PARIS 1919 (45 page)

When the empire collapsed, so did an economic organism of which Austria had been at the heart. The Danube, navigable now from the Black Sea to southern Germany, ran through it. A huge Catherine wheel of railway lines revolved around it, linking up with other wheels around Budapest and Prague. In November 1918, the trade that carried food and raw materials into Austria and brought manufactured goods out stopped, as if, said a Vienna newspaper, by the blow of an ax. The coal and potatoes that once came from Bohemia and the beef and wheat from Hungary sat on the wrong side of new borders. Austria did not have the funds to buy them and its new neighbors were not inclined to be generous. Indeed, they were busy claiming their share of the imperial assets in Vienna: the works of art, the furniture, the collections of armor and scientific instruments, the books, the archives, even laboratories. The Italians chimed in with demands for works of art carried off to Vienna before Italy existed and the Belgians with a demand for a triptych taken by Maria Theresa.
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Alarming reports reached Paris about conditions in Austria: the countryside picked bare of its livestock; the empty shelves in the shops; the spread of tuberculosis; the men in ragged uniforms; the thousands of unemployed—125,000 in Vienna alone. Factories stood still and the trains and trams ran sporadically. The former commander-in-chief of the imperial armies ran a small tobacconist's shop, and lesser officers shined shoes. Starving children begged in the streets and there were long queues outside the soup kitchens. Girls from good middle-class families sold themselves for food and clothing. When several police horses were killed in one of the frequent violent demonstrations, the flesh was stripped from their bones within minutes.

The Viennese coffeehouses were still open and their orchestras still played, but their customers drank coffee made from barley and kept their overcoats on. Shops and restaurants shut early to save fuel and theaters were only allowed to open one night a week. The streets were dirty and uncared-for. Windows were boarded up because there was no glass to repair them. The Habsburg palaces had been ransacked and Schonbrünn was now a home for abandoned children, while the Hofburg was rented out for private parties. “Their whole attitude,” said an American observer of the Viennese, “was very much like that of people who had suffered from some great natural calamity, such as a flood or famine. Their attitude and their arguments were very much like those of a delegation seeking help for the famine sufferers of India, and there was a complete assumption that we were free from resentment and filled with a sympathetic desire to put them on their feet.”
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In January 1919, William Beveridge, a British civil servant (and later the father of the welfare state), was sent from Paris to assess Austria's needs. He warned that, without immediate relief, there was likely to be complete social collapse. Already the provinces were refusing to send food into Vienna. Vorarlberg, at the western tip of Austria, was agitating to join Switzerland. Other regions might well follow suit. The socialist government could do little and it had to share its power with a self-appointed people's militia. The peacemakers knew what these signs meant. They did not want Austria going the way of Russia or, later, Hungary. At the end of March, soon after the communists took over in Hungary, the Allies lifted their blockade and supplied credits to the Austrian government. They also shipped in food and clothing. Austria became the fourth largest beneficiary of Allied aid, after Germany, Poland and Belgium. By the spring of 1919, as a prominent Viennese journalist told an American, the situation was very serious but not yet hopeless. That June an attempt by the communists to seize power by force was put down relatively easily.
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The Austrian treaty was far from ready when the invitation went out to the Austrians to send their delegates to Paris; but, as Wilson said, it was a good idea to show that the Allies supported the Austrian government. They could not invite the Hungarians as well, when there was a communist government in Budapest, no doubt allied with the Russian Bolsheviks. Lloyd George was milder. He had heard that two hundred of the middle class had been killed in Budapest, but he could not vouch for the truth of that story. “We can't,” he said, “refuse to make peace with the Hungarians because we don't like their government.” In the end, it proved impossible to summon the Hungarians, because fighting broke out between Hungary and its neighbors.
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Austria's delegation was led by its prime minister, Karl Renner, a cheerful, portly man, fond of good food and drink, card games and dancing. Renner was a moderate and a realist. When he left for Paris, crowds at the railway station shouted, “Bring us a good peace.” Renner replied, “Count on me to obtain all that is humanly possible for the good of our dear people. But we mustn't forget that our unhappy country did not win the victory, and we beg you not to nourish mad hopes.” Along with his experts, he took with him a distinguished pacifist; a journalist who had friends in Paris from before the war, including Clemenceau; and Rudolf Slatin, a genuine British hero, who had been with General Gordon in the disastrous expedition in the Sudan (he was held prisoner by the Mahdi for years and then freed by Kitchener and given a knighthood). Slatin Pasha, as the British remembered him, wrote to his old friend Balfour, asking for Austria's delegates to be allowed to negotiate face-to-face with the peacemakers. Balfour regretted that it could not be done, but used Slatin as an unofficial means of communication.
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When his train arrived in Paris, Renner apologized, in French, for not speaking the language. He said how pleased he was to be visiting Paris for the first time. He smiled obligingly for the press. Another of his party managed a quiet dig when he was asked about the train journey through the battlefields: “Someone had the forethought to slow the passage of our train so that we could the better see France looking so lovely in this jolly month of May.” The Austrians behaved impeccably, even when they were obliged to wait patiently for their terms because the Council of Four, which had summoned them in a burst of enthusiasm, as promptly forgot them. They played cards, read and went for long walks. “We got good French food and wines,” recalled one, “which most of us enjoyed after the long hungry years.” When it could be arranged, their Allied guards took them out for little expeditions. Renner asked especially to see a French agricultural college. The Austrians made a good impression—quite unlike, everyone said, the Germans, who had by then also arrived in Paris. In St. Germain the locals were particularly fond of a delegate from the Tyrol, in his chestnut hunting jacket and little green hat with its large black feather. They did not realize that he was dressed in mourning because the largely German-speaking southern part of the Tyrol had already been awarded to Italy.
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Enough was leaking out about the peace terms, mainly from the Italians, to make the Austrians uneasy and depressed. Austria's borders had been largely left to the specialist committees, who had heard from countries such as Czechoslovakia or Italy about what they wanted, but not of course from Austria itself. Galicia went to Poland, Bohemia to Czechoslovakia. Some three million German-speaking Austrians went with them. Otto Bauer, Austria's cleverest socialist and its foreign minister, made an impassioned speech back in Vienna. “No less than two-fifths of our people are to be subjected to foreign domination, without any plebiscite and against their indisputable will, being thus deprived of their right of self-determination.” He had a point, but few in Paris were prepared to listen.
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The Allies had also decided that Austria would not be allowed to join up with Germany. This was not something they had anticipated having to do. They had not after all expected that there would be an Austria at all. Nor had the German-speaking Austrians, apart from a handful of right-wing nationalists, shown much inclination to join Germany. They were after all the dominant group in a great empire. “God save the Emperor,” the old anthem went, “Closely with the Habsburg throne, Austria's fate remains united.”
Anschluss,
or union, never commanded widespread support until the last days of the Great War. On October 16, as Austria-Hungary was scrambling desperately to get out of the war and indeed to survive, Emperor Karl announced the creation of a new empire “in which every people would build its own political community in its own area of settlement.” Unlike Czechs or Poles or Slovenes, German-speakers had never developed such a community. Who would need them when, as looked increasingly likely, there were no more emperors? How would they live among a Slavic majority? The German-Austrians faced a bleak future, whether or not Austria-Hungary survived, and it was out of that pessimism that the demand for Anschluss with Germany burgeoned.
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On October 21, German-speaking deputies in the Austrian parliament met as a Provisional National Assembly. They did not truly represent a nation as the Czech or Slovenian deputies did and, at that point, they asked not for union with Germany but for self-determination for Germans within the old Habsburg empire. By November 11, however, there was no longer either emperor or empire. It was also clear that the states emerging out of the wreckage of Austria-Hungary had no interest in any sort of political arrangement with German-speaking Austria. On November 12, the assembly, speaking in the name of all Austrian Germans, proclaimed the republic of Austria in one breath and asserted that it was part of the larger German republic in the next. It was an act born out of fear, much as Croatia's decision to join with Serbia was. Germany, the onetime enemy and the mistrusted ally, suddenly looked like a refuge. Unlikely political groups joined forces in those bewildering last days of the empire— anti-Semites, Jews, nationalists, socialists, liberals, Tyrolese and Styrians fearful of falling under Italian or Serbian rule—to demand union with Germany.
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Many Austrians, in fact, had reservations about
Anschluss:
Catholics, the great majority, who did not like North German Protestants; businessmen who feared German competition; and Viennese who did not want their city to take second place to Berlin or Weimar. Austrians of all classes remembered the long rivalry between Prussia and Austria for leadership of all Germans and the way in which Germany had refused to let Austria-Hungary make a separate peace during the war. But what alternative was there for them now?

By 1918, many Austrians saw
Anschluss
as the only hope for protection and prosperity for their little country. In the universities and coffeehouses, pan-German intellectuals talked dramatically of rejoining the severed branch to the great German tree. The Socialists were enthusiastic because, as Bauer argued, Germany was moving leftward. Joining the Austrian and German working classes would strengthen socialism everywhere. Renner's attitude was more pragmatic and more typical: “the fear of famine and unemployment and Anschluss as the only possible solution.”
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The new provisional assembly in Vienna opened negotiations with Germany. The Austrians moved cautiously, making it clear to the Germans that any union must respect Austria's unique character. The Germans were equally cautious. Germany did not want to annoy the peacemakers unnecessarily, especially before its own terms were settled. As Brockdorff-Rantzau, the German foreign minister, made clear to Bauer, Germany had to think of itself. If the Allies thought that it was gaining territory in the south, they would be all the more inclined to take away its land in the west and east.
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These discussions were academic. The Allies had made up their minds, largely at France's insistence, to forbid any union between the two German-speaking countries. Briefly, at the end of the war, the French had toyed with the idea of encouraging Austria and Bavaria to unite, to form a strong Catholic bloc to counter Protestant Prussia. When it became clear that neither the British nor the Americans would support the breakup of Germany, French policy switched to preventing Austria from falling into Germany's arms. In Vienna, the French representative dropped heavy hints that if Austria wanted favorable peace terms, it should abandon all talk of
Anschluss.
France was for peace, said Clemenceau. “But if we reduce our armaments, and if, at the same time, Austria adds seven million inhabitants to the population of Germany, the power of our German neighbours will increase in a manner very threatening to us.” Wilson worried that this might contradict Austrian self-determination, but in the end he and Clemenceau agreed in April that there would be a clause in the German treaty specifying that Germany must respect Austria's borders. Lloyd George suggested a face-saving compromise: that Austria could join Germany if the League of Nations approved. Wilson accepted the suggestion with relief, and clauses were inserted to that effect in both the German and Austrian treaties. Since the vote in the League Council had to be unanimous, this effectively gave France and Italy a veto.
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At the end of May the Austrian delegation complained gently that it was rather disturbed over the “incertitude” about its peace terms. The treaty for Austria, along with those for Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey, still lay in bits and pieces around Paris, in this committee or that commission. The Council of Four, which had to approve the final drafts, had been occupied with last-minute negotiations on the German treaty and wrangling over Italy's claims. Austria and its problems came well down the list. As a British expert complained, “There is practically no one on the spot who has really sound knowledge and experience, and of course the Italians are very difficult.”
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What the Austrian delegation finally saw on June 2 was a slapdash document—“a simulacrum of a Treaty,” in Hankey's opinion. Some clauses had been lifted wholesale from the German treaty and there had been no time to check for accuracy and consistency. The Austrians were startled to learn, for example, that they were forbidden to have submarines. The terms were also, as Clemenceau explained with some embarrassment, incomplete. The Allies had not been able to agree on some of Austria's borders, especially those with Italy, in the Tyrol, and with Yugoslavia. Because of a last-minute disagreement, Clemenceau had been obliged to tear out the section on the Yugoslav borders just before he handed the terms to the Austrians.
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