Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe (68 page)

Of course, we know that this view was wrong – but the Allies themselves began 1918 exhausted and appalled at how little impact they had made on the Central Powers. With the German army hugely reinforced by the end of the Russian war and division after battle-hardened division moved to the Western Front, the initiative still lay with Germany if not with Austria-Hungary, which became a virtual military observer. But Karl had effectively run out of armies: even with the wholesale evacuation of soldiers from the major fortresses and standing down of the Carpathian defences there were simply very few Habsburg troops left and no supplies. Some final bright ideas resulted in the requisitioning of race horses and instructions that new conscripts should bring their own underwear from home, but these were not going to balance out the depletion of factories, the collapse of transport and chronic anaemia in all aspects of Central European life.

One of the issues that dominated 1918 was the return of Habsburg prisoners of war after Russia’s surrender. The extraordinary total of a million and a half men had been captured, of whom perhaps a third had died. Scattered all over the former Russian Empire, they made their way back home as well as they could, one of the first of the horrible mass migrations that were to mark region after region of Europe until the late 1940s. The return of the prisoners, often seriously ill, understandably often imbued with a hatred for an Empire that had humiliated them, and frequently Communist and/or criminal, threatened to outweigh any surviving value in the still existing army. There are no real figures, but it was estimated that perhaps two hundred thousand deserters were roaming around the Empire and punishments were brought back that would have brought a happy smile to the lips of figures like Radetzky and Windisch-Graetz, such as tying them to stakes or locking them in irons. Attempts to process all these haggard survivors and put them back into the army went completely wrong with an overwhelming percentage of the POWs unfit by any physical or political benchmark.

In many ways the Empire’s resilience had been remarkable, but by the end it was assailed by such a multiplicity of problems that the major power centres inside and outside the Empire started to make other plans. The symbolic last straws are so numerous you could build a hut with them. The best one was the sinking of the
Saint Stephen
, the only Hungarian battleship ever built, the fruit of a desperate desire for power-projection and the pride of the futile naval base at Pula. It had nothing much to do during the War as it was so painfully vulnerable to the Italian, French and British navies waiting for it as soon as it reached the Mediterranean. Finally leaving harbour in June 1918 as part of a frantic bid to disrupt the blockade, it was intercepted by Italian torpedo boats before it even reached the blockade line and destroyed with the death of most of its crew. Hungarian dreams of naval grandeur came to an end.

For the Central Powers the killing blow came in the surprising shape of the Bulgarian front. For years the Allies had been penned up around Salonika, derided by the Central Powers and a source of embarrassment to the Allies themselves. In September 1918 a joint French and Serbian force at last broke through, threatening the entire Balkans. Neither Germany nor Austria-Hungary had an answer to this and Ludendorff threw in the towel. There were simply no troops left – they were all committed to occupation duties across their vast but economically morbid eastern Empire, or to grimly holding out against overwhelming superiority in the West (with the USA planning an army by 1919 of some four and a half million men).

The months that followed were complex, exhilarating and frightening. Suddenly, in a way with no precedent since the Turkish invasions, it mattered profoundly where you or your ancestors had chosen to live. A decision taken for romantic, economic, arbitrary or despairing reasons perhaps many generations before would now dictate the state in which you would live: and in the cases of millions of people this would in the coming thirty years result in their pauperization, expulsion or murder.

As it became clear that the War was ending the various nationalities began to move against the Habsburgs. Many commentators have seen this as a tragic sequence of events but it is impossible to exaggerate how little credit remained to the Empire – not just contempt for Karl and the Empire’s rulers but, worse, indifference and a sense that any future dispensation made them irrelevant. The Empire was a haggard, starving ruin with predators both within it and around it. It was simply not recognizable as anything like the entity that had declared war so confidently in the summer of 1914. Militarily, yet another last straw was the Battle of Vittorio Veneto in late October – an Italian triumph after so many decades of humiliation at Austrian hands. As the last thirty thousand or so Habsburg subjects to die for the Empire duly did, it was clear that everything was lost.

The somewhat chaotic minutes still exist for the final, late October meetings of the Common Ministerial Council in Vienna when for the last time Austrian Germans, Czechs and Hungarians met with Karl in scenes of hopeless indecision and lack of realism. On 18 October Karl had announced a
Manifesto to My Faithful Peoples
announcing a federation of six new states under his rule: Austrian, Ukrainian, Czech, Polish, Hungarian and Yugoslav. But this was all far too late and proclamations were breaking out all over the place, completely ignoring the wishes of Vienna or Budapest. The Council made ponderous comments about the rights of the Crown of Stephen, shook their heads over ‘the sphinx Wilson’ and generally gave the sense of confused figures roused up from a retirement home. Outside, the new era, of boulevards filled with running, menacing crowds, panicked police and angry veterans, was beginning. On 11 November, in a final piece of peevish indirection, Karl refused to abdicate but instead ‘relinquished participation’.

The Empire ended and its subjects looked out onto a new and – as it would prove – terrible world.

Conclusion

If I think about how I have divided up my time in researching this book, I am struck by the enormous accumulation of hours just spent walking. In city after city a much more characteristic activity than any other was the criss-crossing of residential areas. It became a sort of sickness. I would just take a rough compass direction and make sweep after sweep through areas of private homes – Communist-era tower-block estates, rows of tiny nineteenth-century artisanal housing, streets filled with the decayed great villas of the old haute bourgeoisie. Shortly after the end of the Cold War, I spent some days staying as a guest of an elderly couple in the suburbs of Dresden. Their house was extremely bare. They had no phone and no television, and were kind, gentle and stunned by the utterly unexpected change of regime, a change to which they could hardly react. Their lives orbited around a small allotment in the next block from their home. This allotment had been converted into a demented, Technicolor arbour crowded with trellised flowers so brightly coloured they were hard to look at. In the summer the couple would take out a couple of fold-out chairs from a tiny shed and sit under the flowers.

I mention this because it has stuck in my mind for some thirty years, but also because it seemed such a reasonable response to an impossible situation. All over Central Europe there are countless such gardens. On many streets the pavements have been made wide enough to plant flower gardens and everywhere there are tiny plots that receive the most lavish care and thought and contrast drastically with the many, often very haggard public spaces.

Wandering along these streets I found myself endlessly rolling over in my mind the same quite simple questions, goaded by the usual mixture of the clinking and banging of washing-up, barking dogs, children’s voices, music from a radio. Each of these towns is a place filled with the normal life almost everyone aspires to – a daily round of family and work, food and sex, conversation and sleep. But they are also places that have been subjected to waves of utter catastrophe, of a kind outsiders such as me cannot begin to understand. The sounds of washing-up, dogs, kids and music would have been consistent for all of the last century, but the identity of those making those sounds would have been different. There can hardly have been a home in the former Empire into which the most terrible forces – intellectual, political and military – did not reach a hand. This would have begun in 1914 with the first of a flood of telegrams announcing the death or mutilation of family members but the demands made on all these homes now went on for generations. This is most obviously the case, of course, in the great former Jewish sections of cities such as Prague, Vienna, Budapest and Kraków – here a various, thriving, vigorous culture had been annihilated within twenty-five years of the Empire’s end and millions of people murdered for mystical and intellectual reasons so perverted that they raise effectively unmanageable questions about the real nature of Europe’s civilization. The Kazimierz district of Kraków remains intolerable – the sounds of family life are the same, but they are made by different people. But this is true across the entire region. In cities like Lviv or Ivano-Frankivsk almost the entire population was killed or expelled – for being Jewish, for being Polish, for being German, for being wealthy, for being pro-Nazi or pro-Communist. The Galician Jewish town of Kolomyya is now a bustling, messy Ukrainian town, but with no Jews at all. When the Cold War ended its statue of Lenin was taken down and the pedestal turned out to be filled with old Jewish gravestones.

Almost everyone within the old Empire seems to have taken turns to be destroyed by one aspect of the twentieth century or another. The Lychakiv Cemetery in Lviv is in this sense one of the most remarkable, over-charged sites of memory in the world – an extraordinary domain in which it is possible to confront the many groups, racial, linguistic, social, which created the uniquely complex and curious culture of Galicia, but who were almost all destroyed. The battered, moss-caked and pompous family mausoleums of the city’s great Polish families rub shoulders with Protestant, Uniate and Orthodox graves. The huge memorial built in the 1920s to mark the successful defence of Lviv (or rather Lwów) by its Polish citizens against invading Ukrainian troops has (amazingly) been recently rebuilt. For decades this was a ground zero of nationalist political terror, smashed to pieces in turn by vengeful Nazis, Soviets and Ukrainians and ultimately turned into a truck depot. It is a measure of the post-ideological exhaustion of the present day that the Ukrainian and Polish governments were able to agree to the grandiose monument’s rebuilding (it was reopened in 2005) – but also an indication that the issues around the monument are at an end as, after all, Lviv no longer has any Polish population.

The poet Adam Zagajewski wrote in 1991 an essay called ‘Two Cities’ about his memories as a very young child of the mass expulsion of surviving Poles from Lviv after the Second World War. In one of the biggest of many acts of overwhelming brutality, Stalin decided to solve the problem of the mixed Polish–Ukrainian areas of old Galicia by moving the entire Polish state west into what had been German territory – much of it the old Habsburg territories of Silesia seized by Frederick the Great. The surviving Germans in these Silesian towns, many of which were little more than rubble, were all kicked out and expelled Galician Poles moved in. Many Poles were relocated to places like Gleiwitz, which now became Polish Gliwice, some three hundred and seventy miles west of Lviv. Zagajewski’s essay is about the extremes of the human experience in Europe and is remarkable in all kinds of ways, but the image that sticks in the mind is of those new inhabitants of Gliwice who refused to admit that they had even moved. They talked to their neighbours as though nothing had happened, wore their ancient clothing, referred to each other by now meaningless courtesy titles and tried to imagine that nothing had happened to interfere with the Habsburg idyll in which they had grown up. Effectively they walked around Gliwice imagining that its geography was that of Lwów. And, of course, they all tried as hard as possible not to notice the arrival of the People’s Republic, a new system to replace the horrors of Nazism, and itself representing, in Zagajewski’s words: ‘fear, blood draining out of the face, trembling hands, talking in whispers, silence, apathy, sealing windows shut, suspicion of one’s neighbours, signing up for the hated Party membership’.

*   *   *

The speed of this absolute catastrophe, from 1914 to 1950 or so, engulfed virtually everyone within the Habsburg Empire, for different reasons. Hundreds of instances race through my mind all the time and could just turn everything into a jumbled catalogue of horror of a pointless kind: the German towns with no Germans, the Polish towns with no Poles, the Hungarian towns with no Hungarians. But also, of course, the countryside: the countless tiny Jewish villages scattered across Galicia and Bohemia. In London a museum in the Westminster Synagogue preserves 1,564 Torah scrolls, mainly from Jewish villages in Bohemia, and which are in most cases all that remains of places which until the creation of the Nazi ‘Protectorate’ were an integral, quintessential element in European life.

From the end of the Great War onwards there was always a sense of puzzlement in the West as to why the new post-Habsburg politicians seemed so unreasonable – why the occasional pleasant figure, generally an aristocrat, ‘of good will’, would so rapidly be submerged by others who seemed little more than wild beasts. Red terrors and White terrors, mass mobilizations, ethnic violence and an obsession on both left and right with military posturing plunged most of the old Empire into a nightmare which, with ever more inventive twists and turns, went on for generations. But these were all figures fighting over a faded and decaying remnant. This can be seen in the coldest way by population figures. Vienna, the great Imperial capital, emptied out, its population dropping by some three hundred thousand in the inter-war period, its vast bureaucratic buildings half empty, its economy in ruins. Budapest, the second Imperial capital, had by contrast a ballooning population, but only because hundreds of thousands of Hungarians fled into the city from Serbian and Romanian reigns of terror in what had just ceased to be southern and eastern Hungary.