Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

by Winder, Simon

  The Gloriette is in many ways a perfect example of mix-and-match Habsburg cheese-paring, with many of its architectural details, including its charismatic carved bull skulls, hacked out of Maximilian II’s old Neugebäude Palace in the suburb of Simmering. But its extravagant and charming pointlessness makes it nearly as fine a monument to Maria Theresa’s reign as her breakfast house in the zoo and a happy contrast to her fusty and banal interior decorations. An Allied bombing raid on Vienna wrecked the Gloriette, as well as killing the rhinoceros in the next-door zoo. There is a pathetic photo of the rhino’s keeper posing with its armoured corpse, together with a more enjoyable one of Red Army troops with the giraffes inside their enclosure – presumably nobody was in a position to tell them they were not allowed within the fencing. The Gloriette was rebuilt after the War, and with its great swags of carved Roman weapons and massive eagle, it is now a rather odd sort of cafe. It stands there as an absolute and permanent statement of belief in Austrian victory and confidence, in the face of any number of actual catastrophes and defeats. Once they had finished mucking about with the giraffes, presumably the Soviet troops must have enjoyed wandering over to see the ravaged heap of the Gloriette. Silesia was never retrieved but the rest of the Maria Theresa’s inheritance had survived an overwhelming assault by a great coalition of its enemies.

  The war on Christmas cribs

  Tucked away in the midst of the magniloquent, trippy interior of Melk Abbey are two visitors from an earlier time: Clement and Frederick, the catacomb saints. In a bonanza for the Catholic fight-back a great series of subterranean tunnels was found in Rome in 1578, filled with the bodies of early Christians. It was assumed that they had been buried there because they had been persecuted and these ‘catacomb saints’ were exported by the Jesuits all over the Catholic world as superb instances of the primitive sufferings of the True Church. In fact they were the skeletons of pious but ordinary Romans who, having blamelessly lain in the dark for a millennium, now found themselves landed with a random Christian name, canonized and put on a mule cart. Clement arrived in Melk during the great refurbishment, and Frederick was a later arrival, donated by Maria Theresa in 1762. Given the huge number of bodies in the catacombs these saints could be handed out like cookies, and even today a quiet word in the right ear could probably secure one. The Jesuits got a bit out of control as they were also dealing in bits of the martyred St Ursula and her eleven thousand virgins (a spectacular skeleton-pit fraud dug up in Cologne, the equivalent for the Catholic Church of Spindletop for the Texas oil industry). In any event, the two skeletons at Melk lounge in their glass caskets, covered in peculiar body-stockings and jewels, their skulls resting on lurid pillows, and looking oddly like Marlene Dietrich in Rancho Notorious.

  Maria Theresa’s donation of St Frederick was already a pretty retro gesture by the 1760s as Catholic intellectual and emotional culture had moved on. The Jesuits were suppressed across Europe by the Pope in the following decade, except (in a perverse result) in Prussia and in Russia, where Catherine the Great once may have been anti-Catholic but was damned if she was going to be told what to do by some man living in Italy. A new austerity and prayerful privacy reigned. Oddly, this shift moved almost in lock-step with the growth of public musical theatre, as though the now idle impresarios of the Catholic Church found fresh work in opera and oratorio. It is strange that the hysterical emotionalism of, say, Mozart’s Don Giovanni or Haydn’s The Creation should channel much the same extreme atmosphere that places such as Melk had done in earlier decades but in a new form. I do not know if it would be possible to make a real link, but it does look as though out-of-control fervency had simply moved house.

  Joseph II himself exemplified this move towards a more intellectual Church. Often wrongly thought of as anti-Catholic, he simply wished to sweep away the dirty clutter of superstition and peeling gilt that made places like Melk seem deeply old-fashioned by the time of Maria Theresa’s death in 1780. She herself had been sceptical of many of these traditional accretions, but Joseph took the reaction to bizarre lengths. By some definitions one of the most talented of Habsburg rulers, Joseph in everything he did seemed to lurch and overreach. The shape of his reign was a very odd one. After Franz I’s death in 1765 he became Holy Roman Emperor, seemingly re-establishing the Habsburg grip on a stable basis. But he then spent some fifteen years under his mother’s tutelage, a ruler who by this point knew how to make things work merely by lifting a finger. To make things even worse he had to deal with his mother’s contemporary, Frederick the Great, who hung like some appalling spectre over his life, the man who had humiliated his family, but who was also a figure to be admired and whose rationalism and austerity formed a rather sadly obvious model for the strange young man. How different the future if Joseph had modelled himself on his own father and just lolled about eating sweets and looking through a magnifying-glass at bouquets of flowers made out of jewels. Instead, Joseph was racked by an action-this-day fever to modernize and overhaul the lands which, in his view, had failed his dynasty.

  The Catholic Church – an institution in every way the ideological partner of the monarchy – was thrown into chaos by a great heap of edicts from Joseph. He had views on everything from banning the making of cribs in the Tyrol to forcing priests to switch to practical and hard-wearing leather vestments (there is a hilariously sad example in Melk). Monasteries viewed as not directly serving the community were shut and the whole tradition of purely private contemplation reaching back to the origins of Christianity was nearly stamped out. As the Jesuits had also been suppressed an enormous number of buildings became available for use as schools, barracks and offices, ushering in the paper- and personnel-driven modern state. The effects can still be seen scattered all over Central Europe, with religious-looking buildings turning out to have oddly secular functions. In Olomouc there is still a carved stone on the side of what is now the Regional Museum declaring how Joseph II had shut down this Convent of the Poor Clares to make it into a school for the town. Jesuit churches were reassigned – so the church which had for many years had its hands full looking after Frederick III’s entrails in Linz now became the city’s cathedral. The Catholic Church was a landowner on a vast scale, owning half of Carniola and at least a third of Moravia: Joseph was driven mad with rage by what he viewed as idle ecclesiastical land and grabbed whatever he could. It was a truly revolutionary act, and it was one which would prove to have an unexpected and devastating effect on the rest of the Holy Roman Empire.

  Just as bad for Joseph were all those days spent in pointless processions and pilgrimages, days when the population could be building the economy. Most of the Habsburgs’ own intricate religious calendar was dumped and processions and pilgrimages were banned or heavily regulated. Many Catholics agreed with much of what he was doing. Atheists remained an almost invisibly small group, and the form of renewal Joseph was carrying out had an entirely respectable Catholic pedigree. This was a process that had begun under Maria Theresa. As an odd side-effect of her ownership of the Austrian Netherlands, the Catholic renewal movement of Jansenism which originated there had made rapid inroads in Vienna. Jansenism, with its cold austerity and cult of the parish priest, was baffling to fans of gold vestments and flying babies, and attracted much suspicion. The old joke was that Jansenism was like the route of the Danube – it starts Catholic, it then becomes Protestant, and it ends up infidel. But Maria Theresa was herself convinced: a fair test of its legitimacy. The rise of Freemasonry has conventionally been seen as a secular challenge even to an overhauled Catholic Church, but given how much great Catholic music Mozart wrote or that two abbots of Melk Abbey itself were buried with their Masonic aprons tucked into their coffins, this is doubtful. What shook off most of his supporters was, as usual, simply Joseph’s relentless, impatient and humourless failure to prioritize. Dismantling greedy Church land-holdings should have been his great achievement, but this got tangled up with stupid rages about Christmas cribs and badgering priests to dress in
leather. The end result was not enlightened reform but a chaos of miserable and upset subjects to no great purpose.

  Beyond the Church, Joseph slashed at all privileges and ossified habits as though through sheer willpower he could change his domains from a congeries of particularist, multilingual estates into the coherent single entity that he wanted, a proper state, like Britain or France. This was a ridiculous aim: the only coherence enjoyed by the Habsburg lands was that they had fallen into his family’s lap. It was typical of Joseph that this never occurred to him – he never seems to have wondered whether in practice rationality was the Habsburgs’ worst nightmare. A well-educated, aspirational, unsuperstitious people might well develop other interests than simply offering support for Joseph’s latest whim. The sheer stubborn mess of the territories defeated him, but it is interesting that he tried, and he was the last Habsburg except the abortive Franz Ferdinand to throw himself at his inheritance to try to give it proper shape. Symbolically he did this by refusing to be crowned King of Hungary, moving the various state crowns to Vienna and insisting that the Monarchy now was a single and unitary state. German would now be the Monarchy’s official language and Hungarians would be forced to use German in all official dealings. Serfdom was to be abolished, the clergy were to be taxed, the nobility were to lose their legal privileges, corsets were to be banned as a threat to childbirth, churches could be built by non-Catholics, the crusty ‘Spanish customs’ of bowing and scraping at court were to go.

  These changes have been overshadowed by the French Revolution and by Joseph’s premature death and the subsequent overturning of many of his edicts, but their impact at the time was astounding. If you were a nobleman and a Hungarian, had a lot of serfs and liked corsets and Tyrolean cribs you must have been permanently speechless with horror. It was as though through sheer will-power Joseph was going to take on every sectional group in the country. When he died of overwork, personal misery and tuberculosis in 1790 there must have been many mourning subjects who allowed themselves a small glass of something to mark the occasion.

  Joseph’s removal of a great range of legal disabilities from the Jews is one of the changes for which he was most revered, with Galician Jews for generations seeing Joseph as one of the great figures in their history. In the mid-nineteenth century the Jewish section of Prague was renamed Josefov in his memory. Some of these disabilities were so grotesque that it is hard to engage with the idea that they ever existed. Jews could now remove the yellow star from their clothing, move freely around the Monarchy, open their own factories, employ Christian servants, and attend university and visit theatres. They were also permitted to leave their homes on Sundays and on Christian festivals, bans previously in place on the grounds that as Christ’s murderers it was offensive for them to be seen in public. These changes inaugurated a new and powerful relationship between the Habsburgs and the Jews which ultimately resulted in the greatness of Central Europe’s late-nineteenth-century culture. Joseph’s motives, however, were as usual to do with efficiency – he wished to make Jews into fully productive citizens and he wanted them for his army. There was also the usual sickness that accompanied all Habsburg thinking about Jews. As a Catholic, Joseph believed that the Jews’ adherence to their faith was a result of their legal disabilities. Once they were in the mainstream, took German names and were taught German at school they would cease to be Jews. The Hungarians came to the same conclusion with ‘their’ Jews – full citizenship would lead ultimately to conversion. To a limited extent this did happen over the following century, just as many ethnically Czechs, Croats, Slovenes and so on Germanized or Magyarized themselves. This bad faith at the heart of the reforms – that Jews were to be welcomed into some imagined mainstream only in the hope that they could eventually disappear – was to have a long and ultimately terrible history. Jews themselves, of course, knew what was going on and a great era of debate opened as to the right response to these reforms and how much compromise might undermine the nature of Judaism. Germanization too was a philosophy with a catastrophic future, with its inbuilt assumption that it was the task of other languages to lie down and become extinct. In the 1780s however these were just a couple of strands in the mayhem of Josephine reform, with decrees streaming out of the Hofburg – the Schönbrunn Palace having been mothballed as inefficient and old-fashioned – at an astounding rate.

  Joseph was probably lucky to have died when he did, as even without the French Revolution, his actions had clearly run completely out of control by then. As the streets filled with homeless nuns, crib-smugglers and angry noblemen, it was unclear if Joseph might in fact have provoked his own revolution. Attempts to abolish serfdom for example flushed out another massive area of disability based on language. The Hungarians of Transylvania dealt with Romanians every day, with most of their serfs being Romanian (or Wallachian as they were then called). Indeed, Romanians were the largest group in Transylvania’s tumultuous ethnic mix. The Hungarians themselves hardly formed a coherent group, split like any complex society into competing elements, with noble landowners, an often poor gentry and many small farmers. There was also the very large, separate group known as Székelys, who had traditionally defended the eastern frontiers and, while speaking Hungarian, had little in common with the aristos in Cluj. At some basic mental level, however, the Hungarians pretended the Romanians did not exist and that Transylvania was a thoroughly Magyar land. This tension (or fantasy) was to continue until the cataclysm of 1918, having some of the same flavour as twentieth-century South Africa. In 1784 the hideous Revolt of Horea, Cloşca and Crişan erupted. These men led some thirty-six thousand Wallachian followers across western Transylvania in a fury of anti-Hungarian violence, animated by the excitement around Joseph’s reforms. Thousands of Hungarians were murdered and troops sent in with the usual massacres. Horea and Cloşca were ultimately broken with a hammer on the wheel, quartered and then displayed in smaller chunks on poles along the roadside. Crişan managed to kill himself in gaol to avoid this fate. These events suggested that Joseph might be leading the Monarchy into total chaos. Certainly this was the conclusion drawn by his successors, who clamped down and deradicalized, with the French Revolution providing excuse enough to drop further reform. The Revolt of Horea, Cloşca and Crişan, though, would have a long future.

  Illustrious corpses

  Joseph’s reforms were always a strange mixture of the well-meaning and the merely peculiar. A fine (if terrible) example has been preserved in the Piranesi-like gloom of the Špilberk fortress in Brno. The fortress has a long history of infamy, and while it is promoted locally as a family day out, it cannot shake off its miserable role as both Habsburg and Nazi barracks and prison. One of its worst rooms demonstrates the strange results of what should have been Joseph’s finest hour – the abolition of the death penalty.

  The death penalty had always stemmed in part from the unwillingness of the authorities to fund long prison sentences. Most criminals’ sentences were fines, confiscation of property or expulsion from their city or even country. They could also be mutilated in some disgusting way, or publicly humiliated, either in the stocks or through being forced to wear freakish and peculiar metal masks. Some chilling examples of these survive in Salzburg castle, and to be forced to walk the streets for a week, humiliated and half stifled, looking like some shunned relative of the Tin Man must have been a horrible ordeal. Some religious criminals could be burned alive, and for crimes against the state they were sent off to be galley-slaves or executed in the sort of dreadful and exemplary ways used for the Romanian rebels. So the state had many forms of punishment, but long terms in gaol were not among them. Except in the case of debtors, potentially useful political prisoners or errant noble family members, the idea of long-term incarceration, feeding and looking after criminals for decades at public expense was not part of the repertoire.

  There was, however, a quite widespread feeling that executions were degrading and unenlightened. Their point was to be great public spectacles,
a stage-managed, living-flesh version of the moral stories in cheap prints, books and sermons about duty, obedience and the need to curb pride, but they would often get out of control. We do not know the feelings of the crowd watching Cloşca’s and Horea’s prolonged agony, but it is fair to assume that their status as Romanian folk-heroes was established as much by the execution as by the rebellion. But if there were not to be these horrible fiestas what would replace them? Joseph’s abolition of the death penalty was therefore a problem as it meant an alternative had to be found, presumably long-term incarceration.

  Parts of the Špilberk fortress were taken out of use in 1858 and its military governor opened it up as a tourist attraction, having blacksmiths make fake torture instruments, fabricating a barely interesting legend about unfaithful wives being walled up in one of the rooms and putting in such fitted-as-standard features as a strappado’d shop dummy. A more serious reconstruction was of Joseph II’s ‘dark cells’ for those murderers who were now spared execution. The new enlightened regime meant that the prisoner spent the rest of his life chained inside a wooden box in total darkness and silence (beyond the distant sound of church bells), with bread and water shoved through a slot by a soundless gaoler. After only weeks of this, prisoners would go completely mad or else simply will their own deaths.