Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

by Winder, Simon

  Franz Joseph’s death, following the killing of so much of the army on which his dynastic rule rested, weakened and hollowed out Imperial loyalty. Karl may have been himself weak and hollow but he did understand that the triumph of the Habsburg position was unsustainable – that the army was falling apart and the entire Empire was starving from the Allied blockade. Each week that the war continued brought total collapse nearer. In the spring of 1917 he made a secret bid to get Austria-Hungary out of the war through negotiations with France. These got nowhere as the issues which concerned France could only be settled by Germany. Indeed Karl’s ‘man of peace’ posture was merely a reflection of terminal Habsburg provincialism – that he had no stake in the Western Front, where the war would be decided. In the spring of 1918 the French gleefully revealed the secret correspondence and Karl’s already feeble reign became completely circumscribed by the enraged Germans. It was probably at this point the Empire had no future – even some increasingly inconceivable victory by Germany would have resulted in drastic reorganization. Germany had already ballooned out crazily to the east. This was Hindenburg’s Wallenstein-like Ober Ost territory, forty thousand square miles from the Black Sea to the Gulf of Finland, carved out since 1915 by the destruction of town after town using giant searchlights, massed cannon and Zeppelins, in a now-forgotten sequence of victories hideously similar to those of 1941 in the region. There was a preview too of how high the stakes were viewed by both sides, with the Russians in Vilnius destroying everything they could before retreating in an enforced mass evacuation. The fighting in Galicia is also overlaid in our minds by what happened later, but in the First World War pogroms, looting and reprisal shootings by Russian troops accompanied both their invasions of the territory.1 By 1918 the Germans were juggling with client states from the Gulf of Bothnia to the Volga – but this was not the Habsburg experience, which was mere helpless exhaustion, a corpse held upright by its overbearing ally.

  Discussions within the Empire about what to do with their new provinces showed that even total victory only created fresh problems. For example, bringing the captured Serbian lands into the Empire simply meant that the Serb lands were now unified. This was not meant to be the point at all. The original 1914 ‘punishment expedition’ was designed to cow, humiliate and disarm Serbia. Instead, after an extraordinary national epic, surviving Serbs had been evacuated by the British and French to Corfu and now had a refitted and aggressive army fighting primarily on the Salonika Front – a zone to the south of Bulgaria from which the Allies intended to march their way directly up into the Empire, but which was held in stalemate until late in 1918. It is hard to be aggressive if the prospect of any new territory fills the notional hegemon with dread. The Germans were dealing with ever larger and more complex client states, but the Habsburgs had little to do with this. Hungarians could feel happy that Belgrade was so devastated and so many of its inhabitants killed or fled that it could now be seen as merely a ‘Hungarian provincial town’, but there was no medium-term hope for coping with millions of surviving enraged Serbs, any more than there was any way that the starving Empire could feed its hundreds of thousands of Italian prisoners. The ideological basis for grabbing further lands seems to have just packed up, and this intellectual conclusion made it difficult for the surviving elites throughout the Empire to battle the forces that would make it fall apart in the winter of 1918. Perhaps it had been back in 1878, with the half-hearted occupation of Bosnia and the Sanjak, that a sort of colonial weariness had set in – but in any event the temporary triumphs of 1916–18 marked the final realization, far too late, of the sort of fantasies that had once fervently preoccupied Leopold I, Charles VI and other of Karl’s ancestors through so many hours of devotional prayer.

  The price of defeat

  The process by which Habsburg civilization began to collapse began almost as soon as war was declared in 1914 and the first of what would be some eight million uniformed young men began to leave. Of these over a million were killed, almost two million were wounded; over a million and a half were taken prisoner, of whom almost a third died in captivity. Within a year there can have been no street not filled with fearful or distraught families. Beyond this obvious disaster there was an economic catastrophe. Austria-Hungary was painfully easy to blockade. Once Italy entered the war the British were able to close the Adriatic, which completely shut down the Empire’s only ports – the great entrepôt of Trieste and the now futile and neutered naval base at Pula. Supplies could only arrive from a handful of neutrals via Germany (and, of course, Germany kept much of these for itself) or, even more tortuously, via the Ottoman Empire once the Balkans had fallen to the Central Powers in late 1915.

  Europe had become wealthy on the basis of its international trade and many of its component elements had become ever more specialized about what they needed to create for themselves and what they could import. This trade was paralysed in 1914 and never really recovered until years after 1989. All the inland towns of the Empire essentially existed as places in which goods could be exchanged, with each further circulation of each item allowing a further profit to be clipped, fuelling an entire, unbelievably complex world of merchants, bankers, lawyers and those who worked for them. This system collapsed. The most central, semi-trivial but essential things associated with the Empire disappeared – most obviously the famous cafes no longer had coffee or chocolate. Even if (for some odd reason) you were to set aside the issue of the immense numbers of families wrecked by combat deaths and mutilation, inflation had on its own destroyed the middle class that had made the capital cities and provincial centres so prosperous. Perhaps this was an even greater factor than the combat deaths in the Empire’s demise: the millions of pleasantly complacent bourgeois of the summer of 1914 emerged at the end of 1918 desperate, impoverished, fearful and angry. Everywhere you can see the high-water mark – the lovely Partium town of Oradea must have been a permanent building site from the 1890s to 1914, a playground of Hungarian eclecticism of the most unrestrained kind (including the scarcely credible Black Eagle Hotel complex, all multi-coloured flowers, stained glass and cheerful bobbles). But this all stopped and never restarted, leaving the town centre architecturally frozen as it was when news of the assassination arrived. Even before the war ended Vienna was already shrinking, the result of starvation and sickness, but also of the general seizing up of its Imperial functions.

  The army monopolized supplies of every kind. There was a fevered search for even the smallest scraps of metal to make weapons – in 1917 alone almost ten thousand tons of church bells were melted down for their copper, but even items like door-handles and the casings from shop display windows were seized. The lack of rubber meant that everything down to the pockets of billiard tables was grabbed by the army in a feverish and futile attempt to put tyres on military vehicles. The lack of new cotton (once blithely imported from the USA or British-controlled Egypt) meant that clothing began to wear out and had to be replaced with hemp, which had to be grown on land formerly devoted to food. As a final flourish, the great Spanish influenza pandemic that killed perhaps twenty-five million people around the world landed particularly crushingly on the Empire, infiltrating cities that already hardly functioned and seeming to focus on digging out the final elements of Habsburg culture, killing Klimt in February 1918 and Schiele and his pregnant wife in October. There is an understandable lack of commemoration of these terrible events. One that has always stuck in my mind is Zemlinsky’s extraordinary Third String Quartet, with its neurasthenic, grey, pulseless atmosphere, like ‘licking a cold, dirty window-pane’, as someone once said.

  It is hard to see how societies can hold together under such circumstances. At the time it was thought that the Empire broke apart because of military defeat and nationalist agitation. These were undoubtedly important, but since 1915 the Empire had existed only as a sort of husk. Those who had most effectively bought into the idea of the Empire had been its young military elite, the aristocracy who spoke lots of th
e languages and cared about the structure as a whole and about the framework created by the Emperor, and these were mostly dead within months of the war beginning. The legitimacy of the entire structure was then beaten to pieces by economics – an absolute impoverishment which mixed with wave upon wave of both civilian and military deaths. The Russian revolution of February 1917 served notice on the Emperor Karl only weeks after his coronation: his uselessness in that sense was beside the point. Strikes and mutinies crippled the entire Empire by the end of 1917. On 16 January 1918 some twenty-five thousand women were standing in line at Vienna’s main meat market waiting for food.

  It was the absolute collapse of legitimacy that (as in Russia) provided the space for new ideas. The whole of Central Europe began an experiment that lasted for much of the century and submitted its populations to previously inconceivable levels of violence. The forces that now rampaged through docile, pompous but civilized backwaters were only there because everything else had failed. Oradea, for example, was invaded by Romanian troops after the Armistice and its Hungarian citizens were subjected to violent discrimination that has carried on intermittently ever since, with Hungarians today making up less than a quarter of the inhabitants. In 1927 a meeting of the Legion of the Archangel Michael in Oradea resulted in half the town’s synagogues being burnt to the ground. There was never a point at which normal life could exist in a stable form.

  Triumphs of indifference

  One oddity of the War was that the British and the Habsburgs only ever fought each other in glancing, minor ways. The British blockade was fundamental to the starvation of much of Central Europe, but this was a remote form of warfare, came from control of the North Sea and Mediterranean and required little active animosity to be hideously effective. Otherwise, some British troops were shifted to the Alps in the aftermath of Caporetto to stiffen the Italian line, and Austrian specialists and observers encountered the British on the Palestinian and Salonika fronts, but the Habsburg forces effectively fought a separate war. This was also true for the Americans, for whom the Austrians were mysterious, but also – through the narratives both of innumerable Galician immigrants as well as visits by Czech intellectuals – a symbol of stifling European backwardness, a crusty prison of the nations. Because there was so little actual fighting this could have been an advantage to Karl as the Allies’ passions were barely engaged by the continuing existence of his Empire. But, as it proved, this also meant a fatal lack of information, a willingness to rely on a handful of experts for advice, and a careless indifference to the Empire’s collapse which made it an easy sacrifice.

  The Emperor Karl seems to have left almost no impression on anyone who met him – a banal, peevish, stroppy figure, his best chance was to decorate his audience chamber with the portraits of any number of comparably unengaging ancestors, and argue that the dynastic principle had at regular intervals thrown up make-weights even more helpless than himself. Sadly, his ineffective predecessors were propped up by a royal framework designed to maintain the dignity of even the least dignified. Wandering around the Schönbrunn Palace, stifled by the retirement-home gentility of Franz Josef’s old furnishings, with the glamour of the Russian Revolution unfolding up the road, Karl was a disappointing figure in every respect. It is a shame that the last Emperor did not go out in a reckless blaze of glory, roaring out a medieval battle-cry as he was gunned down, surrounded by beautifully dressed bodyguards, in a final battle with revolutionaries in Heroes’ Square. But there had been no precedent for such swagger since Maria Theresa’s youth. Karl had few options but he managed to manage all of them poorly. Much of the rage and bitterness Karl had to deal with stemmed from the sense – particularly once peace with Russia had been made in March 1918 – that the Empire was on the verge of validating its terrible casualties. Everything that had ever given a Habsburg citizen an ethnic or strategic headache seemed at an end with the borders not only secure but all the countries beyond them prostrate. No Russian army could ever invade Hungary again, no Serb army Croatia, no Romanian army Transylvania. All that remained was to stand by and wait for the Germans to defeat the British, French and Americans and all would be well. By the spring of 1918 every conceivable Habsburg goal had been met. And even in the unlikely event of defeat there seemed no specific threat, as the Allies had not made any commitment to break up the Empire and an armistice would make no difference to the patent implosion and degradation of their enemies.

  Of course, we know that this view was wrong – but the Allies themselves began 1918 exhausted and appalled at how little impact they had made on the Central Powers. With the German army hugely reinforced by the end of the Russian war and division after battle-hardened division moved to the Western Front, the initiative still lay with Germany if not with Austria-Hungary, which became a virtual military observer. But Karl had effectively run out of armies: even with the wholesale evacuation of soldiers from the major fortresses and standing down of the Carpathian defences there were simply very few Habsburg troops left and no supplies. Some final bright ideas resulted in the requisitioning of race horses and instructions that new conscripts should bring their own underwear from home, but these were not going to balance out the depletion of factories, the collapse of transport and chronic anaemia in all aspects of Central European life.

  One of the issues that dominated 1918 was the return of Habsburg prisoners of war after Russia’s surrender. The extraordinary total of a million and a half men had been captured, of whom perhaps a third had died. Scattered all over the former Russian Empire, they made their way back home as well as they could, one of the first of the horrible mass migrations that were to mark region after region of Europe until the late 1940s. The return of the prisoners, often seriously ill, understandably often imbued with a hatred for an Empire that had humiliated them, and frequently Communist and/or criminal, threatened to outweigh any surviving value in the still existing army. There are no real figures, but it was estimated that perhaps two hundred thousand deserters were roaming around the Empire and punishments were brought back that would have brought a happy smile to the lips of figures like Radetzky and Windisch-Graetz, such as tying them to stakes or locking them in irons. Attempts to process all these haggard survivors and put them back into the army went completely wrong with an overwhelming percentage of the POWs unfit by any physical or political benchmark.

  In many ways the Empire’s resilience had been remarkable, but by the end it was assailed by such a multiplicity of problems that the major power centres inside and outside the Empire started to make other plans. The symbolic last straws are so numerous you could build a hut with them. The best one was the sinking of the Saint Stephen, the only Hungarian battleship ever built, the fruit of a desperate desire for power-projection and the pride of the futile naval base at Pula. It had nothing much to do during the War as it was so painfully vulnerable to the Italian, French and British navies waiting for it as soon as it reached the Mediterranean. Finally leaving harbour in June 1918 as part of a frantic bid to disrupt the blockade, it was intercepted by Italian torpedo boats before it even reached the blockade line and destroyed with the death of most of its crew. Hungarian dreams of naval grandeur came to an end.

  For the Central Powers the killing blow came in the surprising shape of the Bulgarian front. For years the Allies had been penned up around Salonika, derided by the Central Powers and a source of embarrassment to the Allies themselves. In September 1918 a joint French and Serbian force at last broke through, threatening the entire Balkans. Neither Germany nor Austria-Hungary had an answer to this and Ludendorff threw in the towel. There were simply no troops left – they were all committed to occupation duties across their vast but economically morbid eastern Empire, or to grimly holding out against overwhelming superiority in the West (with the USA planning an army by 1919 of some four and a half million men).

  The months that followed were complex, exhilarating and frightening. Suddenly, in a way with no precedent since the Turkish invasions, it
mattered profoundly where you or your ancestors had chosen to live. A decision taken for romantic, economic, arbitrary or despairing reasons perhaps many generations before would now dictate the state in which you would live: and in the cases of millions of people this would in the coming thirty years result in their pauperization, expulsion or murder.

  As it became clear that the War was ending the various nationalities began to move against the Habsburgs. Many commentators have seen this as a tragic sequence of events but it is impossible to exaggerate how little credit remained to the Empire – not just contempt for Karl and the Empire’s rulers but, worse, indifference and a sense that any future dispensation made them irrelevant. The Empire was a haggard, starving ruin with predators both within it and around it. It was simply not recognizable as anything like the entity that had declared war so confidently in the summer of 1914. Militarily, yet another last straw was the Battle of Vittorio Veneto in late October – an Italian triumph after so many decades of humiliation at Austrian hands. As the last thirty thousand or so Habsburg subjects to die for the Empire duly did, it was clear that everything was lost.

  The somewhat chaotic minutes still exist for the final, late October meetings of the Common Ministerial Council in Vienna when for the last time Austrian Germans, Czechs and Hungarians met with Karl in scenes of hopeless indecision and lack of realism. On 18 October Karl had announced a Manifesto to My Faithful Peoples announcing a federation of six new states under his rule: Austrian, Ukrainian, Czech, Polish, Hungarian and Yugoslav. But this was all far too late and proclamations were breaking out all over the place, completely ignoring the wishes of Vienna or Budapest. The Council made ponderous comments about the rights of the Crown of Stephen, shook their heads over ‘the sphinx Wilson’ and generally gave the sense of confused figures roused up from a retirement home. Outside, the new era, of boulevards filled with running, menacing crowds, panicked police and angry veterans, was beginning. On 11 November, in a final piece of peevish indirection, Karl refused to abdicate but instead ‘relinquished participation’.