Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

by Winder, Simon

  Un vero quarantotto

  Debrecen is now one of the most easterly Hungarian cities. It is a measure of the catastrophe that has engulfed Hungary in the twentieth century that it was once in the middle of the country. The lurch could have been even worse as, with much of the country filled with marauding Romanian troops in 1919, there was a moment when it looked as though the whole of Bethlen Gábor’s old Partium region was going to be gulped down by Bucharest, leaving the traumatized Hungarian republic as a tiny reservation not much bigger than Slovakia. As it was, many predominantly Hungarian towns were taken, but Debrecen survived.

  The Great Church in Debrecen therefore now has an even more defiant cultic role in Hungarian life than before, if that is possible. The city from which Calvinist (and often nationalist and anti-Habsburg) ideas radiated to all points of the compass has now become the last outpost – it is as though Kansas City suddenly found itself on the border with Mexico. The Great Church is in itself something of a disappointment. The battered, glowering building it replaced, the ‘Andrew Church’, must have had much of the charisma of the Black Church of Braşov, and had a detached bell-tower and very tall military watchtower from which to scour the surrounding plains for the dust-cloud that would indicate an Ottoman army. Sadly the Andrew Church burned down at the beginning of the nineteenth century, poor timing given the dreary rule-book classicism which plagued the architecture of the period. Calvinists are, of course, well known for their aversion to figurative religious imagery, and a huge, white-washed, almost featureless classical interior is not much fun. I felt my latent Catholic genes stirring – surely just one small picture of Jesus having a hard time wouldn’t hurt? The relentless austerity of the main church was disappointing, but at this point in my travels around the Empire I had an almost sixth sense about these things. I remember one occasion in the Upper Austrian town of Steyr when I saw signs pointing to the castle park and I immediately thought, ‘I bet there is an orangery there which has been converted into a restaurant where I can have lunch’: and there was. Similarly – as soon as I saw a sign saying Temporary exhibition in the tower I immediately thought ‘I bet this is going to be something a bit mad’: and it was.

  As though to atone for the monotony of the main church, the tower was filled with an exhibition of extraordinarily manic, precise models of entirely conjectural buildings. Created in the first half of the twentieth century by the Calvinist preacher and writer Lajos Csia, it was a happy example of how the most austere of faiths will suddenly sprout the strangest flowers. The rooms were filled with marvels: visions of the Temple of Solomon, the best ever Tower of Babel, the Temple Mount, all produced in a seemingly clinical, unromantic manner and yet – in their very conception – dementedly romantic. Greatest of all were two attempts to recreate Ezekiel’s vision of the renewed Temple in Jerusalem, as revealed to him by the ‘man whose appearance was like the appearance of brass’ – a riot of strange turrets and battlements, following the man of brass’s cubit-by-cubit instructions. There is a long and honourable tradition of antiquarian conjectural fantasy (not least in the work of Athanasius Kircher, discussed earlier), but this is without doubt one of its most convincing and enjoyable expressions, with fascinating hints lurking too of the deep, ancient roots of science fiction.

  But in the history of the Empire, Debrecen is not simply ‘the vegetable garden of Hungarian Calvinism’, or indeed the home of conjectural models of Ezekiel’s vision. It is also the home of the tragically abortive Hungarian state of 1849, with Lajos Kossuth’s declaration of independence in the Great Church and the anxious, short-lived parliament meeting in the oratory of the next-door Calvinist college.

  The events of 1848–49 have an uneasy place in European history. All those involved – on both sides – seem to have been painfully self-conscious about what they were setting out to achieve or to prevent. Without being too reductive, the forces of ‘liberalism’ and the forces of ‘reaction’ (both concepts that need to be put in inverted commas as they can in practice both be pretty much ummmed and aaahed to death) had an air of working from a script. This script, of course, had been laid out by the French Revolution. A combination of poor harvests and technological change formed part of the backdrop to 1848, but perhaps more important was the sense of legitimism in decay. Franz I had been so confident of the security of the Habsburg throne that in his old age he saw no problem with his incapable son succeeding as Ferdinand I (as with his father, the numbering starting again to show the fresh minting of the ‘Austrian Empire’ following the demise of the Holy Roman Empire, otherwise he should have been Ferdinand IV – in Hungary he was King Ferdinand V). Under Metternich’s tutelage the government of the Empire in many ways simply ignored Ferdinand, but this meant that too much was required of a handful of officials with no legitimacy of any kind, not the least of them being the increasingly elderly and depressive Metternich himself.

  The revolutions across Europe began in Paris where the elderly Louis Philippe, himself brought to power eighteen years before in a coup, wobbled around helplessly. As soon as the barricades went up, panic flooded across Europe. Characters such as Metternich and Louis Philippe, who had experienced the French Revolution in their late teens, knew the drill and fled in an intelligent attempt to avoid having their heads put on sticks. Across the Habsburg Empire major cities fell, from Milan to Venice, from Prague to Vienna. It briefly seemed as though anything might be possible.

  A striking and clear strand in the revolutions was that the removal of dynastic rule over pieces of land naturally led to its substitute: national ownership based on language. If people no longer believed that Ferdinand I ruled Milan then something else was needed. Particularly vulnerable were the bits and pieces in Italy like the duchies of Modena and Parma, which had no rationale beyond a specific individual dynast’s inheriting them. This issue of ownership crowded into every aspect of life. If an individual wearing odd and expensive clothing no longer owned a territory, then the system by which the people lived on that land also caved in – with serfdom immediately seen as unacceptable and illogical.

  1848 was a year of miraculous liberation and excitement, but once its opening phase was over it became clear that it had unintentionally opened a particularly unpleasant Pandora’s box. National structures were relatively unproblematic in France, which while far from monoglot, at least had a single dominant language, and at least plausible in Italy, but for German-speaking countries and for the rest of the Habsburg Empire the very idea of ‘nation’ was an unresolvable nightmare. The new German parliament at Frankfurt almost immediately made this clear – just taking the territory of Bohemia, what would it mean for Czech-speakers to attend an otherwise German-speaking event? Some Germans were encouraging but there was a great temptation to see the Czechs as mere picturesque peasants like the Bretons in France, incapable of political action. The threat of a future devoted to a Czech equivalent of tossing chocolate crêpes and knitting striped sweaters was enough to galvanize a Czech nationalism which would drive everything before it – ultimately indeed, only a century later, sweeping away or killing all the Bohemian Germans. At the further end of the Empire, Poles, thrilled by the collapse of central authority, began to gather. But they, in turn, saw no reason to include Ruthenians, who, now no longer serfs, had as much right as anyone to a view on how they should be ruled. But, as with the German–Czech relationship, the Poles could see the Ruthenians at best only in a folklorique light, as colourful man-beasts without culture. Less than a century later this tension would be resolved through the deaths of millions of people.

  The importance of the change was enormous. If people are viewed as subjects then in many contexts their language, cultural practices or religion are irrelevant. The Habsburg Empire had long specialized in attractive engravings of the ‘Peoples of the Empire’ in their different smocks, hats, boots and kerchiefs. A small area of Transylvania might have had a Hungarian aristocratic family in a substantial small palace, employing many of the Hungaria
n, Romanian, Jewish, German and sometimes Armenian locals. Particular experts might be brought in – German teachers or English horse-breeders or French governesses. The local aristocrat would in this case be responsible to the Austrian rulers of Transylvania, whose authority came from Ferdinand. The different groups in this area might cordially dislike each other – they would rarely intermarry, they went to different churches (although Hungarians and Germans could overlap), celebrated different feasts, ate different foods and navigated each day through a welter of different prohibitions, prejudices and acceptable/unacceptable behaviours. But substantially until 1848 all these groups were neutered. After 1848, however much the new regimes tried to pretend otherwise, everything became about national identity and the way that all these groups in, say, that one small area of Transylvania had competing claims for authority, autonomy and economic control. The consequences were catastrophic. There is no doubt that by many measures 1848 was a great watershed in European history – I am not sure anyone today would particularly fancy going back to a world where most of us would be tied labourers. But it is impossible not to feel a sense of dread about the gap between the excitement of 1848 and the degree to which we now know it was firing a starting gun that would initiate many of Europe’s most terrible events.

  Once the euphoria of 1848 had subsided, the revolutionaries’ lack of a wider, unified purpose became painfully clear and everywhere the revolutions were co-opted or destroyed. There is a wonderful Italian phrase: un vero quarantotto, meaning a total cock-up: ‘a right ’48’ – and un vero quarantotto about sums it up. Just as doddering or shifty rulers everywhere had known how to play their parts, and had fled by hiding in laundry-baskets or dressing up as common soldiers, so the military leaders knew their parts. The amazingly old General Radetzky had fought throughout the Napoleonic Wars, was absolutely loyal to the Habsburgs, and saw the Italian revolutionaries as merely an uppity rabble. The Prince of Windisch-Graetz further north was similarly incredulous about shop-keepers and other trash in Prague and Vienna having a view about anything at all. Once the initial shock of the revolutions was over these men organized their regular troops and systematically destroyed both the insurrectionaries and anybody else they disliked or who was unluckily in the way. There is something jaunty and almost unserious about the image of 1848 – lots of people in top hats and extravagant neck-ties, smoking cheroots while lounging on a barricade with a rifle, listening to someone playing Chopin in a nearby pub. It also seems relatively frivolous in the light, most obviously, of the French or Russian revolutions. But it is not clear how its actual suppression could have been any worse. The revolutionaries were hopelessly at odds with one another, both amazed by their initial success and then by the sheer complexity of what should happen next – indeed, some of the revolutionaries may have been socialists or Communists (The Communist Manifesto was published in February, though it had little impact until later), but many others could in practical terms hardly be called revolutionaries at all. A very broad spectrum of people could agree with the statement ‘It’s disgusting and embarrassing to be ruled by King Ferdinand II of the Two Sicilies’, but a decision on what to do next was much harder.

  It was the failure to agree on the next step that allowed the military their chance, and the results were ferocious. The two attempts by the King of Piedmont to invade northern Italy and liberate Habsburg territory were ruthlessly crushed. The heartbreaking attempts by Austrian-ruled Venetia to re-establish its ancient independence, snuffed out by Napoleon only fifty years before, ended in the city’s being besieged and shelled into submission. Venice’s revolution has never been part of the heroic history of Italian liberation because its leaders had no interest – except in extremis – in the rest of the Italians, with whom Venice had never shared a political history. It remained a north-eastern, Adriatic, Croatian-tinged sort of place a million miles from Milan. The Venetian uprising gave rise to some great statements, such as Antonio Morandi’s:

  Venice arose from the waves purged of Austrian putrefaction, haughty enough never to tolerate a fresh servitude, and beautiful with that beauty the progress of civilization brings with it.

  This sort of infectious, wonderful rhetoric could not hide deep problems within the city – with the new, generally bourgeois leadership as frightened of arming and training the workers as they were of the approaching Austrian army.

  It was in the Moravian town of Olomouc that the future really took shape. Here a group of loyalist conspirators mounted a coup. The government of Ferdinand I had in the Emperor’s name agreed in a general panic to all kinds of concessions to the rebels. If Ferdinand were to be deposed (or rather ‘resign’) then his successor would not be bound to honour these concessions. The next in line to the throne was the childless Ferdinand’s younger brother, Franz Karl, but he and his wife wanted nothing to do with running an empire, so he in turn renounced his rights in favour of his own eldest son, the teenager Franz Joseph. The revolutions were already in deep trouble almost everywhere, but the decisive steps were taken in the pretty ecclesiastical quarter of Olomouc where Franz Joseph was proclaimed the new Emperor, and Ferdinand shuffled off to a long and pleasant retirement in the Bohemian countryside. One of the great oddities of Franz Joseph’s reign is its relentless obsession with the dignity of the House of Habsburg, with crushingly stuffy protocols, military uniform collar tabs, hierarchy and choreography – but the reign’s entire foundation was an illegitimate fraud. By most definitions Franz Joseph was no more ‘real’ than Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, who turned himself into Napoleon III in 1852 – and yet one managed through sheer longevity and dullness to make himself appear the fons of legitimacy and the other was always a sly, creepy adventurer.1

  This brings the story back to the Great Church in Debrecen. The general crisis of 1848 had seemed to some Hungarians to be the great opportunity to break free at last of Habsburg rule, but as for so many others who misread the year’s events and ended up either dead, in prison or spending many years in exile in London, New York or Constantinople, this turned out to be untrue. Inspired leadership and patriotic fervour allowed the Hungarians to carve out an empire of their own, but this only existed through their having a ready-made army in the Magyar-speaking units of the Imperial forces and through the grace of total if temporary Habsburg failure. The curse that emerged elsewhere applied in the Hungarian lands just as brutally. If Habsburg authority was declared void and a group of agreeable Hungarian-speaking politicians announced themselves as the true successors, then this tore open ethnic problems of a kind that would in due course destroy the Hungary they were trying to build. Breaking clear of Vienna simply authorized the massive groups within Hungary who had no wish to be dominated by Hungarian-speakers to in turn break clear of Buda. This resulted in a racial war as Serbs, Croats and Romanians massacred the Hungarians in their midst. The Habsburgs gleefully egged on the counter-rebels, but Slavs and Romanians would have done this anyway – it was built into the events that were unfolding. The disaster was compounded by the arrival in Transylvania of an enormous Russian army in support of the Habsburgs and which dramatized the degree to which legitimism had really given way simply to reaction – the willingness to kill or manacle anyone who refuses to do as they are told. The Russians were driven to intervene by disgust at insurrection, but also because they could not help noticing how many Poles were joining the Hungarian army: a liberal, republican, independent Hungary providing a shelter for Poles would have featured very high in the long list of the Tsar’s nightmares that focused on the threat posed by personal freedoms. The degree to which Franz Joseph owed his position simply to reaction was played out in incredibly complex patterns throughout the rest of his long reign.

  Lajos Kossuth’s formal, public declaration of independence in the Great Church at Debrecen on 14 April 1849 was one of the great moments in Hungarian history, and a tragic disaster. It is a marvellous document, but filled with the contradictions and evasions that would doom the Hungarians in 1918.
Many Hungarians saw Kossuth’s announcement as dangerous and futile, but once it happened there was a clear patriotic duty to support it until General Görgey’s surrender to the Russian army four months later. Kossuth began by saying how the Habsburgs were ‘perjured in the sight of God and man’, which was about right, and therefore no longer kings of Hungary. Hungary was a nation of a hundred and ten thousand square miles and fifteen million people – a population which ‘feels the glow of youthful strength within its veins’. The declaration after a good start then lost all its dignity as it was obliged to discuss the large percentage of the fifteen million people whose youthful strength was in fact directed against Kossuth and his associates.

  The Mexican–American War earlier in the decade is a tragic comparison to the situation of the Hungarians in 1849. The Americans had to face a weak enemy whose hold on California and the south-west was slight, with very few settlers and only history and legality on its side. The Hungarians wanted to follow in their footsteps, declaring their own republic and taking back under direct rule all the Croatian and Transylvanian lands that had been alienated from them. But they really could not have had more enemies and Kossuth, instead of just rolling out ringing phrases, had to turn bitterly in the Declaration on the ‘partisan chieftains’ of Croatia, the Serbians ‘whose hands yet reeked from the massacres they perpetrated’ and the misled Romanians who had been ‘stirred up’. But this was hopelessly inadequate and wishful as a diagnosis – the ‘partisan chieftains’ under Jelačić were simply loyal to the Habsburgs, with Jelačić the legitimate Ban of Croatia. The region crawled with anti-Hungarian forces. The previous month Franz Joseph had effectively snapped Hungary in pieces, declaring Croatia, Slavonia, Fiume, the Voivodina and Transylvania as separate new provinces and therefore cleverly rewarding all the non-Hungarian nationalities for their loyalty, and previewing the ruin of the Hungarian aristocracy.