Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

by Winder, Simon

  In the end none of the opportunities came off and the period from 1849 to final humiliation in 1866 was catastrophic for the Habsburgs – but catastrophic in an annoying way, as so many of the problems stem from a mulish failure by Franz Joseph and his advisers ever to do anything right. It would be far too complicated and tiresome to give all the details of the congresses, treaties, meetings between monarchs and armistices that stud the period. Places which have never before or since been important suddenly took on a world-historical role. I have a friend who used for family reasons to have to go to the western Schleswig coast for Christmas and, not speaking German let alone dialect, he was obliged for a few days, as gales howled over the dunes and the tiles rattled on the roof of the farmhouse kitchen, to listen to his wife’s relatives at mealtimes collapse with laughter – while he munched his way through the usual burnt pig selections and potatoes – as they came up with incomprehensible but clearly ever more elaborate insulting terms to describe him. Schleswig has featured in almost no conversation before or since the 1860s, but at this one moment in time, across Europe there was a sudden rush to atlases. Statesmen would narrow their eyes, stare at some imagined horizon, puff out their chests and claim some overwhelming, scarifying national interest in places with barely any population or even any animals.

  The extreme instability of the period came from the collapse of the semi-solidarity of Europe’s rulers following the 1848 revolutions. Suddenly a policy of mere reaction seemed untenable, not least because of the arrival of the Emperor Napoleon III in France, the great lord of misrule in this period and as creatively damaging in his way as Bismarck was to be. It was the Habsburgs’ disaster to suddenly appear, at different times and in different constellations, a backward and unhelpful element in the European system. This was most clearly shown in the Crimean War, where Britain and France uneasily allied themselves against Russia in a bid to protect the Ottoman Empire from further predation. The Austrians owed the Russians everything for their help in defeating the Hungarians, but now, only four years later, they found themselves siding with the Allies out of fear of Russian ambition to take over Moldavia and Wallachia from the Ottomans and thereby block the Danube. Franz Joseph was in an impossible position – he moved his troops into Transylvania in a threatening manner, forcing the Russians to keep an army on the border which would have been useful elsewhere, but then could not make up his mind to attack. The Russians were half mad with rage over this betrayal and their recent and useful alliance with the Austrians was at an end. In happier times, a grateful Franz Joseph had given a statuette of himself to his best friend Tsar Nicolas. Nicolas now took the statuette off his desk and gave it to his valet.

  But Franz Joseph knew that for Britain and France it was – at some level – quite a pleasure to attack Russia, as the Russians had no way of getting back at them, their navies making it wholly implausible that Cossacks would ever put, say, Tunbridge Wells to the torch. A declaration of war by Austria would have ensured at once that all the serious fighting would be on Austrian territory, starting with Transylvania, a province whose topography was entirely familiar to the Russian army from its very recent visit. There was a strong chance that the Crimean War (famous, as it turned out, for its grinding and inconclusive character) would have ended with the Russian occupation of Vienna and a situation not unlike 1945. Prussia managed to stay neutral without annoying anyone, Austria managed to alienate absolutely everyone (including Britain and France) and all this in a context where even the weakest knowledge of Habsburg history showed that alliances were essential for survival.

  Appearing feckless, dithering, inconstant and backward, Franz Joseph’s regime made vague gestures to embrace new allies, but to no avail. One surprising result of the Crimean War was the temporary collapse of Russia as a European power, the new tsar’s interests redirected to the Far East and even to a fairly liberal course, the combination of the two removing what had been a reliably swivel-eyed and scarlet-faced Force of Reaction. Even if Austria could have made up with its former protector, Russia was no longer capable of doing any protecting. Prussia should have been a source of comfort as its unbalanced monarch Friedrich Wilhelm IV was obsessed by hierarchy and loved deferring to the Habsburgs as the senior sovereigns. But even he found himself constrained by German nationalism and any hope of a military treaty had to result in Prussian command over the army, which Franz Joseph could not agree to. The French were far away from Austria and in any event ruled by a dangerous revolutionary maniac, the nephew of the Habsburgs’ nemesis. The British more or less gave up on the Austrians over their chronic indecision during the Crimean War, and this really marked the last gasp of one of the great constants in Central Europe: the British use of Austrian troops to pin down the French and get killed in huge numbers, while the British helped themselves to colonies in the rest of the world.

  This sudden vulnerability was stark – no more Holy Alliance, no more automatically friendly German Confederation. In a visionary moment in 1854 Lord Palmerston mused that a general reorganization of Europe could be made whereby Prussia would be given Schleswig-Holstein and in return give Posen (a chunk of eastern Prussia) to a newly re-founded Kingdom of Poland; and Austria would get the Danubian principalities in exchange for evacuating its territories in Italy. If only this had happened peacefully the entire course of Europe’s history would have been different. But, as usual with such counterfactuals, different does not mean better. Similarly, as soon as anyone talks about Prussia’s step-by-step takeover of Germany and its fatal consequences, there is always the assumption that if Austria had defeated Prussia, and Vienna become the capital of a united and rather different Germany, the outcome would have been in some way nicer: an idea for which, by definition, there is no evidence at all.

  In the case of Italy, the speed with which a series of invasions and revolutions united it is staggering. In the spring of 1859 the Habsburgs in most of the north and their clients in the centre (Modena, Parma and Tuscany) seemed absolutely dominant. Their large army and control of both Lombardy and Venetia, much reinforced since the revolutions of 1848, made the idea of any form of Italian independence a joke. But by the spring of 1861 a parliament was meeting that represented the whole of Italy except Venetia and Lazio. As in 1914, the Austrians were driven beyond endurance by the goading of a small irredentist power, in this case the militarily tough north-western kingdom of Piedmont. Piedmontese provocation in Habsburg Lombardy resulted in the Austrians demanding that Piedmont disarm. Prussia and Britain had both expressed irritation with Piedmont, and Austria confused this with military support for itself. When Piedmont ignored the ultimatum the Austrians attacked and, following a secret treaty, Napoleon III gleefully sent in thousands of French troops to support the Piedmontese. Defeated first at the Battle of Magenta, the Austrians were defeated again at the immense Battle of Solferino, in which some three hundred thousand poorly led and baffled troops killed each other in horrifying numbers before the Austrians withdrew. Napoleon tricked Franz Joseph into an armistice to allow them to talk man to man. Here the dull and starchy Franz Joseph was completely outwitted with vague promises of helping out his relatives, who had by now been thrown out of Modena, Parma and Tuscany. Napoleon suggested that it was much better for Austria to withdraw from Lombardy and keep Venetia than risk dismemberment at some international congress. Italian unification leapt from Napoleon’s control, with much of Europe simply sitting immobilized and aghast as various ancient cities, with courts that had often been the nursery of the greatest artistic and intellectual moments in Europe’s history, and over which so many battles had been fought over the centuries, suddenly became engulfed by the new Italian state and reduced to municipal councils.

  Franz Joseph’s response to the Battle of Solferino (the awfulness of which led to the foundation of the Red Cross) was to end the war. This was an extremely old-fashioned thing to do, and a trick he would repeat in 1866. With our more recent experience, from the Franco-Prussian War onwards, with fight
ing which mobilizes entire societies and generates total demands, and which only ends by one side collapsing in complete disarray, this attitude seems odd. The Austrians, despite losses of some thirty-five thousand in a couple of weeks, still had many troops, a powerful defensive position and the possibility (as Napoleon uneasily realized) of intervention by Prussia. And yet Franz Joseph preferred just to pack it in. From our perspective it almost makes the losses seem frivolous. The Habsburg army was designed to fight and if the stakes were so high why give Lombardy up so easily? Franz Joseph seems to have developed a fatalistic attitude that it was better to be defeated honourably than simply to hand out family territory on the off-chance that this might appease whichever predator he was dealing with. This resonates with all his ancestors’ behaviour too and it is more a comment on the increasingly odd and backward Habsburg presence in Europe than a criticism of Franz Joseph that he recognized this.

  Italian unification, however much of a mixed blessing this may have been for many Italians, seems now to be as inevitable as German and Romanian unification and Franz Joseph’s dully correct position – while it put a whoopee-cushion under Kaisertreu – kept many more people alive than some more apocalyptic policy. But as the white marble statues filled up more and more of the Military History Museum’s foyer, there must have been some very bitter conversations between officers having to deal with the shock of Habsburg expulsion from Lombardy of all places, with its family associations lying in a tangled heap from at least the fifteenth century. But the Museum – which still has FJ monograms on the doors to the toilets – would be putting up special displays featuring quite a few more humiliations before it could all settle down.

  New Habsburg empires

  Travelling south from Graz, it is always exciting to be crossing another linguistic barrier. The west–east wedge of German and Hungarian settlement across the middle of Europe is suddenly broken through, and places with names like Kaindorf an der Sulm give way to places with names like Šentilj. The modern state of Styria and country of Slovenia compete with one another for harmless, outdoors daffiness, with local websites a great mass of mushroom festivals, special stitched costumes and hiking opportunities. But all this admirable neutralism has to twist around a past of German–Slovene hatred, perhaps most brilliantly expressed in Peter Handke’s great novel Repetition, with its picture of bitter discrimination and a shared landscape viewed through two quite different pairs of eyes.

  Modern Slovenia is stuck together from the rubble of the Empire’s end, with its core made up from the Duchy of Carniola with bits of Styria, Gorizia, Istria and a small piece of the old Hungarian county of Vas. The northern Slovenian city of Maribor was the site of violent fighting in 1918 as this German-speaking city (Marburg an der Drau) in a sea of Slovene-speaking countryside was grabbed by Yugoslavia, but only briefly as Hitler, in Habsburg mode, carefully reincorporated it into Styria in 1941, with the town’s ancient Jewish population dispossessed and sent to the camps. There are some grim photos of Hitler, Bormann and others complacently surveying this citadel of Germandom from the charismatic Old Bridge across the River Drava. All the Germans were then expelled in 1945 and Maribor became an authentically if traumatically Slovenian town. The expulsions are commemorated in a plaque on Graz’s Castle Hill.

  It is hard to shake off the harshness of Maribor’s fate or the lack of continuity with the Habsburg past – the town’s gloominess may be my own over-self-conscious projection. Under the late Empire it was a harmless minor way-station en route to the Hungarian-ruled kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia and the medley of the Austrian Littoral – it was a linguistic border town but not a political one. The great theme that beckons with every mile of the railway trundling down towards Ljubljana and Trieste is the one of the Habsburgs’ futile southern destiny.

  The slightly hysterical air of reaching a different cultural and linguistic world is based not least on the sudden prevalence of heaped piles of seafood. The best restaurant in Maribor is an Adriatic fantasia, a sort of cornucopia of bits of octopus, lemons, small things with fins, all thrown together with heaps of Mediterranean herbs. By the time you get to Ljubljana everyone is pretty much fish-mad, with perhaps the definitive seafood obsessive’s restaurant tucked into the arcades under the great Jože Plečnik’s magical Triple Bridge. Maribor itself is quite notably far inland and has as much claim to be a seafood Mecca as Birmingham, but it is quickly clear that this all stems from a reasonable Slovene yearning to be as Mediterranean as possible. Here they can play the decisive card that makes them not German – it’s all calamari, oregano and prettily coloured drinks for them, leaving behind a sad world back in Graz of people having to pretend that river fish don’t taste of mud.

  For the Habsburgs this temptation to leave the sauerkraut behind and get a bit of sunshine was simply too great. Their ownership of Venetia was something new, a reward from the Napoleonic Wars, but it proved to be a total curse. The Venetians were, like all inhabitants of declining states, personally blamed for their fate – they were too indolent, sensual and corrupted and did not deserve to survive. There was no sense at all that it was not the Venetians but Venice itself that was the problem, that it was the terms of trade stuck at the top of the Adriatic that had gradually made the whole area a backwater. What had been one of the focal points of maritime history had, in an age of trans-global voyages and the resettlement by Europeans of entire continents, become merely an appendix. Whoever inherited Venice would have exactly the same problem. But for planners in Vienna, adding the small Habsburg ports of Trieste and Pola to the Venetian inheritance would make the Empire into a great oceanic and commercial power.

  It was unfortunate for the Habsburgs that the Venetians had no interest in any such vision. Venice’s quite separate political development from the rest of Italy gave it a certain resistance to Italian nationalism, but this did not for a second imply anything other than loathing for the Austrians. Despite all the indicators (for example, the self-immolatory Venetian Republic of 1849) the plan remained that the old Venetian properties would become an indissoluble part of the Empire, defended by a new navy and by the mighty Quadrilateral – the latter yet another of these notionally ‘impenetrable’ fortress systems which simply soak up troops who might otherwise be mobile and of some use.

  A principal architect of this Habsburg vision was Franz Joseph’s younger brother Maximilian, who was put in charge of this southern strategy. At the implausible age of twenty-two he was already head of the Austrian Navy and, almost as a private whim, organized a small but proper battle fleet and sent out a major scientific expedition around the world in the manner of other countries with navies. His monument remains the extraordinarily desolate seaside castle of Miramare, just west of Trieste. Built in the 1850s as a sort of Disneyish dream-home for Maximilian and his wife, it was still incomplete when he took the Habsburg global destiny far too seriously and was persuaded to head to Mexico to become an emperor in his own right, only to be crushed by political forces way outside his control: humiliated, imprisoned, executed and finally immortalized in Manet’s paintings. The castle sums up the futility of all political striving, having hosted wave upon wave of short-lived visitors – men who would briefly stand in the hallway, look at its weary post-Scott medievalism plus running hot water, and wonder. Habsburgs, nationalists, Fascists, royalists have all passed through. There is even a terrific suite of razionalista cupboards and chairs from a time in the 1930s when the Duke of Aosta, Viceroy of Italian East Africa, lived at Miramare, complete with two sensational Italian Fascist painted maps, one of Libya filled with camel cavalry and a giant SPQR standard, the other of Italian Somaliland, decorated in a spirit of some desperation with a big crocodile and a selection of the corals and anemones, which apparently bejewel its coastal waters. Just as Maximilian died in Mexico City, so the Duke of Aosta died of malaria in a British POW camp in Kenya, meaning two cursed owners in the same castle. You can definitely see why there were no further takers.

  The ca
stle is crowded with elaborate objects and paintings which seem only to mock Maximilian’s fate – many of them only installed after he left for good. There is a very strange painting of him as a teenager with his younger brother Karl Ludwig (the future father of Franz Ferdinand) inspecting the bottoms and breasts of slave-girls in a Smyrna market. I have never been able to work out how to even start researching who thought that was a good idea as a theme for a painting – perhaps it started off as a private memento. Maximilian’s time in the navy is commemorated by his having his private office as an exact copy of his office on board his flagship, with lots of nautical-looking struts – a hearty joke which must have rather paled by the time that work was completed. There is a painting of the seemingly unenthusiastic ceremonies in Venice (a small bonfire and a handful of boats – it’s no Canaletto) when he was appointed Viceroy of Lombardy–Venetia. And here too is the actual table at which he signed his assent to become Emperor of Mexico. There is also a spooky range of posh gifts which he never saw, from top well-wishers such as the Pope, plus an unused Japanese-themed smoking-room and a chapel still futilely decorated with a Mexican eagle. Best of all is an oil painting by Cesare dell’Acqua (perhaps the worst painter of the nineteenth century, albeit in a hotly contested field) showing the Argonauts in olden times rowing into the bay of Miramare and being waved at by lots of semi-nude locals.

  But most bitter of all is the Imperial Mexican throne room, lined with paintings of Habsburg ancestors and with a huge map of the world colouring in all the places once owned by the family, designed to show Maximilian’s inheritance in Mexico as a renewal of that of Charles V, the whole thing decorated with an uneasy mix of conquistadors and grateful First Nations types. It is possible, of course, to become too gleeful or too morose in the face of such beautiful examples of the vanity of human wishes. It would be interesting to know how New Zealand troops billeted at Miramare in 1945 as part of the Trieste protection force, standing in the throne room, felt about it all. The castle just spills over with examples of the decay and delusions of empire.