Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

by Winder, Simon

  2. An amazing institution which will pop up at irregular intervals from now on, more usually called by its bristlingly off-putting German name of the Heeresgeschichtliches Museum.

  Chapter Ten

  1. Ferdinand I was quite capable of occasional lucidity. As Franz Joseph lurched through the fiascos of 1866, Ferdinand said: ‘This new man, he’s losing battles, losing provinces. I could have done that just as well.’

  Chapter Eleven

  1. The craze for such weapons was a brief one, ended by the impossibility of retreating with an object of such monstrous weight and value – one of Maximilian I’s sudden and frequent exits from the battlefield was enlivened by disasters involving many of his Swiss mercenaries having to be diverted to hauling along one of these futile behemoths.

  Chapter Twelve

  1. Szymanowski is strictly speaking a Russian Pole, but his manner and values are so Habsburg-friendly as to make him an honorary subject. And I like him too much to miss him out.

  2. After much horror and bloodshed the answer would be: yes.

  Chapter Thirteen

  1. Israel is now of course one of the very few countries left in the world still having to struggle with severe majority–minority issues of a once very familiar Habsburg kind.

  2. At least ten in the twentieth century, each acutely threatening to one or more of the city’s communities, whether by class, religion or language, and not counting the huge political shift of 1991.

  Chapter Fourteen

  1. An eagle-like creature with a central place in Magyar mythology. There is a huge statue of one on Budapest’s Castle Hill, but the biggest (with the somewhat narrow boast that it is Central Europe’s biggest freestanding bird sculpture) is on a hill outside the town of Tatabánya.

  2. Exhibit A: He must be the only person in history ever to exclaim, as his train crossed the border into Tsarist Russia, ‘Now we enter the land of liberty.’

  3. A not inaccurate fear as once the thrilling judder of unification had happened all these places became total backwaters, with once significant cities as various as Trieste, Cluj, Novi Sad and Braşov experiencing a geographical equivalent of the bends so violent that they became consigned to decades of a Shropshire-like level of somnolence.

  4. Bosnia-Herzegovina was fully absorbed in 1908 and the Sanjak returned to the Ottomans.

  Chapter Fifteen

  1. Wholesale massacres by Ukrainians and Poles, both of each other and of Jews in the year after the War officially ended, meant that by 1919 the old Habsburg Galicia had effectively ceased to exist.

  MAP OF MODERN CENTRAL EUROPE

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  INDEX

  Bibliography

  Two books are not listed in the bibliography: Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon and Claudio Magris’ Danube. I adored these books when I read them many years ago and can probably blame them for much of my interest in the region, but I have simply been unable to reread them. They make me feel like a space traveller whose rocket is a sort of dustbin powered by sparklers trying to navigate between Jupiter and Saturn. The gravitational power of these books is just too great: even reading an essay by Geoff Dyer about Rebecca West’s book was enough to make me feel this whole project was being dragged helplessly into her orbit. So they should not be part of the bibliography, but of course their influence is everywhere, at least at the level of chaotic misrememberings.

  I have included a number of titles which I found really interesting but which ended up not directly contributing to the book. I have not included separate listings for all the fiction by Thomas Bernhard, Joseph Roth and Stefan Zweig as it seemed a pointless way to fill up pages: I have just listed a handful of particularly fine examples in the hope that someone somewhere might start with these and then get hooked. Dates are of the editions that I have, therefore not necessarily the first. Spelling of author names is given in the form on the book and is therefore not more broadly consistent.

  The real backbone to this book is innumerable tourist information pamphlets, sheets pinned up on church notice boards, pamphlets tucked in with CDs, conversations with individuals vastly better informed than myself, museum booklets and unmanageable piles of evocative, bewildering and entrancing maps – few objects can be more freighted with feeling than a good multilingual map of Transylvania. My two bibles (an obviously contradictory idea) throughout the writing have been a copy of Baedeker’s 1911 Austria-Hungary guide, generously lent by John Seaton, whose encouragement and friendship have meant so much to me for many years, and Magocsi and Matthews’ superb Historical Atlas of East Central Europe, which has answered a thousand questions and raised many more.

  Charles Allen, The Buddha and the Sahibs (London, 2002)

  Aharon Appelfeld, trans. Dalya Bilu, Badenheim 1939 (London, 2005)

  Ronald G. Asch, The Thirty Years War: The Holy Roman Empire and Europe, 1618–48 (Basingstoke, 1997)

  Karl Baedeker, Guide to Austria-Hungary with Excursions to Cetinje, Belgrade and Bucharest (London and New York, 1911)

  Béla Balázs, The Cloak of Dreams: Chinese Fairy Tales, trans. Jack Zipes (Princeton, 2010)

  Philip Ball, The Devil’s Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science (London, 2006)

  Miklós Bánffy, They Were Counted, trans. Patrick Thursfield and Katalin Bánffy-Jelen (London, 2000)

  Miklós Bánffy, They Were Divided, trans. Patrick Thursfield and Katalin Bánffy-Jelen (London, 2001)

  Miklós Bánffy, They Were Found Wanting, trans. Patrick Thursfield and Katalin Bánffy-Jelen (London, 2000)

  Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950–1350 (London, 1993)

  Antony Beaumont, Zemlinsky (Ithaca, 2000)

  Steven Beller, A Concise History of Austria (Cambridge, 2006)

  David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? (London, 2011)

  Marina Belozerskaya, The Medici Giraffe and Other Tales of Exotic Animals and Power (New York, 2006)

  Thomas Bernhard, Extinction, trans. David McLintock (London, 1996)

  Thomas Bernhard, Old Masters: A Comedy, trans. E. Osers (London, 2010)

  Robert Bireley SJ, The Refashioning of Catholicism, 1450–1700 (Basingstoke, 1999)

  William Blacker, Along the Enchanted Way: A Story of Love and Life in Romania (London, 2009)

  Paul Blanchard, The Blue Guide to Northern Italy (London, 2005)

  T. C. W. Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe 1660–1789 (Oxford, 2002)

  T. C. W. Blanning (ed.), The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 2000)

  T. C. W. Blanning, Joseph II (Harlow, 1994)

  Tim Blanning, The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648–1815 (London, 2007)

  Richard Bonney, The European Dynastic States, 1494–1660 (Oxford, 1991)

  Catherine Wendy Bracewell, The Uskoks of Senj: Piracy, Banditry, and Holy War in the Sixteenth-Century Adriatic (Ithaca, 1992)

  Vladmir Brnardic, Imperial Armies of the Thirty Years War: Cavalry (Botley and Long Island City, 2010)

  Vladimir Brnardic, Imperial Armies of the Thirty Years War: Infantry and Artillery (Botley and Long Island City, 2009)

  Reed Browning, The War of the Austrian Succession (New York, 1994)

  Rogers Brubaker, Margit Feischmidt, Jon Fox and Liana Grancea, Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town (Princeton and Oxford, 2006)

  Bernd Brunner, Bears: A Brief History, trans. Lori Lantz (New Haven, 2007)

  Malcolm Bull, The Mirror of the Gods: Classical Mythology in Renaissance Art (London 2005)

  Tim Burford and Norm Longley, The Rough Guide to Romania (London, 2008)

  Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart (London, 1984)

  Elias Canetti, The Human Province, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (London, 1986)

  Elias Canetti, Kafka’s Other Trial, trans. Christopher Middleton (London, 2012)
<
br />   Bryan Cartledge, Mihály Károlyi and István Bethlen (London, 2009)

  Bryan Cartledge, The Will to Survive: A History of Hungary (London, 2006)

  Holly Case, Between States: The Transylvanian Question and the European Idea during World War II (Stanford, 2009)

  Kenneth Chalmers, Béla Bartók (London, 1995)

  Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (London, 2012)

  Mark Cornwall (ed.), The Last Years of Austria-Hungary: A Multi-National Experiment in Early Twentieth-Century Europe (Exeter, 1990)

  Gerald R. Cragg, The Church and the Age of Reason, 1648–1789 (Harmondsworth, 1960)

  Gordon A. Craig, The Battle of Königgrätz: Prussia’s Victory over Austria, 1866 (Philadelphia, 2003)

  Kevin Cramer, The Thirty Years’ War and German Memory in the Nineteenth Century (Lincoln and London, 2007)

  Roger Crowley, Empires of the Sea: The Final Battle for the Mediterranean 1521–1580 (London, 2008)

  Norman Davies, God’s Playground: A History of Poland: Volume I: The Origins to 1795 (Oxford, 2005)

  Norman Davies, God’s Playground: A History of Poland: Volume II: 1795 to the Present (Oxford, 2005)

  Norman Davies, Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe (London, 2011)

  Istvan Deák, The Lawful Revolutionary: Louis Kossuth and the Hungarians, 1848–1849 (New York, 1979)

  Peter Demetz, Prague in Black and Gold: The History of a City (London, 1998)

  Jeroen Duindam, Vienna and Versailles: The Courts of Europe’s Dynastic Rivals, 1550–1780 (Cambridge, 2003)

  Mark Edmundson, The Death of Sigmund Freud: Fascism, Psychoanalysis and the Rise of Fundamentalism (London, 2007)

  Erich Egg, Das Grabmal Kaiser Maximilians I. (Innsbruck, 1993)

  Andrew Evans, The Bradt Guide to Ukraine (Chalfont St Peter, 2010)

  R. J. W. Evans, Austria, Hungary, and the Habsburgs: Central Europe c. 1683–1867 (Oxford, 2006)

  R. J. W. Evans, The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy 1550–1700 (Oxford, 1979)

  R. J. W. Evans, Rudolf II and His World (London, 1997)

  György Faludy, My Happy Days in Hell, trans. Kathleen Szasz (London, 2010)

  Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: History’s Age of Hatred (London, 2006)

  David Freedberg, The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History (Chicago and London, 2002)

  Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945 (New York, 2007)

  Horst Fuhrmann, Germany in the High Middle Ages c. 1050–1200 (Cambridge, 1986)

  David Gates, The Napoleonic Wars 1803–1815 (London, 1997)

  Misha Glenny, The Balkans: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers (London, 1999)

  Joscelyn Godwin, Athanasius Kircher’s Theatre of the World (London and New York, 2009)

  Thomas E. Greiss (ed.), The West Point Atlas for the Wars of Napoleon (New York, 2003)

  Charles Habsburg, The Autobiography of the Emperor Charles V, trans. Leonard Francis Simpson (London, 1862 – Kessinger Publishing digital reprint)

  Peter Handke, Repetition, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York, 1998)

  Peter Handke, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York, 2002)

  Jaroslav Hašek, The Good Soldier Švejk, trans. Cecil Parrott (London, 1973)

  Peter Heather, Empires and Barbarians: Migration, Development and the Birth of Europe (London, 2009)

  Charles Hebbert, Norm Longley and Dan Richardson, The Rough Guide to Hungary (London, 2005)

  Mary Heimann, Czechoslovakia: The State that Failed (New Haven and London, 2009)

  Holger H. Herwig, The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary 1914–1918 (London and New York, 1997)

  Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State (London, 2010)

  Michael Hochedlinger, Austria’s Wars of Emergence, 1683–1797 (Harlow, 2003)

  Amanda Holden with Nicholas Kenyon and Stephen Walsh, The Viking Opera Guide (London, 1993)

  Peter Hopkirk, Foreign Devils on the Silk Road: The Search for the Lost Treasures of Central Asia (London, 1980)

  Bohumil Hrabal, Closely Watched Trains, trans. Edith Pargeter (Evanston, 1990)

  Bohumil Hrabal, The Death of Mr Baltisberger, trans. Michael Henry Heim (London, 1990)

  Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude, trans. Michael Henry Heim (London, 1991)

  Rob Humphreys, The Rough Guide to Austria (London, 2005)

  Rob Humphreys, The Rough Guide to the Czech Republic (London, 2009)

  Rob Humphreys, The Real Guide to Czechoslovakia (New York, 1991)

  Agnes Husslein-Arco (ed.), Anton Romako: Admiral Tegetthoff in the Naval Battle of Lissa (Vienna, 2010)

  Agnes Husslein-Arco and Marie-Louise von Plessen (eds.), Prince Eugene: General-Philosopher and Art Lover (Vienna and Munich, 2010)

  Charles Ingrao, The Habsburg Monarchy 1618–1815, 2nd edition (Cambridge, 2000)

  Charles and Barbara Jelavich, The Establishment of the Balkan National States, 1804–1920 (Seattle, 1977)

  Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (London, 2007)

  Jonathan Keates, The Siege of Venice (London, 2005)

  Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris (London, 1998)

  Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis (London, 2001)

  Danilo Kiš, The Encyclopedia of the Dead, trans. Michael Henry Heim (Evanston, 1997)

  Danilo Kiš, Garden, Ashes, trans. William J. Hannaher (New York, 1975)

  Dezső Kosztolányi, trans. Bernard Adams, Kornél Esti (New York, 2011)

  Dezső Kosztolányi, trans. Richard Aczel, Skylark (New York, 2010)

  Paul Koudounaris, The Empire of Death: A Cultural History of Ossuaries and Charnel Houses (London and New York, 2011)

  Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts, trans. Linda Asher (London, 1995)

  Chris Lavers, The Natural History of Unicorns (London, 2009)

  Norman Lebrecht, Why Mahler?: How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed the World (London, 2010)

  Paul Lendvai, Inside Austria: New Challenges, Old Demons (London, 2010)

  Alexander Lernet-Holenia, Baron Bagge/Count Luna, trans. Richard and Clara Winston and Jane B. Greene (Hygiene, 1980)

  Dominic Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals from the Sixteenth Century to the Present (London, 2002)

  Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge, 2000)

  Norm Longley, The Rough Guide to Slovenia (London, 2007)

  John Lukacs, Budapest 1900: A Historical Portrait of a City and Its Culture (London, 1993)

  C. A. Macartney, The Hapsburg Empire 1790–1918 (London, 2010)

  William O. McCagg, Jr., A History of the Habsburg Jews 1670–1918 (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1992)

  Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (London, 2009)

  Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided, 1190–1700 (London, 2003)

  Richard Mackenney, Sixteenth Century Europe: Expansion and Conflict (Basingstoke, 1993)

  Gordon McLachlan, The Rough Guide to Germany (London, 2004)

  Paul Robert Magocsi and Geoffrey J. Matthews, Historical Atlas of East Central Europe (Seattle, 1993)

  Noel Malcolm, Bosnia: A Short History (London, 1994)

  William Maltby, The Reign of Charles V (Basingstoke, 2002)

  Sandor Márai, Embers, trans. Carol Brown Janeway (London, 2002)

  Peter Marshall, The Magic Circle of Rudolf II: Alchemy and Astrology in Renaissance Prague (New York, 2006)

  Mark Mazower, The Balkans: From the End of Byzantium to the Present Day (London, 2000)

  Simon Millar, Vienna 1683: Christian Europe Repels the Ottomans (Botley, 2008)

  Lieutenant-Colonel J. Mitchell, The Life of Wallenstein, Duke of Friedland (London, 1837 – BiblioLife digital reprint)

  Laurence Mit
chell, The Bradt Guide to Serbia (Chalfont St Peter, 2010)

  Andrej Mitrović, Serbia’s Great War, 1914–1918 (London, 2007)

  Mary Wortley Montagu, Life on the Golden Horn (London, 2007)

  Simon Sebag Montefiore, Prince of Princes: The Life of Potemkin (London, 2000)

  Eduard Mörike, Mozart’s Journey to Prague, trans. David Luke (London, 1997)

  Geoff Mortimer, Wallenstein: The Enigma of the Thirty Years War (Basingstoke, 2010)

  Herta Müller, The Land of Green Plums, trans. Michael Hofmann (New York, 1996)

  Robert Musil, Flypaper, trans. Peter Wortsman (London, 2011)

  Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities, trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser (London, 1979)

  Ménie Muriel Norman, A Girl in the Karpathians (London, 1891 – British Library reprint)

  Richard Overy, The Bombing War: Europe, 1939–1945 (London, 2013)

  Geoffrey Parker, Europe in Crisis 1598–1648, 2nd edition (Oxford, 2001)

  Ota Pavel, How I Came to Know Fish, trans. Jindriska Badal and Robert McDowell (London, 2010)

  Martyn Rady, The Emperor Charles V (Harlow, 1988)

  Timothy Reuter, Germany in the Early Middle Ages 800–1056 (Harlow, 1991)

  Gregor von Rezzori, The Snows of Yesteryear, trans. H. F. Broch De Rothermann (London, 1989)

  Barnaby Rogerson, The Last Crusaders: The Hundred-Year Battle for the Centre of the World (London, 2009)

  Joseph Roth, The Emperor’s Tomb, trans. John Hoare (London, 1984)

  Joseph Roth, Flight Without End, trans. David le Vay in collaboration with Beatrice Musgrave (London, 1984)

  Joseph Roth, Weights and Measures, trans. David le Vay (London and Chester Springs, 2002)

  Ulinka Rublack, Reformation Europe (Cambridge, 2005)

  Paul W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics 1763–1848 (Oxford, 1994)

  H. M. Scott, The Birth of the Great Power System, 1740–1815 (Harlow, 2006)

  James J. Sheehan, German History 1770–1866 (Oxford, 1989)