Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe (45 page)

The events of 1846 had a powerful effect on the Polish nobility, who now had to contend not only with Ruthenian hostility in the east but, far worse, with the realization that their ‘own’ Polish peasants would kill them if they had the chance rather than offer anything that might be thought of as national Polish solidarity. For the rest of the Empire’s existence the Polish landowners tended to be an aggressively loyal group, with Tarnów casting a long shadow. For the Habsburgs any excitement over this Galician loyalty was probably overwhelmed by the failure of their Enlightenment project as the province remained an impoverished backwater much of whose population, whether Polish, Jewish or Ruthenian, spent its leisure hours working out how to leave for America.

That this book is not filled up purely with interesting instances of racial or linguistic tension across the nineteenth-century Empire is because of their ultimately rather numbing effect. But this prospect of extreme violence has just to be kept in mind, lurking in the background, even if some lucky generations escaped it. It is striking, for example, how many characters in the nostalgic post-1918 novels of life in Habsburg Hungary are armed with a revolver or automatic – not with relevance to the plot, but just as a casual aspect of their day-to-day lives. For all the positive, normal relations between groups, and the ever-more overblown presentation of the immemorial Hungarian nobility’s hold on Transylvania, there seems to have been a skittering, frightened undertow to the banquets, hare-hunts and balls. In Transylvania it was memories of Horea, Cloşca and Crişan that stalked the aristocratic imagination – but this would also be added to by the mass Romanian defection to the Habsburgs in the 1848–49 War of Independence, which enclosed within it a barely reported murderous race war.

In Galicia it was memories of Tarnów that performed a similar service for the surviving Polish noble families. Both societies shared something of the brittle, sports-obsessed cheerfulness of the British in India – or indeed of Southerners in the pre-1861 United States. These were societies which could resort to any level of violence in support of racial supremacy. Indeed, an interesting global history could be written about the ferocity of a period which seems, very superficially, to be so ‘civilized’. Southern white responses to Nat Turner’s Slave Rebellion in 1831, with Turner himself flayed, beheaded and quartered, can be linked to the British blowing rebel Indians to pieces from the mouths of cannons in 1857. The intermittent ferocity of relations between some groups in the Habsburg Empire tends to be seen in isolation and contrasted with the relative docility of life in the countryside of Britain, say, or France – but it is perhaps just a handful of European societies which had a homogeneity sufficient to make them non-violent (and Ireland could also be swapping notes with Transylvania). This hatred, inequality, irredentism and mutual contempt would be played out with ever more terrible results and, in more muted ways, still persist today in the very few areas where the issue has not completely burned itself out.

Un vero quarantotto

Debrecen is now one of the most easterly Hungarian cities. It is a measure of the catastrophe that has engulfed Hungary in the twentieth century that it was once in the middle of the country. The lurch could have been even worse as, with much of the country filled with marauding Romanian troops in 1919, there was a moment when it looked as though the whole of Bethlen Gábor’s old Partium region was going to be gulped down by Bucharest, leaving the traumatized Hungarian republic as a tiny reservation not much bigger than Slovakia. As it was, many predominantly Hungarian towns were taken, but Debrecen survived.

The Great Church in Debrecen therefore now has an even more defiant cultic role in Hungarian life than before, if that is possible. The city from which Calvinist (and often nationalist and anti-Habsburg) ideas radiated to all points of the compass has now become the last outpost – it is as though Kansas City suddenly found itself on the border with Mexico. The Great Church is in itself something of a disappointment. The battered, glowering building it replaced, the ‘Andrew Church’, must have had much of the charisma of the Black Church of Braşov, and had a detached bell-tower and very tall military watchtower from which to scour the surrounding plains for the dust-cloud that would indicate an Ottoman army. Sadly the Andrew Church burned down at the beginning of the nineteenth century, poor timing given the dreary rule-book classicism which plagued the architecture of the period. Calvinists are, of course, well known for their aversion to figurative religious imagery, and a huge, white-washed, almost featureless classical interior is not much fun. I felt my latent Catholic genes stirring – surely just
one
small picture of Jesus having a hard time wouldn’t hurt? The relentless austerity of the main church was disappointing, but at this point in my travels around the Empire I had an almost sixth sense about these things. I remember one occasion in the Upper Austrian town of Steyr when I saw signs pointing to the castle park and I immediately thought, ‘I bet there is an orangery there which has been converted into a restaurant where I can have lunch’: and there was. Similarly – as soon as I saw a sign saying
Temporary exhibition in the tower
I immediately thought ‘I bet this is going to be something a bit mad’: and it was.

As though to atone for the monotony of the main church, the tower was filled with an exhibition of extraordinarily manic, precise models of entirely conjectural buildings. Created in the first half of the twentieth century by the Calvinist preacher and writer Lajos Csia, it was a happy example of how the most austere of faiths will suddenly sprout the strangest flowers. The rooms were filled with marvels: visions of the Temple of Solomon, the best ever Tower of Babel, the Temple Mount, all produced in a seemingly clinical, unromantic manner and yet – in their very conception – dementedly romantic. Greatest of all were two attempts to recreate Ezekiel’s vision of the renewed Temple in Jerusalem, as revealed to him by the ‘man whose appearance was like the appearance of brass’ – a riot of strange turrets and battlements, following the man of brass’s cubit-by-cubit instructions. There is a long and honourable tradition of antiquarian conjectural fantasy (not least in the work of Athanasius Kircher, discussed earlier), but this is without doubt one of its most convincing and enjoyable expressions, with fascinating hints lurking too of the deep, ancient roots of science fiction.

But in the history of the Empire, Debrecen is not simply ‘the vegetable garden of Hungarian Calvinism’, or indeed the home of conjectural models of Ezekiel’s vision. It is also the home of the tragically abortive Hungarian state of 1849, with Lajos Kossuth’s declaration of independence in the Great Church and the anxious, short-lived parliament meeting in the oratory of the next-door Calvinist college.

The events of 1848–49 have an uneasy place in European history. All those involved – on both sides – seem to have been painfully self-conscious about what they were setting out to achieve or to prevent. Without being too reductive, the forces of ‘liberalism’ and the forces of ‘reaction’ (both concepts that need to be put in inverted commas as they can in practice both be pretty much ummmed and aaahed to death) had an air of working from a script. This script, of course, had been laid out by the French Revolution. A combination of poor harvests and technological change formed part of the backdrop to 1848, but perhaps more important was the sense of legitimism in decay. Franz I had been so confident of the security of the Habsburg throne that in his old age he saw no problem with his incapable son succeeding as Ferdinand I (as with his father, the numbering starting again to show the fresh minting of the ‘Austrian Empire’ following the demise of the Holy Roman Empire, otherwise he should have been Ferdinand IV – in Hungary he was King Ferdinand V). Under Metternich’s tutelage the government of the Empire in many ways simply ignored Ferdinand, but this meant that too much was required of a handful of officials with no legitimacy of any kind, not the least of them being the increasingly elderly and depressive Metternich himself.

The revolutions across Europe began in Paris where the elderly Louis Philippe, himself brought to power eighteen years before in a coup, wobbled around helplessly. As soon as the barricades went up, panic flooded across Europe. Characters such as Metternich and Louis Philippe, who had experienced the French Revolution in their late teens, knew the drill and fled in an intelligent attempt to avoid having their heads put on sticks. Across the Habsburg Empire major cities fell, from Milan to Venice, from Prague to Vienna. It briefly seemed as though anything might be possible.

A striking and clear strand in the revolutions was that the removal of dynastic rule over pieces of land naturally led to its substitute: national ownership based on language. If people no longer believed that Ferdinand I ruled Milan then something else was needed. Particularly vulnerable were the bits and pieces in Italy like the duchies of Modena and Parma, which had no rationale beyond a specific individual dynast’s inheriting them. This issue of ownership crowded into every aspect of life. If an individual wearing odd and expensive clothing no longer owned a territory, then the system by which the people lived on that land also caved in – with serfdom immediately seen as unacceptable and illogical.

1848 was a year of miraculous liberation and excitement, but once its opening phase was over it became clear that it had unintentionally opened a particularly unpleasant Pandora’s box. National structures were relatively unproblematic in France, which while far from monoglot, at least had a single dominant language, and at least plausible in Italy, but for German-speaking countries and for the rest of the Habsburg Empire the very idea of ‘nation’ was an unresolvable nightmare. The new German parliament at Frankfurt almost immediately made this clear – just taking the territory of Bohemia, what would it mean for Czech-speakers to attend an otherwise German-speaking event? Some Germans were encouraging but there was a great temptation to see the Czechs as mere picturesque peasants like the Bretons in France, incapable of political action. The threat of a future devoted to a Czech equivalent of tossing chocolate
crêpes
and knitting striped sweaters was enough to galvanize a Czech nationalism which would drive everything before it – ultimately indeed, only a century later, sweeping away or killing all the Bohemian Germans. At the further end of the Empire, Poles, thrilled by the collapse of central authority, began to gather. But they, in turn, saw no reason to include Ruthenians, who, now no longer serfs, had as much right as anyone to a view on how they should be ruled. But, as with the German–Czech relationship, the Poles could see the Ruthenians at best only in a
folklorique
light, as colourful man-beasts without culture. Less than a century later this tension would be resolved through the deaths of millions of people.

The importance of the change was enormous. If people are viewed as subjects then in many contexts their language, cultural practices or religion are irrelevant. The Habsburg Empire had long specialized in attractive engravings of the ‘Peoples of the Empire’ in their different smocks, hats, boots and kerchiefs. A small area of Transylvania might have had a Hungarian aristocratic family in a substantial small palace, employing many of the Hungarian, Romanian, Jewish, German and sometimes Armenian locals. Particular experts might be brought in – German teachers or English horse-breeders or French governesses. The local aristocrat would in this case be responsible to the Austrian rulers of Transylvania, whose authority came from Ferdinand. The different groups in this area might cordially dislike each other – they would rarely intermarry, they went to different churches (although Hungarians and Germans could overlap), celebrated different feasts, ate different foods and navigated each day through a welter of different prohibitions, prejudices and acceptable/unacceptable behaviours. But substantially until 1848 all these groups were neutered. After 1848, however much the new regimes tried to pretend otherwise, everything became about national identity and the way that all these groups in, say, that one small area of Transylvania had competing claims for authority, autonomy and economic control. The consequences were catastrophic. There is no doubt that by many measures 1848 was a great watershed in European history – I am not sure anyone today would particularly fancy going back to a world where most of us would be tied labourers. But it is impossible not to feel a sense of dread about the gap between the excitement of 1848 and the degree to which we now know it was firing a starting gun that would initiate many of Europe’s most terrible events.

Once the euphoria of 1848 had subsided, the revolutionaries’ lack of a wider, unified purpose became painfully clear and everywhere the revolutions were co-opted or destroyed. There is a wonderful Italian phrase:
un vero quarantotto
, meaning a total cock-up: ‘a right ’48’ – and
un vero quarantotto
about sums it up. Just as doddering or shifty rulers everywhere had known how to play their parts, and had fled by hiding in laundry-baskets or dressing up as common soldiers, so the military leaders knew their parts. The amazingly old General Radetzky had fought throughout the Napoleonic Wars, was absolutely loyal to the Habsburgs, and saw the Italian revolutionaries as merely an uppity rabble. The Prince of Windisch-Graetz further north was similarly incredulous about shop-keepers and other trash in Prague and Vienna having a view about anything at all. Once the initial shock of the revolutions was over these men organized their regular troops and systematically destroyed both the insurrectionaries and anybody else they disliked or who was unluckily in the way. There is something jaunty and almost unserious about the image of 1848 – lots of people in top hats and extravagant neck-ties, smoking cheroots while lounging on a barricade with a rifle, listening to someone playing Chopin in a nearby pub. It also seems relatively frivolous in the light, most obviously, of the French or Russian revolutions. But it is not clear how its actual suppression could have been any worse. The revolutionaries were hopelessly at odds with one another, both amazed by their initial success and then by the sheer complexity of what should happen next – indeed, some of the revolutionaries may have been socialists or Communists (
The Communist Manifesto
was published in February, though it had little impact until later), but many others could in practical terms hardly be called revolutionaries at all. A very broad spectrum of people could agree with the statement ‘It’s disgusting and embarrassing to be ruled by King Ferdinand II of the Two Sicilies’, but a decision on what to do next was much harder.