Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe (63 page)

The logical conclusion to the situation seemed not so much the break-up of the Empire as some cataclysm in which the survivors of some inter-galactic war would at last impose a world in which everyone would speak Hungarian or everyone would speak German, and in which questions of democracy and representation would be resolved by turning non-Nibelung races back into illiterate slaves. However far each language group might successfully spread, they would by definition always be impinging on another people, who could then be claimed as a threat. Each group ground and splintered against the next, in the manner of
The Seventy Thousand
. The situation was kept under control by the Habsburgs and their loyalists, who were found in irregular but considerable patches across the Empire and who for reasons of their own could see the potential disaster ahead. Many of these individuals had a genuine attachment to the Empire as a whole and to the dynasty, values particularly spread by the army. Others were neutralized by anxieties about the alternatives: Bosnian Muslims fearful of Serbian rule and western Croatians of Italian rule and Galician Poles of German or Russian rule. Others – Italians, Serbs and Romanians – were split between those who yearned for Anschluss with Rome, Belgrade and Bucharest and those who looked down on these corrupt, badly run new nations and feared being chewed up, swallowed and then forgotten by them.
³

This need to keep all these groups in play had the unexpected effect of making the Habsburg authorities (dynastic and martial) in modern terms very liberal, while many groups who one would think of as liberal (urban, middle class, civilian) were frothingly nationalist. Czechs sat quietly at home reading about Hussites slaughtering German invaders, Ruthenians reminisced about massacres of Polish landowners and Romanians and Serbs listened to epic poetry about their ancestors’ unlimited ferocity-cum-nobility. All these fantasies would be put to the test. But nobody at the time could have imagined that they would end up most potently in the hands of the Germans – in some ways the least thought-about minority in the Habsburg Empire: a Western ruling elite, but equally fulfilling every role from shopkeeper to ordinary soldier to agricultural worker, dotted irregularly everywhere from the Tyrol to the Carpathians.

The largest immune group was the Jews, except those sufficiently assimilated to wholly share German or Hungarian views. There was no nationalist politician, pointing with trembling fingers at a medieval map, wearing his people’s flag in his lapel, robustly singing some nineteenth-century anthem, who did not see the Jews as an obstacle. Even the most assimilated Jewish Hungarians would suddenly find themselves excluded by middle-class Protestant Hungarians, who would drift off into pathetic fantasies about pure ancestry from ancient horsemen. Herzl understood what this might mean, but in a sense all nationalist politicians understood it – that the logic of their views had to mean the disappearance of all those who did not share their ‘race’. This could be achieved by everyone being penned inside separate frontiers (the solution since 1945, with the Soviets and then the EU as neo-Habsburg gendarmes), but there were terrible alternatives to be tried first.

The end begins

Austria-Hungary’s monuments to the dead of the First World War tend to be small and private: the work of relatives, or groups of surviving individuals from specific regiments. This is understandable – a war fought for dynastic and Imperial reasons which ended with total defeat and the eradication of both the dynasty and Empire, followed by a maelstrom of social and economic disasters, ticks none of the boxes likely to result in a thoughtful public commemorative programme. None of the successor regimes had any interest in enshrining such a catastrophe, with no form of words really available that could both acknowledge what had happened (some 1,100,000 dead) and come up with any even faintly consolatory rationale. Some small towns (Szekszárd and Rust for example) have simple ‘standing soldier’ monuments in the same style as those in Britain and France, and major cities have them generally tucked away, in side chapels or school halls, with many destroyed by one regime or another. The only really moving exception I came across was in Most na Soči, a tiny Slovenian village on the railway line between Gorizia and Ljubljana where I had planned to travel on to Kobarid, the site of a major battle in the autumn of 1917. The atmosphere of the station, with battered flat-bed railway trucks, silent, dripping mountain trees and the reek of resin and sawdust, was so wonderful that it made me pause fatally, emerging into the courtyard just in time to see the day’s only bus to Kobarid trundling off across a bridge over the spectacular cyan-coloured river. Filling in the time until the next train back and trying to retrieve something from the fiasco I wandered around the area until I suddenly found myself facing an immense, flat, vertical rock face into which was carved in colossal lettering:

HIER KÄMPFTE DAS XV. KORPS
MAI 1915: OKTOBER 1917

Here the XV Corps fought
. At the monument’s base are steps and a sort of altar and stone torches. These latter used to be lit to create a suitably warrior-pagan atmosphere. Of course everything was soggy moss, mould and rust streaks, but this only enhanced its strange dignity. I have to admit a research defeat, being simply unable to find out how such a monument has survived, with both its post-Habsburg Italian and Yugoslav owners not exactly in favour of the Empire. Perhaps its bald declaration was sufficiently abstract to be respected. It certainly sums up all that can be said about the Habsburg armies – they fought, but in the end they met everywhere with disaster and defeat. How such disaster overtook and eviscerated the Empire, which had lasted so successfully for so many centuries, is a great and complex subject that requires whole books rather than a few glib paragraphs and is, of course, both a Habsburg story and a European one.

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 unstoppable 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.