Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe (50 page)

Part of Franz Joseph’s plan was to use the German Confederation to outlaw Prussia and so authorize the other German states to attack Prussia. Bismarck responded by declaring the Confederation finished. Prussian troops then effortlessly carved through the minor monarchies, with Saxony, Hannover and Hesse-Kassel in tatters within about forty-eight hours. After the Hannoverian soldiers surrendered, the Prussians disarmed them, gave them railway tickets home and then ended their kingdom, a territory that had been one of the key factors in European and British politics for a century and a half.

Highly unfortunately the Austrian war effort in the north was in the hands of Ludwig von Benedek, a fine example of a Habsburg commander who froze up under his sheer incapacity. He seems to have, after the first moments of excitement, become catatonic, simply waiting for enormous Prussian armies winding through various Bohemian passes (which could have individually been knocked off before they came together) to join up and destroy him. Some four hundred and twenty thousand men crashed into each other at Königgrätz, in the largest but also dullest battle in European history. The sheer helplessness of Benedek makes it awful to read about – not from any sympathy for the Habsburgs, but from a sense that so many people died and so much trouble was taken to such pitiful ends. From the Prussians’ point of view it was more a question of traffic management than anything else once it was clear that – to their astonishment – the Austrians were just going to stay put until they were outnumbered and pinned down.

It is very odd that an Empire that defined itself in military terms perhaps more than any other except Russia should have been so useless at fighting. All dreams of taking back Silesia or of forging a Grand Duchy of the Rhineland vanished with sensational speed. The old German Confederation was replaced by total Prussian control over most of Germany and the end of Vienna’s role in western Europe, with only a handful of southern German monarchs staying independent. Italy, despite defeat, took over Venetia through the humiliating agency of France and came a further large step closer to unification. Napoleon realized far too late that he was now left quite alone with a monstrously enhanced Prussia on his border – a fact which would be resolved with the destruction of his own regime and the abasement of France four years later. This disappearance of Austria from western Europe really is one of the great shifts in the continent’s history. It may have long ago been removed from the old Austrian Netherlands (now independent Belgium) but before 1866 there were Austrian troops up in Holstein and in the Confederal fortresses along the Rhine. All this went up in a puff of smoke and the attitude and thinking which had linked Franz Joseph back to Maximilian I and Charles V was at an end. This was hardly to be regretted, but it was startling: the Habsburg Empire was now merely a regional power, and a cowed one.

Meanwhile the Military History Museum was gamely continuing to finish its decoration and put further white marble Habsburg military heroes in its lobby. Ever more lavish display cases were installed, full of the notably gorgeous uniforms of the past – plus medals, sashes, battle paintings, elegant weapons, captured Turkish tents. There must have been
really
awkward conversations around the ticket booth by the late summer of 1866 as almost every aspect of the museum now appeared coarsely sarcastic. Last time I was wandering around the museum there was a temporary exhibition of such oddness I cannot help thinking of it as having been a dream. This featured a video of an Austrian army fashion show held in the grand hall in 2006. There, below frescoes of the frowning generals of the Thirty Years War and heraldic shields of the old Empire’s territories, was a stage draped in camouflage. With Euro-style electronic dance music playing, army recruits uneasily strutted back and forth modelling the latest range of Austrian military wear: fatigues, combat gear, skiing clothes, military bras, SAS-type clothing, plus drop-dead formal wear for that special occasion. The effect was stunning – momentarily it all seemed an outrage to end all outrages: the silliest possible spectacle, with girls and boys pouting and waving their bottoms around, making a chimp-house of the entire Military History Museum. Wake not the ghost of Prince Eugene! But by the time they sashayed off, it seemed in fact perfectly judged and in the living spirit of the Battle of Königgrätz. Here was an army whose principal use was as a sequence of bodies on which to project attractive, matching uniforms rather than to fight. This is, of course, admirable – there is nothing at all to be said for being a country good at fighting, and the rapid collapse at Königgrätz with a brisk surrender to follow prevented many more battles and deaths. The fashion show cheerfully embraced both modern Austrian neutralism and a past of upbeat incompetence.

Funtime of the nations

The rise of nationalist music is one of the Habsburg Empire’s great gifts to the world. Its rich musical life, its concert halls and its conservatoires meshed together across a vast area to find exceptional players and receptive audiences, all in the cause of music that was setting out to destroy it. The music is more prominent than it would have been at the time because the other avenues of cultural nationalism – newspapers, periodicals, discussion groups, epic poems – are in many ways closed to us. The music, together with paintings, sculptures and folk dress, is what is left. As with so much of the Empire’s life, it was provoked by the love–hate relationship with the German language – with German music, like German bureaucracy, the unstoppable flood of the mainstream. What started as a tentative or even merely peevish and backward attempt to hold on to something of their own traditions ended with the non-Germans making something remarkable. It is striking how close German comes to winning in the early nineteenth century. Figures such as Smetana famously had to battle to teach themselves Czech, and there are innumerable cases of nationalists who in private continued to feel more comfortable in other languages. But the challenge of a German hegemony, pouring into the Empire not just from Austria but from the whole vast expanse of northern Europe, made the creation of various national musics a seemingly life-and-death issue.

Shortly after the Cold War ended I went to a chamber concert in Prague Castle. It was extremely cold and sitting still listening to the music was a peculiarly intense experience. The room had a window looking out over the Old Town and, hearing the wonderful, chiming, declamatory sounds of a Dvořák piano quintet, music for a moment really did sound like the secret weapon that destroys all invaders – an illusion, of course, but a potent one.

In a way the nationalist explosion fitted in well with Habsburg priorities. The
folklorique
had always been an aspect of the Emperor’s
job and Franz Joseph was very adept at switching uniforms, medals, hats and crowns depending on what part of the Empire he was visiting. The Hungarian aristocracy was particularly keen to join in, with its enthusiasm for outrageous costumes involving fur, feathers, gold chains and frogging creating a surreal mishmash almost unrelatable to any real time or place. Nationalism effortlessly left off from the old engravings which assigned each part of the Empire a particular form of dress. Everyone hunted high and low for what they felt would be the most authentic elements in their region, meaning the least tainted by Germanism. This tended to equate genuine with rural or mountainous. Figures like Dvořák spent much of their energy creating sound-pictures of the Bohemian countryside. These are beautiful and great works of art, but as an image of linguistic or cultural purity their implications were chilling. Surely what most exemplified Bohemia was in fact the booming Czech–Jewish–German city of Prague? What really best characterized the entire Empire was its chaos of nationalities, and its best hope lay in an ideology (already supplied by the Habsburgs) of cooperation, or at worst grudging wariness. The disaster of Central Europe lay in the language wars which now engulfed everybody and which made on the face of it harmless issues like what music you listened to or what braiding you had on your shirt into ever more violent badges of exclusion.

Most of the rest of this book is about this subject. We know it ended in catastrophe, but of course at the time it was exciting, new and very creative. It is also possible to say, at some gloomy level, that nineteenth-century liberalism was always doomed to fall into the nationalist trap. Just as Joseph II ended up provoking rebellion and hatred everywhere, so an insistence on uniformity, rationalization and freedom of expression ends up with race-hatred. If it is not acceptable for everyone in the Empire to use German to communicate, then
any
counter-suggestion excludes another range of languages. In Hungary the Croats pleaded for Latin to be kept as the official language because they knew that the alternative was that they would have to learn Hungarian. The strange role of Latin in Hungary had itself originated in the Middle Ages as elsewhere in Europe, but somehow it had maintained itself as a
lingua franca
that stretched across the kingdom, allowing Slovak to speak to Romanian. It may be just loopy obscurantism to suggest that Latin should in fact have been imposed on everybody, but it would have solved this problem, and more plausibly than one of the constructed languages such as Volapük or Esperanto (the latter celebrated in an unbeatable museum in Vienna). But for a linguistically scrambled zone of Europe to have to choose a single specific language of command, school and bureaucracy raised the stakes for those excluded incredibly high, way beyond folk-dances and Hutsul authenticity.

Boycotts, abuse, marches and ever more aggressively chauvinist festivals broke out across the Empire in the latter half of the nineteenth century. These all seem a bit charming compared to the racist torture-chamber that was revealed in the following half-century, but it was this eruption that laid the ground work.

The weakness of Vienna after the disaster of 1866 allowed everyone to pounce, with, for example, the first Slovene Congress being held in Gorizia, or the Italian-speaking South Tyrol sending petitions to be split from the German-speaking north. The Czech example was a particularly grim one. With Bohemia such a tangle of Czechs, Germans and Jews and with German the dominant language of commerce and government, Czechs felt they had little choice but to assert themselves. 1848 had marked the point where Czech and German liberals faced impossible choices. The Germans naturally looked to a future ruled by German-speakers in Vienna or in Frankfurt – but equally naturally Czechs saw neither option as even faintly appealing. As the century progressed the situation became ever more ferociously polarized, with mutual shop boycotts so severe that in the end even Jews were successfully pressured into serving customers of only one language or the other. This wretched, Ulster-like atmosphere was ultimately only resolved, catastrophically, in the 1940s.

Bohumil Hrabal’s wonderful 1976 novel
Too Loud a Solitude
sums up where all this would end. The narrator meets and falls in love with the lovely Manča at a dance. She wears folk costume, braids and beautiful long ribbons in her hair. She rushes to the latrine before the dance begins, not realizing that in the process she is dipping her ribbons in the ‘pyramid of faeces’ under the plank. As she leaps and whirls, her ribbons centrifugally fling a medley of excrement into the faces of the other dancers.

The deal

1866’s most important political pouncers were undoubtedly the Hungarians. Here was Franz Joseph’s regime in total disarray – his army humiliated, his allies dethroned, his ministers’ judgement almost comically adrift. With Vienna kicked out of Germany, perhaps it could also be kicked out of Hungary? The arguments against a total break were considerable. The war of 1848–49 showed that even a severely weakened Austria could turn nasty by summoning the genie of the suppressed nationalities. There was also a chance that outside help could be called in – if not the thoroughly alienated Russians, then perhaps the newly forgive-and-forget Prussians. The misplaced confidence that Kossuth had felt about Hungary’s ability to be an independent state fuelled a more general anxiety: could an independent Hungary really hope to exist in such a rough neck of the woods? Austria might be viewed with fear and contempt, but was far better than the only other obvious ‘protector’, Russia. And with an ever more assertive Romania, what if Hungary was left on its own to fight off some future Russian–Romanian invasion of Transylvania? These were all grounds for clinging to Vienna – and all nightmares which would indeed cause sleepless nights in the following decades.

The genius at the heart of the negotiations was Ferenc Deák, who had opposed Kossuth’s extremism and saw the value to Hungary of being linked to the rest of the Empire, both economically and militarily. Negotiations between Vienna and Buda had been going on for some years, but now suddenly snapped into place. Franz Joseph’s government was frenziedly preparing a fresh war of revenge on Prussia and could only do this by leaning on Hungarian support, not unlike Maria Theresa back in 1740. A radical overhaul resulted (although in the end the war of revenge got shelved): a new state linked by the person of the Emperor and common defence, foreign affairs and (for shared issues) finance ministries. The negotiation dripped with bad faith on both sides, with a powerful Austrian camarilla always seeing it as a short-term deal with the Hungarians to be followed by retribution in due course. At the end of the century Franz Ferdinand dreamed of opening his reign with a swift military occupation of Budapest and there was always a poisonous undercurrent of mutual hatred threatening to break the surface. But much to everyone’s surprise the new state of Austria-Hungary survived. The Hungarians had sufficient independence to mostly do what they liked with their territory, with an attractively substantial pan-European stage on which to act.

Territorially the two halves were now called Cisleithania (west) and Transleithania (east), the River Leitha forming a chunk of the border. Vienna therefore kept everything except what might now be called ‘The Crown Lands of St Stephen’. Transylvania was at last ruled from Budapest and over the next few years the old Military Frontier was dismantled, with areas such as Syrmia (which included the great fortress at Petrovaradin and the Serbian cultural hub of Sremski Karlovci) passing to Hungary, together with the Banat (based around Timişoara) and the Slavonian and Croatian Military Frontiers. These zones were enormous, complex and settled with innumerable linguistic groups not necessarily enthusiastic to become part of Hungary. The last two of these (the Slavonian and Croatian Military Frontiers) greatly increased the size of Hungary-ruled Croatia, previously just a small block based around the insignificant Zagreb, a military town which had only received its first mayor in 1850. It was now that Croatia received much of the strange shape it still retains today – a sort of default area of land filling in, like grouting, the gaps between Ottoman Bosnia and other Habsburg holdings. Coastal Dalmatia remained out of its reach though, staying as the surviving piece of the old province of Venetia as an Austrian possession. In 1868 the Croatians negotiated specific sub-rights from Budapest that delineated the Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia, which distanced it in a not dissimilar manner to Hungary’s distancing from Austria. But in practical terms Croatia-Slavonia was hemmed in and with little room for manoeuvre of its own.