Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe (55 page)

The one great value that Franz Joseph does bring to the extraordinarily churning landscape of his Empire is something approaching blindness to nationalisms. If the Empire was to have any point then it had to struggle against overt racism. A political entity which had been a plurality of family lands brought together by accident, which had gone on to become a military machine and a Catholic bastion, became in its final decades somewhat by default an island of, if not tolerance, then certainly of relative restraint – much to the growing anger of many of its inhabitants.

The village identity of the hundreds of thousands of new migrants to the city had been shaped by tradition and by religious practice. The villagers of Galicia, for example, identified themselves simply as Jewish or Catholic or Uniate or Orthodox. Many had no idea what language they spoke – it was just the dialect of the village. The spread of trains, of education and of books and newspapers changed this, redefining how people felt about themselves even before they moved to the cities and had to ‘choose’. This choice (just as in the United States) could within two generations represent a total jump, whereby in the Empire’s case a Slovak, Romanian or Jew, say, could become Hungarian, changing language, dress, diet, profession. So the village couple from the Banat arriving in Budapest in the 1870s could have Magyarized adult children by the 1890s and have themselves long changed their own tastes and behaviours almost beyond recognition. Mass rallies, religious affiliation, occupation would shape a nationalism for people who had proved to be formidably flexible before donning a specific and final costume.

There are famous Jewish examples: Mahler’s father was an inn-keeper from central Bohemia, his grandmother a pedlar; Kafka’s grandfather was a ritual slaughterer from southern Bohemia. Not all this great movement resulted in a Habsburg destination. I am so in the midst here of my personal heroes that it is impossible even to type this without feeling deeply moved, as though the opening of Mahler’s
Second Symphony
were
playing in the background (which it is, in fact) – but here are two further: Billy Wilder’s epic (although also quite common) journey from Galicia to Germany and then to America to fulfil his destiny and make some of the greatest Hollywood movies; the grandparents of Philip Roth leaving Galicia and therefore making possible my favourite writer – who in turn has done so much to bring Central European writing to an English-speaking readership.

The Jewish example is particularly clear as the process of travel by earlier traditionalist Jewish standards was unacceptable – leaving behind communities could only result in behavioural disasters and engagement with ‘the abomination of the land’. But by all kinds of measures this was true for countless non-Jews too, who had to discard a welter of ancestral shibboleths and learn entirely new ways of behaving in the huge new cities. From the top of the Petřín Hill in Prague you can see the rough outline of the much older built-up areas, all gnarled and tangled up around the river, but then there is a totally rebuilt late-nineteenth-century Josefov with its extravagant, indeed peculiar, apartment blocks, the great monuments in the New Town to Czech nationalism from the same period – and then beyond that a sea of housing in every direction for the countless new workers from the countryside.

As the villagers arrived in the cities it was very unclear to them exactly who their new masters were. The aristocracy may have made money from land deals for the new housing, but were irrelevant to most of these new inhabitants. Any surviving sense of deference had been shaken off with the move. Confronted with a tangle of trams, newspapers, sermons, political parties, schools, there were crucial decisions that needed to be made about assimilation, diet, acceptable habits. As good an example as any is the Bohemian town of Plzeň. Until the later nineteenth century this was very clearly a German place called Pilsen, part of a broad framework of German-speaking places whose inhabitants viewed Czech as the rural language or as that of their servants. Its famous beer was created by a Bavarian, Joseph Groll, and lager was viewed as an entirely German drink (as was the case too in the predominantly German town of Budweis, now České Budějovice). The Plzeň beer works is still here, but is now simply an enormous computer-controlled hangar, in which green bottles whip by, supervised by the handful of surviving workers whose main job is to clean up occasional smashed glass. The whole place smells eerily soapy and is a long way from the world of twinkle-eyed old men in leather aprons and funny moustaches it was clear that everyone on the tour had been looking forward to. As merely one of many holdings in the depressing SABMiller multinational’s portfolio, Pilsner Urquell
is at this point just a brand meant to convey a vague sense of Central European pub chumminess – a good fellowship cruelly mocked both by the factory and its ownership and grimly remote from the old ideals of the Velvet Revolution.

The German oligarchs who had always run Pilsen found themselves completely adrift within a few years of the railway coming through. Pilsen was a major hub and an enormous repair shop sprang up, employing thousands of (mainly) Czechs. Even worse, in 1866 Emil Škoda was made chief engineer of Count Waldstein’s weapons factory in the town. Within three years Škoda bought out Waldstein, and then become one of that extraordinary group of capitalist inventors who presided over the vast explosion in
things
involving metal and electricity. It is good that this is a mere passive book I am writing, or I would now be excitedly getting out and bringing over to you one of my favourite possessions,
150 Years of Škoda in Photographs and Documents
. The photos form a uniquely eloquent and hair-raising meditation on late-Habsburg life, with dwarfed men next to ship’s turbines, naval guns and a giant steel-geared wheel with
30,000 kg
helpfully written on it. Here was a temple to the precision manipulation of metals on a monstrous scale, with sprawling floors crammed with semi-assembled weapons, cases of rivets, pails of grease and chains swinging from gantries. What
is
the right political dispensation for such a transformative Pandaemonium: for its owners, for its Czech ex-peasant workers, for its products? Austria-Hungary was never remotely an industrial power on the scale of Germany or Britain but it still made astounding things of a kind that would have been viewed as forms of black magic by an earlier generation. It is in the spirit of the age that figures such as Bruckner and Mahler should start producing music that matches the endeavours of the Škoda Works. Haydn’s ‘Sunrise’ Quartet seems a very long way away.

Pilsen in the space of a few years therefore became Plzeň. Czechs poured in from the countryside and the issue of who had allegiance to whom and why became critical. The spread of mass political parties, literacy and money created a new public space which quite rapidly ran out of control. Forms of nationalism are very easy for an outsider to deride. They are obviously poisonous, depressing and end in catastrophe for everybody. There was always a Habsburg argument that nationalism could be restricted to forms of the picturesque (costumes, foods, parades – not unlike in the United States). There was a socialist argument that nationalism was a demagogic sham and a trap for the workers. There was also a liberal argument for the dangers of hating someone simply because they spoke a different language or attended a different church.

But these different arguments against nationalism could, for obvious reasons, find no common ground with one another. In addition, it was very hard indeed not to become infected. What did it take in practice for a Hungarian liberal to agree that the majority Romanian areas of Transylvania should be handed over to Romania, or that the Serbs could help themselves to southern Hungary? Such views were mere eccentricity. The longer I have spent thinking about this book the more horror and disgust I feel for nationalism, which seems something akin to bubonic plague, but clearly such a perception only gets anyone so far. Even the most intelligent and articulate figures in Europe embraced it in some form and could no more shed it than they could shed their own skins. Once the language you used (and the newspapers and books you read) and the religion you grew up with became part of a public sphere, rather than an entirely local issue, there was no going back. Plzeň was a perfect example. After years of escalating Czech language demands, the Badeni Decrees of 1897 announced that in Bohemia all government business had to be conducted by men who could speak both Czech and German. This was an intelligent retreat from the previous all-German position, but overnight turned Germans (who generally had not learned Czech at school) into second-class citizens and Czechs (who
had
been obliged to learn German) into the new masters. Bohemia was torn apart by riots and boycotts and the Decrees were withdrawn. But what
was
the solution, if Plzeň’s richest and biggest employer and his employees were Czech? And what did this mean for Bohemian Germans, who now felt baffled and abused, and could contrast their fate with that of other German-speakers just a few miles down the road, in the Second Reich?

It was only a keen sense that without the Habsburg umbrella fratricidal hatreds could run riot that kept discipline across the Empire. Many dreamed of a nationally pure independent homeland, but many too stayed aware that the region’s tangle of ethnicities made that idea very dangerous. Even as central a figure as Tomáš Masaryk, who served in the Parliament in Vienna from the 1890s, recognized that Czech independence was unrealistic: Prague may have been overwhelmingly a Czech city, but the islands of German-speakers in places such as České Budějovice, Brno and eský Krumlov meant that even if Bohemia could somehow cut away the German-speakers along the western and northern borders (the Sudetenland) some form of compromise with the remaining Germans was necessary. It was only the cataclysm of the Great War that changed Masaryk’s thinking.

Much of the nationalist running within the Empire was made by the groups who were causing ‘trouble’ for the dominant German and Hungarian nationalities and had external sponsors. Serbia and Romania had many co-nationals within the Empire who might have had until now almost unrelated histories but who, it was suggested, should now unite with others who happened to speak the same language. Ultimately many Habsburg Serbs and Romanians would come to agree with this assessment – but until the disasters of 1917–18 most did not. There was little in the brutal way that Belgrade or Bucharest ran their affairs that made them look preferable as rulers. For example, the 1907 peasant rebellion in Romania, which ended in a bloodbath that killed some ten thousand people, gave a serious pause for thought and added to the sense (which was also felt by many Habsburg Serbs) that the national flame was perhaps in rather more competent hands inside the Empire, even with all its humiliations, than in the uncouth nation states.

It is often said that Vienna was brilliant at playing the different nationalities off against each other, manipulating them like circus animals with a mix of treats and threats. In practice, for much of the time Vienna was merely incompetent, battling to deal with a cauldron of socio-economic change and sometimes taking blind stabs at a solution (such as the Badeni Decrees), which merely caused further chaos. The situation in Bohemia, though, was characteristically difficult in a way that helped Vienna. Short of a language-based civil war to clear the province (which happened in 1938–45) there was genuinely no answer to the conundrum. In Galicia it was fun to support Ruthenian cultural expression to keep the Poles worried, but the only ‘solution’ to the region’s problems was the declaration of a total ethnic and class war – and, again, this did in due course happen. Whether these were permanently preventable is too frightening and tangled a counter-factual to have any meaning. Both the Austrian and Hungarian sides of the Empire spent inordinate amounts of time scribbling calculations of relative ethnic strengths on the backs of envelopes. The first German ethnic political parties in Vienna’s half made the ingenious suggestion that Dalmatia should be handed to the Hungarians and that Galicia should be made a separate administrative kingdom: with all those Slavs gone a German majority could then turn on and overwhelm the Czechs and Slovenes. The Hungarians, doing their own maths, were understandably just as keen
not
to be handed Dalmatia. It was very useful to Franz Joseph to see how many of the Slav groups owed a natural allegiance to him because of fear of what their German and Hungarian masters would do if unchecked by the genuinely supranational element in the Hofburg. But even this allegiance was a wobbly one. The Poles may have been trapped by circumstances, but what if the millions of other Slavs – Czechs, Slovaks, Ruthenes, Slovenes, Croatians, Serbs – were to feel that their oppression by the ‘master nationalities’ could be ended by another external sponsor, perhaps by Russia?

The Führer

Germans too were of course moving into ever bigger towns, with places such as Linz, Graz, Wiener Neustadt and Steyr growing as well as Vienna. Steyr is in fact an excellent parallel to Czech Plzeň: a matching but ethnically German military-industrial complex. In Steyr’s case this was based around the sprawling gun works. Local supplies of iron had meant that Steyr had produced weapons since the Middle Ages, but in the usual nineteenth-century way growth now became frenzied, with many thousands of workers turning out rifles and automatics designed by Ferdinand Ritter von Mannlicher. In the local museum there is – aside from innumerable examples of Mannlicher and his successors’ gun designs – one very remarkable object. This is a photo showing a delegation of Abyssinians visiting the Steyr Mannlicher works in around 1910. They are photographed during a machine-gun demonstration. The gun is just about to be fired and most of the photo consists of men in top hats, tailcoats, pince-nez and elaborate facial hair putting their fingers in their ears. The members of the delegation are picturesque and remote in a different way, but one Abyssinian, a young man with a cartridge belt and strikingly short hair, just happens to be staring at the camera. He is someone
quite
different: his level, cold glare makes him look like a visitor from the future, a 1960s African Marxist in a crowd of decayed stuffy nincompoops. This is a photo that should be on the wall of all schoolrooms where history is taught. I do not mean for anti-colonial reasons, but because of the cross-currents that swirl around the image: the terrible weapon on display being treated as a trade item; the way that the Austrian industrialists look more ‘exotic’ now than the Abyssinians; the assumption that the Abyssinians must have been patronized and even derided by their hosts, but it was the hosts who within a decade would be destroyed, with Steyr Mannlicher shut down by the Treaty of Versailles. It is interesting, too, simply to think about why the picture was taken in the first place.