Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe (69 page)

These traumas created an immediate nostalgia and a sense that something extremely precious had been lost. It is striking in many of the remarkable novels from the 1930s how many celebrate almost obsessively the broad range of possibilities that had once existed in the former Empire, the geographical sprawl of which had now been replaced by the small and dirty cages of the new nation states. In one of the greatest Hungarian novels, Desző Kosztolányi’s charming
Kornél Esti
, the hero waves goodbye to the amusingly named pubs in Budapest (the Torpedo, the Vitriol – ‘a low dive’) and heads off to the coast. In a magical scene of yearning he travels down through the pre-War Empire, waved on by a friendly Croat guard, to the Hungarian Adriatic port of Fiume, where a Hungarian flag flaps cheerily over the deep blue sea. For the novel’s original readers this would have been very hard to read, with the route now filled with implacably hostile and triumphalist new Yugoslav and Fascist Italian owners. Another of Kosztolányi’s novels, the wonderful
Skylark
, together with much of the rest of his work, is set in a fictional pre-War southern Hungarian town based on his birthplace of Subotica, now also under Yugoslav rule. Joseph Roth, whose novels tried to embrace as much as possible of the old Empire, shared this pan-European yearning. In
The Emperor’s Tomb
the narrator living in Vienna gets together with his chestnut-seller cousin from Slovenia to visit a Jewish coach-driver in Galicia (in Roth’s favourite, back-of-beyond, fictional frontier town of Zlotograd). Writers such as Stefan Zweig, Alexander Lernet-Holenia and Miklós Bánffy also fill the 1930s with characters travelling back and forth across the Empire. They celebrate the friendly relations between different nationalities and a sense of tolerance or at least indifference which had now completely vanished in favour of a heavily fanged nationalism. Bánffy’s scenes of pre-War young noblemen in Kolozsvár getting friendly policemen to clear the pavement so that they can sing with a gypsy-band beneath the windows of girls they love were crazily impossible in the newly Romanian-ruled city of Cluj at the time he was actually writing.

But of course much of this fiction would shortly in turn be buried under a fresh, even greater wave of horror, which gives the books a painful charm greater than the writers even intended. Indeed, it was perhaps the aristocrats in Bánffy’s
Transylvanian Trilogy
who bugged me most as I wandered gloomily through the endless streets of these at-best haggard towns. What I kept coming back to, seeing all these houses whose inhabitants may since 1914 have been scooped out and replaced several times over, is that so much of the critique of the Empire was a genuinely
liberal
one – but liberalism itself ended up as deeply intolerant. The great effort to shake clear of the Empire’s creaking, feudal structures meant breaking through into a new world not of tolerance and equality, but of viciousness far greater than anything the old Austro- Hungarian rulers could have dreamed of.

Austro-Hungarian liberalism rapidly splintered with the end of the Empire into mutually enraged forms of exclusionary nationalism or Communism. The numbers of those who remained committed to something even slightly inclusive rapidly dropped to almost zero, leaving only a handful of aristocrats like Bánffy. As soon as the Emperor Karl’s rule collapsed there was no model available for a serious democracy – or at best democracy became a casual weapon reached for by a majority group so they could impose themselves on smaller groups. Even Czechoslovakia could not manage its minorities. As with the other successor states a key early move there had been to demolish every trace of the Habsburgs. In the far western German-speaking town of Eger (now Cheb) this meant demolishing the statue of the modernizing, pro-German Joseph II in the main square. Attempts to do this resulted in riots that burned down the only Czech-language school. Czech troops swamped the main square like an occupying army. Once the battered statue had been disposed of, Eger became a hot-bed of German resentment, effectively not part of the Czechoslovak state, with even Czech road signs torn down. In short, Franz Ferdinand’s vision of German Bohemia immediately came true. Throughout the 1930s the town noisily celebrated being the place where the German hero Wallenstein had been killed by Habsburg cowards, for which could be read the neo-Habsburgs in Prague. With absurd Wallenstein festivals and marches, with the people of Eger dressed as soldiers of the Thirty Years War, this all shifted by easy stages into Sudetenland enthusiasm for Hitler. These people were never reconciled to the Czechoslovak state. Cheb is now yet another town entirely filled with new people, another disaster, with every single German killed or expelled.

So the question that has driven me mad through the years writing this book is the obvious one. Was it inherent in the destruction of the Habsburg Empire that Nazism would result? In the vast, endlessly complex nationalist laboratory of the Empire’s final decade, was Hitler himself in fact the quintessential product? So many of his obsessions, tics and visions seem rooted here and not in Germany itself. Were his Habsburg obsessions injected into Germany, much as the German General Staff injected Lenin into Russia? Like all such questions, in the end it cannot be answered.

A reliable sense of settled gloom can always be had by standing in the half-complete mess of Heroes’ Square in Vienna. It was here that Hitler had perhaps his greatest triumph, in the spring of 1938. German Austrians had met the notionally invading Nazi troops in a delirium of mass joy, their humiliation in the grubby little Republic of Austria at an end. By the time that Hitler appeared on the balcony of the Hofburg, looking out onto the square at an adoring crowd of some two hundred thousand, many thousands of others (leftists, monarchists, Austrian patriots, Habsburgs) had been arrested and ferocious anti-Jewish violence had broken out. On crossing the Austrian border with his motorcade, Hitler had first gone to visit the graves of his parents in Upper Austria and then visited Linz, where he had been a student. But it was Vienna where, as a subject of Franz Joseph, he had spent his early twenties as a humiliated semi-vagrant. Standing on the hideously ornate and tacky Hofburg balcony he effectively
became
Franz Joseph, but a Franz Joseph who would rule a reconstituted Empire just on behalf of its German element, in grudging cooperation with the Hungarians – the other ‘Nibelung’ race – and ending the politics which had dominated pre-1914 Vienna: Jews and Slavs would now once more be put back in their places.

Heroes’ Square is a miserable spot. An old barracks and parade-ground cleared into an arena for Imperial splendour, it was only part-built when the Empire ended, leaving just two bathetic statues, one of Prince Eugene, the other of Archduke Charles, and it is now a car park subject to gusts of wind which whirl together dirt and discarded plastic cups. I have always been bothered most by the sight from the square of the huge Nazi-era Flak Tower, lurking like something from
The War of the Worlds
behind the museums. Most of these towers have been demolished, but this one, oddly, has survived – a huge concrete structure used as a high platform for anti-aircraft guns and as an arsenal and bomb-shelter. It was built with these practical purposes in mind, but it was also meant to stand there for ever as a symbol of Viennese fortitude, so that future generations in the Nazi Empire would admire it, just as they admired the statues in Heroes’ Square of Vienna’s two greatest earlier defenders, or the spot on the Kahlenberg where the princes met before racing down the hill to destroy the Ottoman armies besieging the city. The Flak Tower was meant to be faced with marble, but the marble was marooned in its French quarry as one of the minor casualties of D-Day and then, for obvious reasons, never delivered. Wandering around the square, the Flak Tower is an insistent and nasty presence on the horizon. I remember sitting on the Hofburg steps with my wife on our honeymoon, staring at it – a romantic moment. On every visit since, over some twenty years, I have found myself looking up to see if the Austrians have at last demolished it. But it is still there.

Notes

Introduction

1
. In alphabetical order: Austria, Belgium, Croatia, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland, and Ukraine plus briefly the entire Spanish overseas empire. The family also came to own Portugal and its empire as well as, more permanently, Spain and its empire through Charles V’s son, Philip.

Chapter Five

1
. The Venetian Republic also held back, surprisingly – very much a case of the doge that did not bark in the night.

Chapter Six

1
. The somewhat unfortunate name is originally in English and is not a silly translation.

2
. Even Ferdinand’s death was musically good news, provoking Schmelzer’s matchless
Lament on the Death of Ferdinand III
with its atmosphere of a ghostly, just deserted ballroom.

Chapter Seven

1
. Luckily the air clears of confusing Ferdinands very shortly.

Chapter Eight

1
. Just to be quite clear, I say ‘German’ and ‘Hungarian’ assuming a silent ‘-speakers’ or ‘-speaking’ as this addition would be so cumbersome. I am of course not suggesting the existence of Germany or Hungary in a modern sense. This needs constant self-discipline. Carinthians or Transylvanians had all kinds of loyalties, but none of these were directed at later generations of nationalist historians.

Chapter Nine

1
. And indeed his skull
did
show a pronounced bump of excellence in the area devoted to music – the sheer stupidity of phrenology must make us freeze with anxiety about the dim things we unthinkingly buy into today.

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