Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

by Winder, Simon

  This triumph of ‘Romanianism’ was a critically significant event in the Empire – it meant that if Hungary stumbled politically or militarily, its entire eastern area would be painfully vulnerable to subversion from Bucharest. Despite the breathtaking incompetence and bad timing of the Romanian government throughout both world wars, Romania grabbed Transylvania and held on to it (aside from a brief interlude in the Second World War when it was partitioned). And since then mass emigration by both Saxons and Hungarians made renewed rule from Budapest impossible, although an idea still harboured by particularly reckless politicians.

  For the Hungarians, 1867 was a moment of immense excitement, with the dazzling prospect of a serious kingdom of their own. This excitement was raised to frenzy in the new, unified city of Budapest in 1873 (sticking together Buda, Pest and Óbuda). But it was impossible not to recognize that they faced a formidable range of new ‘subjects’. Within five years protests had come not just from the ASTRA Romanians, but from Serbs in Nagybecskerek, Slovaks in Turócszentmárton and Croats in Zágráb (now, tellingly, the towns of Zrenjanin in Serbia, Martin in Slovakia and Zagreb in Croatia). A further edge was given to these political and linguistic movements (the two cannot be split) by the way that so many of these groups lived in mountainous or otherwise poor land. Often, particularly in Slovak northern Hungary or in Transylvania, they were under the supervision of a Hungarian landlord class of an increasingly bizarre level of old-fashionedness, making the ethnic issue also one of access to resources. The huge estates no longer provided an adequate economic motor, preserving one lifestyle and shutting out others.

  In the face of such resentment, the process of ‘Magyarization’ really was relentless – a Slovak could sit in his mountain fastness in a folk costume or he could move to Budapest or Transdanubia, learn Hungarian and get a factory job. Then, as now, the crushing dullness of the countryside, the low life-expectancy, the vagaries of dearth and disease, made even the worst-paid city jobs glamorous. For a much later generation this was still the case – Herta Müller, a Nobel prize-winning Romanian German, vividly describes in her novel The Land of Green Plums how the only options in the Banat countryside were to grow melons or to tend sheep, and how the only excitement came from when the sheep got loose in the melons and smashed them up with their hooves. This was no different in nineteenth-century Banat and somewhere like Budapest offered staggering temptations. The entrance price was to become literate and learn a new language and this process generated a further 2,000,000 or so ‘fresh’ Hungarians between 1850 and 1910. The largest group in this converted total were Jews, about 700,000, followed by Germans (500,000), Slovaks, Romanians and South Slavs. The effect was startling. One oddity of the Hungarians’ own focus on land-ownership and estates and of so many historical reversals was a consistent lack of an urban culture, with Germans, Jews, Serbs and Armenians at different times and places doing most of the civic work. This changed finally by 1900. Even in 1848 Budapest was still a German-speaking town, but by 1900 a vastly larger city was 80 per cent Hungarian. Across much of central Hungary the Hungarians had become urban, with the traditional landed interest ever less representative. In the same period the Hungarians were also helped out by enormous numbers of the ‘nationalities’ simply leaving – almost a million Slovaks, for example, heading very sensibly for the United States, where some would have a key role in creating the ideology and negotiations that in the depths of the Great War led to the –slovakia bit of Czechoslovakia.

  As the First World War approached it became ever more complicated to be a Hungarian politician – not only did many suffer from a pathological aversion to the Austrians and their relentless attempts to undermine the Compromise or at least revise its terms, but there was upheaval across much of the kingdom. However many Magyarized, it was never enough. There had been a hope that the Slovaks might simply disappear altogether, but this did not happen and the process, as with Germanization in Austria, seized up, as literacy spread and local politicians and priests protected local language schools. The Slovaks only proved a serious threat once the Empire had collapsed in 1918, but the Romanians became ever more grimly opposed to Hungarian rule and had a clear plan – unification with Romania. The Serbs were split, but for many there was an obvious foreign sponsor just over the border in Belgrade. The Croats by definition also loathed Magyarization but were held back by anxiety over being themselves absorbed by the Serbs, or indeed the Italians. They were also distracted by a wish to be united with Dalmatia, which stayed under separate Austrian rule. Everyone became obsessed with percentages, with minute census examinations of each county to spot hopeful pro-Hungarian trends. This became a form of panicked timidity, with the Hungarians ever more neurotic about any further move by Austria-Hungary into the Balkans, simply because more Slavs would change the ratios further against them. Budapest went numb with anxiety both over Bosnia-Hercegovina’s annexation in 1908 (more Slavs!) and Franz Ferdinand’s plans for a new Compromise which would have put South Slavs on the same footing as Germans and Hungarians. Admittedly, a key motivation for Franz Ferdinand’s vision was his borderline-pathological hatred of the Hungarians, but the replacement of ‘Dualism’ by ‘Trialism’ was a logical next step, even if furiously resisted by elements in the Empire.

  There is probably no limit to how interesting (to me anyway) these population issues are but I need to stop. The nationalism which had in many ways proved abortive in 1848 had become compelling for ever more people as the century proceeded. None of these needed to matter in a life-or-death way as long as the Empire held the ring, which it still did effectively in 1914 and indeed perhaps into 1918. But events increasingly seemed to play to national more than Imperial audiences. Janáček’s piano sonata 1.X.1905 has its unusual title because it was written to commemorate the killing on that date by Imperial police of a man in Brno who was simply demonstrating in favour of a Czech university. This incomparable piece of music has an awful prescience – conveying a sense of running men on suddenly hostile boulevards, the panic of the crowds later anatomized by Elias Canetti and which would become one of the most disturbing features of Europe from 1914 onwards. Janáček’s outrage over this single death was completely swamped by later events which make the Habsburg Empire now seem very mild – but it did not seem mild at the time.

  As nationalisms locked more and more solidly there was one commentator who seemed to many at the time simply eccentric but whose short 1896 tract The State of the Jews was perhaps the single most extraordinarily effective of all nationalist documents. Just as Czechs or Croats pointed in a mystical, philological fashion to medieval kingdoms or Romanians made crazy appeals to Roman Dacia, so Theodor Herzl looked back to the Jewish state before the destruction of the Temple and the dispersal of the Jews across Europe and the Middle East. Herzl’s family were from the far south of the Military Frontier, from the small river town of Zemun (now a suburb of Belgrade), but had moved to Pest, where Herzl was born in 1860. His parents were entirely Germanized Jews who, provoked perhaps by the increasingly fevered anti-German atmosphere in Budapest, moved to Vienna in 1878. Herzl was characteristic of a torrent of individuals who had shape-shifted across the Empire. The conclusion he reached when he wrote The State of the Jews was that the Empire was coalescing in a way which would exclude Jews and then kill them. It was as if everybody was playing a form of nationalist musical chairs that would end with places for everyone but the Jews, who would be left standing. Anti-Semitism was unappeasable – no attempt to integrate and no betrayal of Jewishness could ever persuade the new Central European nationalists that Jews ‘belonged’ even if Jews had been there since the Roman Empire. The only solution was to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and for Jews to leave Europe before it was too late.

  Herzl’s revolutionary ideas met with derision, but also with curiosity. Palestine had received a handful of Jewish visitors, was remote, expensive to reach, but also, and most importantly, did not feature for most Jews as a very worthwhile locatio
n. As an idea and as a focus for religious identity it was compelling, but the modern reality of the dusty Ottoman eyalet made Herzl’s suggestion merely ludicrous to many – it had the air of a hotter and even worse version of Galicia. From an uncertain beginning, however, the Zionist movement grew, and it was impossible not to see this – Herzl did – as a logical side-effect of the increasing exclusionary nationalist hysteria gripping the Empire. Herzl was an extraordinarily compelling figure and he criss-crossed Europe looking for and finding support. The motives of those he talked to varied in sickening ways. Russian ministers particularly were thrilled by a solution which would allow them to expel ‘their’ Jews. Wilhelm II came closest to seriously pursuing the idea of a Jewish homeland on a visit to the Ottoman Empire, but for the traditional motive (‘The tribe of Shem’, he declared, would be ‘directed to worthier goals than the exploitation of Christians’), and in the face of Ottoman resistance he backed down. Herzl and his supporters became ever more desperate for a result, driven on by news of terrible pogroms in Russia. This led to the strange, ultimately abortive discussions with Britain. The British had any amount of colonial land at their disposal and serious thought was given to building the homeland in Cyprus, then on the Mediterranean coast of Sinai, west of Gaza (a scheme which the young Lloyd George was involved in) and then in British East Africa. This last became a formal offer: a Jewish block of land in the Kenyan Highlands. Looking back it does seem astonishing that Herzl, a not particularly well-known Viennese journalist, could conjure up his ideas almost from thin air, win thousands of supporters, create a powerful Zionist movement and then persuade the British to come up with a homeland, all in not even eight years. The problems with Kenya (or ‘the Uganda scheme’ as it was inaccurately known) was the obvious one: that it was just a new place of exile plus monkeys and elephants and entirely adrift from anything approaching the Land of Israel. With Herzl’s early death in 1904 Zionism lost its hero and the Kenyan option dissolved.

  Herzl’s book is filled with the most extraordinary statements: ‘Am I stating what is not yet the case? Am I before my time? Are the sufferings of the Jews not yet grave enough? We shall see.’ But he was wrong. Zionism was a quintessential Habsburg movement and Israel in many ways the perfect expression of the mutual exclusionism that was wracking the Empire,1 but the context in which Israel was in fact founded was inconceivable at the time of Herzl’s death. The incredulity with which The State of Israel was greeted by many Jews was entirely honourable and intelligent, marking, among many other things, their commitment to a long-standing Empire which successfully protected them. Jews would be both the Empire’s greatest cultural element and then its greatest memorialists. A great chasm existed between even Lueger and Hitler. Herzl was right to see a deeply sinister strain in turn-of-the-century European life, but it took a series of catastrophes without a precedent since the first Ottoman invasions to give them an atmosphere in which they could breed.

  Elves, caryatids, lots of allegorical girls

  When writing about any particular time or place there is always a severe worry that the chunks and scraps left behind are so denatured, chaotic and historically loaded as to be unusable. Historical and technological change mutate and ironize cultural remains so thoroughly that the listener or viewer or reader can be cornered into just choosing either a purely aesthetic response (transported on wings of song) or a detective response (Berg’s music as evidence the First World War was about to break out), both of which manage to be boring and reductive in their own ways.

  Hugo Wolf’s work is among the most extraordinary Habsburg products of the 1880s and ’90s, with songs such as ‘To an Aeolian harp’ (‘An eine Äolsharfe’) and ‘The Converted’ (‘Die Bekehrte’) beautiful in an almost alarming, too-bright way. But the way that we experience them today is crazily at odds with their original context. For example, I enjoy listening to them in our kitchen, with a bowl of nuts and some beer, generally with the background sound of large passenger planes roaring overhead every few minutes and our second son in the sitting room playing a computer game like Afghan Rough-House or KriminalKrew. This is hard to relate to the salon of a Vienna society hostess, all ruche, inlay work and satins (and that’s just the hostess), with the recital being listened to by a handful of posh whey-faced neurasthenics. More uncanny than the need to filter out the sound of a Glock pistol dispatching Taliban in the sitting room is the simple act of repetition. Even the most poisonously demanding patron could not get the singer and accompanist to sing ‘To an Aeolian harp’ dozens and dozens of times in one evening just because they liked it so much. Our sheer familiarity with specific pieces of music in a specific performance is completely at odds with the spirit in which they were both composed and appreciated.

  Going to an actual Wolf recital, I felt driven to the edge of terror by the idea that in front of me were a soprano and pianist of real flesh and blood, who would have to manage from scratch the high-wire act of getting through even one of these songs without any of the lurking mistakes, splutters and mental blanks that could take them by the throat at any second. In this sense a recording is effectively unrelated to Wolf’s aims. And, of course, it is not as though Wolf is all fun – it is hard to imagine some of his cuter material, such as ‘Elf Song’ (‘Elfenlied’ – tippety tap!), can ever have had many takers, or the dirgy ones which just seem to go up and down for five minutes like voice and piano exercises. But, again, this is a huge difference – not only do we listen to pieces of music exponentially more often than in their original contexts, but we are also terrible completists. Just sticking with Wolf: I am sure fans, singers, patrons, even the composer himself, must have thought ‘Elf Song’ pretty much a disgrace and only raised the idea of playing it in a spirit of comic threat. But now we must listen to the whole gamut of songs, good and bad, meticulously edited, complete and nailed down to a definitive listing. Even that unvarying sequence is a total affront to the Lieder spirit – thank goodness for digital randomizers, which could be further improved if they could also run ahead, intelligently assessing and wiping songs before they are even played.

  The gulf between our experience of these songs and the composer’s intentions is nothing compared to other problems pressed on us by history. We know that Wolf died young of syphilis and haggard with self-loathing, feeling in the end that his songs were mere minor work. We also know that his death in 1903 marked in some ways the end of the Lieder tradition, with the great composers who followed him never establishing a similar level of public enthusiasm for their attempts at the genre. Even Wolf’s background as a German Slovenian is problematic, as the disappearance of German Slovenians is a minor tragedy of the twentieth century. And of course – the big one – our awareness that all this confident-seeming late-nineteenth-century culture, with its gloom and grandeur, is all about to come to an end in cataclysm. This last is without doubt the most infuriating and boring struggle of them all. I hate the way that it gives everything a layer of sad varnish completely at odds with its lived experience, but what can be done? The entire structure of this book, even the page number reached, is doomed to press on towards an over-the-cliff denouement invisible to the protagonists, but also in no way inevitable.

  Wolf introduces a form of super-aestheticism which was in many ways to be a key strand in the sensibility of the ‘Late Empire’, a sensibility somehow confected from a strange tangling up of l’art pour l’art and parade-ground philistinism. The famous cultural clashes of the pre-1914 Empire – the banning of Strauss’s Salome, the outcry over Klimt’s paintings for the Great Hall of the University of Vienna, the shock at Loos’s Goldman und Salatsch building (the ‘Looshaus’) or Freud’s Three Essays on Sexuality – all seem to us a battle between idiocy and modernity. But this narrative of a battle between the future and reaction, between prescience and timidity (which we all so enjoy and is so self-selecting and self-flattering) is not true, with the reality much less clear. Like everyone, I cannot think of anything more fun than imagining so
me spindle-shanked courtier in knee-britches, frock coat and a quizzing glass, surrounded by images of the Virgin Mary and St Leopold, denouncing some piece of modernism as a bestial and lubricious mockery of all that is decent. There were indeed court factions of this kind, but they were never very significant. More characteristic was the straightforward dullness of Franz Joseph himself, whose sheer lack of curiosity (except about things like hunting rifles or uniform tabs) made him so lulling an influence on all things cultural. After he opened each of the major cultural forums around the Ring, a depressing official painting would be produced of him standing with various figures in uniform or court dress, surrounded by another pharaonic pile of red marble and gilding which could now be filled with music or stuffed animals or paintings. He would make some much quoted comment (the Kunsthistorisches Museum: ‘This turned out rather well’) which was meant to make him sound simple and direct, but which more accurately reflect his chilling imperviousness.