative erection of a statue of the heretic Giordano Bruno on the site in Rome where he had been burned by the Inquisition led to a papally inspired riot on the Campo dei Fiori. Up until 1913, the papacy forbade Italian Catholics from voting in Italian elections, since casting a vote might be seen as conferring legitimacy on an illegitimate regime. Only in that year, under the so-called Gentiloni Pact, was the ban partly lifted by the Pope, and only then in order to prevent the victory of socialist candidates.
How much such edicts were ever taken to heart by Romans, living in the reality of a united Italian kingdom, its life now stretched into decades rather than being an aberration as the Catholic Church proclaimed, was open to question. Nearly all counted themselves Catholic; most who were eligible voted nonetheless. Foreign Catholics might yet discern a semi-divine atmosphere in the Vatican – even lapsed Catholic Americans such as Theodore Dreiser relished an opportunity to get near to the Pope – and there were still so-called ‘Black’ salons in Roman high society where only those who shared the political leanings of the church were admitted.14 But most Romans were less ideologically or spiritually inclined than these ultra-conservative zealots. Even if they regularly attended church out of custom and allowed their lives to be pleasantly punctuated by the celebration of this or that saint’s day, most Romans were more cynical about the intrigues of the Vatican and more sceptical about its holiness. ‘His [the Roman’s] seat is too near the stage, and the working of the mise en scène is too familiar to him’, wrote Bagot.15
Some Italians disparaged Rome as being too archaic, too trapped in history, too corrupt, too concerned with parliamentarianism rather than action. ‘Fish begin to stink from the head’, ran one article in a nationalist journal, ‘Italy, from Rome’.16 In his 1912 poem ‘The Pope’s Aeroplane’, an extraordinary Futurist imagining of a plane flight across Italy which combined the archaic and the ultra-modern, Marinetti saw Rome as a ‘giant molehill’, its smell of political petty-dealing rising to high heaven. Such refrains were not uncommon. While Italian governments had made Rome the capital of Italy, Rome’s destiny was not complete. For nationalists and for their acolytes – men such as Benito Mussolini, flirting with combinations of socialism and nationalism – Rome had been re-established, not yet restored.
Yet this much was clear to most Italians by 1913, and to some visitors: Italy could no longer be discounted as the victim of European history – broken up, fought on and over, occupied. It was now a great power. Might it not rise further? Not to the level of Britain or France perhaps, but as an equal to Austria-Hungary, its competitor in the Adriatic, and the only other European country (besides Switzerland) which contained a significant indigenous Italian minority. ‘The Pope’s Aeroplane’, a hymn to speed and to danger, planes swooping down and then rising up vertiginously, trains winding like serpents on railway tracks below, ended in Marinetti imagining war between Italians and Austrians, but only as the expression of something deeper, a war of liberation from Italy’s past:
Giacomo Balla, Abstract Speed (The Car has Passed), 1913. Italy, country of the dolce far niente, was also the country of Futurism. Wrote Marinetti: ‘we want to deliver Italy from its gangrene of professors, archaeologists, tourist guides and antiquaries’.
I am free and powerful! …
I am an Italian delivered all of a sudden
From his Christian ballast
And from his Catholic fetters! …
Onward to Vienna! … Onward!17
VIENNA
Shadows and Light
The Kingdom of Italy ended, and the lands of the Habsburgs began, in the Adige valley, in the foothills of the Alps, south of the city known as Trento in Italian and Trient in German. In the sixteenth century Trento had been made famous as the site of a council of the Roman Catholic Church. Since then it had slipped back into obscurity, occasionally being transferred from the authority of one dynasty to another, but always returning to the Habsburgs, a fixed element in the ever-changing scene of European politics. Now, Trento was one of the last remaining pieces of that family’s once vast Italian holdings, a dynastic hangover, an anomaly in the Europe of nation-states, ruled over by the greatest and most historically freighted anomaly of them all: the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
In 1909 Benito Mussolini had briefly lived in Trento, invited by the local socialist party to be their coordinator. In 1913, the city’s chief significance was as a railway town lying on one of the main arteries between southern and central Europe. To the north lay the Brenner Pass, nature’s gateway through the Alps. On the other side of it was Austria proper, where one spoke German, albeit in an accent and dialect that would make a north German shudder.
From the Brenner Pass it was only a few dozen miles to Innsbruck, and then a few hours further to Vienna – to St Stephen’s Cathedral, to the Hofburg palace and its now eighty-three-year-old occupant, Emperor Franz Joseph, to a favourite corner in one’s favourite café. Approaching the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s capital city, one could anticipate barging through the double doors from a wintry street into the café’s pleasant fugginess, the head waiter calling out one’s name in smiling greeting, bowing slightly as he did, and surreptitiously ordering his staff to prepare one’s favourite coffee for that hour of the day: from a kapuziner, if it was early, to a fiaker (with rum) if it was late, served the right way in the correct glass or cup, as it always had been. As it always would be.
To unfold one’s map of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1913 was to be struck, first, by its extent. The Habsburg lands stretched from Switzerland in the west halfway to the Black Sea in the east, and from the Russian and German empires in the north, deep into the Balkans in the south. In 1908, much to the chagrin of Russian nationalists who saw their country as the natural guardian of the Balkans, Austria-Hungary had taken one further step into the Balkan arena by formally annexing Bosnia to the empire, a territory which had been administered from Vienna for thirty years but which had nonetheless hitherto remained formally part of the Ottoman Empire. Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, was already within a stone’s throw, or a cannon shot, of the Austro-Hungarian border, a point not lost on Austrian generals in 1913 as they considered whether to intervene in the Balkan wars and, at the risk of war with Russia, shut down a troublemaker on the Habsburg doorstep. (Baedeker included Belgrade, and Bucharest, as side-trips in its edition on Austria-Hungary.1) The population of these realms was fifty million souls – a little more than France or Britain, a little less than the German Empire. Within the ample girth of the Austro-Hungarian Empire lay mountains and lakes, vineyards and fishing villages, snow and sun. The Habsburg empire yielded iron and coal from Bohemia; in Galicia it produced its own oil, making the Habsburg lands self-sufficient.2 It contained areas as rich and as industrialised as Germany, and other areas as poor as Russia. It was as varied as the world itself. It traded with itself, it invested in itself: it was perhaps a world to itself.
But therein lay the rub. Because to look at any more detailed maps of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – ethnographic, religious or political – was to be struck by something rather more worrying: the remarkably disparate, if not downright fissiparous, nature of the Habsbur
g realms. Baedeker advised that, while in Bohemia, Styria, Upper and Lower Austria, Salzburg, Carniola, Moravia, Galicia, Austrian Silesia, Bukowina and Hungary one drove on the left; in Carinthia, Tyrol, Istria and Dalmatia, one drove on the right.3 ‘Nowhere in Europe’, noted an American book on Austria-Hungary, ‘is the past so intermingled with the present’.4 Imperial climatologists called the empire a ‘laboratory of nature’.5 The socialist leader Victor Adler, perhaps more appropriately, called the empire a ‘laboratory of world history’. (In 1914 the Vienna satirist Karl Kraus would call it a ‘proving ground for world destruction’.6) It seemed a miracle that such a variety of lands could be held together under any political structure.
A linguistic or ethnographic map of Austria-Hungary, such as those drawn up in the wake of the 1910 census, looked rather like the canvas of a particularly adventurous abstract painter, splattered with a multitude of different colours, few tones dominating over others, the overall impression one of kaleidoscopic variety. Around Trento, Franz Joseph’s subjects spoke Italian. In a large swathe of land from the Swiss border to the Danube, and then all along the borderlands with the German Empire, they spoke German. In the heartlands of Bohemia, and in Prague, the Czech tongue was predominant, but not exclusive. Further east, linguistic supremacy passed to the Poles on the northern side of the Carpathian mountains and, below them, to the Slovaks, though with German-speaking exceptions. At the eastern extremity of the Habsburg lands the peasants, by and large, spoke dialects that linguistics experts loosely grouped as Ruthenian (essentially, Ukrainian), while Polish would be the first language of those in the region’s largest city: Lviv, Lwów or Lemberg depending on who was speaking to whom. Moving clockwise around the edges of the Habsburg empire, one alighted upon areas where the locals spoke Romanian. Interspersed with Romanian-speakers in the south-east, but forming the clear majority of the population as one moved towards Budapest, were the Hungarians, the second-largest linguistic group under Habsburg rule. Finally, in the Balkans proper, the Habsburg standard flew over Serbs, Croats, Bosnians and Slovenes.
All of these linguistic groups had different attitudes towards the empire as a whole, and different places within it. Some fell under different administrative systems within the empire, some were more or less unified. Some could look to compatriots outside the Habsburg lands: the south Slavs (to Serbia), the Poles (to their fellow Poles under German and Russian rule), the Romanians (to Romania), the Ruthenians (to Ukrainians in Russia, though their lot was not necessarily one to be wished for) and to some extent the Austro-Germans (some of whom followed a pan-German credo, preferring imperial Germany to imperial Austria). Other groups were contained entirely within the empire, including the Czechs and the Hungarians.
Taking a religious map of the Habsburg realm, one faced a similar picture of diversity, though not quite as daunting, and one less of clear lines than of shadings. Most subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were Catholic. But not all. In parts of Hungary, around the city of Debrecen for example, the population was Protestant. Serbs tended to be Orthodox, feeling greater religious kinship with Russians than with Catholic Austrians. In Romanian-speaking areas, meanwhile, the Orthodox Church battled with the Unitarian for confessional supremacy. Bosnia was different again, with a substantial Muslim Bosniak minority in a sea of mostly Orthodox Serbs. There were Jewish communities in every part of the empire, but particularly in the north and east of the Habsburg lands – and in Vienna itself, where Jews played a key role in the city’s cultural life, and in its courtrooms, hospitals and consulting rooms.
The political map of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire was by far the simplest, with two halves: one supposedly Austrian in the west (known as Cisleithania in reference to the river Leitha, or simply Austria) and one supposedly Hungarian in the east (known as Transleithania, or simply Hungary). But this apparent simplicity was deceptive – indeed it created its own problems. For the dual structure could not mask the far more complex linguistic and religious make-up of Austria-Hungary on the ground. In Austria, the Austro-Germans were the largest group, yet they represented little more than a third of the population. In Hungary, the Hungarians accounted for under half the population.
That the Habsburg lands had a dual structure at all was the result of a moment of weakness, born of an impulse of dynastic survival – and it showed. It dated back to 1867, when Emperor Franz Joseph was a young man. The previous year his armies had been defeated by those of Prussia, the Habsburgs’ upstart rival for influence in Germany, at the battle of Königgrätz near the town of Sadow (in Czech, Sadová). In the shadow of defeat, Franz Joseph had delegated a Saxon, Baron Beust, to negotiate a deal with the Hungarians, the empire’s second-largest grouping, so as to ensure that they did not take this opportunity to escape from Habsburg rule altogether as they had threatened to do in previous years.7
The result was the ausgleich, or compromise. The Hungarians agreed to stay, but demanded a new constitutional formulation, and insisted that the ancient lands of St Stephen (Hungary’s warrior patron saint) be ruled from Budapest, irrespective of their current population. Both halves of the Habsburg lands would have their own premiers and parliaments, in Vienna and in Budapest – with the Budapest parliament elected according to a system that entrenched the supremacy of the Magyar (Hungarian) landed gentry. But they would share an army, foreign policy, and common financial burden. There would be three central ministries (foreign, defence, finance) in regular written contact with delegations from the two parliaments. The three central ministers sat alongside the two premiers in a joint council chaired by the imperial foreign minister. All of these governments would be responsible to the sovereign, Franz Joseph, though he was styled Emperor in Austria but King in Hungary. His government was thus, in 1913, ‘K. u. k’, ‘Kaiserlich und Königlich’, ‘Imperial and Royal’. (The ‘und’ was added after 1867, to make clear that empire and kingdom were indeed separate, and yet part of the same body, a concept which no doubt made sense to those brought up with the mysteries of the Holy Trinity.) Later, when Austrian novelist Robert Musil wrote a fiction about the empire in which he had grown up, he described the K. u. k as ‘Kakania’.8 Franz Kafka’s sense of the absurd no doubt owed something to the political structures by which he was surrounded in Prague.
Even in the 1860s few thought that such arrangements were a perfect compromise – for a start, aspects of the compromise were to be renegotiated every ten years, thus guaranteeing an almighty dust-up between the two entities with alarming regularity. But then the ausgleich was the best that could be mustered at the time. From Franz Joseph’s own perspective the compromise had initially been a temporary expedient, to be revisited later, perhaps when the armies of the empire were able to regroup, inflict a defeat on the Prussians, and find themselves again at the heart of German politics. This was not to happen. By 1871 Prussia had been victorious again, over France this time, and the German Empire had been proclaimed. There was no going back. But the Austro-Hungarian Empire was stuck with the ausgleich. The deal of 1867 had become practised constitutional reality by 1913 – and, imperfect though it was, by then it had lasted longer than most of the Emperor’s subjects had been alive.
At the imperial level, some worried about the effect of duality on military preparedness. Franz Joseph’s nephew and heir apparent, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, fretted about the issue of the languages of command in the army, particularly after experiences with the Hungarian portion of the forces, where they insisted on speaking only Hungarian (against regulations) even in front of him.9 At the turn of the century the Hungarians demanded an independent Hungarian militia (the Honvéds). Franz Joseph rejected the idea. The issue festered, a constant worry.
The structures of empire inevitably created their own dynamics for its different nationalities. The Poles became accustomed to dualism, providing a number of key ministers over the years, enjoying more freedoms than their fellow Poles under German boot and Russian thumb and lording it over the Ruthenians. The Czechs,
in contrast, felt let down by the whole dual structure, which promoted the Hungarians above them, and made them a second-class nation: where was there a recognition of the lands of St Wenceslas to match those of St Stephen? This feeling was accentuated by the fact that Bohemia and Moravia, in which the Czechs were in a majority, were fast becoming industrial powerhouses for the empire as a whole, with forty per cent of their population working in industry, producing the bulk of Austro-Hungarian iron, and hosting the giant Škoda armaments works.10 True, the economic position of the Czechs was improving, and an increasing share of the factories was owned by Czech-speakers, but disagreements over language in the administration of local government – German or bilingual German-Czech? – were a running sore.
Ultimately it was these divisions, on top of other political divisions between and within linguistic groupings, which meant that the Austrian parliament in Vienna had become something of a pantomime parliament by 1913. Ten languages were admitted (German, Czech, Polish, Ruthenian, Serbian, Croat, Slovenian, Italian, Romanian and Russian), yet there were no interpreters, and everything was set down only in German.11 Desks were rattled, insults exchanged – there was even the occasional punch-up. The introduction of universal male suffrage in Austria (but not Hungary) in 1907 did not make politics more manageable, as Franz Joseph had hoped. The government ruled by decree where necessary. Tourists came to visit parliament in Vienna, and to gawp at the spectacle. One was a young and failing artist from upper Austria, Adolf Hitler, his fists clenched in excitement.12 Leader of the Russian Bolsheviks Vladimir Lenin, living now in Austrian Galicia – ‘almost Russia’, as he termed it – read about such things in the Kraków papers, a diversion from work preparing for the next meeting of the party, in between skating in winter and hiking trips up into the Tatra mountains in spring.13 The Georgian agitator and bank thief Josef Djugashvili, otherwise known as Stalin, was sent to Vienna (under a Greek cover name) to study what lessons could be gleaned from the experience of the socialists in Austria for the application of Bolshevism to the nationalities question in Russia.14
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