Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

by Winder, Simon

  Historical hindsight weighs particularly heavily on the period between 1815 and 1848 because there is such an air of restraint and calm. It was sneered at by later nationalists as an era of people taking piano lessons and adding to their teacup collections, but by almost any measure it was a marvellous time, with the pianist now being able to play Schubert and Schumann and the teacups the shock-troops of a new bourgeois culture. The long period of warfare and revolution had been so complex that we will never be able with confidence to pin any specific behavioural changes to it. Was the new pan-European bourgeois culture something which would have happened anyway with the increasing cheap mass-production of objects and the growth of the non-noble professions? It is certainly striking that although anti-Napoleon forces won the wars, across Europe men still now found themselves wigless and wearing simple deep-coloured materials and women found themselves in post-Empire-type dresses. This is perhaps the period when Vienna most set the pace for other cities (with Paris temporarily being sent to stand in the corner), with its public culture of consumption, cake, civility, public concerts, and with the Prater (a gift from Joseph II to his people) coming into its own.

  This ‘Biedermeier’ period leaves all sorts of subtle traces across the Empire, but it was its private impact which was so appealing. It hardly threatened the nobility in any sense, but even the nobility, whatever their immense privileges, found themselves at least painted more informally, even if their actual lifestyle tended still to revolve around several family homes and hundreds of staff. The spread of a sort of cult of children and children’s toys and general domesticity is apparent – it is hard not to have Schumann’s ‘Dreaming’, ‘Knight of the Hobby-Horse’ and ‘Blind Man’s Bluff’ from Scenes of Childhood as the theme-tunes for the period or Schubert’s genial Marches militaires, which could not be less militaire. One piece I never tire of listening to is Schubert’s tiny Hungarian Melody for piano, composed in 1824 and part of the cheerful, tentative engagement in ‘play-clothes’ nationalism. Schubert, who was born in Vienna and whose father was Moravian and mother Silesian, was much influenced in this sort of music by the Bohemian composer Václav Tomášek, and here he is conjuring up four minutes of the most lovely, vaguely Hungarian music – thereby swinging in his own person all the way across the Empire.

  The introversion and lack of ambition was exactly what Franz I and Metternich were looking for – an acquiescent, devout, quietly consumerist middle class flanked by a nobility providing intelligent leadership and a mass of peasants doing as they were told. It is striking both how successful they were in achieving this – helped enormously by having a shocked and exhausted post-war generation on their hands – and how brief the achievement was. Unprecedented, dizzying social change was unstoppably en route, with the landscape being steadily dotted with factories and pinned together with new rail-lines, the effects of which would make the Biedermeier Habsburg era rapidly look antique.

  Problems with loyal subjects

  Being the father of his people was always a key skill of the Habsburg Emperor. A wish to be accessible to ordinary subjects, to be concerned equally with issues great and small, was as much part of the state ideology as gaudy crown-and-ermine max-outs surrounded by huzzahing aristos. After all, the logic of absolutism infantilized subjects, but also made them the Emperor’s special care. Joseph II had recognized this in his lurching sequence of wild improvisations. It was his perception that it was the great magnates who gummed up state efficiency and that the energies of those beneath them could be released through abolishing guilds, serfdom and other local obstacles. Franz I perfected at a popular level the idea of the family man, never happier than at home either with his actual wife and children or with the wider family of even his meanest subjects. His successor, Ferdinand I, as much as he was able, certainly provoked affection and the cult of Franz Joseph eventually became a fervent one – the simple huntsman for whom no subject’s travails were too slight for his concern. Millions of homes were decorated as much with cheap prints of ‘the good Emperor’ as with Jesus and Mary.

  This was a very powerful weapon in the control of the Empire and expressed itself through processions, statues, oaths of loyalty, prayers in every religion, military service and so on. Most strikingly it pinned down an aristocracy that might otherwise have been much more restive and difficult – the Emperor may have been reliant in every part of the Empire on local aristocratic proxies to run things, but he also had a direct line to ordinary people, who could be unleashed with the most extreme ferocity. The Emperor may have posed as the good father, blessing good behaviour and gently chiding unruliness, but in practice unruliness tended to result in somewhat bad-father bouts of near-psychopathic breakdown.

  A striking example of this had been the Horea, Cloşca and Crişan Revolt of 1784, mentioned in chapter 8. On the face of it this sounded like a classic incoherent shambles of burning manor-houses and people doing terrible things with scythes in an orgy of primitivism. But Horea had himself met Joseph II in Vienna and throughout the revolt the Romanian peasants who were butchering their Hungarian overlords in the Apuseni Mountains were under the impression they were helping Joseph out. In an earlier tour through Transylvania Joseph had made it clear that the backwardness and inefficiency of serfdom had to end and he was besieged by Romanians (‘Wallachians’) handing him memorials about the cruelty of their fate (extraordinarily, accumulating some fourteen thousand of these). In retrospect one can see that this was the point (if not earlier) when Hungarian rule over its eastern regions was in serious trouble. Each of the key pieces of social control – around churches, obedience, education and labour service – began to crumble, with Joseph abolishing such symbolic issues as the peasant being obliged to kiss his lord’s hand. The great revolt ended in disaster, with the peasants massacred by Imperial troops – whole areas were depopulated, with almost the entire social structure from top to bottom dug out and destroyed. Joseph’s paternal concern for his subjects proved to be trumped by loathing for disobedience.

  The old Hungarian town of Nagyvárad (now Romanian Oradea) has a striking little memorial to this period. Following the suppression of the Revolt, Joseph moved quickly to liberalize the area (much to the rage of the surviving Hungarians). One aspect of this was to allow the Romanian Orthodox to build a church in the town. This wonderful building is known as the Church of the Moon as it has fixed into its front an ingenious gadget: a large sphere painted half black and half yellow which turns a little each day to show the correct phase of the moon, from new to full. This feature is apparently unique in Europe – and you can see why, as a comparable (and more realistic) effect can be gained simply by looking up at the moon itself. But the gadget’s idiocy is more than balanced by its charm – and by the beauty of the building itself – a perfect example of a late-eighteenth-century Orthodox church, obliged by the Habsburg authorities to look exactly like a Catholic one from outside and with even its iconostasis looking like a feature of a Catholic church gone oddly wrong, with the same sorts of attractive little religious scenes unaccountably stacked up to form a wall. Right above the iconostasis, tucked into a gold medallion in the roof, is a little painting of a bearded face, which the authorities must have wearily assumed was yet another tiresome prophet. In fact it is Horea himself, painted shortly after he had been cut into pieces, with chunks of him stuck on poles and displayed in Oradea and elsewhere.

  There is a great temptation to see everything that unfolded in Transylvania as a reflection of mounting Hungarian–Romanian hatred, with the former only maintaining control of the latter through violence and intimidation. A problem with thinking about historical events is that they by definition deal with breakdowns – but even in the run-up to the First World War there were still many instances of loyalty, friendship and justice between the two groups. Many Hungarians were very poor, not just the Széklers in eastern Transylvania, but also many minor nobles who lived in conditions not unlike those of the Romanians. These Hungarians are the
forebears of the nutty provincial figures so beloved of later Hungarian literature, who want only to be left alone with their gypsy mistresses, and refuse ever to open letters let alone telegrams as a matter of principle. This extreme localism meant that, as usual with a colonial class, there was a fatal lack of solidarity – with Hungarians split at the very least between pro-Habsburgs, anti-Habsburgs and quietists but also within each of those groups liberals, reactionaries and even revolutionaries.

  This sense of the Hungarians as a colonial class, defined by language and religion, as against Romanians, Slovaks, Serbs and Croats, is new in this period. As various forms of military, paternalist feudalism dissolved under both Joseph’s reforms and the values of Napoleon it became clear that Horea, Cloşca and Crişan might indeed be the future. With each passing decade dramas around rights, language and religious worship were played out. The twists and turns of Hungarian liberals who wished to democratize Hungary sufficiently to share power with the aristocrats but not sufficiently to allow in the Romanian and Slavic majority would be one of the great, tragic subjects of the nineteenth century.

  This happened across the Empire in different forms, with German nobles lording it over Czech peasants in Bohemia and Poles over Ruthenians in eastern Galicia. Most emphatically and consistently it was played out in schools. Attempts to prevent the ‘underclasses’ from having access to education were pursued in a sneak preview of Nazi policy in the 1940s, but gradually broke down, both through the protests of those involved and in the continuing Josephine streak in the Empire which saw the obvious inefficiency of having millions of clueless, semi-literate subjects in a Europe in which even ordinary soldiers needed to be better than this. Conceding schools then resulted in battles over the language of instruction, with the poet Mihai Eminescu’s great comment in 1870: ‘We are more afraid of Hungarian schools than we are of their Diet, their ministers and their soldiers.’ If hordes of Romanian tots from illiterate families could be taught in Hungarian then they would effectively become Hungarian. But as more Serbs, Czechs, Slovaks, Croats, Ruthenians and Romanians managed to become literate in their own languages (often through Church-sponsored schooling), as movement control based on serfdom collapsed and as trains offered an amazing new mobility and newspapers allowed those with the right languages to compare notes, the ‘colonial’ powers in the Empire became ever more defensive.

  Perhaps the most self-consciously paternal of all the Habsburg provinces was the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria (a Latinized version of the regions of Halych and Volhynia). We look back on the kingdom now as a piece of outrageous cynicism, the Habsburg share of the evisceration of a great European state, given an elaborate new name to avoid any mention of the word ‘Poland’. But from the point of view of Joseph II and his successors it was a purely Enlightenment project – the rescue of a benighted land from the feudal bumpkinism of Polish aristocrats. Its capital at Lemberg (now the Ukrainian city of Lviv) was consciously set up as a beacon of order and decency and with a quite different aesthetic to the faux medievalism which was the root justification for Habsburg rule over much of the rest of the Empire. But the same problem began to emerge. Hardly anyone was even aware of the Ruthenians at the time of the Partition – and as in Transylvania the make-up of the countryside’s population was confusing, dotted with settlements of Poles quite as poor as the Ruthenians and the Jews and all ruled over by other Poles of immense wealth and power. As the Enlightened state got into action, fuelled above all by the need for army recruits, it became ever more obsessed with sifting its subjects into categories, whether religious, racial, linguistic or class-based.

  In the longer term the rise of the Ruthenians and their creation of a ‘Ukrainian’ ideology that linked them to their fellows to the north-east, inside the Russian Empire, was to be as fatal to the Habsburgs (and to the Poles) as Transylvanian Romanians identifying with the increasingly independent Wallachia and Moldavia. But in the shorter term the most chilling issues lay around the obedience and indeed the very existence of the Polish ruling class.

  If there was a core subject on which the reactionary regimes of Central Europe all agreed it was the need to keep down the Poles. The Habsburgs elaborated an ever more complex Galician ideology which was meant to trump any remaining Polish sentiment and which ended up actively goading the Ruthenians into political life to keep the Poles loyal and frightened. In the first half of the nineteenth century the most obvious chink in the anti-Polish army was the appealingly named Free, Independent and Strictly Neutral City of Kraków, a five-hundred-square-mile city state squidged between the three occupying powers as an anomaly created by the Congress of Vienna. In the 1830s it was decided secretly that if it were to rebel the Austrians would have the right to annex it. The Poles, including many exiles in France, hoped to use Kraków as a catalyst for a general, massive effort to shake off the surrounding powers – an effort which in retrospect looks desperately unlikely to succeed. At the beginning of 1846 Kraków and western Galicia rose in revolt, and this was easily and ferociously crushed by the Habsburg armies.

  There was one terrible variant in Galicia. As insurrectionaries raised the Polish flag in Kraków and urged Poles across Galicia to rebel, some Habsburg officials played a new card. In the Enlightenment spirit with which the region had been acquired, they accused the aristocrats of disloyalty and of representing an old, discredited past. They urged the region’s peasants to stay loyal and to turn on their masters. The result was a grotesque one. The region’s principal town, Tarnów, had its attractive main square transformed by the arrival of innumerable peasant carts heaped with murdered Polish aristocrats – at least a thousand were killed and their manor houses burned down. Somehow, it had become rumoured that the best way for the peasants to show their loyalty was by bringing the corpses into the town. The Galician authorities were horrified but also pleased. The peasants’ leader, Jakub Szela, was thanked, given a medal and set up with a farm in Bukovina, even as the peasant revolt was itself crushed. Kraków became a miserable Habsburg barracks town until its recovery in the late nineteenth century.

  The events of 1846 had a powerful effect on the Polish nobility, who now had to contend not only with Ruthenian hostility in the east but, far worse, with the realization that their ‘own’ Polish peasants would kill them if they had the chance rather than offer anything that might be thought of as national Polish solidarity. For the rest of the Empire’s existence the Polish landowners tended to be an aggressively loyal group, with Tarnów casting a long shadow. For the Habsburgs any excitement over this Galician loyalty was probably overwhelmed by the failure of their Enlightenment project as the province remained an impoverished backwater much of whose population, whether Polish, Jewish or Ruthenian, spent its leisure hours working out how to leave for America.

  That this book is not filled up purely with interesting instances of racial or linguistic tension across the nineteenth-century Empire is because of their ultimately rather numbing effect. But this prospect of extreme violence has just to be kept in mind, lurking in the background, even if some lucky generations escaped it. It is striking, for example, how many characters in the nostalgic post-1918 novels of life in Habsburg Hungary are armed with a revolver or automatic – not with relevance to the plot, but just as a casual aspect of their day-to-day lives. For all the positive, normal relations between groups, and the ever-more overblown presentation of the immemorial Hungarian nobility’s hold on Transylvania, there seems to have been a skittering, frightened undertow to the banquets, hare-hunts and balls. In Transylvania it was memories of Horea, Cloşca and Crişan that stalked the aristocratic imagination – but this would also be added to by the mass Romanian defection to the Habsburgs in the 1848–49 War of Independence, which enclosed within it a barely reported murderous race war.

  In Galicia it was memories of Tarnów that performed a similar service for the surviving Polish noble families. Both societies shared something of the brittle, sports-obsessed cheerfulness of the British in
India – or indeed of Southerners in the pre-1861 United States. These were societies which could resort to any level of violence in support of racial supremacy. Indeed, an interesting global history could be written about the ferocity of a period which seems, very superficially, to be so ‘civilized’. Southern white responses to Nat Turner’s Slave Rebellion in 1831, with Turner himself flayed, beheaded and quartered, can be linked to the British blowing rebel Indians to pieces from the mouths of cannons in 1857. The intermittent ferocity of relations between some groups in the Habsburg Empire tends to be seen in isolation and contrasted with the relative docility of life in the countryside of Britain, say, or France – but it is perhaps just a handful of European societies which had a homogeneity sufficient to make them non-violent (and Ireland could also be swapping notes with Transylvania). This hatred, inequality, irredentism and mutual contempt would be played out with ever more terrible results and, in more muted ways, still persist today in the very few areas where the issue has not completely burned itself out.