Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe (46 page)

It was the failure to agree on the next step that allowed the military their chance, and the results were ferocious. The two attempts by the King of Piedmont to invade northern Italy and liberate Habsburg territory were ruthlessly crushed. The heartbreaking attempts by Austrian-ruled Venetia to re-establish its ancient independence, snuffed out by Napoleon only fifty years before, ended in the city’s being besieged and shelled into submission. Venice’s revolution has never been part of the heroic history of Italian liberation because its leaders had no interest – except in extremis – in the rest of the Italians, with whom Venice had never shared a political history. It remained a north-eastern, Adriatic, Croatian-tinged sort of place a million miles from Milan. The Venetian uprising gave rise to some great statements, such as Antonio Morandi’s:

Venice arose from the waves purged of Austrian putrefaction, haughty enough never to tolerate a fresh servitude, and beautiful with that beauty the progress of civilization brings with it.

This sort of infectious, wonderful rhetoric could not hide deep problems within the city – with the new, generally bourgeois leadership as frightened of arming and training the workers as they were of the approaching Austrian army.

It was in the Moravian town of Olomouc that the future really took shape. Here a group of loyalist conspirators mounted a coup. The government of Ferdinand I had in the Emperor’s name agreed in a general panic to all kinds of concessions to the rebels. If Ferdinand were to be deposed (or rather ‘resign’) then his successor would not be bound to honour these concessions. The next in line to the throne was the childless Ferdinand’s younger brother, Franz Karl, but he and his wife wanted nothing to do with running an empire, so he in turn renounced his rights in favour of his own eldest son, the teenager Franz Joseph. The revolutions were already in deep trouble almost everywhere, but the decisive steps were taken in the pretty ecclesiastical quarter of Olomouc where Franz Joseph was proclaimed the new Emperor, and Ferdinand shuffled off to a long and pleasant retirement in the Bohemian countryside. One of the great oddities of Franz Joseph’s reign is its relentless obsession with the dignity of the House of Habsburg, with crushingly stuffy protocols, military uniform collar tabs, hierarchy and choreography – but the reign’s entire foundation was an illegitimate fraud. By most definitions Franz Joseph was no more ‘real’ than Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, who turned himself into Napoleon III in 1852 – and yet one managed through sheer longevity and dullness to make himself appear the
fons
of legitimacy and the other was always a sly, creepy adventurer.
¹

This brings the story back to the Great Church in Debrecen. The general crisis of 1848 had seemed to some Hungarians to be the great opportunity to break free at last of Habsburg rule, but as for so many others who misread the year’s events and ended up either dead, in prison or spending many years in exile in London, New York or Constantinople, this turned out to be untrue. Inspired leadership and patriotic fervour allowed the Hungarians to carve out an empire of their own, but this only existed through their having a ready-made army in the Magyar-speaking units of the Imperial forces and through the grace of total if temporary Habsburg failure. The curse that emerged elsewhere applied in the Hungarian lands just as brutally. If Habsburg authority was declared void and a group of agreeable Hungarian-speaking politicians announced themselves as the true successors, then this tore open ethnic problems of a kind that would in due course destroy the Hungary they were trying to build. Breaking clear of Vienna simply authorized the massive groups within Hungary who had no wish to be dominated by Hungarian-speakers to in turn break clear of Buda. This resulted in a racial war as Serbs, Croats and Romanians massacred the Hungarians in their midst. The Habsburgs gleefully egged on the counter-rebels, but Slavs and Romanians would have done this anyway – it was built into the events that were unfolding. The disaster was compounded by the arrival in Transylvania of an enormous Russian army in support of the Habsburgs and which dramatized the degree to which legitimism had really given way simply to reaction – the willingness to kill or manacle anyone who refuses to do as they are told. The Russians were driven to intervene by disgust at insurrection, but also because they could not help noticing how many Poles were joining the Hungarian army: a liberal, republican, independent Hungary providing a shelter for Poles would have featured very high in the long list of the Tsar’s nightmares that focused on the threat posed by personal freedoms. The degree to which Franz Joseph owed his position simply to reaction was played out in incredibly complex patterns throughout the rest of his long reign.

Lajos Kossuth’s formal, public declaration of independence in the Great Church at Debrecen on 14 April 1849 was one of the great moments in Hungarian history, and a tragic disaster. It is a marvellous document, but filled with the contradictions and evasions that would doom the Hungarians in 1918. Many Hungarians saw Kossuth’s announcement as dangerous and futile, but once it happened there was a clear patriotic duty to support it until General Görgey’s surrender to the Russian army four months later. Kossuth began by saying how the Habsburgs were ‘perjured in the sight of God and man’, which was about right, and therefore no longer kings of Hungary. Hungary was a nation of a hundred and ten thousand square miles and fifteen million people – a population which ‘feels the glow of youthful strength within its veins’. The declaration after a good start then lost all its dignity as it was obliged to discuss the large percentage of the fifteen million people whose youthful strength was in fact directed against Kossuth and his associates.

The Mexican–American War earlier in the decade is a tragic comparison to the situation of the Hungarians in 1849. The Americans had to face a weak enemy whose hold on California and the south-west was slight, with very few settlers and only history and legality on its side. The Hungarians wanted to follow in their footsteps, declaring their own republic and taking back under direct rule all the Croatian and Transylvanian lands that had been alienated from them. But they really could not have had more enemies and Kossuth, instead of just rolling out ringing phrases, had to turn bitterly in the Declaration on the ‘partisan chieftains’ of Croatia, the Serbians ‘whose hands yet reeked from the massacres they perpetrated’ and the misled Romanians who had been ‘stirred up’. But this was hopelessly inadequate and wishful as a diagnosis – the ‘partisan chieftains’ under Jelačić were simply loyal to the Habsburgs, with Jelačić the legitimate Ban of Croatia. The region crawled with anti-Hungarian forces. The previous month Franz Joseph had effectively snapped Hungary in pieces, declaring Croatia, Slavonia, Fiume, the Voivodina and Transylvania as separate new provinces and therefore cleverly rewarding all the non-Hungarian nationalities for their loyalty, and previewing the ruin of the Hungarian aristocracy.

So much of the fighting in 1849 remains almost hidden from the records – countless massacres, atrocities, summary shootings, as the surviving Hungarian forces were herded into an ever smaller space. Many leaders fled into the neighbouring Ottoman Empire where, in a perverse inversion of earlier Hungarian history, they had to adopt Turkish names and notionally embrace Islam to avoid extradition. Many others were executed. The most famous of these symbolic acts of revenge was outside the massive fortress of Arad, nowadays in the hands of the Romanian army but with its walls and approaches buried in a mass of luxuriant vegetation of a kind that suggests
Sleeping Beauty
, and with much of its surrounding land now dedicated to the Neptune Water-Park. It was here that thirteen Hungarian generals were hanged as rebels instead of shot as soldiers – a decision by Franz Joseph to humiliate them and, through them, humiliate all Hungarians. Kossuth went on to become a celebrated exile and global voice of liberalism, even though his decisions had provoked disaster at every turn. Franz Joseph, still only nineteen years old, had shown a ruthlessness which is hard to reconcile with his later image as father of his nation – an image almost entirely the result of his appealing white side-whiskers rather than any actual actions or thoughts he might have had.

The other tower of the Great Church, the one without Ezekiel’s Vision in it, is famous for its enormous bell. It was originally built in 1636 for the Prince of Transylvania, György I Rákóczi – an earlier Hungarian rebel and inspiration for Hungarian nationalists who had fought both Ferdinand II and Ferdinand III and had the bell wittily made out of melted Imperial artillery he had captured. The bell shared the fate of the rest of the Great Church in the fire of 1802, crashing to the ground and cracking. In 1873 the authorities decided that it should be completely recast and hung up again. It is quite hard to believe this is true, but as a preliminary the magnificent Rákóczi shield, which was part of the moulding, was hammered off and melted into a separate small bell, so that the metal of the new Great Church bell would not have its virtue tainted by rebellion. Sometimes it is hard to be sympathetic to the Hungarians’ chauvinism, but the treatment of the Rákóczi bell and the mystical Habsburg dynastic loopiness it betrays shows the mindset that they were up against.

Mountain people

Sitting happily in the Seven Piglets in Lviv, slurping a bowl of Hutsul-style mushroom soup, I felt I had landed in the acme of folkloric happiness. There were benches of rough-hewn wood scattered with sheepskins, low, deeply carved wooden rafters, every surface painted in Ukrainian decorative patterns and a live violin-and-squeezebox band playing, albeit
Bésame Mucho
but that’s fine. Waiters in baggy embroidered white shirts rushed around, helpfully bringing me things like piglet with walnuts and sauerkraut of a kind that will sooner or later but not yet give me a gastric ulcer. The whole place is so extreme that it has an almost aversion-therapy feel – patients are brought here who spend too much time listening to folksong arrangements or have devoted entire rooms of their house to hand-painted Easter eggs. Anyway, the aversion therapy didn’t work for me, as the pancakes laden with forest fruits arrived with a flourish.

An obsession with folklore can take many forms, running the gamut from a timid interest in fabrics to the barrel-chested roaring and good fellowship that characterizes the once notorious Girl Fair at Muntele Găina. Folklore tourism has been important ever since the railways were invented, and the tension between ‘remoteness’ and easy access, between celebrating a unique way of life and polluting it can never be resolved. The remarkable Hutsul village of Yaremche in western Ukraine is a prime example. It is genuinely marvellous. The River Prut, the colour of serpentinite, thunders under a bridge and the Carpathians (no doubt bear-filled) glower around the little town. There are horses with embroidered saddles and two teenage boys with golden eagles of alarming power, size and shagginess on their shoulders. There is even that Ukrainian favourite, a stall where you can dress up in a Red Army uniform and pose for photos with a variety of startlingly heavy automatic weapons.

Of course, the whole thing is an elaborate tourist construct and has been so for many years, otherwise I would not be there. Stall after stall sells industrial quantities of sheepskin coats, traditional samplers and carved wooden coasters, and coach after coach arrives filled with people to buy them during the short summer season. People have been coming to Yaremche as a daytrip from Ivano-Frankivsk or even Lviv – in the intervals between political and military upheavals – ever since it was an option.

Folklore has an oddly intimate role in the Habsburg Empire. Partly this came from the obvious fact that so much of the Empire was made up of unproductive and annoying mountains (albeit mountains sometimes filled with valuable minerals). Life in these areas, across the Alps, their Balkan spurs and over to the Carpathians, was probably more characteristic of the Empire than any other environment. Their inhabitants were fiendishly difficult to control – the gap between straggles of snowbound houses along high valleys and the beautifully regulated order of a walled town must have driven administrators mad. With thousands of thinly populated valleys, it was also unclear that there was much need to control them. Just taking a train up through the passes of the Tyrol it is obvious that until recently this cannot have been much of a tax base. Entire regions were cut off for a large part of the year (the key to Adalbert Stifter’s great short story ‘Rock Crystal’) and rarely produced much economic excess. The little they did (hams, embroidery, fleeces) were sold at summer fairs so they could buy the things they could not make or repair themselves, a context in which gypsies have always been a crucial element – in a symbiosis of the most sedentary and least sedentary.

Life in these valleys was extremely harsh. No tourists in their right mind would visit Yaremche in winter. In a sense their inhabitants were lucky because there were many times when their remoteness and poverty protected them from the historical events in the plains – but an exceptionally bad winter or terrible flooding or a fire might do as much damage as a Turkish army and plague in a valley could kill all its inhabitants. So much of this is barely recorded, but these communities must have been re-founded frequently, presumably from neighbouring valleys. In any event the attraction of the high meadows for grazing was invisible to most humans, who considered the whole way of life dreadful. When the Italians took over the South Tyrol in 1918 they imagined they could restock the region with Italian-speaking hill farmers and remove all the Germans, but even the most hard-scrabble, hollow-eyed
contadino
considered it insane to spend his brief existence wrestling with moufflon in ten-foot snowdrifts and the project foundered. This was a life that could only be endured if you were born to it.

The most famous example of mountain people banding together is the Swiss Confederation. The often formidable difficulties in communicating between the different elements of the alliance in fact helped to keep the genuinely federal nature of their arrangements. The maze of passes within the Swiss Alps could either be a green light for banditry and short-term business thinking, or it could allow for peaceful trade and prosperity and the Confederation regulated this to everyone’s gain, as well as offering protection against outsiders. The Confederation’s resolute hatred of the Habsburgs (themselves originally in part Swiss) climaxed in the Swabian War of 1499 when after a series of disasters Maximilian I was obliged to leave them alone. The mayhem caused by such a small country in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries is breathtaking – and, indeed, although the Swiss founding principle might have been an anti-Habsburg one, their role in killing off Charles the Bold and thereby ensuring Habsburg supremacy must have earned them at least a Christmas card from the Emperor.