Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe (54 page)

Even in the
relatively
benign Empire however there is no point at which there was anything like stability, and the ghost of Maria Theresa insisting that Jews stay indoors on Sunday out of shame at being Christ’s murderers was never dispelled. The massive surviving late-nineteenth-century synagogues in the Empire, most famously the Great Synagogue in Plzeň and the Dohány Street Synagogue in Budapest, have so many powerful and disturbing associations that visiting them is not really an aesthetic experience. But in as much as it can be, they are clearly victims of the same woeful gigantic industrial eclecticism as the museums and opera houses scattered across the Empire in the same decades. The two thousand Jews of Plzeň had the indignity of constant interference in the design of their synagogue to ensure it was as ‘Oriental’ as possible, to make it quite clear it could in no sense be confused with a Christian place of worship, with an early design turned down for having insufficiently exotic towers.

This insistence on difference kept bubbling up in frightening ways. A notorious case was the revival of the blood libel in 1882 in the Hungarian village of Tiszaeszlár, where local Jews were accused of abducting a Christian peasant girl called Eszter Solymosi and getting a kosher butcher to kill her, draining her blood into a bowl for use in Sabbath matzos. The defendants were eventually let go on the straightforward grounds that there was no evidence (the girl was eventually found drowned in the river), but the media, including disturbing numbers of Catholic priests, had whipped up an anti-Semitic frenzy and there were attacks on Jews across Hungary. Scarcely credibly, at the time of my writing the far-Right Jobbik party have been promoting a cult of Eszter Solymosi’s grave and raising questions about what really happened to her in the Hungarian Parliament. The more we pride ourselves on being intelligent and thoughtful the more we turn out to be Morlocks.

Jewish unease within the Empire was stoked by the Tiszaeszlár scandal, but at least there was a widespread official recoil from its repulsive imbecility. This did not mean Jews could feel that they stood on stable ground. The move to assimilate meant assimilation through speaking German or Hungarian, the ‘master languages’, and this meant that in a world of ever more unhinged nationalism Jews became a particular focus of hatred for politicians and demagogues pushing a Slovak, Romanian, etc. agenda, while at the same time not appeasing German or Hungarian Christian anti-Semitism. Outside the Empire horrible events filled the newspapers. Most immediately frightening were stories from Romania, where the government decided that Jews, like Gypsies, were by definition not Romanian. With the end of international supervision after 1878 the Romanians proceeded with violence, fraud and intimidation on a scale that provoked a mass exodus, with some sixty-seven thousand Jews (a quarter of the entire population) leaving for the USA. The vastly larger Jewish population in Russia was subject to repeated and ferocious violence, with thousands dead. The Empire became an island of relative decency, but with poverty as much as anti-Semitism driving huge numbers of Jews out of Galicia to the USA and elsewhere. Assimilation proved enormously successful for many, but every decade provided its own frights and challenges for Jews throughout the Empire, and nobody could assume any genuine, lasting normality.

Village of the damned

I have often turned over in my mind the idea of writing a book about zoo architecture. This neglected form of building is so rich and so peculiar and it has never really had its due. It is an amalgam of shop-window display, storage facility and prison and its most direct clients (the animals) are unable to notice it, whereas its more casual clients (the visitors) treat it as an almost invisible frame. The buildings tend to be very solid so that their inhabitants do not get out and kill everyone. Their robustness therefore accidentally preserves them, unlike the trappings of many other areas of entertainment, circuses, say, or fairgrounds. This longevity gives a visitor today a surprising link to the popular atmosphere of the past – the period from the late nineteenth century to the 1920s when zoos stood at the apex of ‘a day out’, the populist direct descendants of the cabinet of curiosities.

One of the oldest and most marvellous is the Budapest Zoo. So often when meant to be en route to some more up-scale cultural highlight I have found myself instead wandering off to admire its demented entrance gate, decorated with
art nouveau
mandrills, bears and elephants in perhaps the single most fun sculptural commission ever tendered for. Much of the zoo found its current form in the years of urban joy before 1914, with several of the same Hungarian eclecticists who did so much to heroically decorate buildings across the capital let loose to do pretty much what they liked. Chief hero is probably Kornél Neuschloss-Knüsli, who conjured up not only the great entrance gate, but also the scarcely credible Elephant House – a fantasy on Central Asian mosque architecture with blue-tiled roofs, a minaret and somewhat un-Koranic decorative hippo-rhino-hippo-rhino head decorations around the guttering. The elephants themselves merely chomp away, oblivious to their odd double-relocation – first to Hungary itself, and then to a faux-Tamerlane backdrop also very remote from their true home. Indeed, the Elephant House is possibly the maddest of all Hungarian ‘Turanian’ fantasies about national origins in some vague but grand part of Central Asia, with the unique displacement activity of also granting the nation’s elephants a shared Hungarian ancestry. During the period of the First World War, when the Hungarians found themselves, untypically, in alliance with the Ottomans, the smart new Elephant House caused great offence as it was effectively a mosque being used to harbour beasts, so the minaret had to be taken down for a while.

The wonders of Budapest Zoo are almost infinite. Not least there is the Aquarium underneath the Palm House. Here the fish seem to have been chosen – parrot- and lion-fish, clouds of tangs – so that they match the beautiful mosaics and even a creature as sinister as a moray eel becomes ennobled, the shimmering gold of its flanks making it seem like a Klimt escapee. Indeed of all such places in the world (and I have been to
a lot
) this is the one where your head is most clearly plunged into the glass-harmonica planet of Saint-Saëns’
Aquarium
. Drenched in drifting colours, floating in the spirit of the fin de siècle, it is shocking to come out into mere standard-issue daylight and distant car and playground noises.

All zoos are palimpsests created by bouts of director activism, changing styles, a sudden influx of funds. The Budapest Zoo had a grim interlude in its existence as collateral damage during the 1944–45 city siege. Most of the animals were killed and the buildings devastated – so what we see now, as in so much of Budapest, is the result of many years of dedicated reconstruction work. In the general nightmare of those months people had other things to think about than the zoo. At one point a lion escaped into the Underground and came up to scavenge dead horses for a while before a squad of Soviet troops was sent, in one of the war’s more unusual missions, to finish him off. Almost the only survivors were some hippos who, when electrical power was lost and most other animals froze, wallowed happily in a pool of the warm artesian water which wells up all over Budapest. There were two hippos trapped in Trieste harbour during the 1866 War – the delicate process of unloading them from their ship’s special tanks trumped by tiresome military priorities – but to my frustration I have been unable to find out if these are linked in some way to the 1945 Budapest hippos, with the possibility this would create of a parallel history of Central Europe seen through the endurance of one brave African artiodactyl family.

The whole place is in a sense a tease for its central work of genius. The one area of zoos I typically tend to avoid is the children’s petting zone, where a handful of demonic white goats blankly chew, and an abject sheep, patted until its wool only exists in patches, shivers in a corner. But the Budapest Zoo is quite different. At its heart lies a work of extreme satirical savagery: the Guinea-Pig Village. This genuinely frightening, brilliant piece of work consists of an enclosure filled with small, simplified wooden models of a typical Central European provincial town, with its town hall, school, pompous bourgeois homes (for the doctor, the lawyer), a church and rows of cheaper houses. But, of course, it is filled not with people but with guinea-pigs. I have had a short clip of the village in action loaded onto my phone now for four years and the main reason I refuse to upgrade that phone is fear of losing it. To add to the febrile atmosphere, the clip has the happy accident of a police siren going on in the background, and the lucky viewer can see dozens of guinea-pigs racing through the main square to gorge on a bucket of carrots that has just been thrown into their community. As a piece of conceptual art the Guinea-Pig Village has a genuine sneering ferocity that can never lose its power to shock. As the animals rush from their respective parts of the enclosure they really
do
appear to be small, box-shaped, wiry-haired versions of town councillors, shopkeepers and local professionals, all in meaningless pursuit of carrots. It would not work with any other small creature, but there is a stuffy self-sufficiency about guinea-pigs that anyway makes them look as though they are off to some grim, patriotic gala dinner, even without the wooden town hall to help the effect. There are even little wooden cars, in one of which a guinea-pig had stayed sitting, immune to the appeal of the carrots because he was clearly dying – but with none of his friends noticing or caring. Fortunately we do not need to choose, but weighed in the artistic scales: how many stories by Kafka or essays by Kraus would be needed to balance the power of the Guinea-Pig Village?

On the move

The urban contempt for small-town life encapsulated in Budapest’s petting zoo is an only slightly wonky segue into discussion of the huge changes that racked the Empire in its final decades. Everywhere, people were flooding out of their guinea-pig villages and filling up the big cities. There was a push and a pull about what happened. In the early nineteenth century in many areas of the Empire money was only used intermittently. Communities remained self-sufficient and based around barter, with regular visits from itinerants, particularly Gypsies, who could supply missing items from the outside world, but wherever a railway protruded there would be a fresh and irresistible bridgehead for the cash economy. One Ruhr factory could turn out in a day all the little metal objects, better made and cheaper, needed for entire regions. New necessities such as sugar, tobacco and more interesting alcohol poured in a chaotic flood across the continent. Nowhere was ever completely cut off except seasonally, but the sheer effort of horse transport had made objects from the outside world relatively rare and expensive. Now people were showered in marvellous things, often quite modest but with profound impacts: hairclips, mirrors, screws, needles, make-up, cooking oil – objects partly transformed by cheapness and partly by their disposability. The flood of machine-made clothing had as deep an effect on Central Europe as it did on India.

Just as railways injected extraordinary things into places previously hidden by distance, climate or mountains, so they also allowed for far larger populations to be reliably fed and housed in cities of unparalleled size. Between around 1870 and 1910 places such as Lviv, Graz, Brno and Trieste doubled in size, Prague grew by four hundred thousand inhabitants, Budapest by five hundred thousand, Vienna by twelve hundred thousand. There was no precedent for this astounding flood of people. They swamped all existing social structures, reshaped landscapes and created a new sense of excitement or of dread, according to taste.

Incidentally, it is generally around here that anybody writing about the Habsburg Empire is obliged to have a section on people like the Empress Elisabeth and her son Crown Prince Rudolf, but really if these people are of interest you should probably just look them up on Wikipedia, which has excellent entries. In Britain there is a cruel and entertaining system of classification for films, where each movie is given an age approval rating with a little sentence to follow up, most helpfully something like:
Contains strong sex and language
. I once saw a poster for a French film with a man and a woman in hats smiling at each across a table in the countryside and the clearly bored film censor had given it a rating followed by:
Contains scenes of mild emotional involvement
. I find it really hard to think about Elisabeth and Rudolf for even a moment without this phrase coming to mind. There she is drifting around Europe, glumly riding her horse, being a wistful soul-sister to the hopeless Ludwig II; there he is being vaguely liberal, binge-drinking, miserable and unable to cope. She has the ignominy of finally being stabbed to death by an anarchist who had hoped to kill somebody else, but on being disappointed by his victim’s no-show fell back on her. Rudolf ends up with an odd-looking teenage girl in a double-suicide – but perhaps they were murdered? Or not. These scandals of yesteryear definitely contain scenes of mild emotional involvement. It is perfect that Elisabeth and Rudolf have ended up as the stars of the Imperial Furnishings Warehouse Museum in Vienna, which contains Rudolf’s desk and a hilarious exhibition showing all the old palace bits and pieces used as props in the trilogy of films about Elisabeth from the 1950s starring Romy Schneider (Part 3:
Sissi: Fateful Years of an Empress – Contains scenes of crushing lack of interest
). Their lives seem to map perfectly onto the rooms of the museum, filled with old hat stands, flimsy posh chairs, fire-screens and so on. Franz Joseph himself often has an air of being actually constructed out of these objects, as he trundles back and forth for decades, almost immune to why his Empire was interesting, diligently signing things, hunting, shuttling to the Imperial Villa in Bad Ischl with its special pathway to his mistress’s house. I don’t think anyone needs even to be particularly on the political left to feel that in this period interesting life is elsewhere.