Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe (56 page)

German-speaking political alienation from the Habsburgs stemmed both from a general lashing out at other minority groups, as in Bohemia, and from a new working-class self-assertion in the Austrian industrial centres. A powerful narrative of German grievance began to be articulated from the 1870s onwards. When German-speakers had been splintered between numerous different European small states, being a German in the Habsburg Empire had been a badge of pride. The rise of Prussia had challenged that pride, but now the creation of the German Reich actively ridiculed it. Were Austrian Germans to become mere marginal Alpine picturesques like the Swiss?
²
In Bohemia, an ancient part of the old Holy Roman Empire, German towns were becoming overrun with Czechs demanding their rights; in Carinthia it was the same with Slovenes. The Germans glared at the Hungarians’ half of the Empire, which they saw as a parasitic burden on German-speaking tax-payers; and at the Jews, who seemed to be newly confident in ways that Germans increasingly were not. As Franz Joseph’s government made ever more frantic attempts to balance nationality against nationality, it found to its dismay that it was in the process shaking loose its German core.

One chilling sample of this new streak of German paranoia was Georg Ritter von Schönerer, an Austrian landowner who, like many, was traumatized by the Battle of Königgrätz and came to worship Bismarck, feeling that Germans trapped within the Habsburg Empire should break free of Franz Joseph’s dead hand and unite with their fellows. Schönerer was a terrifying figure: racked with hatred for the Habsburgs, for the Catholic Church that backed them up, for Czechs who should know their place, for liberals, for socialists – and above all for Jews. As head of the Pan-German Party and an MP he was a key figure in fuelling the violent loathings that made the Parliament in Vienna into a dysfunctional shambles, destroying any sense of rational debate or give-and-take. He invented the ‘Heil’ greeting and had the title of ‘Führer’ bestowed on him by his followers. He saw himself as the protector of all Germans, succeeded in getting a prime minister dismissed and created for German-speakers their own fangs and paranoia quite as bad as anything offered by other linguistic groups.

Schönerer was too haughtily aristocratic to be a mass figure, but he did not need to be as he was trumped by ‘Handsome Karl’, Karl Lueger, the Mayor of Vienna. He lacked Schönerer’s eccentricity, and was ostentatiously pro-Habsburg and a populist of genius. More than anyone in the pre-War world he seized the opportunities provided by the new mega-cities, working to make Vienna a bearable place for its hundreds of thousands of new inhabitants through vast waterworks and tram systems. Much of what still makes Vienna work is thanks to Lueger. From 1897 to his death in 1910 he dominated the city. He was devout, a great organizer, adored by the Germans and nearly as anti-Semitic as Schönerer – whose campaign to ban the arrival of more Jews in Vienna he had supported in the 1880s.

While I am writing this there is a campaign to rename the road now called the Doktor-Karl-Lueger-Ring. Lueger once referred to the Jews as ‘beasts of prey in human form’, said that wolves, leopards and tigers were closer to humans than Jews, and agreed that a good solution to the ‘Jewish problem’ would be to put them all on a big ship and sink them at sea. It does not seem too uncontroversial to say that the nature of these comments probably trumps his role in improving Vienna’s sanitation systems. It is impossible not to feel that by walking on ‘his’ section of the Ring, or by looking up at his grand statue facing the Stadtpark you are effectively being forced to endorse him.

Schönerer and Lueger disagreed on many issues but between them developed a particular model for Austrian German politics and a separate ethnic awareness that hardly existed before. Until then, to be a German inhabitant of the Empire was an undefined and effortless tag, as it had always been. To be a German anywhere in the Empire had given certain, seemingly natural privileges and implied particular forms of organization. Other ‘races’ suffered from religious disabilities, illiteracy or poverty in ways that kept them below and separate. As the nineteenth century progressed this ceased to be true, with groups who had been mere labourers or serfs or shut out from most professions suddenly feeling just as entitled and articulate, just as well-dressed and culturally astute as their former masters. In 1908 the teenaged Adolf Hitler arrived in Vienna, one of many thousands of badly off German-speakers from Upper Austria looking to the big city to find their fortunes.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The sheep and the melons
»
Elves, caryatids, lots of allegorical girls
»
Monuments to a vanished past
»
Young Poland

The sheep and the melons

At numerous points while writing this book I have had real difficulty believing my luck. Despite ludicrous setbacks, humiliations and the curse of my language incompetence, I had a motive and excuse to visit many miraculous spots. I never felt this more strongly than in the central Romanian city of Sibiu.

Sibiu is a classic ‘Saxon’ foundation under the protection of the Hungarian kings, ruled under a German legal code (‘Iglau law’) which defined the settlers’ obligations and privileges. As Hermannstadt it became a major German settlement, and only Braşov was further east. In few places is there still such a strong sense of this past, with its colossal, glowering Saxon church, its Upper Town on a great block of rock and its Lower Town with its crooked and sunless streets (where I stayed in a small guest-house and each morning seemed a new gift as I would step out into what appeared to be one of the Expressionist sets from Paul Wegener’s movie
The Golem
). Battered watchtowers, like brick and wood prototypes of the Martian Tripods in
The War of the Worlds
, still stand sentinel, looking out towards the mountains for long-vanished Wallachian and Turkish enemies, and street after street is crowded with architecturally chaotic but somehow inspired buildings.

That Sibiu changed in the first half of the twentieth century from a south-eastern Hungarian border town to a central Romanian one is just one small example of the horrible wrenches experienced by the inhabitants of the Empire. The dominant group in Sibiu, the Saxons, like all dominant groups, claimed some immemorial stability and social order, using history to shore up their unique ownership of the town since the fifteenth century or earlier. This was untrue, as Sibiu’s past was, as one would imagine from its location, an absolutely chaotic skein of revolts, battles, convulsions, plagues and religious tension. But perhaps until the mid-nineteenth century it could still broadly be said that Sibiu was a German-speaking town roughly fulfilling its old function as a guild-based entrepôt, making and circulating things and services, still guarding against Wallachia, then under an uneasy mix of Ottoman and Russian rule and potentially in the military front line again after the Crimean War broke out in 1853.

What began to happen in the later nineteenth century in Sibiu, as in hundreds of other places across the Empire, was a demographic revolution. It seems so important somehow for Europeans to imagine themselves as stolid, immobile and timeless – and yet almost everywhere people were on the move. A special case has always been made for sheepishly acknowledging that millions of European fellow countrymen were hot-footing to port cities to head off to settlement colonies, but there is a blankness about the same process when it happened within the continent. A marvellous (and ginormous) history of Europe from 1850 to 1950 or so might just completely ignore kings and queens and be filled with Irish building London, Neapolitans heading to Lombard factories and Slavic and Romanian peasants heading for Habsburg towns. The same push-and-pull that made uprooting to the Americas or the Pacific plausible for millions also drove an
internal
mass movement. Sibiu was always small but its size nonetheless ballooned, from some thirteen thousand people in 1850 to nearly thirty thousand by 1900. The ethnic composition changed, with the Saxon population nearly doubling, but the Romanian more than tripling. In the same period a small Hungarian population of fewer than one thousand grew to nearly six thousand. In miniature therefore Sibiu laid out the almost impossible problems facing forms of governance in the Empire. By luck Sibiu, as part of Transylvania, was ruled directly by Vienna into the 1860s when democratic (or at least mildly democratic) elections were proclaimed in 1861 to be held in 1863.

The year 1861 turned out to be the crucial year for Romanians. In the deal that would be done in 1867 to create Austria-Hungary, Transylvania was assigned to the Hungarians. But by 1867 this scheme was too late – the Romanians had found a political voice and objected violently to being handed over to their new Hungarian overlords. In 1861 the remarkable Transylvanian Association for Romanian Literature and the Culture of the Romanian People (ASTRA) was founded in Sibiu. It started from an extremely low base in Transylvania, but with the most simple (and therefore exciting) tasks to be done – schooling in Romanian, the establishment of a basic Romanian literature and the creation of a separate Romanian economic sphere away from German or Hungarian concerns. The amazing polymath George Bariţ was a perfect example of this generation of Romanians, working on the first Romanian encyclopaedia, teaching, writing, energizing, going to Vienna to represent his constituency before 1867 blocked that off – and working first as secretary and then as president of ASTRA.

Bariţ was much hated by Budapest as a key figure in pleas to Vienna not to put Transylvania under Hungarian rule, but figures like him multiplied uncontrollably and in 1892 the great Transylvanian Memorandum was sent to Franz Joseph asking for equal Romanian rights. The absolute failure of this appeal (which Franz Joseph refused to even read) and the imprisonment by the enraged Hungarians of most of those who signed it showed the unresolvable nightmare of ethnic entanglement now unfolding. With the wretched ease of hindsight it is obvious the land-grab of 1867 was a terrible mistake for Hungary. Hypnotized by visions of some ancient medieval state and by apocalyptic fears of their own national extinction the Hungarians tried to create a state which was even bigger than Italy and failed. The many Hungarians who lived in Transylvania were in incoherent blocks that could not be put together into anything defensible. Even worse, they were in any event used to living under diverse regimes and with strange neighbours, so even fellow Hungarians could not be relied on in practice to view Budapest’s rule as a plus.

This hindsight is useless and even by 1867 it cannot have been clear how the pace of change would crush everyone. We can now see that ASTRA and its associates were going to be important, but it would have required a strange sort of genius to have understood this at the time – some schools and a little Romanian-owned paper-mill were not something to warn the Chancelleries of Europe about. But events moved on. By 1900 the neighbouring Kingdom of Romania was a substantial, fully independent state and providing a welcoming home for any Transylvanian Romanians fleeing their Hungarian overlords. And within Sibiu alone Romanians had come a long way from being a semi-literate and impoverished group spurned or used casually by Saxons and Hungarians alike. Indeed ASTRA had inspired millions of Romanians both inside and outside the Empire. This was the result of Bariţ’s activism but also of the actions of his great ASTRA contemporary Andrei Şaguna. A monk and bishop, he had through relentless petitioning and planning (and motivated in part by a total hatred of Hungarians, a hatred which was warmly reciprocated) gained official recognition in 1864, with only three years to go before the shift to Budapest rule, of the independent Romanian Orthodox Church. By 1900 the results were clear in Sibiu, with building proceeding on an ASTRA museum and on a spectacularly beautiful Romanian Orthodox Cathedral, which now forms part of a sort of religious Restaurant Row, with almost all conceivable denominations having a major church within about five minutes’ walk of one another.

This triumph of ‘Romanianism’ was a critically significant event in the Empire – it meant that if Hungary stumbled politically or militarily, its entire eastern area would be painfully vulnerable to subversion from Bucharest. Despite the breathtaking incompetence and bad timing of the Romanian government throughout both world wars, Romania grabbed Transylvania and held on to it (aside from a brief interlude in the Second World War when it was partitioned). And since then mass emigration by both Saxons and Hungarians made renewed rule from Budapest impossible, although an idea still harboured by particularly reckless politicians.

For the Hungarians, 1867 was a moment of immense excitement, with the dazzling prospect of a serious kingdom of their own. This excitement was raised to frenzy in the new, unified city of Budapest in 1873 (sticking together Buda, Pest and Óbuda). But it was impossible not to recognize that they faced a formidable range of new ‘subjects’. Within five years protests had come not just from the ASTRA Romanians, but from Serbs in Nagybecskerek, Slovaks in Turócszentmárton and Croats in Zágráb (now, tellingly, the towns of Zrenjanin in Serbia, Martin in Slovakia and Zagreb in Croatia). A further edge was given to these political and linguistic movements (the two cannot be split) by the way that so many of these groups lived in mountainous or otherwise poor land. Often, particularly in Slovak northern Hungary or in Transylvania, they were under the supervision of a Hungarian landlord class of an increasingly bizarre level of old-fashionedness, making the ethnic issue also one of access to resources. The huge estates no longer provided an adequate economic motor, preserving one lifestyle and shutting out others.