Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

by Winder, Simon

  The existence of this building shows the strange balancing act that Vienna had to keep up every day, always with different interest groups, aggrieved parties, collaborators and enemies needing to be nudged, bought off, incarcerated, ignored. It also raises very difficult issues of distance, both physical and temporal. To wander along, as at some elaborate buffet, looking at different options and behaviours is effectively an activity unrelated to living one’s life within one of them. To stand outside these issues is to be invisible and irrelevant. The last generation of Habsburg officials, such as von Rezzori senior, prided themselves on this being their stance, and yet we can now see the innumerable ways in which they fooled themselves, their scientific rationalism a delusion. But there really was a form of Imperial colour-blindness, the kind celebrated later by writers such as Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth (not coincidentally Jews), and which did have a real, transparent value. This was at its most extreme in Bukovina, perhaps Europe’s greatest macedonia di frutta, and a culture (which also produced Paul Celan and Aharon Appelfeld) unique but now long dispersed.

  Young Poland

  Even when baring their teeth at one another, Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary generally cooperated to ensure that ‘their’ Poles were reconciled to their fates as inhabitants of a non-country. Austrian-ruled Galicia was in Imperial terms a great success although only by default: the Poles who lived there were deeply aware of how much worse their lives would be in the German province of Posen or in Warsaw, the third largest city in Russia. The presence of an ever more educated, vocal and insistent Ruthenian element in Galicia, an absolute majority in some regions, gave the Poles further reason for loyalty to the Habsburgs. But within that Polish loyalty attitudes ranged from genuine belief to contemptuous cynicism. The relative loyalism of Galicia meant that it tended to be held up as an example to other provinces, but this loyalism came at a very high price. For much of the rest of Europe, Galicia was synonymous with impoverished misery, with at least a million Galicians (many Jewish) emigrating and squalor and gloom prevailing outside a handful of spruced-up town centres. Economically the stakes were perhaps too low for the Poles for it to be worth being too fractious. Despite great bureaucratic ingenuity it seemed that nothing could be done with the region. The one peculiar exception were the oil deposits around Drohobych, which created the strange little semi-Americanized enclave of prosperity which Bruno Schulz later turned into a sort of wonderland in The Street of Crocodiles.

  Kraków, a much smashed-up backwater, had been tacked onto Galicia in 1846 when it fell to Austrian rule after a failed rebellion. The capital of Galicia remained Lwów, far to the east, and Kraków at first seemed merely haunted and debilitated by its earlier greatness, with the Wawel Castle reduced to a dreary Habsburg barracks, its lovely Renaissance pillars covered up. But almost by default Kraków, as a provincial town rather than a major governmental centre, and as the biggest of these not in the brutal hands of the Germans or Russians, became an open space for rebuilding Polish culture. One curious moment came in 1873 when the Germans celebrated the four-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Nikolaus Kopernikus, a figure who Poles were under the impression was Mikołaj Kopernik, Kraków student, hero and Pole. Copernicus was clearly a linguistically and ethnically complex figure of a kind quite common in the era in which he lived. But the blustering German argument threw up the chilling possibility of Polish culture as well as land being dismantled before the eyes of the surviving Polish intelligentsia. It was in Kraków that there was a context in which such a future might be averted.

  Kraków benefited from the same speedy industrialization and growth as elsewhere in Europe, becoming a substantially new Polish Christian and Polish Jewish city and at last shaking off its era of stagnation. It was the home of Jan Matejko, who single-handedly painted virtually every major event in Poland’s history in a lurid, feverish, Verdi-esque and incredibly enjoyable style which makes me wish that British history had had such luck. This frenetic act of recovery meant that by his death in 1893, Matejko had ensured that every Polish schoolchild would grow up with the most vivid sense of his buried nation’s past, laughing at the discomforted Turk, sneering at the proud Prussians’ grovelling submission to the Polish king, warm and alive to the thrill of the Union of Lublin. Perhaps more than anybody Matejko’s histrionics hauled Polish identity out of the danger zone, with the paintings’ public display spreading a renewed pride far more effectively than any history books.

  ‘Young Poland’, which grew up from the 1890s, is one of those artistic movements frustratingly little known to the rest of the world. This is in part because so much of it was entangled in formats which are rarely translated (plays, poems) or are site-specific (buildings, stained-glass windows). My own ignorance was total, but it is hard not to stand in awe of such figures (once you have encountered them) as Stanisław Wyspiański, who seems to have been wonderful at everything he turned his hands to (interior design, plays, poetry, furniture), or Feliks ‘Manga’ Jasieński, a charismatic Orientalist who brought Japanese culture to Kraków and who rightly has a sort of shrine to his sensibility in the Wyspiański Museum. Much of ‘Young Poland’ was politically harmless, except in the sense that the very idea of a vigorous Polish culture could not avoid having implications. Much of Wyspiański’s most beautiful work consists of paintings of children and domestic life and it seems utterly without menace, but he could not escape a more vigorous nationalism that surged everywhere in turn-of-the-century Europe. One compelling oddity, and a fine example of Wyspiański’s ability to turn his hand to pretty much anything, is the fantasy he created with Władysław Ekielski of a total architectural renewal of the Wawel hill. This shabby Habsburg military complex and parade-ground was at last evacuated by Austrian troops in 1905, opening up amazing possibilities for rebuilding and effectively reconsecrating the greatest of Polish national sites. Wyspiański and Ekielski reimagined it as the Acropolis of the Polish Nation, a sort of fairy castle of turrets and domes, museums and new government buildings flanked by an enormous hippodrome. It is a charming vision, preserved in an incredibly charismatic model, but all over Europe people were sketching similar ideas of unlimited grandiosity, some of which actually got built (such as the gross, mournful Neue Burg in Vienna). As a model, however, Wyspiański and Ekielski’s vision cannot be bettered. When they were creating it genuine national independence, rather than mere dangled forms of autonomy, was surreally unlikely, but all the cultural groundwork had been done by ‘Young Poland’ and the Poles, as it turned out, only had a short while to wait.

  I realize that things are getting a bit pell-mell around here, but we cannot move on without a quick mention of the multi-talented Stanisław Witkiewicz. He is owed the world’s gratitude for inventing the Zakopane-style of architecture, a modern and substantial version of the wooden buildings and carvings of the Gorále mountain people of Poland’s far south. I am rarely happier than wandering around Zakopane, which, even with its almost uncontrollable crowds of visitors from Kraków, is still a thrillingly enjoyable town. It is here that one of my favourite composers, the intermittently great Karol Szymanowski, lived, creator of among many other things the wonderful Gorále pantomime-ballet Harnasie. It was here too that Joseph Conrad – who had grown up in Kraków and Lwów but had left Poland forty years before – found himself on a nostalgic visit stuck by the outbreak of the First World War. Eventually a sympathetic American consul arranged for him to be extracted from Austria-Hungary. As Szymanowski and Conrad are two of my spiritual godparents (not a role they would have volunteered for), to be in their mountain town made everything seem more beautiful and significant than it perhaps really is. Witkiewicz’s vision of a town of authentic, severe yet extravagant, wooden houses continues to prevail in some parts of Zakopane. I would love to live there, surrounded by Zakopane-style butter-moulds and milking-stools, wearing a folkloric blouse and walking in the Tatra Mountains. It has been a tourist trap for at least a century, but sitting at a table munching a vast pl
ate of mountain-style meat listening to Gorále musicians, you feel that it is absolutely fine to be trapped.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  ‘The fat churchy one’ » Night music » Transylvanian rocketry » Psychopathologies of everyday life » The end begins

  ‘The fat churchy one’

  The Archduke Franz Ferdinand is one of the modern era’s terrible ghosts, doomed to re-enact year after year his floundering final hours, ostrich feathers everywhere, his body bulging in an absurd uniform. He is always en route to that wrong turn which will bring him face to face with the depressed young man, sitting in a Sarajevo cafe mulling over the pathetic failure of his assassination plot, who is suddenly presented with this incredible reprieve. Betrayed by his useless security arrangements and daft, pop-eyed, moustachioed appearance, Franz Ferdinand seems to cry out to be killed and usher in a new and awful world.

  Franz Ferdinand spent almost his entire adult life rehearsing and war-gaming his upcoming role as Habsburg Emperor. From the age of twenty-six to his murder a quarter of a century later, he impatiently awaited his despised uncle Franz Joseph’s death. Of course we will never know if he would have been a ‘good’ Emperor. It may well be that he had just waited too long and that whatever qualities he might have possessed had long curdled, lost in a maze of ritual, uniforms, masses and – above all – hunting. His shooting skills made him legendary, belonging to that disgusting and depressing era when the aristocratic hunting expedition became married to modern military technology, unbalancing the entire relationship of hunter and hunted, so that shooting partridges became like a proto-version of playing Space Invaders. Franz Ferdinand totted up the dazing total of some three hundred thousand animals killed. The little woodland critters on his Bohemian estates must have indulged in a certain amount of high-fiving on receipt of the news from Sarajevo.

  Franz Ferdinand’s reputation is doubly ruined – not just by the dumb, chaotic, portentous nature of his death, but by his comic role at the opening of Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk. The devastating opening chat between Švejk and his landlady – where Švejk assumes that the Ferdinand whose murder has been announced must either be a Ferdinand who works as a chemist’s messenger or a Ferdinand who is a local dog-shit collector (‘Neither of them is any loss’) – has for many thousands of readers buried the Archduke for ever. The last straw is the landlady’s crushing correction: ‘Oh no, sir, it’s His Imperial Highness … the fat churchy one.’

  In the modern Czech Republic, Franz Ferdinand’s home at Konopiště is a hugely popular tourist site and is at the heart of the renewed cult of the Habsburgs as happy rulers of a better time. Having frittered much of my life wandering around Central European castles, I think I can say with some authority that this is the most interesting of them all. Despite damage and theft by the Nazis, the interior of Konopiště accurately reflects its appearance when Franz Ferdinand and his family left it for the last time, en route to Bosnia. It is comparable perhaps only to Freud’s house in London as a picture of the inside of a particular mind. It also brings to mind Bartók’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, with each door opening to reveal a fresh aspect of the heir’s psyche. Franz Ferdinand was a great mental and physical cataloguer – a man who felt that he could know everything by systematizing everything – and he used Konopiště as an extension of his own memory.

  As he shot animals around the world (everything from rhinos to gemsbok to emus) Franz Ferdinand carefully wrote down each kill, leaving a complete and dismaying record. Hundreds of these animals were stuffed and mounted, leaving whole corridors of the castle bursting with antlers, tusks, beaks, snouts, glass eyes, feathers and bristles. Just a moment of inattention while wandering past these heads could result in being gouged by something or releasing a nauseating shower of sawdust and skin. Wherever Franz Ferdinand travelled he had photos taken, and corridors are filled with his global wanderings, across Egypt and Australia, Canada and the United States (where he had, to his bafflement, actually to hand in his gun before visiting Yellowstone National Park). He collected weapons, many superb pieces being from his cousin the Duke of Modena, who bequeathed him not only heaps of wheel-locks, silver-chased partisans and jousting armour, but also so much money that he became one of the richest men in Europe – independently of any Imperial money, much to Franz Joseph’s impotent fury. Entire rooms are stuffed with ingenious metal objects for killing people, in glass cases, in decorative patterns, hanging from the ceiling. Franz Ferdinand also collected statues of St George (although his favourite saint was St Hubert – patron saint of hunters) and every nook and niche is filled with beautiful, strange or indifferent sculptures of George, with or without dragon. In all this monstrous accumulation of stuff there is something eerie and excessive. There is even a wing of the castle built specially for his cousin and friend Crown Prince Rudolf’s use, filled with objects of a kind which the young Franz Ferdinand thought would please him. Rudolf killed himself without ever visiting the castle, but the wing, with its wood panelling and air of masculine, tweedy, outdoorsy common sense plus a slight whiff of eau de Cologne, was kept as a perverse shrine.

  By the time that you have taken all this in – plus Franz Ferdinand’s obsessive diary of his geographical location for every day in his life (the page open, fascinatingly, on a visit to Waltham Abbey, the experimental explosive and gunnery laboratory outside London) plus his multi-compartmented leather travelling cases – it is clear that there was something very peculiar about the castle’s owner. Undoubtedly very clever, conscientious, focused, hungry for information, he was also humourless, narrow, grasping and an insatiable, unappeasable cataloguer of a chilling kind. Whether at Konopiště or at the Upper Belvedere Palace, his Vienna base, Franz Ferdinand spent year after year wondering how to reform the Empire and which Hungarians he would gaol first, poring over maps and books, cross-examining whole crowds of experts, all in preparation for when he would at last take over. He imagined for the Empire a definitive reorganization which would tidy it up, rationalize it and essentially bring it into line with his game diary, St George statues and serried flintlocks. We will never know if the plan for a United States of Greater Austria would have worked (there were many variants and it is unclear how seriously he took them) but on paper it seems tantalizing: fifteen ethnically coherent states with Vienna as the (very powerful) federal capital. To look at the map (designed by the Romanian Transylvanian Aurel Popovici) is to see a future which never happened – or only happened in part under the obscene, transient tutelage of the Nazis. The existence of such states as Szekler Land, Trentino and German Bohemia would have saved a lot of agony and the map has become an anguished commentary on what has happened in the century since it was proposed.

  Franz Ferdinand was an unusual Habsburg in that he was poor at learning languages, and his complete failure to master Magyar may have been one of the reasons he hated Hungary so much. For his map to have worked the first obstacle had to be the destruction of the Hungarian state. The years of obfuscation, special pleading and hypocrisy by the Hungarian aristocracy so enraged Franz Ferdinand that he – a lifelong hater of democracy – became a warm supporter of a broad franchise just in Hungary (not in Austria) purely to enrage and then ruin the Hungarian aristocracy. He wanted to recreate the atmosphere of prostration that had prevailed back in 1849 so as to reshape the current botch and make a Habsburg super-state. These fascinating possibilities of course fall foul of the acute problems in achieving them. However friendless the Hungarians may have been, such a drastic reordering could have attracted malevolent Russian interest as well as Italian, Serbian and Romanian outrage of a kind that might well have led to some similar conflagration to that provoked by Franz Ferdinand’s murder. It also assumed that each nationality would have remained, once the Hungarians had somehow been disarmed, happy and merely folklorique within the bounds of Habsburg federalism. Why would the Bohemian Germans be willing to keep living in their little woodsy province rather than unite with the Second Reich?
The plan (and Franz Ferdinand had many – so he may have spotted this flaw himself at some point) also failed to notice that it was the Hungarians who were the gendarmes, the most zealously brutal and anti-nationalist enforcers. Their neutralization would knock from the Habsburgs’ hands their most powerful weapon. In any event, some of the variants enshrined in Popovici’s map would ultimately be tried, with truly horrible results – but both the ruthless re-cutting of boundaries and the implicit violence had important origins in Franz Ferdinand’s mind.

  In many of Franz Ferdinand’s political dealings there is the air of someone dreaming about how one day he will thrash all his servants in the hope that this will enforce obedience. But this was in many ways just his unpleasant personal manner and he was certainly no warmonger. One of the worst counterfactuals around his death is his role in the July Crisis, had he not caused it by being dead. He was no titan, but could he have shaped a more intelligent Austro-Hungarian strategy than the gang of fatalists and jittery oddballs who gathered around the ancient Franz Joseph? If much of the July Crisis was caused by the utter moral failure of Europe’s civilian leadership, then it is plausible to think that Franz Ferdinand’s enormous authority may have imposed a different pattern of thinking. He was always convinced that the motor for a stable and successful Europe was a German–Habsburg–Russian alliance, an alliance which had been, after all, highly successful for much of the nineteenth century. This perception that the three empires should support each other for dynastic, anti-democratic and anti-Polish reasons was very plausible – and indeed the perhaps needless alienation of Russia proved as great a disaster for Europe as the split between Britain and Germany.