Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

by Winder, Simon

  Funtime of the nations

  The rise of nationalist music is one of the Habsburg Empire’s great gifts to the world. Its rich musical life, its concert halls and its conservatoires meshed together across a vast area to find exceptional players and receptive audiences, all in the cause of music that was setting out to destroy it. The music is more prominent than it would have been at the time because the other avenues of cultural nationalism – newspapers, periodicals, discussion groups, epic poems – are in many ways closed to us. The music, together with paintings, sculptures and folk dress, is what is left. As with so much of the Empire’s life, it was provoked by the love–hate relationship with the German language – with German music, like German bureaucracy, the unstoppable flood of the mainstream. What started as a tentative or even merely peevish and backward attempt to hold on to something of their own traditions ended with the non-Germans making something remarkable. It is striking how close German comes to winning in the early nineteenth century. Figures such as Smetana famously had to battle to teach themselves Czech, and there are innumerable cases of nationalists who in private continued to feel more comfortable in other languages. But the challenge of a German hegemony, pouring into the Empire not just from Austria but from the whole vast expanse of northern Europe, made the creation of various national musics a seemingly life-and-death issue.

  Shortly after the Cold War ended I went to a chamber concert in Prague Castle. It was extremely cold and sitting still listening to the music was a peculiarly intense experience. The room had a window looking out over the Old Town and, hearing the wonderful, chiming, declamatory sounds of a Dvořák piano quintet, music for a moment really did sound like the secret weapon that destroys all invaders – an illusion, of course, but a potent one.

  In a way the nationalist explosion fitted in well with Habsburg priorities. The folklorique had always been an aspect of the Emperor’s job and Franz Joseph was very adept at switching uniforms, medals, hats and crowns depending on what part of the Empire he was visiting. The Hungarian aristocracy was particularly keen to join in, with its enthusiasm for outrageous costumes involving fur, feathers, gold chains and frogging creating a surreal mishmash almost unrelatable to any real time or place. Nationalism effortlessly left off from the old engravings which assigned each part of the Empire a particular form of dress. Everyone hunted high and low for what they felt would be the most authentic elements in their region, meaning the least tainted by Germanism. This tended to equate genuine with rural or mountainous. Figures like Dvořák spent much of their energy creating sound-pictures of the Bohemian countryside. These are beautiful and great works of art, but as an image of linguistic or cultural purity their implications were chilling. Surely what most exemplified Bohemia was in fact the booming Czech–Jewish–German city of Prague? What really best characterized the entire Empire was its chaos of nationalities, and its best hope lay in an ideology (already supplied by the Habsburgs) of cooperation, or at worst grudging wariness. The disaster of Central Europe lay in the language wars which now engulfed everybody and which made on the face of it harmless issues like what music you listened to or what braiding you had on your shirt into ever more violent badges of exclusion.

  Most of the rest of this book is about this subject. We know it ended in catastrophe, but of course at the time it was exciting, new and very creative. It is also possible to say, at some gloomy level, that nineteenth-century liberalism was always doomed to fall into the nationalist trap. Just as Joseph II ended up provoking rebellion and hatred everywhere, so an insistence on uniformity, rationalization and freedom of expression ends up with race-hatred. If it is not acceptable for everyone in the Empire to use German to communicate, then any counter-suggestion excludes another range of languages. In Hungary the Croats pleaded for Latin to be kept as the official language because they knew that the alternative was that they would have to learn Hungarian. The strange role of Latin in Hungary had itself originated in the Middle Ages as elsewhere in Europe, but somehow it had maintained itself as a lingua franca that stretched across the kingdom, allowing Slovak to speak to Romanian. It may be just loopy obscurantism to suggest that Latin should in fact have been imposed on everybody, but it would have solved this problem, and more plausibly than one of the constructed languages such as Volapük or Esperanto (the latter celebrated in an unbeatable museum in Vienna). But for a linguistically scrambled zone of Europe to have to choose a single specific language of command, school and bureaucracy raised the stakes for those excluded incredibly high, way beyond folk-dances and Hutsul authenticity.

  Boycotts, abuse, marches and ever more aggressively chauvinist festivals broke out across the Empire in the latter half of the nineteenth century. These all seem a bit charming compared to the racist torture-chamber that was revealed in the following half-century, but it was this eruption that laid the ground work.

  The weakness of Vienna after the disaster of 1866 allowed everyone to pounce, with, for example, the first Slovene Congress being held in Gorizia, or the Italian-speaking South Tyrol sending petitions to be split from the German-speaking north. The Czech example was a particularly grim one. With Bohemia such a tangle of Czechs, Germans and Jews and with German the dominant language of commerce and government, Czechs felt they had little choice but to assert themselves. 1848 had marked the point where Czech and German liberals faced impossible choices. The Germans naturally looked to a future ruled by German-speakers in Vienna or in Frankfurt – but equally naturally Czechs saw neither option as even faintly appealing. As the century progressed the situation became ever more ferociously polarized, with mutual shop boycotts so severe that in the end even Jews were successfully pressured into serving customers of only one language or the other. This wretched, Ulster-like atmosphere was ultimately only resolved, catastrophically, in the 1940s.

  Bohumil Hrabal’s wonderful 1976 novel Too Loud a Solitude sums up where all this would end. The narrator meets and falls in love with the lovely Manča at a dance. She wears folk costume, braids and beautiful long ribbons in her hair. She rushes to the latrine before the dance begins, not realizing that in the process she is dipping her ribbons in the ‘pyramid of faeces’ under the plank. As she leaps and whirls, her ribbons centrifugally fling a medley of excrement into the faces of the other dancers.

  The deal

  1866’s most important political pouncers were undoubtedly the Hungarians. Here was Franz Joseph’s regime in total disarray – his army humiliated, his allies dethroned, his ministers’ judgement almost comically adrift. With Vienna kicked out of Germany, perhaps it could also be kicked out of Hungary? The arguments against a total break were considerable. The war of 1848–49 showed that even a severely weakened Austria could turn nasty by summoning the genie of the suppressed nationalities. There was also a chance that outside help could be called in – if not the thoroughly alienated Russians, then perhaps the newly forgive-and-forget Prussians. The misplaced confidence that Kossuth had felt about Hungary’s ability to be an independent state fuelled a more general anxiety: could an independent Hungary really hope to exist in such a rough neck of the woods? Austria might be viewed with fear and contempt, but was far better than the only other obvious ‘protector’, Russia. And with an ever more assertive Romania, what if Hungary was left on its own to fight off some future Russian–Romanian invasion of Transylvania? These were all grounds for clinging to Vienna – and all nightmares which would indeed cause sleepless nights in the following decades.

  The genius at the heart of the negotiations was Ferenc Deák, who had opposed Kossuth’s extremism and saw the value to Hungary of being linked to the rest of the Empire, both economically and militarily. Negotiations between Vienna and Buda had been going on for some years, but now suddenly snapped into place. Franz Joseph’s government was frenziedly preparing a fresh war of revenge on Prussia and could only do this by leaning on Hungarian support, not unlike Maria Theresa back in 1740. A radical overhaul resulted (although in the end the war of
revenge got shelved): a new state linked by the person of the Emperor and common defence, foreign affairs and (for shared issues) finance ministries. The negotiation dripped with bad faith on both sides, with a powerful Austrian camarilla always seeing it as a short-term deal with the Hungarians to be followed by retribution in due course. At the end of the century Franz Ferdinand dreamed of opening his reign with a swift military occupation of Budapest and there was always a poisonous undercurrent of mutual hatred threatening to break the surface. But much to everyone’s surprise the new state of Austria-Hungary survived. The Hungarians had sufficient independence to mostly do what they liked with their territory, with an attractively substantial pan-European stage on which to act.

  Territorially the two halves were now called Cisleithania (west) and Transleithania (east), the River Leitha forming a chunk of the border. Vienna therefore kept everything except what might now be called ‘The Crown Lands of St Stephen’. Transylvania was at last ruled from Budapest and over the next few years the old Military Frontier was dismantled, with areas such as Syrmia (which included the great fortress at Petrovaradin and the Serbian cultural hub of Sremski Karlovci) passing to Hungary, together with the Banat (based around Timişoara) and the Slavonian and Croatian Military Frontiers. These zones were enormous, complex and settled with innumerable linguistic groups not necessarily enthusiastic to become part of Hungary. The last two of these (the Slavonian and Croatian Military Frontiers) greatly increased the size of Hungary-ruled Croatia, previously just a small block based around the insignificant Zagreb, a military town which had only received its first mayor in 1850. It was now that Croatia received much of the strange shape it still retains today – a sort of default area of land filling in, like grouting, the gaps between Ottoman Bosnia and other Habsburg holdings. Coastal Dalmatia remained out of its reach though, staying as the surviving piece of the old province of Venetia as an Austrian possession. In 1868 the Croatians negotiated specific sub-rights from Budapest that delineated the Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia, which distanced it in a not dissimilar manner to Hungary’s distancing from Austria. But in practical terms Croatia-Slavonia was hemmed in and with little room for manoeuvre of its own.

  The two halves of the Empire carried on in parallel, held together by Franz Joseph’s startling longevity. Both halves boomed, being immeasurably richer by the beginning of the twentieth century. Austria had been neutered and infantilized by its defeat by Prussia – when the new united Germany emerged in 1871 it became Franz Joseph’s central aim in life never to be alienated from Berlin again. It became axiomatic that Imperial security could only be guaranteed by holding Bismarck in a clingy embrace. Hungary was even further neutered and infantilized politically by being in Vienna’s shadow and using the security guarantee provided by their association to underfinance its own armed forces. This Berlin–Vienna–Budapest axis now settled in, and of course with no sense at all of what a bitter future generation would owe to it.

  An expensive sip of water

  It could be argued that Bohemia’s two great contributions to Europe have been to do with the manipulation of water – whether in lager or in spas. Certainly while Europe has many spas scattered in the most unlikely places, it was western Bohemia that had the most prestigious and enormous ones: Franzensbad (named after Emperor Franz I), Marienbad (the Virgin Mary) and Karlsbad (Emperor Charles IV). There was also Teplitz, which was as grand as any but suffered a catastrophic late-nineteenth-century disaster when coal miners accidentally dug into its principal underground spring and – in a spectacular subterranean burp – filled it with arsenic, corpses and pit props in a way that overnight obliged seekers of health to make other arrangements.

  Marienbad (Mariánské Lázně) fills an entire valley with hotels, shops and sanatoria of the utmost haughty grandeur. A seemingly endless esplanade of white stucco flanks a park filled with splashing fountains, ancient trees and little bridges, all framed by soothing hills smothered in firs. In its pre-1914 heyday famous guests crowded in, everybody from Gogol to Twain, Mahler to Paderewski. In an earlier period Chopin took the waters and Goethe experienced his last, sad romance here. Most famously Edward VII (the last monarch actively to relish ruling Britain) stayed at the Hotel Weimar and chatted with Franz Joseph.

  Things have been a bit bumpy since – with a devastating collapse in pan-European aristocratic clients after 1914, a period as a Nazi military hospital during the Second World War (Günter Grass rested up here), the expulsion of almost its entire population (who were German-speaking) after the war’s end and its battered resurrection under the Communists as a people’s spa. This last has been set aside now in favour of trying to recreate the pre-1914, Europe’s playground atmosphere. Once more people parade up and down the old Kaiserstrasse as they admire the hotels, buy jewels and amber and stop for a cake and ice-cream. Once again, genuinely dying people and mere malingerers hiss at each other across dining rooms, fortunes are lost at roulette and nannies and mistresses clutter the parks. There is lots of hilarity around the spa itself with drinkers using special china sipping cups to try the different springs as they gush from individual taps. I grew up in a spa town, so medically touted waters hold no fears, but even I had to blench at the hard-core Cross Spring, an atrocious blend of metals and sulphur, which gives its sippers some insight into the experience of a victim of poisoning.

  As in its golden era, Marienbad has an attractively brittle quality based around most of its treatments being a pointless fraud. The hotel facades seem determined to outstare sceptical visitors and get them to reach for their credit cards. Marienbad doctors were famous for their ability to batten like vampires onto rich, pettish hypochondriacs and many careers were made clowning about with mud, hot water and invoice pads. As real twentieth-century medicine built its bypasses around places like this, luckily for Marienbad many people did not notice and Central Europeans still swear by treatments of puzzling lack of efficacy.

  The struggle between classiness and charlatanism is as old as the very idea of the spa and there has always been an entertainingly ‘mixed’ crowd. I noticed gently walking down through the park an attractive young Russian family in expensive leisurewear, somewhat let down by the massive scorpion tattoo on the husband’s sandalled ankle. This suggested that perhaps the entire clientele once stripped off would sport acres of Russian prison tattooing and almost all be engaged in exciting fringe free-market activities.

  Of course, it is profoundly boring here. You can only sip nasty water, munch chocolate cake or buy amber bracelets for a certain percentage of the day. Rubbing out a key underworld rival with a silenced machine-pistol in a mud bath – with bullets making different sounds as they clack into the tiling or plock into the mud – does not take much time. Even the Russian Orthodox Church, built for members of the Tsar’s family, seemed oddly listless and unengaged with its environment. I tried to shake off this sense of futility by walking in the surrounding hills which, while attractive, were very empty of spa patients, as though nobody could even bring themselves to wrestle actively with their condition, real or imagined. As usual, rambling around was rewarded, this time by an immense cemetery with battered monuments to the old German community now elbowed aside by hundreds of newer Czech graves, perfectly showing the process by which ethnic change puts down serious roots through death.

  The only real disappointment was to discover that Last Year in Marienbad was not filmed there. This strange masterpiece has wandered about in my head for so many years that it was perversely upsetting to find that my enthusiasm for going to see Marienbad had been misplaced: it turns out it was filmed in palaces around Munich and of course it could not have been filmed in Czechoslovakia at the height of the Cold War – duh!

  The film’s atmosphere does somehow hang around the real Marienbad, though, a sense of time suspended, of a peculiar lethargy. If towns and cities are the focuses required for us to live out our daily lives, then spas are something else: a space in which the sick are meant to get well but a
lso where, uneasily, the well are meant to enjoy themselves in a constrained and tasteful way. They are quiet places because it is vulgar to be noisy, but it is also insensitive as people really are ill. This atmosphere hangs over Aharon Appelfeld’s short novel Badenheim 1939. Appelfeld grew up in the Bukovina, in the Carpathians. The Nazis murdered his mother and he worked in a labour camp before escaping into the forest where he lived for three years, still only in his early teens, surviving until picked up by the Red Army. He reached Palestine in 1946 and became an Israeli citizen. This background is essential to understanding the sheer rage of Badenheim 1939. A Marienbad-like spa gradually wakes up for the season, as the orchestra arrives, the cake shop opens, variety acts set up in the hotel and guests flood in. As the day in, day out routine of the spa settles down it becomes clear that the gentility and calm are an illusion and the authorities are keen to discover who among the guests are Jews.

  The genius of Badenheim 1939 is the way that it panders to the idea of the spa as a place which is necessarily harmless and charming, while allowing tiny glances of horror to intervene, which until the end almost everyone refuses to notice. It is a much more subtle book than simply an attack on Jewish passivity – Appelfeld sees the whole idea of the great Central European spa as an evasion and in effect a monstrous trick. This framework for polite, empty circulation, a regulated, closed environment for the right kind of people, now seems to stand for a lost and enviable pre-1914 world, but in practice it has always been toxic and peculiar.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Mapping out the future » The lure of the Orient » Refusals » Village of the damned » On the move » The Führer