Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

by Winder, Simon

  I realize with a chill that this section could go on almost indefinitely and it would be possible to bludgeon the reader with items from page after page of my notes, which should perhaps just be quietly binned. I see a note here, for example, I made in Sibiu: Picture of eighteenth century horse-driven mint: four horses needed to work coin-stamping machine! Use to kick off section on coins? But this all has to stop somewhere.

  Just in passing, given the stresses and terrors inflicted on this part of the world, it must be pointed out that what have tended to survive for display in Romanian museums are very heavy or rugged objects. Through the brutal winnowing process of the past century, things too heavy to loot or too inert to burn now have a disproportionate hold on the displays. Not just swords and tankards and metal dishes, but such surprises as a heavy stone that convicted malefactors had to wear round their necks with the notice ‘Live a Christian life and beware of evil – then the stone will not hang on your neck’. Or perhaps the most enduring of all – the enormous statues created during the Great War to raise money for war bonds. For a certain sum pledged the individual could hammer a nail into the wooden statue, generally of a medieval knight, sometimes with the family name written on the nail’s head. As thousands of nails accumulated, the statue became a sort of iron monster. This was an Austro-Hungarian invention copied by the Germans. There is a just spectacular example in the Altemberger House Museum in Sibiu, an implacable sort of crusader-robot about ten feet high with a blankly sinister armoured face. These creatures have a strange claim on our attention – their materials have kept them, bar a little oxidizing, just as they were, as expressions of willing or unwilling local patriotism, to raise money for the Empire to fight the Russians. Their iconography is meant to whip up a sense of the crusader West fighting the barbarian East, of Christian morality against pagan depravity. This is obviously trash history, but also quite interesting as so many of the combatants on both sides did see themselves as medieval knights. There is, for instance, a statue in London’s Hyde Park showing the British as St George and the Central Powers as a dead dragon, a mere heap of superbly rendered metal scales. This was a universal cliché. So these money-raising robots are a very clear-cut reminder that the Central Powers saw themselves as on the side of right, fighting for specific and noble values against the barbarians that surrounded them. The nails are a final monument both to an Empire about to cease to exist and a community (in Sibiu’s case half German and a quarter each Romanian and Hungarian) which invested (literally) in that Empire and which has also ceased to exist.

  Psychopathologies of everyday life

  Writing about the last decades of the Empire is a useful way of delaying the point at which it implodes. There is no point in rehearsing yet again the vigours and wonders of that period before 1914, when Freud waved cheerily from a tram at Schiele and the Second Vienna School sang a capella to delighted cafe-goers. Fuelled by waltzes, nicotine and sexual perversion, the Empire hurtles to its doom leaving an astonishing meteor streak across the sky.

  It would be absurd to deny that this was a very remarkable culture, and indeed it is the reason (as for everyone) why I first became interested in the Empire. But I have become ever more struck by how much this narrative was almost entirely created after the War – and indeed in many cases, particularly in Britain, was still being constructed into the 1990s. For Britain, Austria-Hungary could probably have been summed up as a barracks-ridden, aristocratic and actively philistine place. There was some appreciation of Vienna’s music, but this was generally viewed as having a merely museum-like quality – the land of Johann Straus II and Brahms. Budapest and Prague, which we would now think of as crazily wonderful, hardly figured. Even the one great musical sensation from Austria-Hungary, Strauss and von Hofmannsthal’s Der Rosenkavalier, ecstatically received at both Covent Garden and the Met in 1913, added to the sense of decay by being set in the era of Maria Theresa and, however ironic and beautiful, to the sense of its being an embalmed culture, which even had to bring in a German composer to provide its music.

  It is really very alarming to see just how little anybody knew or cared about Austria-Hungary. A giant figure such as Mahler (who died in 1911) was valued as a conductor (the reason he went to New York) and some of his music was known, but most of his symphonies did not receive their British or American premieres until many years later – in the UK the Second Symphony only in 1931 and the Third only in 1961. The Adagietto from the Fifth had been played on its own as a ‘lollipop’ at the Proms before the war – which seems about right – but the whole symphony was not played until 1945. The US was similarly slow to get to grips with this music. And as for what we would now see as the great tumble of extraordinary music from Schönberg, Berg, Zemlinsky, Webern and others, it was almost as though it did not exist. The pieces which for me at any rate are the terrible soundtrack to the end of the Empire, Berg’s Three Pieces for Orchestra or Zemlinsky’s startling Second String Quartet, were unplayed. Bartók’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle was written in 1911 but was not premiered until 1918 in Budapest which, in the context of the time, did not make this a hot ticket for Allied music-lovers. It was eventually given its stage premiere in the US and UK in the 1950s.

  Writing from the period was also quite disregarded. Kafka had published a handful of stories (Description of a Struggle and The Judgement) but it was many years before these were familiar in the West. Freud, in his late fifties when the war broke out, was, outside very narrow circles, more or less unknown – Interpretation of Dreams and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life were only just being published in New York. Painting and architecture fared no better. We may all love Klimt now, but at the time he was completely swamped by the overwhelming, blazing presence of the Paris art scene. Adolf Loos had built nothing yet outside the Empire and perhaps the two most appealing figures of the entire period, Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser, were busy conjuring up wonders at the Wiener Werkstätte more or less ignored by the wider world.

  So the society which now strikes us as headily varied, tolerant and inventive carried on its work almost unnoticed in London or New York. This matters only in the very narrow sense that this was a society only really appreciated in the rear-view mirror. The horrors of the War and the subsequent civil wars, massacres and invasions sealed into place something which subsequently appeared lost and precious, a process built on and elaborated by countless exiles and by the two great post-War authors Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth, the latter not really being widely read in the West until the 1990s. The steady accumulation of interest in the Empire was, of course, long delayed by distaste for the region, which bridged much of the gap between 1918 and 1939. During this time figures like Bartók and Schönberg became admired partly because of their own loathing of their countries’ regimes. This distaste was naturally maintained easily across 1939–45 and then left the entire region derelict and friendless (again, except through émigrés) until the end of the Cold War. So a process began in 1914 of turning Central Europe into Eastern Europe, where cities such as Lviv, Debrecen or Cluj, which had been part of a culture rooted in mainstream European values, and part of a framework that made towns from northern Italy to Transcarpathia look pretty much the same, were banished into outer darkness.

  But it is perhaps just as striking that the inhabitants of Austria-Hungary themselves did not seem to know what they would be missing. Many of the creative figures we now most admire were at the time part of very small coteries and it was probably true that the dominant tone of the Empire really was much more set by parade-grounds and barracks, perhaps with a spa attached. But also it was a place absolutely dominated by nationalist issues to which everything else seemed subservient. The parliaments in both Budapest and Vienna were reduced to virtual paralysis by waves of fury about schooling, military languages of command and so on, with deputies banging their desks, throwing ink-pots, fighting duels, and having to be periodically shut down by troops. We may value a handful of remarkable individuals who were made by
the Empire, but their shared strangeness (and frequent Jewishness) shows the pressures of living in a Europe which was harsh, ignorant, callous and militarily obsessive. Perhaps the cultural survival and indeed veneration of figures such as Kraus, Freud, Hašek, Kafka, Schiele and Webern flatters and distorts how we think of the Empire. It would be a grotesquely demeaning thing to set up and it would be visited by nobody, but perhaps a major exhibition should be put together celebrating all the figures who were often very successful at the time but who are now forgotten – the heroic realist sculptors, the anti-Semitic cartoonists, the insipid society portraitists, the writers of slim bestsellers on how German Austrians should join the Reich or why Jews, Romanians, Ruthenians and so on are biologically made to be untrustworthy.

  One interesting example of the era’s real concerns is shown in Janáček’s spectral choral piece from 1909 The Seventy Thousand. Janáček is a perfect example of a great composer only fully discovered in the West in the 1980s whose work now so retrospectively colours the early twentieth century as to provide a sort of soundtrack for it. The Seventy Thousand uses a startling blend of male voices, in whispers and shouts, to create an atmosphere of despairing hysteria. Janáček has a benign air, almost entirely because in old age he looked like a children’s toy, but in practice he was a thoroughly unpleasant Slav nationalist of a dotty kind.2 This piece is very odd, a setting of one of Petr Bezruč’s bestselling Silesian Songs, about the fate of Czech-speakers in the Duchy of Teschen/Těšín/Cieszyn. The song saw the Czechs as crushed between the two millstones of German and Polish and doomed to disappear:

  One hundred thousand of us have been made German

  One hundred thousand of us have been made Polish

  …

  A crowd, we look on vacantly

  Just as one calf watches the slaughter of another.

  So what was the right number of people to speak a particular language? All over the Empire there were different obsessions – generally fuelled by isolating a specific area like Teschen and then having a mental breakdown about some demographic shift. Nobody made choral settings of poetry pointing out that there were plenty more Czechs just down the road and that Czech culture was thriving as never before (expressed not least in the works of Bezruč and Janaček). This crazy ethnicity-meets-mathematics environment stemmed from the fall-out of intellectuals as diverse as Friedrich List and Charles Darwin, fuelled and spread (awkwardly) by literacy and forms of democracy. It was a definite problem that the Empire’s parliaments made language the route to power. This sense of an unending scramble for a place in the sun, a place that could only be reached by stamping down on the heads of others, lay at the heart of the European disaster that now unfolded. Retrospectively the Habsburg version seems a bit childishly harmless, but it was bitter and vicious enough at the time, and the Empire was the laboratory as much for Nazism as for Zionism. Schools, newspapers, elections, cafes, government jobs became battlegrounds for linguistic competition. The governments veered between repression and electoral concession. In February 1914 a classic Habsburg gesture was made in Galicia, when the parliament in Lviv at last allowed in some Ruthenian deputies, albeit not in proportion to their share of the population and with Poles still having the whip-hand. With, as it turned out, only months to go before the Russian invasion destroyed Galicia this last attempt to satisfy minorities pleased nobody: it was seen by Poles as a frightening concession and by Ruthenians as merely an unsuccessful piece of cynicism to try to buy them off. Similar elaborate and angry dances were going on between Germans and Czechs in Vienna and Hungarians and Romanians in Budapest.

  The logical conclusion to the situation seemed not so much the break-up of the Empire as some cataclysm in which the survivors of some inter-galactic war would at last impose a world in which everyone would speak Hungarian or everyone would speak German, and in which questions of democracy and representation would be resolved by turning non-Nibelung races back into illiterate slaves. However far each language group might successfully spread, they would by definition always be impinging on another people, who could then be claimed as a threat. Each group ground and splintered against the next, in the manner of The Seventy Thousand. The situation was kept under control by the Habsburgs and their loyalists, who were found in irregular but considerable patches across the Empire and who for reasons of their own could see the potential disaster ahead. Many of these individuals had a genuine attachment to the Empire as a whole and to the dynasty, values particularly spread by the army. Others were neutralized by anxieties about the alternatives: Bosnian Muslims fearful of Serbian rule and western Croatians of Italian rule and Galician Poles of German or Russian rule. Others – Italians, Serbs and Romanians – were split between those who yearned for Anschluss with Rome, Belgrade and Bucharest and those who looked down on these corrupt, badly run new nations and feared being chewed up, swallowed and then forgotten by them.3

  This need to keep all these groups in play had the unexpected effect of making the Habsburg authorities (dynastic and martial) in modern terms very liberal, while many groups who one would think of as liberal (urban, middle class, civilian) were frothingly nationalist. Czechs sat quietly at home reading about Hussites slaughtering German invaders, Ruthenians reminisced about massacres of Polish landowners and Romanians and Serbs listened to epic poetry about their ancestors’ unlimited ferocity-cum-nobility. All these fantasies would be put to the test. But nobody at the time could have imagined that they would end up most potently in the hands of the Germans – in some ways the least thought-about minority in the Habsburg Empire: a Western ruling elite, but equally fulfilling every role from shopkeeper to ordinary soldier to agricultural worker, dotted irregularly everywhere from the Tyrol to the Carpathians.

  The largest immune group was the Jews, except those sufficiently assimilated to wholly share German or Hungarian views. There was no nationalist politician, pointing with trembling fingers at a medieval map, wearing his people’s flag in his lapel, robustly singing some nineteenth-century anthem, who did not see the Jews as an obstacle. Even the most assimilated Jewish Hungarians would suddenly find themselves excluded by middle-class Protestant Hungarians, who would drift off into pathetic fantasies about pure ancestry from ancient horsemen. Herzl understood what this might mean, but in a sense all nationalist politicians understood it – that the logic of their views had to mean the disappearance of all those who did not share their ‘race’. This could be achieved by everyone being penned inside separate frontiers (the solution since 1945, with the Soviets and then the EU as neo-Habsburg gendarmes), but there were terrible alternatives to be tried first.

  The end begins

  Austria-Hungary’s monuments to the dead of the First World War tend to be small and private: the work of relatives, or groups of surviving individuals from specific regiments. This is understandable – a war fought for dynastic and Imperial reasons which ended with total defeat and the eradication of both the dynasty and Empire, followed by a maelstrom of social and economic disasters, ticks none of the boxes likely to result in a thoughtful public commemorative programme. None of the successor regimes had any interest in enshrining such a catastrophe, with no form of words really available that could both acknowledge what had happened (some 1,100,000 dead) and come up with any even faintly consolatory rationale. Some small towns (Szekszárd and Rust for example) have simple ‘standing soldier’ monuments in the same style as those in Britain and France, and major cities have them generally tucked away, in side chapels or school halls, with many destroyed by one regime or another. The only really moving exception I came across was in Most na Soči, a tiny Slovenian village on the railway line between Gorizia and Ljubljana where I had planned to travel on to Kobarid, the site of a major battle in the autumn of 1917. The atmosphere of the station, with battered flat-bed railway trucks, silent, dripping mountain trees and the reek of resin and sawdust, was so wonderful that it made me pause fatally, emerging into the courtyard just in time to see the day’s onl
y bus to Kobarid trundling off across a bridge over the spectacular cyan-coloured river. Filling in the time until the next train back and trying to retrieve something from the fiasco I wandered around the area until I suddenly found myself facing an immense, flat, vertical rock face into which was carved in colossal lettering:

  HIER KÄMPFTE DAS XV. KORPS

  MAI 1915: OKTOBER 1917

  Here the XV Corps fought. At the monument’s base are steps and a sort of altar and stone torches. These latter used to be lit to create a suitably warrior-pagan atmosphere. Of course everything was soggy moss, mould and rust streaks, but this only enhanced its strange dignity. I have to admit a research defeat, being simply unable to find out how such a monument has survived, with both its post-Habsburg Italian and Yugoslav owners not exactly in favour of the Empire. Perhaps its bald declaration was sufficiently abstract to be respected. It certainly sums up all that can be said about the Habsburg armies – they fought, but in the end they met everywhere with disaster and defeat. How such disaster overtook and eviscerated the Empire, which had lasted so successfully for so many centuries, is a great and complex subject that requires whole books rather than a few glib paragraphs and is, of course, both a Habsburg story and a European one.