Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

by Winder, Simon

  Perhaps the single most striking aspect of the last decades of the Empire is the speed with which its concerns became fatally irrelevant to the rest of Europe. After its crushing by the Prussians in 1866 the Empire continued to behave like a major predator, without noticing that it had become a prey animal – a lion that was actually a gnu. In the wake of the defeat Habsburg forces marched out of the federal fortresses on the Rhine and evacuated Holstein and ended their long engagement with western Europe, removing the last traces of a possible shared interest with Britain.

  In an era defined by the dramatic expansion of Europe into the rest of the world, the Empire only participated as a provider of impoverished emigrants to North America. Two strange exceptions happened in 1878. One was the peculiar expedition to the Arctic Ocean, crewed by shivering Dalmatians, mentioned in chapter 12. But even this was a private expedition so – mercifully – it did not establish Habsburg sovereignty over Franz Joseph Land, thus saving the Empire both from foolish investment in the harvesting of hardy mosses for world markets, and a serio-comic further battlefront in the First World War.

  The other exception stemmed from Bismarck’s urging, after 1866, that the Habsburgs follow their destiny in south-east Europe. This was a region about which the Germans cared little, but which, it was true, had been at the heart of Habsburg ideology since the days of Ferdinand I. In 1878 the process of Ottoman decay resulted in further lumps of Turkish Europe falling off in the face of Russian aggression. But here the narrow scope of Habsburg concerns shows in a chilling form. Russia’s interests were now transcontinental – scooping up places such as Tashkent and Samarkand, moving along the Ussuri and Amur rivers into the Far East and in the same 1878 war snatching further chunks of the Caucasus. By contrast Austria-Hungary only had eyes on Bosnia-Herzegovina, which it occupied, along with the wonderfully named Sanjak of Novi Bazar, notionally to restore order and only on behalf of the Ottoman Empire, which already had its hands full.4 This feeble pretence was met with ferocious Muslim resistance and some five thousand Habsburg casualties. Strangely, one of the most prominent war memorials in Graz – on the road that leads to the Arnold Schwarzenegger Stadium – marks the invasion of Bosnia.

  The acquisition of this small, bitter and impoverished region (from which many Muslims now fled) was in itself almost pointless, a parody of Prince Eugene’s sweeping triumphs. It had three purposes: to keep apart the two micro-states of Montenegro and Serbia; to prevent Serbia’s own occupation of the territory; and to act as a jumping-off point to grab in due course the port of Salonika. The first two were sensible enough and identified an alliance which would prove extraordinarily dangerous, if embarrassingly so, given the disparity between the Empire and its teeny Balkan enemies. The Salonika plan was discreetly shelved, although the idea of the Habsburgs as an Aegean power dominating the whole Balkans is fascinating – and it hints at an alternative history where there is nothing at all preordained about Greece’s eventual ownership of the city, after many further twists and miserable turns.

  Any thoughts of further expansion into the Balkans by the Empire were nixed by the impossible attitude of the Hungarians. As all Hungarians now lived inside the Empire any territorial extension would result in a larger percentage of non-Hungarians – and the addition of yet more Slavs. This pathological, zero-sum, ethnographic obsessiveness drove Vienna mad and resulted in Franz Ferdinand’s secret dreams of marking his future coronation by invading Hungary. But, again, the Hungarians had a sort of point – any further extension south which enfolded further Serbs could only be supervising the creation of an internal Yugoslavia. Indeed in 1913 the result of the Second Balkan War was the final expulsion of the Ottomans and much more territory for the Serbs, which made Bosnia-Herzegovina their next piece of unfinished business. The assassination of Franz Ferdinand in Bosnia the following year was therefore both beautifully apt, and part of a far wider pattern which would indeed destroy the Empire.

  The disappearance of the Ottomans has a curious trigger quality. There were Turkish troops in the Belgrade fortress as late as 1878 – they marched out on the declaration of full Serbian independence – and on the Adriatic in 1912. Despite disaster after disaster it was only in 1912–14 that they retreated to the small block of land around Edirne still held by the Turkish republic today, the final remnant of Turkey-in-Europe. It is as though their departure removed the discipline which had prevented the region’s other major actors from turning on each other.

  The Habsburgs watched immobilized as pie-carving Romanian, Bulgarian, Montenegrin, Greek and Serbian armies resolved the region’s future in the Balkan Wars almost without reference to them. This was a desperate and humiliating situation. How could these small countries be taking such violent and far-reaching action while completely ignoring their colossal neighbour? The answer was that they were all well aware of structural Habsburg timidity. For all the war-games, parades and bluster, the Habsburgs had gone from being a pan-European power in the 1850s to a local one, frightened of its neighbours. It is perhaps an implausible image, but Austria-Hungary and Germany in global terms had in a generation become the Babes in the Wood, clinging to each other, surrounded by colossal powers operating in a global, not a European framework. In a world in which America and Russia were both deliriously expanding and where colonies were seen as the currency of economic, masculine assertion, Austria-Hungary and Germany hardly counted, with even Belgium a more convincing Imperial power. Of course, these were Babes backed up by Škoda and Krupp, but in both Vienna and Berlin there were acute anxieties that their styling themselves ‘Empires’ seemed increasingly sarcastic, given their now relatively small, boxed-in landmasses. It is strange that the term ‘World War’ in 1914 did not really apply to the Central Powers, who essentially fought a war merely around the rim of their European borders. This sense of encirclement, decline, of an agenda shifting against them had a powerful impact on Vienna, Budapest and Berlin’s ever more irrational world-view.

  Much of the discussion about blame for the disaster comes from arguments about which of these capitals did most to bring it about, but this can never be resolved. And with each passing year it becomes clearer that blame can be more usefully handed out to all the major European countries, which seem racked by a sort of disastrous febrile skittishness. For those clambering out of the catastrophe of 1914–45 (or indeed 1914–89) it was crucial to give reasons for what had happened of an appropriately cosmic grandeur – either a monstrous German plot or a systemic failure within capitalism. The idea that the unfolding of the war could have been simply the result of a cock-up, of truly contemptible civilian decision-making allied to a balance of forces which happened to make the war unwinnable by either side, seems far more plausible now. These old cosmic explanations allowed political leaders to take no responsibility for what happened – when, of course, every capital city throughout the conflict was filled with civilian men who allowed themselves to be flattered and hypnotized by what they thought could be achieved by unleashing military power.

  One final act of will by the Habsburgs led to the creation of Albania. The Albanians were a group who moved from having no agreed form for their alphabet in 1909 to full independence five years later. They were an extraordinarily cosmopolitan and widespread people and had had a powerful impact on Mediterranean history, both fighting for the Ottoman Empire and undermining it –

  Albanians had ruled Egypt and fought and administered everywhere from the Red Sea to the Caucasus. A large part of the world had been open to them and the collapse of the Ottomans was a disaster. They found themselves shut into a tiny and vulnerable national area for the first time, grudgingly proclaiming independence only when it was clear that Turkey-in-Europe was at an end. Serbia saw how it could obtain a sea coast at last and invaded the region. This was the perfect nightmare for the Habsburgs: a Serbia with ports, which its Russian ally’s navy could use first to box in the Adriatic and end Habsburg access to world trade, then as a base for ferrying in an unstoppabl
e expeditionary force. Fortunately other European powers could see that this would not be brilliant for them either and cooperated to create an Albanian buffer-state, with Serbia nonetheless keeping the Kosovo vilayet, a decision which would have profound consequences in the 1990s. The old Sanjak was split between Serbia and Montenegro.

  It is a striking measure of Habsburg weakness that it could only manage a geographical spoiling action, and only then with the cooperation of the Italians, who also relished a weak new state in the Adriatic – but who otherwise could not have been more inimical to the Empire, despite being its notional ally. From the perspective of the seventeenth or eighteenth century the Balkans should have been the final horizon of the great Habsburg mission, their troops effortlessly filling in the peninsula down to the Peloponnese, but it was a horizon which now vanished in a haze of vacillation and timidity. Romania and Serbia could with growing confidence look on other Romanians and Serbs still ‘trapped’ inside the Empire as hostages who would one day be redeemed. The Serbs felt the same about Bosnia-Herzegovina. Gavrilo Princip, born an Ottoman subject in western Bosnia in 1894, was entirely characteristic of bitter Christian Slavs who – harassed by the Habsburg police – made their way to Belgrade looking for revenge.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The curse of military contingency » Sarajevo » The Przemyśl catastrophe » Last train to Wilsonville » A pastry shell » The price of defeat » Triumphs of indifference

  The curse of military contingency

  In common with much of the rest of Europe, Austria-Hungary managed to be imbued with a militarist ethic while not really fighting anyone. After the humiliation of 1866 the army which stood at the heart of the state only saw action occupying Bosnia. The small and futile Habsburg navy had a curious outing as four ships and some three hundred marines became an almost unnoticed element in the international expedition to ‘restore order’ in China after the Boxer Rebellion. This fact is only of interest because one of the members of the expedition was Baron von Trapp, who was on board the armoured cruiser SMS Kaiserin und Königin Maria Theresia on the Yangtze. This was of course very many years before, played by Christopher Plummer, he sang ‘Edelweiss’ and won my ten-year-old daughter’s heart for ever, committing us as a family to playing the Sound of Music DVD so many times the digital coding almost wore through.

  This pacific stance meant that despite countless manoeuvres, table-top plans, wave upon wave of uniform and weapon reform, nobody had any real experience of war. This was true too for Germany, where the army also became just a pleasant rite of passage – years of hanging around in a terrific uniform and making friends who would form drinking clubs, reunion dinners and mutually back-scratching business arrangements that would define the future shape of their millions of participants’ lives, but no fighting. This was, of course, entirely admirable. Franz Joseph loved reviewing troops and artists spent their entire careers doing paintings of him looking at smart cavalry regiments. This harmless activity could have put an entirely rosy glow on his reign if he had died before 1914 (as by almost any reasonable criterion he should have done) but the continuity of his values until 1916 shows how a poisonous sense of violence was a latent constant year after year. The military remained overwhelmingly the state’s principal preoccupation and the biggest factor noticeable in the Habsburg landscape. Dominant buildings in the cities, such as the Wawel Castle in Kraków or the Buonconsiglio Castle in Trento, were massive and unlovely barracks (the latter’s beautiful frescoes all whitewashed over) and the world wistfully recreated in Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March or Stefan Zweig’s Beware of Pity was – looking between the lines – a narrow, macho, dreary place. Perhaps the clearest sense of the scale of Habsburg society’s commitment to the military was that by the end of 1914, 3,500,000 of its trained citizens had been activated for service. All those years of polishing boots, drill, small-town brothels and drinking contests before passing into civilian life meant that, even years after, you would suddenly find yourself reached out for, so that you could die or be wounded in some hideous way.

  This was true across the whole of Europe. The lack of an ideological element to this obsession with military contingency makes it hard to understand now. Generals were constantly coming up with fresh plans for dealing with fresh enemies, with the stakes strangely low. Perhaps the only ideologically motivated European country was France – by far the most militarized as a percentage of population – grimly bent on its eventual war of revenge with Germany to regain Alsace-Lorraine. Otherwise everyone seems to take turns in being allies or enemies, to little effect. There was a common obsession with isolation (except, for much of the period, in the case of Britain, which had little stake in the Continent beyond peace in the west) and layer upon layer of public and secret treaties offered various forms of security while at the same time provoking counter-reactions. The actual combination in place in 1914 seems now like a mere accident, with quite different possibilities if war had broken out a couple of years earlier: in which case at the very least Italy would have fought alongside Germany and Austria-Hungary; or a couple of years later: in which case Russia and Britain would almost certainly have been totally antagonistic again.

  As had often been the case in the nineteenth century, Germans, Austrians and Russians needed to cooperate to keep the Poles down but also so their rulers could visit each other’s houses, swap uniforms, have banquets and hang around sounding off about the evil of liberals. This was a great source of stability. The one constant was a grim determination by Franz Joseph to stick to Germany under all circumstances. His early reign had been marked by isolation and military humiliation. Moving in lock-step with Berlin gave him a magic shield. Russia was a problem, though. Bismarck had kept Russia quiet through the deeply secret Reinsurance Treaty, which in its most secret inner sanctum agreed even to allow Russia to attack Constantinople with impunity. Bismarck’s dyspepsia was brought on by knowing that France’s delirious fantasies of revenge could be realized through a treaty with Russia and to avoid this a nod and a wink to Russian expansion anywhere else was preferable. Bismarck’s departure in 1890 put everything into the hapless hands of Kaiser Wilhelm, who refused to renew the military treaty as he felt instead that he could rely on his sparkly personal magnetism to stage-manage the relationship just by speaking to the Tsar, man to man. This provoked total panic among the now isolated Russians, who in 1892 duly signed up with France. That a further twenty-two years went by before war broke out shows that the set-up was not fatal in itself. But it did hold the potential for turning a local problem into a pan-European one.

  For the Germans eastern Europe became ever more of a backwater. Their interests – particularly via Hamburg and Bremen – were in trade, and the bulk of their most dynamic industrial areas were in the west, as were their best customers. With the exception of Silesia, the German eastern areas which had so defined the old state of Prussia no longer counted for much, and yet it was the east that saw the disasters of the twentieth century. From the early 1890s onwards Vienna and Berlin initiated ever more fevered and elaborated war-games to work out how to deal with the Russian menace. Germany was oddly placed as it had no interest in taking any Russian territory and Russia had no interest in taking any German territory. In that sense the countries, allies for much of the nineteenth century, were only antagonistic because of Russia’s alliance with France. Germany was also entirely defensive in the west: by 1914 it had given up its absurd plan to take on Britain’s navy and it just wanted France to carry on buying things. But, again, it was France and Russia’s alliance that turned Germany from a sated power into a paranoid one, its planners obsessed with the need if there were to be war to knock out first France and then Russia, in a military operation of more and more unfeasible vastness. But the plan’s principal author, Alfred von Schlieffen, had died of old age in 1913 without his ever more elaborately deranged heaps of train times, scribbled arrows and diktats ever coming close to being used.

  Austria-Hungary’s situat
ion was quite different as it had to deal with active interference by Russia. As in Austria-Hungary, Russia (whatever its rulers’ dreams) could not simply be run as a giant prison cell, nor were its elite able to function as cold and disengaged technocrats immune to wider trends. For Russia, particularly Russia totally humiliated by the 1905 war with Japan, a tear-stained, proud interest in their Slav ‘little brothers’ the Serbs and Montenegrins came to take on real importance: both as a genuine piece of mystical craziness and as an ideology based on the surprisingly hard late-nineteenth-century fighting that had taken Russia itself further into the eastern Balkans in its wars with the Ottomans. If the Habsburgs had occasional but rapidly suppressed thoughts about taking over Salonika, the Romanovs had more concrete plans, kept warm since Catherine the Great, to take over Constantinople. If they were to do this then they would need a quiescent or friendly Balkans. Bismarck had thought it worthwhile to buy Russian friendship by letting them into Constantinople, and the British and French had a similar secret clause in their agreement during the Great War, and it is odd in a way that it never actually happened.

  This pan-Slavism was a variant on other standard-issue nationalisms across much of Europe, cutting across more local boundaries in a confusing manner and finding its fullest expression in Yugoslavism. Pan-Slavism was also, of course, highly selective – the Czechs were warmly embraced in St Petersburg when they sent delegations there to annoy their Habsburg masters, whereas, oddly, Russian–Polish toasts of friendship never seemed to happen. One indicative fruit to drop from this peculiar tree was perhaps the most futile of all declarations of war when, during the Russo-Japanese War, Montenegro, in solidarity with its ‘big brother’, declared war on Japan.