Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

by Winder, Simon

  So much of the fighting in 1849 remains almost hidden from the records – countless massacres, atrocities, summary shootings, as the surviving Hungarian forces were herded into an ever smaller space. Many leaders fled into the neighbouring Ottoman Empire where, in a perverse inversion of earlier Hungarian history, they had to adopt Turkish names and notionally embrace Islam to avoid extradition. Many others were executed. The most famous of these symbolic acts of revenge was outside the massive fortress of Arad, nowadays in the hands of the Romanian army but with its walls and approaches buried in a mass of luxuriant vegetation of a kind that suggests Sleeping Beauty, and with much of its surrounding land now dedicated to the Neptune Water-Park. It was here that thirteen Hungarian generals were hanged as rebels instead of shot as soldiers – a decision by Franz Joseph to humiliate them and, through them, humiliate all Hungarians. Kossuth went on to become a celebrated exile and global voice of liberalism, even though his decisions had provoked disaster at every turn. Franz Joseph, still only nineteen years old, had shown a ruthlessness which is hard to reconcile with his later image as father of his nation – an image almost entirely the result of his appealing white side-whiskers rather than any actual actions or thoughts he might have had.

  The other tower of the Great Church, the one without Ezekiel’s Vision in it, is famous for its enormous bell. It was originally built in 1636 for the Prince of Transylvania, György I Rákóczi – an earlier Hungarian rebel and inspiration for Hungarian nationalists who had fought both Ferdinand II and Ferdinand III and had the bell wittily made out of melted Imperial artillery he had captured. The bell shared the fate of the rest of the Great Church in the fire of 1802, crashing to the ground and cracking. In 1873 the authorities decided that it should be completely recast and hung up again. It is quite hard to believe this is true, but as a preliminary the magnificent Rákóczi shield, which was part of the moulding, was hammered off and melted into a separate small bell, so that the metal of the new Great Church bell would not have its virtue tainted by rebellion. Sometimes it is hard to be sympathetic to the Hungarians’ chauvinism, but the treatment of the Rákóczi bell and the mystical Habsburg dynastic loopiness it betrays shows the mindset that they were up against.

  Mountain people

  Sitting happily in the Seven Piglets in Lviv, slurping a bowl of Hutsul-style mushroom soup, I felt I had landed in the acme of folkloric happiness. There were benches of rough-hewn wood scattered with sheepskins, low, deeply carved wooden rafters, every surface painted in Ukrainian decorative patterns and a live violin-and-squeezebox band playing, albeit Bésame Mucho but that’s fine. Waiters in baggy embroidered white shirts rushed around, helpfully bringing me things like piglet with walnuts and sauerkraut of a kind that will sooner or later but not yet give me a gastric ulcer. The whole place is so extreme that it has an almost aversion-therapy feel – patients are brought here who spend too much time listening to folksong arrangements or have devoted entire rooms of their house to hand-painted Easter eggs. Anyway, the aversion therapy didn’t work for me, as the pancakes laden with forest fruits arrived with a flourish.

  An obsession with folklore can take many forms, running the gamut from a timid interest in fabrics to the barrel-chested roaring and good fellowship that characterizes the once notorious Girl Fair at Muntele Găina. Folklore tourism has been important ever since the railways were invented, and the tension between ‘remoteness’ and easy access, between celebrating a unique way of life and polluting it can never be resolved. The remarkable Hutsul village of Yaremche in western Ukraine is a prime example. It is genuinely marvellous. The River Prut, the colour of serpentinite, thunders under a bridge and the Carpathians (no doubt bear-filled) glower around the little town. There are horses with embroidered saddles and two teenage boys with golden eagles of alarming power, size and shagginess on their shoulders. There is even that Ukrainian favourite, a stall where you can dress up in a Red Army uniform and pose for photos with a variety of startlingly heavy automatic weapons.

  Of course, the whole thing is an elaborate tourist construct and has been so for many years, otherwise I would not be there. Stall after stall sells industrial quantities of sheepskin coats, traditional samplers and carved wooden coasters, and coach after coach arrives filled with people to buy them during the short summer season. People have been coming to Yaremche as a daytrip from Ivano-Frankivsk or even Lviv – in the intervals between political and military upheavals – ever since it was an option.

  Folklore has an oddly intimate role in the Habsburg Empire. Partly this came from the obvious fact that so much of the Empire was made up of unproductive and annoying mountains (albeit mountains sometimes filled with valuable minerals). Life in these areas, across the Alps, their Balkan spurs and over to the Carpathians, was probably more characteristic of the Empire than any other environment. Their inhabitants were fiendishly difficult to control – the gap between straggles of snowbound houses along high valleys and the beautifully regulated order of a walled town must have driven administrators mad. With thousands of thinly populated valleys, it was also unclear that there was much need to control them. Just taking a train up through the passes of the Tyrol it is obvious that until recently this cannot have been much of a tax base. Entire regions were cut off for a large part of the year (the key to Adalbert Stifter’s great short story ‘Rock Crystal’) and rarely produced much economic excess. The little they did (hams, embroidery, fleeces) were sold at summer fairs so they could buy the things they could not make or repair themselves, a context in which gypsies have always been a crucial element – in a symbiosis of the most sedentary and least sedentary.

  Life in these valleys was extremely harsh. No tourists in their right mind would visit Yaremche in winter. In a sense their inhabitants were lucky because there were many times when their remoteness and poverty protected them from the historical events in the plains – but an exceptionally bad winter or terrible flooding or a fire might do as much damage as a Turkish army and plague in a valley could kill all its inhabitants. So much of this is barely recorded, but these communities must have been re-founded frequently, presumably from neighbouring valleys. In any event the attraction of the high meadows for grazing was invisible to most humans, who considered the whole way of life dreadful. When the Italians took over the South Tyrol in 1918 they imagined they could restock the region with Italian-speaking hill farmers and remove all the Germans, but even the most hard-scrabble, hollow-eyed contadino considered it insane to spend his brief existence wrestling with moufflon in ten-foot snowdrifts and the project foundered. This was a life that could only be endured if you were born to it.

  The most famous example of mountain people banding together is the Swiss Confederation. The often formidable difficulties in communicating between the different elements of the alliance in fact helped to keep the genuinely federal nature of their arrangements. The maze of passes within the Swiss Alps could either be a green light for banditry and short-term business thinking, or it could allow for peaceful trade and prosperity and the Confederation regulated this to everyone’s gain, as well as offering protection against outsiders. The Confederation’s resolute hatred of the Habsburgs (themselves originally in part Swiss) climaxed in the Swabian War of 1499 when after a series of disasters Maximilian I was obliged to leave them alone. The mayhem caused by such a small country in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries is breathtaking – and, indeed, although the Swiss founding principle might have been an anti-Habsburg one, their role in killing off Charles the Bold and thereby ensuring Habsburg supremacy must have earned them at least a Christmas card from the Emperor.

  Switzerland came and went in its impact on Europe, with its mercenaries severely mauled in the Italian Wars, but the associated Three Leagues (the League of the Ten Jurisdictions, the Grey League and the splendidly named League of God’s House) to the east of the Confederation caused intermittent violent chaos into the seventeenth century, driving various military commanders into total m
ental breakdowns by their sheer obduracy and localism. It was only the arrival of Napoleon that ended their independence and folded them into Switzerland.

  The Habsburgs were always confounded by the way that while mountains are excellent defences they are also extremely difficult to defend. The Carpathians, as became clear in war after war well into the twentieth century, look like a terrific natural bastion on a map but each pass is sufficiently far from the next that they were hard to reinforce and could therefore turn into the worse kind of static fortress, soaking up troops and supplies while the enemy simply goes round the corner and does something else. In the First World War one of the most depressing experiences (in a crowded category) of the Austro-Hungarian army was the 1915–16 defence of the Carpathians, which had seemed smart on paper, but proved impossible for the usual reason – that so few people live in the mountains because there are so few supplies and they get covered in snow for half the year. The result was thousands of deaths from the cold and a total collapse in the survivors’ morale.

  The Habsburg cult of the mountains and of mountain folklore in fact had military origins. As so few people could live in the mountains there was (if they were not wiped out by fire, flood or slave-raiding) an excess population each year – classically split between women who would work as servants and men who would join the army. Stefan Zweig’s story ‘Leporella’ is the perfect exposition of the fate of women – the Tyrolean girl who ends up in Vienna working for a worthless and libertine nobleman with catastrophic results. Virtually the entire course of Habsburg military literature is filled with tough Slovak, Ruthene or Serb squaddies, assigned by their German or Magyar officers the same sort of ‘martial virtues’ the British projected onto the Highland Scots, Sikhs or Jats. The Habsburgs had also always used large formations of irregular troops, drawn in many cases from the Dinaric Alps and festooned in outlandish hats, boots and jackets. This gave the Habsburg military an entirely different profile to western European formations. The Military Frontier districts guarding the Empire against the Ottomans also had many regular troops, but it was groups such as the mainly Croat Pandurs who became famous, with a romantic cult quite at odds with the realities of border atrocity warfare. Many of these highly decorative irregulars were at such key events as the relief of Vienna in 1683. Given that a vital element in the Allied force there was a mass of Polish hussars with high, feathered wings on their armour and that they were fighting Ottoman camel troops in coloured turbans, the whole thing must have looked like a fancy-dress party or circus parade gone very badly wrong.

  This fascination with exotic folk costume readily shifted, as the army’s clothing became more regularized and banal, into a more general curiosity about those parts of the Empire that still maintained forms of folk dress. The same forces that created railways, accurate long-range rifles and mass colour printing in the mid-nineteenth century also created both nationalism and a civilian cult of folk costume: as millions of peasants flooded into the Habsburg cities, as multicoloured, easily spotted uniforms were put away and as mass literacy became available, real folk costume vanished for most people but became enshrined in other ways.

  It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of folklore to the emergent nationalisms. In the search for authentic new heroes, there was both a military thread and an outlaw or bandit thread, where a motley selection of figures who had stood up to authority became enshrined in countless rhymes, songs, tales and portraits, with their folk costume (often a blind guess, of course – even the figure himself often had a shaky real historical existence, let alone his clothing) a symbol of integrity in the face of besuited German or Hungarian oppression. Everywhere had a bandit king – Juraj Jánošík, friend to the Slovaks and Gorals, or Oleksa Dovbush, scourge of the Poles and friend of the Ruthenes and Hutzuls, now a major Ukrainian hero whose attractive Carpathian rock hideaway I hiked through recently.

  The Hungarians themselves were torn on this issue – they wished to distance themselves from Germanizing greyness, but also wanted to appear progressive and modern. Indeed all nationalist groups became irreparably tangled up on this point and could never decide whether rows of girls waving hoops covered in flowers or rows of men in steel helmets and puttees were the way ahead. In the end they settled for both. There is a particularly shrill cartoon by the Slovenian artist Hinko Smrekar which brings the folk costume question to its acme. Drawn in 1918 it shows Woodrow Wilson standing next to a piece of meat-grinding equipment and shoving into the machine a grotesque crone labelled Old Europe, vampire-toothed, skeletal and in a dirty wig, a crucifix around her neck, holding a gallows and whip. As she disappears into the machinery out of the bottom bursts a group of very fit-looking young women in folk dress, dancing away and helpfully labelled as Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and Poland, with an unidentified further figure with earrings and dark, curly hair which I would guess might be the spirit of Questionable Additional Lands Grabbed by Romania.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Temple to Glorious Disaster » New Habsburg empires » The stupid giant » Funtime of the nations » The deal » An expensive sip of water

  The Temple to Glorious Disaster

  Vienna’s Military History Museum was Franz Joseph’s pride and joy. In many ways it brackets perfectly the entire Habsburg experience, defined by two huge hunks of metal: a fifteenth-century ‘supergun’ from Styria of staggering size and impracticality1 and an armoured cupola from a Belgian fort devastated in 1914 by a twentieth-century supergun, the Škoda heavy siege mortar. This cupola was somehow hauled to the museum across hundreds of miles as a tribute to Austro-Hungarian engineering and industrial prowess and to show its loyalty to and value to its German ally, shortly before all such concerns became nugatory.

  The museum was built as part of the Arsenal complex in south-east Vienna, one of a series of Imperial urban strongpoints packed with weapons that could quell a future 1848 – a role they were never called on to fulfil. Designed quite arbitrarily in a sort of Moorish style more associated with harems than soldiers, it is one of the first examples (and a relatively charming one) of the sort of brain-destroying architectural eclecticism which would wound and goad generations of Habsburg intellectuals and designers into finally giving birth to modernism. Franz Joseph was deeply engaged in every aspect of the building and it was set up as a temple to the greatness of the Habsburg military traditions. The entrance way is crowded with life-size white marble statues of generals – many of them prime figures in the Habsburg cult of victory followed by defeat, making the entire hall into a sort of Temple to Glorious Disaster. The beards, ruffs, tricornes and weapons change but the outcome tended to be the same. At the head of the main staircase there is a bust of the young Franz Joseph with Kaisertreu written under it – the conventional term describing the unquestioning loyalty and adulation felt by the soldiers for their supreme commander. As all these very boringly conceived statues were carved and hauled into place through the 1850s and 1860s this was a sentiment that was to be put under considerable pressure, and more than a few senior officers must have given a derisive ‘Ha!’ as they walked past the Kaisertreu bust.

  It has always been important to the British to think of the nineteenth century as broadly peaceful once Napoleon had been finally defeated, with the Crimean War as an exception plus a couple of ‘cabinet wars’. An air of slight stuffiness hangs over much of the century, but in practice Europe was just as turbulent as in the twentieth century, albeit with an incomparably lower death toll. The British are among the most egregious fantasists, as their Victorian peacefulness only existed by pretending that the dozens of colonial wars in which they were engaged were not happening. Indeed, the near universal habit of seeing European and colonial wars as unrelated is unfortunate, as in practice it was just as dangerous to be a ruler targeted for destruction in Europe as it was to be one in India or Africa. If there had been a suitable venue, figures as diverse as the King of Hannover, the last Mughal Emperor, the Duke of Modena and the Nawab of Oudh coul
d have had bitter conversations about the fickle nature of the mid-nineteenth century.

  Austrian policy was fiendishly difficult. With the crushing of the Hungarian rebellion there seemed to be a possibility of great things, and indeed for short periods the Empire had a quite extraordinary reach, both in its own right and on behalf of the German Confederation, the loose association of German states of which Austria was the most senior member. At one point during the Schleswig-Holstein crisis in the 1860s the Habsburg navy was in the North Sea, engaged in the Battle of Heligoland with the Danish navy and, following defeat, taking refuge in the waters of the British naval base on Heligoland. The very idea of a British base just off the German coast (soon to be swapped in fact with Germany for Zanzibar), let alone Habsburg warships being in the North Sea, let alone fighting the Danes, seems scarcely imaginable, but this was part of a crisis that dominated Europe. In a similar moment of glory Habsburg troops occupied the mouths of the Danube at the outbreak of the Crimean War, creating a buffer between the Russians and the Ottomans. For a couple of years it seemed that a Habsburg fantasy going back at least two centuries was about to be realized with the entire river system under Vienna’s rule, but none of the other powers thought this a good idea and with the end of the war the soldiers were obliged humiliatingly to back out and make way by the end of the decade for a united Romania, a nightmare far worse for Vienna than somnolent Turkish rule.