Blue River, Black Sea

by Andrew Eames

  In Grein I stopped to watch a local football match in the shadow of a boxy baroque schloss that had been given by Queen Victoria to the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas, the family of her husband Albert (and near enough her family too, because Albert’s father had been her uncle). The local team lost, but it didn’t seem to detract from the enjoyment of the occasion once a couple of the local bad losers had quickly left the pitch. It was a beatific evening, a relief after days of rain, and the cobbled Grein square was unchanged after several centuries, complete with an old-fashioned weather station with barometric gauges. Windowboxes were in bloom, a fresco on the Apotheke showed a team of horses pulling salt barges upriver, and swallows skeeting over the rooftops were enjoying a late hatch of insects rising from the gardens. A tiny shop selling books and cards had mounted its CCTV in the window, not for security purposes but so that passersby could see there was more inside. Young couples wandered through, glued to each other’s hips, and an elderly couple followed, their hips distantly connected by the invisible elastic of years of marriage. This meant that whenever the wife stopped to peer over a fence, the husband kept going until the elastic stretched tight enough to haul her away. It was hard to believe that this was the same world where once there was poverty, terrorism and starvation.

  Unfortunately I hadn’t been able to give enough advance notice to catch the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas at home, and the housekeeper wasn’t keen to speak to me without their permission. From their schloss (one of several they still occupy on a seasonal basis) it was clear they were immensely wealthy. The schloss was plain on the exterior but ornate inside, rather like a Muslim wife who wore a chador on the streets, but high fashion underneath. Inside its courtyard not a tile was out of place, and stags’ heads lined the colonnades, each representing a forest domain.

  It was frustrating to miss the Saxe-Coburgs, because they supplied the royal families of Britain, Bulgaria, Belgium and Portugal. But at least I’d met a Hohenzollern (royal families of Germany and Romania) and was on my way to have lunch with a Hohenburg and stay with a Habsburg, and there could hardly be a more potent name in European history than that.

  10

  Dinner with the Archduke,

  Lunch with the Princess

  The Habsburgs started out from relatively inconspicuous beginnings in the eleventh century in a small castle in Switzerland. Whether it was due to a feisty granny, an inspirational schoolmaster, or just something in the water, they certainly did well for themselves thereafter. By the thirteenth century they’d moved east to become dukes in what was then called Austria, effectively a small portion of today’s nation of that name. By the sixteenth century they’d become Holy Roman Emperors, as well as controlling Spain, much of Italy and the Netherlands, plus the territory that became known as Austria–Hungary – a massive area stretching right across to furthest Transylvania and incorporating bits of what are now the Ukraine, Poland, Slovakia, Serbia, the Czech Republic and even Italy. Over succeeding centuries they lost outlying Spanish, Italian and Dutch properties but they were still able to retain control over sprawling Austria–Hungary. Effectively that meant they controlled Central and Eastern Europe from the sixteenth century until the denouement of the First World War.

  As a dynasty the Habsburgs were old-fashioned imperialists through and through. They had a family code of allowing offspring to marry only into other royal households (on pain of being disinherited), which certainly helped keep them in the top slots. The lands they ruled were a collection of manorial estates more akin to a national park of feudalism than a state, and imperial borders varied according to local allegiances. As a rule they allowed the aristocracy to exploit the peasantry, and expected that aristocracy to support the monarchy in return. They handed out territory and titles as a reward for support, particularly when it came to pushing back the Turks, whose empire impinged on theirs to greater and lesser degrees over time, and who were their most persistent foe. Many of the big names in Hungarian nobility – the Esterhazys, Károlyis and Andrássys – were given their estates by the Habsburgs in return for military contributions to these campaigns, so when it came to internal politics even the powerful Hungarian families weren’t going to rock the boat. The nobles had the land; the Jews did the business; the gypsies did the music; and the peasants did the work. That was the accepted order of things.

  The lingua franca of Austro-Hungarian territories was German, particularly under Maria Theresa, who’d encouraged the spread of Danube Swabians like Franz Flock’s family into some of the less populated parts of Central and Eastern Europe. And the cities were even more Germanic than the countryside, with early nineteenth-century Budapest being two-thirds German-speaking and having two daily newspapers in German but none in Hungarian – a remarkable state of affairs for the capital of Hungary. Even Count István Széchényi, regarded as the greatest Hungarian for his promotion of science, regulation of the Danube and reformation of feudalism, kept his diary in German. Over in Prague the situation was similar, with 50,000 Germans resident in the city but only 15,000 Czechs.

  Then along came the nationalist movements of the mid-nineteenth century, at a time when the Habsburgs were struggling with feeble-minded Emperor Ferdinand on the throne. Ferdinand had the burden of many centuries of intermarriage behind him and is famous for one coherent command, which he probably never made: when told that his favourite apricot dumplings were unavailable (because apricots were out of season) he is said to have declared: ‘I’m the Emperor, and I want dumplings!’

  For a while the nineteenth-century nationalist movements were strong and Hungarian (or Magyar) was in the ascendancy in the eastern part of the empire. There, a language law was passed in 1844 barring German and Latin speakers from public office. Pragmatic Austrians who had property and power in Hungary didn’t think twice about taking Hungarian names and addressing their staff in Hungarian so that they could keep their positions and estates. Then a student revolution in Vienna sent the Habsburgs scuttling away for the safety of Innsbruck, but they didn’t need to stay away for long, having enlisted the help of the Russians, who marched up the Danube and put everything back where it was. The monarchy returned to Vienna and Germanization came galumphing back.

  The empire was like that: it ebbed and flowed. It was mired in formality and protocol, slow to react, relying on old loyalties that were eventually being eroded, particularly in Hungary and Transylvania. In the end Emperor Franz Joseph reached a compromise with the nationalistic Hungarians, creating something called the Dual Monarchy, for the sake of an easy life. Effectively this meant that Austria and Greater Hungary became two separate countries, with two parliaments, but with the same king. However, with the same aristocracy ruling over most of the land, loyal to monarch rather than to nation, not a great deal changed in day-to-day living. Even today there are still high-society gatherings in twenty-first-century Budapest at which German, not Hungarian, is the dominant language.

  All of this was orchestrated from the strange twilit world of the Habsburg court. Discussions would take place in the emperor’s study over whether to become more centralist or more federalist, more gentle or more heavy-handed. The pros and the cons, the whys and the wherefores, were tossed to and fro across polished tables in shuttered rooms, while all about was dusty and formal. The court became particularly arcane and protocol-obsessed in the later decades of the everlasting Franz Joseph, Emperor of Austria from 1848 and King of Hungary from 1867. He started full of youth and vigour as successor to ‘dumplings’ Ferdinand, but 68 years later (in 1916) was still on the throne, lean, long-featured and whiskery, formal, inflexible, and finding his peoples particularly tiresome. I visualized him as a figure in a Roald Dahl story illustrated by Quentin Blake, brittle-boned and grumpy. In 1914 he had made the fatal decision to teach the upstart Serbs a thing or two after the assassination of his heir, Franz Ferdinand, while driving through the streets of Sarajevo. It didn’t matter that he didn’t much like Franz Ferdinand: he saw the assassination as the test for an old ma
n’s virility, and was determined not to be found wanting. As a result the whole imperial house of cards came tumbling down.

  In the post-war world order the new Austrian government had confiscated all Habsburg holdings and would return them only if the family members renounced their claim to the throne, which most did. Which was why Archduke Alexander Habsburg-Lothringen was still in residence in the schloss at Persenbeug, where my finger was now pressing the buzzer. With the huge Habsburg back-story looming large over me, I had to admit to some trepidation as I waited for the gate to swing open. What kind of an archduke would Alex be? The I-want-my-dumplings sort? Or the whiskery, brittle-boned, inflexible sort? Happily, he was neither whiskers nor dumplings.

  Persenbeug had once been one of the most important shipbuilding towns on the Danube, and its castle was another of those uncompromisingly solid baroque schlosses that sit imposingly next to the river, and where undoubtedly a toll would have been exacted from passing shipping in the old days. It dated from 1617, had been owned by the Habsburgs since the 1800s, and Emperor Karl I (Franz Joseph’s successor to the throne) had started his short life here, eventually dying in exile in Madeira. Now it sat rather unphotogenically alongside Austria’s first hydropower dam. The Habsburgs must have lost all political power by the time of the latter’s construction, or else they’d never have tolerated such a provocative bit of engineering, right under their walls.

  After my glimpses into Sigmaringen and Grein, the castle’s interior was disappointingly understated. It had been divided up into sections, with subsidiary apartments used by staff from the estate and kept in camphor for other members of the family. Ancestor portraits and battle scenes hung on the walls and heavy wooden chests and suits of armour stood on check-tiled floors. It smelled of polish, leather, beeswax and oil-based preservatives, and if there were any great treasures or magnificent architectural flourishes, I didn’t see them.

  Archduke Alexander turned out to be in his late forties, sallow-cheeked, dark-haired, slightly stooped (which gave a false impression of being tall) and dressed in a light tan jacket and jeans. He was welcoming and hospitable but a touch distracted and hesitant in his manner in a way that nevertheless commanded your attention. He would have been hard to place if you’d met him on the street; a university professor, perhaps, or a caring hospital consultant weighed down by his sense of responsibility, who always had half a mind on the last patient he’d seen and the other half on the next. His wife, Marie-Gabrielle, Countess of Waldstein, was pretty, dreamy and winsome and I found it easy to imagine her in a fairytale world of princes and chandeliers.

  Their lifestyle, however, was reassuringly down to earth. I found them sitting on a swing-seat in the small garden in the castle courtyard, with their three young children – no sailor suits or saluting – variously climbing over or on their parents or tearing off round the flowerbeds. They were interested in my bike and baggage, because they too were regular users of the Danube cyclepath, for family outings, just like any other family with young children living by the riverside. Nor was there any sign of staff (the archduke went to fetch me a can of beer himself) until a nanny appeared at around bedtime and whisked the children off.

  That informality seemed to me a little at odds with Alex’s title, but when I said so, he shrugged. ‘Oh, there are lots of archdukes in the Habsburgs, so it’s no big deal. Although not many still live in privately owned castles.’ His English was faultless, and not as clipped and formal as Prince Hohenzollern’s had been. ‘The main advantage of the title is that you don’t need to be introduced twice,’ he continued. ‘People tend to remember who you are.’ Archduke Otto, the head of the Habsburgs, wasn’t a close relative; he was from the Italian side of the family. ‘They’ve always been comparatively poor inheritance-wise, Otto’s side. Into politics and business, always wanting to feature on the world stage.’

  ‘Does that mean that your side is not poor?’

  He looked at me owlishly through circular glasses, measuring up his reply. ‘We are wealthier than we were when your man came through seventy years ago.’

  It turned out he’d read Patrick Leigh Fermor, and we had a conversation about whether an unnamed aristocrat that PLF had met at Persenbeug had been Alex’s grandfather, who had sat tight in the schloss through the Second World War while the Nazis effectively commandeered all the family’s land. Alex’s grandfather had been no Nazi sympathizer, and when the Russians liberated the area they were happy to let him have everything back.

  When PLF came through, the hydropower dam was just being constructed.

  ‘All that talk in the book about the construction of the new power stations ruining the river’s stock of fish, that sounds just like my grandfather – he was very concerned about the state of the river,’ said Alex. Back in those days the run of salmon was so prolific that castle servants up and down the Danube specifically asked in their employment contracts not to have to eat the fish more than once a week. Now there are no salmon at all.

  Alex himself had grown up locally and even attended the local school, where he hadn’t felt any different to anyone else in the classroom. And now, with a team of seventy managers and foresters, he ran one of the biggest private forest estates in Austria, covering 14,000 hectares, or 54 square miles. It hadn’t been what he’d set out to do, originally starting his career in brand marketing for IBM, but then the question of who would take over the management of the family hectares came up and his brother hadn’t wanted to take it on.

  ‘So what does he do instead, your brother?’

  ‘If you mean what job, he doesn’t really have one.’

  I made some sweeping comment about how the unemployed generally struggle to find a role in life, but the archduke set me right.

  ‘There are two types of people who don’t work. Those who don’t know what to do with their time and who are therefore rather unhappy. And those who read and travel and actually have rather a good time. My brother is the second sort. He reads everything.’

  At this point in the conversation a man dressed head to toe in khaki with a rifle slung across his back emerged from one of the courtyard doors and walked past towards the main gate, greeting us as he went. I immediately assumed this to be a change in guard, or one of the archduke’s personal protection squad on patrol, but I was wrong.

  ‘One of our foresters,’ said Alex when he’d gone. ‘A Czech. Wrote to me out of the blue saying he wanted to work with us, and that doesn’t happen very often in the forestry world. So I said come.’

  ‘And the gun?’

  ‘They’re on a deer cull tonight. We need to kill four hundred a year. Personally I’m not a great fan of shooting.’

  ‘I shoot,’ Marie-Gabrielle chipped in. ‘When I realized we were coming to live here I got my hunter’s licence. I didn’t just want to be a city girl that the locals would laugh at. So sometimes I go out with them. I’ve got some antlers and a good wild boar rug, but Alex won’t have them in the house.’ That didn’t sound Habsburgian at all.

  After dark we sat out on a balcony high up on the castle’s outside wall overlooking the river, a balcony adjacent to the evening kitchen (as opposed to the breakfast kitchen) which the archduke had added to the schloss.

  ‘Fortunately we added it before the National Trust registered the building as a national monument. We would never get planning permission for it now.’

  ‘So is it costly to maintain? A castle like this?’

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t want to turn it into a museum. There are Habsburg properties all over the place that are far more accessible than this. I don’t see how we’d make any money out of it, and we’d have to be here seven days a week.’

  Some distance beneath the balcony a slow procession of boats moved into the lock system of the dam that had been so disapproved of by Alex’s grandfather. The passenger cruisers were pumping out light and sound; the freight barges were just dark, slow-moving metal slugs.

  We talked about the children, and whether th
eir upbringing was going to be any different to that of the previous generations. They were attending the local school, as he had.

  ‘At this stage they’re quite unaware of their family background, which is how it should be,’ said the countess, who had a tendency to throw in whole sentences in German, peppering the conversation with ‘das stimmt’ and ‘genau’ depending on how much she agreed with what had just been said. ‘They’ve got time enough afterwards to learn about the Habsburgs.’

  The plan was for the children to attend the abbey school in Melk, just downriver, and then as for marriage partners, their parents had no preconceptions. ‘If we prepared them to marry only a title then they might end up in a dysfunctional family all alone in some castle somewhere,’ sighed the countess; I assumed she wasn’t alluding to her own situation. ‘I don’t want that for my children.’

  A Land Rover crunched up the castle drive under the balcony and stopped at an outhouse. Two men in khaki untied the carcass of a deer from the front bumper and lugged it inside. The archduke watched without comment, while I steered the conversation back to marriage partners. ‘So you won’t be staging big parties for the children and inviting the eligible and the suitable?’ I explained how the Hohenzollerns had been preparing for just such an occasion at Sigmaringen.

  Alex shook his head. ‘I doubt it.’

  His wife looked at him. ‘But you will have to have a party for your fiftieth.’ She turned to me. ‘He’s not very keen on the idea of parties, as you can see. He should have had one for his fortieth, but he had a good excuse.’

  ‘My father died.’

  ‘Would you invite Otto?’