Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe (59 page)

For the Austrian ‘half’ there is similarly no sense at all of restraint or retreat in the Empire’s last decades. The small, remote province of Bukovina had been picked up as a negotiating thank-you present from the Ottomans in 1775 and was a shambles of mutually antagonist minority groups held together by a Vienna-backed hierarchy. Intelligent concessions and divide-and-rule kept Bukovina going and created pro-Austrian groups who clung together out of fear of the obvious alternative rulers on the province’s borders: Russia and Romania. The capital, Czernowitz, received the standard full kit: electric tramways, an opera house, a whole lot of art nouveau, a bust of Schiller and a comically dreary Austria Monument, put up in 1875 to mark a century since the Turks ceded the territory, and featuring a statue of a lumpy woman with an ivy-entwined sword and a palm-leaf. When the Romanians invaded in 1918 the Austria Monument bit the dust – but its torso was rediscovered in 2003, with copies being sent across Europe as a symbol of Bukovina’s links (by now somewhat thin) with the West. Inevitably an artist took one of these torso copies and put a head in a burka on it, perhaps the most leaden and pathetic piece of conceptual art yet attempted, but equally perhaps a witty genuflection to the nullity of the original monument itself.

It is hard to completely enjoy Czernowitz (now the Ukrainian city of Chernivtsi) as its fate in the twentieth century has been so awful. The survival of so many attractive buildings and spaces is obviously trumped by the non-survival of most of the population for whom these were built. Gregor von Rezzori (his very name a perfect Habsburg amalgam) in his great, astonishingly vivid memoir of growing up there,
The Snows of Yesteryear
,
described the complex world which still existed in Czernowitz even in the 1920s, in the person of his childhood nurse:

I was nourished by her speech. The main component was a German, never learned correctly or completely, the gaps in which were filled with words and phrases from all the other tongues spoken in the Bukovina – so that each second or third word was either Ruthenian, Romanian, Polish, Russian, Armenian or Yiddish, not to forget Hungarian and Turkish.

Almost all these languages have now disappeared from Bukovina and the very existence of von Rezzori’s family appears strange. Following the Russian invasion of 1914, the von Rezzoris were able to call on the huge geographical reach of the Empire, fleeing through a Carpathian pass and settling in houses first in Trieste and then Lower Austria, before returning to now Romanian-ruled Bukovina, with the author ending up at school in Transylvania. This incredibly broad fluid Habsburg frame of reference would be barred by innumerable hostile borders until 1989.

The traumas of much of the western parts of the Empire are better concealed by more recent prosperity and rebuilding, but the haggard nature of so many Galician and Bukovinan towns makes it much more raw and obvious that these are places where everything has gone just completely wrong. Contemporary Chernivtsi makes its money as an enormous market on the edge of the European Union, with products trucked in from as away far as south-east Asia to leak across the chaotic borders into Romania. This at least makes it a busy, bustling place with a real, albeit semi-criminal, purpose. Much of Chernivtsi, with its battered pavements, snarled-up traffic, broken-down lorries, heaped boxes and enormous roadside advertisements, has a very Indian feel and it is curious to come face to face with such clear evidence that townscapes are a side-effect not of culture (‘Indian chaos’) but of specific formulae involving local GDP, tax revenue and government reach.

Chernivtsi is home to one completely astonishing building which has somehow survived all the numerous regimes
²
that have swept the city: the Metropolitan’s Palace. This surreal marvel is a summa of Vienna’s attitude towards its role and its commitment to pharaonic architectural overreach, not unlike the British building New Delhi just as their own rule over India was about to stop. By some measures the Metropolitan’s Palace was the most expensive construction project in the entire Empire and yet it was built for what was never more than a charismatic backwater. Its origins lay in the aftermath of the 1867 Compromise. Habsburg Orthodox populations had previously been subordinated to the authorities in the now Budapest-ruled Serbian town of Sremski Karlovci. For the Austrian half the solution lay in upgrading Czernowitz (already a significant religious focus) as the Vienna-ruled equivalent. The strange geography of the new state here achieved its strangest form. Vienna’s continuing direct rule over Galicia and Bukovina brought into existence a four-hundred-mile scythe of territory between Russia and Hungary, at the far tip of which was Czernowitz. In a tidy piece of madness the new Metropolitan See was responsible for the Orthodox populations of both Bukovina and Galicia, and Dalmatia – with all the many thousands of square miles of territory between the territories under Hungarian rule. Baffled Adriatic Serbs now suddenly found themselves owing allegiance to a man living in the Ukrainian borderlands.

The Metropolitan Palace, as it gradually took shape in the 1870s, seems to have got completely out of control, the building equivalent of the sorcerer’s apprentice unable to stop the spell he has unleashed. The result is a Burgundo-Hanseatic-Grenadan-Hutsul-Byzantine mishmash of a heroic kind, and a classic piece of Habsburg collaboration: with a patently insane Czech architect, Josef Hlávka, armies of medievally inspired German and local decorators and specialists and seemingly no one doing the budgeting. Gregor von Rezzori’s father had an office there for some years and it must have fitted perfectly with his historicist-reactionary enthusiasms. The complex has come through some terrible times, but is now one of the world’s most attractive university buildings. With its little courtyards, magic garden and loopy eclecticism, the whole place made me wish to be reincarnated as a Ukrainian undergraduate. Indeed, so charismatic and enjoyable is Hlávka’s vision that it seems a bit pointless for architects to come up with new, less good solutions for institutional needs – instead of just being hidden away in Bukovina, exact copies should be made for any city that wants one.

The existence of this building shows the strange balancing act that Vienna had to keep up every day, always with different interest groups, aggrieved parties, collaborators and enemies needing to be nudged, bought off, incarcerated, ignored. It also raises very difficult issues of distance, both physical and temporal. To wander along, as at some elaborate buffet, looking at different options and behaviours is effectively an activity unrelated to living one’s life within one of them. To stand outside these issues is to be invisible and irrelevant. The last generation of Habsburg officials, such as von Rezzori senior, prided themselves on this being their stance, and yet we can now see the innumerable ways in which they fooled themselves, their scientific rationalism a delusion. But there really was a form of Imperial colour-blindness, the kind celebrated later by writers such as Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth (not coincidentally Jews), and which did have a real, transparent
value. This was at its most extreme in Bukovina, perhaps Europe’s greatest
macedonia di frutta
, and a culture (which also produced Paul Celan and Aharon Appelfeld) unique but now long dispersed.

Young Poland

Even when baring their teeth at one another, Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary generally cooperated to ensure that ‘their’ Poles were reconciled to their fates as inhabitants of a non-country. Austrian-ruled Galicia was in Imperial terms a great success although only by default: the Poles who lived there were deeply aware of how much worse their lives would be in the German province of Posen or in Warsaw, the third largest city in Russia. The presence of an ever more educated, vocal and insistent Ruthenian element in Galicia, an absolute majority in some regions, gave the Poles further reason for loyalty to the Habsburgs. But within that Polish loyalty attitudes ranged from genuine belief to contemptuous cynicism. The relative loyalism of Galicia meant that it tended to be held up as an example to other provinces, but this loyalism came at a very high price. For much of the rest of Europe, Galicia was synonymous with impoverished misery, with at least a million Galicians (many Jewish) emigrating and squalor and gloom prevailing outside a handful of spruced-up town centres. Economically the stakes were perhaps too low for the Poles for it to be worth being too fractious. Despite great bureaucratic ingenuity it seemed that nothing could be done with the region. The one peculiar exception were the oil deposits around Drohobych, which created the strange little semi-Americanized enclave of prosperity which Bruno Schulz later turned into a sort of wonderland in
The Street of Crocodiles
.

Kraków, a much smashed-up backwater, had been tacked onto Galicia in 1846 when it fell to Austrian rule after a failed rebellion. The capital of Galicia remained Lwów, far to the east, and Kraków at first seemed merely haunted and debilitated by its earlier greatness, with the Wawel Castle reduced to a dreary Habsburg barracks, its lovely Renaissance pillars covered up. But almost by default Kraków, as a provincial town rather than a major governmental centre, and as the biggest of these not in the brutal hands of the Germans or Russians, became an open space for rebuilding Polish culture. One curious moment came in 1873 when the Germans celebrated the four-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Nikolaus Kopernikus, a figure who Poles were under the impression was Mikołaj Kopernik, Kraków student, hero and Pole. Copernicus was clearly a linguistically and ethnically complex figure of a kind quite common in the era in which he lived. But the blustering German argument threw up the chilling possibility of Polish culture as well as land being dismantled before the eyes of the surviving Polish intelligentsia. It was in Kraków that there was a context in which such a future might be averted.

Kraków benefited from the same speedy industrialization and growth as elsewhere in Europe, becoming a substantially new Polish Christian and Polish Jewish city and at last shaking off its era of stagnation. It was the home of Jan Matejko, who single-handedly painted virtually every major event in Poland’s history in a lurid, feverish, Verdi-esque and incredibly enjoyable style which makes me wish that British history had had such luck. This frenetic act of recovery meant that by his death in 1893, Matejko had ensured that every Polish schoolchild would grow up with the most vivid sense of his buried nation’s past, laughing at the discomforted Turk, sneering at the proud Prussians’ grovelling submission to the Polish king, warm and alive to the thrill of the Union of Lublin. Perhaps more than anybody Matejko’s histrionics hauled Polish identity out of the danger zone, with the paintings’ public display spreading a renewed pride far more effectively than any history books.

‘Young Poland’, which grew up from the 1890s, is one of those artistic movements frustratingly little known to the rest of the world. This is in part because so much of it was entangled in formats which are rarely translated (plays, poems) or are site-specific (buildings, stained-glass windows). My own ignorance was total, but it is hard not to stand in awe of such figures (once you have encountered them) as Stanisław Wyspiański, who seems to have been wonderful at everything he turned his hands to (interior design, plays, poetry, furniture), or Feliks ‘Manga’ Jasieński, a charismatic Orientalist who brought Japanese culture to Kraków and who rightly has a sort of shrine to his sensibility in the Wyspiański Museum. Much of ‘Young Poland’ was politically harmless, except in the sense that the very idea of a vigorous Polish culture could not avoid having implications. Much of Wyspiański’s most beautiful work consists of paintings of children and domestic life and it seems utterly without menace, but he could not escape a more vigorous nationalism that surged everywhere in turn-of-the-century Europe. One compelling oddity, and a fine example of Wyspiański’s ability to turn his hand to pretty much anything, is the fantasy he created with Władysław Ekielski of a total architectural renewal of the Wawel hill. This shabby Habsburg military complex and parade-ground was at last evacuated by Austrian troops in 1905, opening up amazing possibilities for rebuilding and effectively reconsecrating the greatest of Polish national sites. Wyspiański and Ekielski reimagined it as the Acropolis of the Polish Nation, a sort of fairy castle of turrets and domes, museums and new government buildings flanked by an enormous hippodrome. It is a charming vision, preserved in an incredibly charismatic model, but all over Europe people were sketching similar ideas of unlimited grandiosity, some of which actually got built (such as the gross, mournful Neue Burg in Vienna). As a model, however, Wyspiański and Ekielski’s vision cannot be bettered. When they were creating it genuine national independence, rather than mere dangled forms of autonomy, was surreally unlikely, but all the cultural groundwork had been done by ‘Young Poland’ and the Poles, as it turned out, only had a short while to wait.

I realize that things are getting a bit pell-mell around here, but we cannot move on without a quick mention of the multi-talented Stanisław Witkiewicz. He is owed the world’s gratitude for inventing the Zakopane-style of architecture, a modern and substantial version of the wooden buildings and carvings of the Gorále mountain people of Poland’s far south. I am rarely happier than wandering around Zakopane, which, even with its almost uncontrollable crowds of visitors from Kraków, is still a thrillingly enjoyable town. It is here that one of my favourite composers, the intermittently great Karol Szymanowski, lived, creator of among many other things the wonderful Gorále pantomime-ballet
Harnasie
. It was here too that Joseph Conrad – who had grown up in Kraków and Lwów but had left Poland forty years before – found himself on a nostalgic visit stuck by the outbreak of the First World War. Eventually a sympathetic American consul arranged for him to be extracted from Austria-Hungary. As Szymanowski and Conrad are two of my spiritual godparents (not a role they would have volunteered for), to be in
their
mountain town made everything seem more beautiful and significant than it perhaps really is. Witkiewicz’s vision of a town of authentic, severe yet extravagant, wooden houses continues to prevail in some parts of Zakopane. I would love to live there, surrounded by Zakopane-style butter-moulds and milking-stools, wearing a folkloric blouse and walking in the Tatra Mountains. It has been a tourist trap for at least a century, but sitting at a table munching a vast plate of mountain-style meat listening to Gorále musicians, you feel that it is absolutely fine to be trapped.