A Mad Catastrophe

by Geoffrey Wawro

  Over the years, the emperor and his ruling clique shifted anxiously between the federalist and centralizing methods, but neither method worked. Centralization provoked the wrath of non-Germans. Federalism could no longer be exercised through aristocrats in the modern age of industrialization and liberalism, and if exercised through middle-class national clubs like the “Young Czechs,” it led inexorably to secession and dissolution. It didn’t help that of Austria-Hungary’s seventeen principal regions, only six were ethnically homogeneous; the rest were tinderboxes like Bohemia, where Czechs and Germans scuffled in the towns and villages over language, jobs, and status.4 By the time Franz Joseph was thirty—he would live and reign to eighty-six—Austria was already unworkable, a veritable dodo bird, too fat and unwieldy to fly, too slow and helpless to live on the ground.

  Count Otto von Bismarck, minister president of Prussia in the 1860s, noticed this immediately. He had resented Austria since the 1850s, when he remarked that “the two powers could no longer breathe each other’s breath in Central Europe.” He took aim at Franz Joseph in 1866, demanding Prussian control of the German states that had been loosely led by Vienna since the end of the Napoleonic Wars. In the haphazard way that was his style, Franz Joseph weighed compromise and war and then chose war to “save Austria’s honor.” He was never much of a strategist, always fighting for intangible “honor” instead of tangible interests—something he would do again in 1914. Imperial interest in 1859 and 1866, as in 1914, would have been far better served by some face-saving deal short of war, which would have preserved the appearance of Austrian power while preventing a ruinous clash between the two historic allies.

  In a lightning campaign, the Prussian army of General Helmuth von Moltke invaded Austria in June 1866 and defeated the Austrian army in a sequence of battles culminating at Königgrätz, a fortress on the Elbe River in Bohemia, on July 3. An Italian army invaded Venetia as the Prussians thrust into Bohemia, took the province, and marched nearly to Trieste. The defeat was total: Austrian diplomats had failed to buy off either the Prussians or the Italians with concessions, and the Austrian generals had failed to exploit good chances to win on both fronts.

  This was an army that had been a stalwart in the wars against Napoleon, and its defeat in 1866 was earthshaking. Indeed, the pope’s foreign minister gasped, “Casca il mondo” (the world has turned upside down) when he heard of the Prussian victory at Königgrätz and the rout of the Austrian army. The political developments that followed were even more astonishing; British Conservative leader Benjamin Disraeli spoke for the rest of Europe when he judged in a speech to the House of Commons in February 1871 that Bismarck’s unification of the three dozen German states under Prussian rule had “entirely destroyed the balance of power” in what amounted to a “German Revolution, a greater political event than the French Revolution of the last century.” The Austrian-led German Confederation had been established at the close of the Napoleonic Wars to deny the wealth, industry, and fast-growing population of Germany to a single power. With those resources suddenly in Prussian hands, the effect on the equilibrium of Europe was revolutionary. An ambitious new power, centered in Berlin, filled up the previously fragmented space between Russia and France and resolved to assert itself.5

  Austria grappled with the fallout from the German Revolution of 1871 more than any other European power. “There is not a diplomatic tradition which has not been swept away,” Disraeli had declared after the Prussian triumph. “You have a new world, new influences at work, new and unknown objects and dangers with which to cope.” But the new world did not favor Austria. Respect for Vienna—an ancient diplomatic reflex—withered away as the other powers registered Austria’s defeat at Königgrätz as well as its inexplicable failure to intervene in the Franco-Prussian War to recover the ground lost in 1866. “We have sunk to the level of Turkey,” an Austrian general muttered, confirming that the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires were the twinned Sick Men of Europe.6

  Taking stock of Austria-Hungary in 1878, the French embassy concluded that only the regions around Vienna and Graz remained “reliably German.” Everywhere else was under siege by national parties—Hungary by the Magyars, Trieste by the Italians, Croatia and Dalmatia by the Croats, Carinthia and Carniola by the Slovenes, Bohemia and Moravia by the Czechs, and Galicia and Bukovina by the Poles, Ukrainians, and Rumanians. In this “mosaic of peoples,” the French observed, Jews emerged as “the only reliable class in Austria.” Tolerated better in Austria than they were in Russia, where they were subject to intense discrimination and lacerating pogroms, Jews were one of the few groups in the empire that rallied enthusiastically to the Habsburgs. “They are multiplying in the East out of all proportion to the other peoples,” the French embassy noted in 1878, “and plundering the peasantry through usury; in the cities they control the press, professions, and banks.” Jewish moneylending in the country and commercial success in the towns spurred waves of Russian-style anti-Semitism in Austria, but the emperor, not yet fifty, didn’t give much thought to these attacks on his most loyal subjects. “He’s sympathetic and well-liked,” the French reported, “but he has no character to speak of; he’s a drifter, floating from one system to the next; he has no real friends or confidants; he trusts no one, and inspires confidence in no one, nor does he even believe in himself.”7

  That was as fair a summary of Emperor Franz Joseph I as any, and the monarch did not ponder long after the defeat of 1866 before deciding on a “fix” to the crisis unleashed by German and Italian unification. Militarily, he adopted—superficially—the Prussian style. The Austrian army defeated in 1866 had relied on aristocratic officers and long-service peasant soldiers, and thus found itself without intelligent, trained reserve troops or officers after the initial battlefield defeats. The emperor’s new war minister, General Franz Kuhn, introduced compulsory three-year service for all Austro-Hungarian males and competitive exams for officer aspirants. Within five years, most of the monarchy’s military aristocracy had left the army, never to return, to protest Kuhn’s cancellation of their privileges (chiefly immunity from competitive exams or any other “merit process”), a step that the snobbish and traditionalist emperor never would have authorized had he not been so discredited by the defeats of 1859 and 1866. Unfortunately, within five years most of the best middle-class officers had left the army too, for the 1870s were the Gilded Age, and the brightest men would leave the miserly military to seek their fortune in finance. Increasingly the Habsburg officer corps became what it would be in 1914: the preserve of lower-middle-class men of slender means who were packed off to the army by their fathers for the free education offered at good military schools like the Technical Academy in Vienna or the war college at Wiener Neustadt.8

  Organizationally, the Habsburg army after 1866 adopted a territorial structure like Prussia’s. The monarchy was carved into fifteen corps districts, from Innsbruck east to Lemberg (Lviv) and from Prague south to Ragusa (Dubrovnik), with every regiment drawing its four battalions locally and joining them to the nearest corps, a perfectly logical system that had never been attempted in Austria because the multinational peoples were not judged reliable in the age of nationalism. Had they been left in their home districts, they might have fraternized with unhappy locals and turned their guns on the emperor, so until the defeat of 1866 Austrian regiments had bounced around the monarchy every three years—Czechs to Budapest, Hungarians to Prague, Croats to Venice, Germans to Cracow, Ukrainians to Vienna, and so on. This “extraterritoriality” in peacetime, maintained as a counterrevolutionary measure, had so complicated Austrian mobilizations in wartime that it was largely abolished in the 1880s. But the new territorial system was not without its own problems. “Please replace my staff company with one made up of more intelligent human material,” one Austrian general wrote another in February 1914, only to be told: “Denied, do what you can with your men of lower intelligence.” The general had wanted Germans for his staff company, and was ordered to make do with Serb
s instead.9

  Tactically, the Habsburg army also attempted to mimic the Prussians. Austrian planners abandoned shock tactics—the massed charges in company columns that had been shredded by Prussian fire in 1866—and introduced Prussian fire tactics in their place. A French officer invited in 1875 to an Austrian exercise on the old battlefield of Trautenau reported that the Austrian instructor opened the exercise thus: “You all know what happened here in 1866; our task is to purge and forget forever the sentiments and tactics that cost us so much blood and delivered so little success. For the old methods, we substitute this: rapid fire by dispersed units.”10

  The new method of warfare made perfect sense but was never really implemented. The Habsburgs would always be slow to procure the latest technologies and to train sufficient numbers of men in the effective use of them. If men were not drafted in large numbers and trained to estimate ranges and aim fire, they could not actually deliver rapid, dispersed fire; they would have to be massed together under the supervision of their officers and NCOs, presenting easy targets to the enemy, as they had in 1866. Even before the technological revolutions of the 1890s—repeater rifles, machine guns, and quick-firing artillery—Emperor Franz Joseph was showing a distressing tendency always to do the wrong thing, or at least to fail to follow through on the right thing. Under his long-serving general staff chief General Friedrich Beck, he authorized largely ceremonial maneuvers, and for years after 1866 he became the advocate of his cavalry mafia—the last preserve of aristocrats in the army—opposing every effort by his most effective cavalry commander in 1866, General Leopold Edelsheim, to abolish the lance and saber and replace them with the carbine and pistol.11

  Politically, the emperor was no less retrograde. To solve the political crisis thrown up by the defeat of 1866, he sat down with his most fiery domestic opponents, the Hungarians, and offered them the deal of a lifetime. In return for their loyalty to the Habsburg crown, the Hungarians, who constituted just 19 percent of the monarchy’s population, were offered control of 52 percent of Austrian territory and 40 percent of its population. For this half share of Austria, they would remit just 30 percent of Austrian taxes.12

  The Magyars effectively seceded from the unitary Austrian Empire in 1867 and revived a “Kingdom of Hungary” in Transleithania that was to have no direct connection with Vienna. The Austrian emperor’s actual title allowed that he was king of Hungary (as well as king of Bohemia, Croatia, Galicia, and other regions of the empire), but these titles had always been regarded as purely ceremonial and the domains they spanned merely provinces. Now the emperor was made to understand that the Hungarian crown trumped all others, including even the Austrian one. Budapest could make all manner of demands on Vienna, but Vienna must make none on Budapest. The Austrian emperor had been king of Hungary since Vienna’s acquisition of the land in 1526, but his control had been expressed on Austrian buildings and stationery thus: k.k., which stood for kaiserlich königlich, or imperial royal. No more: in 1889, the Hungarians demanded that a u be inserted between the ks, so that they would no longer rub companionably alongside each other. Kaiserlich und königlich—imperial and royal—was deemed more pleasingly divisive than kaiserlich königlich.13

  Hair-splitting such as this was greeted with shock in Vienna. The emperor had supposed that by his Compromise of 1867 he had traded Hungarian home rule for a unified Austrian great power. The Hungarians were supposed to participate wholeheartedly in “common” or “joint” k.u.k. ministries of war, foreign affairs, trade, and finance in exchange for the unique power to direct their domestic affairs. The Hungarians now appeared to be reneging on the deal; although they spun good profits from the joint monarchy—two-fifths of the population of Austria-Hungary paying just one-third of its taxes every year—their continuous obstruction of the single state for war, foreign policy, finance, and trade amounted to sabotage, to say nothing of ingratitude. From his perch in Vienna’s Belvedere Palace, Archduke Franz Ferdinand growled that Austria was falling not to rival powers but to an “internal enemy—Jews, Freemasons, Socialists and Hungarians.”14

  Franz Joseph’s work increasingly became ensuring the survival and relevance of the Habsburg dynasty by juggling the contending capitals of Vienna and Budapest. This was an uphill battle, for the dynasty was unimposing even by the loosened standards of a more permissive age. In 1889, Franz Joseph’s only child and heir, the thirty-year-old Archduke Rudolf, fell in love with a teenage baroness and then shot her and himself in Mayerling, his hunting lodge in the Vienna Woods. That murder-suicide, which shortly made the unsmiling Archduke Franz Ferdinand the new crown prince, also severed what little connection there was between the emperor and the empress, who now embarked on her endless travels away from Vienna, a routine that ended with her own assassination in 1898.

  Dynastic damage control was the order of the day. Although everyone knew the emperor kept a mistress for three decades—the actress Katharina Schratt—no one talked about it in the press. When the emperor’s brother Archduke Ludwig Viktor was twice arrested with male companions in public baths in 1904 (first in Vienna, then in Italy), the scandal was hushed up. No Austro-Hungarian newspaper even mentioned it; those that tried were fined and confiscated. Ludwig Viktor himself was given a diagnosis of “depression” and confined to his country house.15 After the debacle of Königgrätz, where middle-class generals had failed as spectacularly as aristocratic ones, Franz Joseph began placing archdukes—princes of the Habsburg house—in every important command to underscore the imperial prerogative, but none of them impressed. Taking stock of the two leading archdukes in 1897, the French embassy commented: “Friedrich: lacks the essential qualities of a general. Eugen: a hard worker, but not gifted in any way.” And these two Habsburgs were the cream of the crop.16 While the dynasty unquestionably survived, the monarchy as a great power began to die.

  Hungary was the virus that was killing the Habsburgs. Hungarian obstruction after 1867 gnawed at the roots of Habsburg power and administration. In 1878, uprisings burned through Ottoman Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Vienna saw the opportunity to wrest the provinces from Turkey, attach them to Austria, and thus ensure Austrian preeminence in the Balkans, which had become the new mission for the empire after its ouster from Italy and Germany in 1866. Unfortunately, the Hungarians opposed even occupation of the territories, let alone annexation, fearing that the million or so Slavs in Bosnia-Herzegovina would further dilute the monarchy’s Hungarian minority. Bismarck, who was trying to give Austria-Hungary the two Turkish provinces at the Congress of Berlin in order to rebalance power after Russian gains in their war with Turkey in 1877–1878, found the situation ludicrous: “I’ve heard of people refusing to eat their pigeon unless it was shot and roasted for them, but I’ve never heard of anyone refusing to eat it unless his jaws were forced open and it was pushed down his throat.”17

  Nor was there a unified pro-Habsburg bloc in Cisleithania to array against the Magyars. Throughout his reign, Franz Joseph had swerved between German liberal centralizers and Slavic feudal federalists. From 1879 until 1897, the emperor turned politics in Cisleithania over to Count Eduard Taaffe’s “Iron Ring,” a cabinet whose highest aim was to keep the empire’s various nationalities in a “balanced state of mild dissatisfaction.”18 But that dodge, which gave the emperor a degree of control, became less effective in the modern age of nationalism and mass communication. By the end of the nineteenth century, Austrian cabinets rose and fell over minor issues—trumpeted in the national clubs and press—like the language of instruction in a small-town elementary school, a situation that would have been unthinkable at the beginning of the century. In the seventeen provinces of Austria, German had always been the required language of school instruction and the local language had been offered only as an elective subject; accepted in the past, this arrangement now enraged increasingly assertive Czechs, Slovenes, and others. Czech historian Frantisek Palacký had famously argued in 1848 that “if the Austrian Empire had not existed, it would have ha
d to be invented” to forestall Russian domination. That imperial talking point had become a thing of ridicule fifty years later. The peoples of Austria did not want Austria or Russia; they wanted freedom.

  In Austria-Hungary, 1897 was a year of existential crisis. The Czechs—who had been stewing for years over the dualist concessions to the Hungarians—finally rebelled against the official German culture of Cisleithania and demanded parity for the Czech language. The new Austrian prime minister, Count Casimir Badeni, sought to mollify the Czechs (and fortify Taaffe’s old “Iron Ring”) by placing the Czech and German languages on an equal footing in the Czech-speaking provinces of Bohemia and Moravia. Officeholders would be forced to know both languages, but since Czechs already knew German from school, the reform really only affected Germans, few of whom had ever bothered to learn Czech. The result was a veritable civil war, as furious Germans disrupted the functioning of the Reichsrat in Vienna, overturning benches and hurling inkpots, and resorted to violence in Prague and the other towns of Bohemia and Moravia.19 German nationalists crossed the border from Saxony singing “Wacht am Rhein” and “Deutschland über Alles” and vowing to prevent the eclipse of their “Austrian brothers.”