Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

by Winder, Simon

  Maximilian lived long enough to get news (perhaps while wearing the special imperial sombrero preserved in the Military History Museum) of his vindication as a naval visionary: the bizarre Austrian naval victory at Lissa. His new fleet, under its commander Wilhelm von Tegetthoff, despite being outnumbered, managed to prevent an Italian landing on the Dalmatian island of Lissa (Vis), part of the frenzy of events in 1866. Tegetthoff devastated the Italian navy through the implausible method of using a metal ram, in a crazy throwback to the Roman Empire. Tegetthoff became a Habsburg hero. He also confused a generation of European naval engineers, who spent years mucking around fitting rams to everything, objects which never in fact tactically came up again. Unlike the futile mainland heroics, his actions also changed geopolitical history. The Italian expedition to Vis was there to establish Italy as the legatee of the entire Venetian state, including its old Dalmatian territories. Its defeat prevented this and despite short periods of Italian rule in the twentieth century, the eastern coast of the Adriatic solidified (with mass deportations of Italian-speakers) as part of Croatia. Admiral Tegetthoff sported the same bizarre whiskers as Maximilian, as though his cheeks were being attacked by two synchronized voles. As a native of Maribor, his victory was commemorated in the main square by a massive, lugubrious bust, sadly dismantled later in an outburst of anti-Habsburg feeling, despite his accidental contribution to the South Slav cause.

  The Habsburg navy never came to anything. The problem always remained that the Empire was a land power and any diversion of resources into the Adriatic simply meant a loss of heaps of steel for the army, but still resulted in too small a navy to make a difference. In the First World War the British and Italian navies easily blocked up the Strait of Otranto with a miscellaneous heap of ships, ropes and nets and made the Adriatic a sort of enormous watery prison for Vienna and Budapest’s expensive fleet. This navy’s only, very dubious gift to the world was the steely Admiral Horthy, who tried and failed to break the Allied cordon and whose courage brought him to sufficient public notice to kick off his long career as the Habsburg ‘Regent’ of what would then be a land-locked Hungary. In the aftermath of Tegetthoff’s early death, a ship was named after him and, in a final gesture of global ambition, sent up to the Arctic. In an epic of futility and ice its crew discovered a genuinely pointless archipelago now proudly named Franz Joseph Land.

  In the century since the Habsburg Empire came to an end, workmen across Central Europe have been busily engaged in taking down any mention of Franz Joseph on countless statues, plaques and street names across the former Empire and it is at the very least odd that the largest-scale use of Franz Joseph’s name survives in an area so remote that even its Soviet owners could never be bothered to change it. So the inheritors of the bold, imperialist and naval future for the Habsburgs were not the Venetians, and certainly not the Mexicans, but a few baffled and perhaps quietly loyal seasonal walruses.

  The stupid giant

  Intermittently, through the series of short but brutal wars of the 1840s to 1870s, Richard Wagner was working on first the libretto and then the music of Siegfried, an opera finally premiered in 1876. I am not quite sure why I like this opera so much and have such weak feelings about the rest of Wagner’s enormous output. Perhaps it is the way that such excessive resources – length, orchestra, design – frame such simple action: no choruses, hardly anybody on stage at all, and then there is the unprecedented coup of only male voices for hours and hours, so that when the Woodbird arrives it is like a spell being lifted. The third part of The Ring of the Nibelung, Siegfried at its heart has a scene of the darkest intensity, where the parties interested in the fate of the dragon Fafner are dotted around the forest, awaiting events. The music has an almost extraterrestrial quality and you can see why so many people in the later nineteenth century and onwards were driven mad by Wagner – he makes so much else sound merely salon and ephemeral. Fafner is the last of the giants, who has used a magic shape-shifting helmet, the Tarnhelm, to turn himself into a dragon and has hidden himself in the depth of the forest to protect his treasure, including a magic ring which, in more intelligent hands, would give its owner dominion over the world. For Fafner, ownership is pointless – he lies on an infinite heap of gold which, in such a woodland-walks context, has no value. Fafner lives only to guard something he cannot use.

  I fear it is easy to see where this is heading. To me – needing psychiatric assistance by now on Habsburg issues – Fafner is the nationalist critique of Habsburg monarchy. The watchers around his lair are, admittedly, sociologically unconventional, as they consist of a god, two angry dwarves and a blond simpleton – but you could see Wotan as the Aristocrat, Black Alberich as the Demagogue, Mime as the Worker, and Siegfried as the hero of the dawning age who will forge a new reality through his great deeds. Imposing Siegfried on the period only works in some respects, but it is quite interesting. The Tarnhelm stands for the shape-shifting political quality of the times: from 1848 to 1871 astonishing experiments are carried out across Europe – abortive republics appear from Rome to Venice to Paris, superstates are created in Germany and Italy of a kind which would have appeared idle fantasies to an earlier generation. Everything seems up for grabs, with figures like Kossuth, Bismarck, Mazzini and Garibaldi ushering in new, conflicting realities.

  The Habsburgs are universally viewed as the stupid giant, their rule exposed to unbearable strain by events in Germany and Italy. To be fair, Franz Joseph does try to use the Tarnhelm himself to improve his situation, switching from absolutism to bits of democracy, from activism to inertia, from centralism to federalism, but almost always in ways that appear too late, cynical, and incompetent. He keeps changing shape under his magic helmet, but you can still see the side-whiskers. Oddly, it is not as though the Habsburgs do not have allies, but they turn out when put to the test to be weak and unsure, whereas the allies that really matter are all in some way alienated. Very much like the marvellous scene when Wotan tries and fails to convince Fafner that he is in mortal danger, there were many people (including even Bismarck) available with advice for the Austrians which would save them. But, like Fafner, they just lie there confusedly awaiting their fate. Once the dragon is rather easily killed, the watchers across Europe wait to find out who will end up with the magic hoard (the blond simpleton, unfortunately).

  Throughout the pan-European crisis of 1866 the Austrians continued to view themselves as a granitic pillar of moderation and consistency, baffled at the way almost everyone refused to believe them. Venetia had been under the rule of the Habsburg army since 1848 and with only the most footling concessions made to local, burning resentment. Attempts to smother everything in floral garlands, fireworks and a cheerful brass band were absurdly at odds with the reality. It was as though Vienna imagined it could portray its rule as a sort of tableau vivant of loyal and laughing peasants looked down on by a portrait of a benevolent Franz Joseph: Emperor, yes, but also father. If one could pan back a little from the tableau vivant the rustic group would be seen to be entirely surrounded by armed guards, busy censors and imprisoned bourgeois notables. Vienna (in a bind that would be endlessly repeated) could make no genuine concessions to the Italians without implying they were a special case: in other words, that Italian nationalism was real rather than the mere sick chimera of a few sallow intellectuals. This meant that many Venetian figures who hated the idea of being ruled by the alien Piedmontese felt trapped into thinking that even this would be better than being held in a state of suspended animation by the Austrians.

  Triumphant tours around Europe by Garibaldi helped fix in the liberal public mind an image (which in any event needed little fixing) of the Habsburg Empire as a backward prison camp, alienating opinion in Britain most importantly. But even on the notionally reliable reactionary right Franz Joseph was in trouble. The Russians had never forgiven the betrayal of the Crimean War and were no longer available to terrify the Hungarians. Unrest in Romania in early 1866 briefly raised the idea that the Habsbur
gs simply dump Venetia and compensate themselves by taking over Romania. This provoked the enraged response from the Russian state chancellor Gorchakov, ‘If I had the nature of a sheep, I should revolt at the very idea.’ So that got nowhere. The Italians had even offered the previous year to buy Venetia, cash, which the Habsburgs could have used. But Franz Joseph chose to consider this an almost unbelievable piece of coarseness. A further problem lay in Vienna’s refusal even to acknowledge the existence of the Kingdom of Italy, making negotiation almost impossible except through dodgy third parties, such as Napoleon III. Napoleon was torn over Venetia. In the end he was committed to nationalism and saw the conjuring up of the Kingdom of Italy as his life’s work. But he could not help being somewhat uneasy about the massive growth of Prussia’s power and his own lack of friends. Should he perhaps now become friends with Austria?

  The final disaster for Franz Joseph lay to the north, where he shared in more fully fledged form Napoleon’s worries. It was quite cruel that someone as limited as Franz Joseph should have been up against Bismarck. But again, he made his own problems. Because the rubble of minor German monarchs tended to be pro-Austrian there remained an unrealistic sense of Habsburg power over the region, a sense stoked by the slavish attitude of the Prussian kings, particularly Friedrich Wilhelm IV, who loved the idea of the Emperor as the olden-times-style senior German ruler and was still panicked about Prussia’s vulnerability, obsessing about its near extinction in the Napoleonic Wars. Bismarck had no such concerns, and saw the contradiction between Prussia’s sky-rocketing economic position and its subservience to Austria within the German Confederation. As an odd sort of conservative, Bismarck did not want to destroy the Habsburg Empire, but he saw that it was (as a multinational mess) incompatible with a German national state. If the Habsburgs disengaged from the Confederation and focused elsewhere – the Balkans looked nice – there was no reason for war, but, as in Italy, Franz Joseph’s sense of honour made backing down quite impossible. It was not surprising that Franz Joseph spent so much time obsessed with a picture-book view of older Habsburg history, focusing more on horse-breeds and heraldry than political events. Hunting through the past for a time when things were better seems a fair response when you find yourself waking up each morning still having to deal with two alligators like Napoleon III and Bismarck.

  Geographically alert readers will have noticed that the previous paragraphs have roamed around Europe hunting for possible friends for Franz Joseph and come up blank. Essentially the only ones left were a number of exiled rulers, including the ex-Duke of Modena, whose final act was to leave his enormous estate to the young Franz Ferdinand – making him, some years before he found himself Franz Joseph’s heir, extraordinarily rich. These people were of very limited real political value, but keen either to go back to their old territories or find new ones. More plausible, seemingly, were the non-Prussian German monarchs, but for years their economies had been drawn ever further into Prussia’s orbit and they were themselves in any event a mixed bag. We can be grateful to Ludwig II of Bavaria for paying the money that allowed Wagner to complete Siegfried and build his dream theatre in Bayreuth, but he preferred dressing up as ancient Germanic heroes to being a real king. George V of Hannover (who had inherited the territory instead of Queen Victoria as Salic law prevented her from doing so) was a frothing reactionary of a kind even other reactionaries would skirt round at drinks receptions. The Grand Duke of Baden was essentially pro-Prussian. All in all, this was not a very shipshape crew, and their responses to the events of 1866 mocked Vienna’s hopes.

  The year 1866 saw mayhem break out across Europe. The combination of allies, neutrals and semi-neutrals meant that actual fighting lasted only six weeks. It is a curious contrast with 1914: both were a surprise to almost everyone involved, but 1866 was militarily resolved with bewildering speed, whereas 1914 turned out to be sickeningly unresolvable. It shows the contingent and peculiar nature of major crises. Prussia had little military experience, Austria had plenty. Nobody knew then that all Austria’s allies in Germany were useless. France’s position was very unclear. The Austrians were goaded into attacking Prussia by disagreements over the Confederation and Schleswig-Holstein. But the Austrians had become used to throwing their weight around in the Confederation with the implied quiescence of Prussia and did not know that Bismarck now had fresh plans for them.

  Franz Joseph went to war with elaborate and old-fashioned intentions: to crush the Italians, humiliate the Prussians, take back Silesia (in a bonkers nod to Maria Theresa) and give one of his exiled relatives a new dukedom in the Rhineland. Critical to this plan was a secret deal with Napoleon whereby France would remain neutral and be given Venetia for his trouble, which could then be handed to the Italians. Insanely, this meant that Habsburg troops were fighting in large numbers to defend Venetia, a region which under all circumstances was now lost. They had their usual self-indulgent few weeks defeating the Italian army, but of course this meant that there were insufficient troops in the north to deal with the Prussians, a probably crucial margin.

  Part of Franz Joseph’s plan was to use the German Confederation to outlaw Prussia and so authorize the other German states to attack Prussia. Bismarck responded by declaring the Confederation finished. Prussian troops then effortlessly carved through the minor monarchies, with Saxony, Hannover and Hesse-Kassel in tatters within about forty-eight hours. After the Hannoverian soldiers surrendered, the Prussians disarmed them, gave them railway tickets home and then ended their kingdom, a territory that had been one of the key factors in European and British politics for a century and a half.

  Highly unfortunately the Austrian war effort in the north was in the hands of Ludwig von Benedek, a fine example of a Habsburg commander who froze up under his sheer incapacity. He seems to have, after the first moments of excitement, become catatonic, simply waiting for enormous Prussian armies winding through various Bohemian passes (which could have individually been knocked off before they came together) to join up and destroy him. Some four hundred and twenty thousand men crashed into each other at Königgrätz, in the largest but also dullest battle in European history. The sheer helplessness of Benedek makes it awful to read about – not from any sympathy for the Habsburgs, but from a sense that so many people died and so much trouble was taken to such pitiful ends. From the Prussians’ point of view it was more a question of traffic management than anything else once it was clear that – to their astonishment – the Austrians were just going to stay put until they were outnumbered and pinned down.

  It is very odd that an Empire that defined itself in military terms perhaps more than any other except Russia should have been so useless at fighting. All dreams of taking back Silesia or of forging a Grand Duchy of the Rhineland vanished with sensational speed. The old German Confederation was replaced by total Prussian control over most of Germany and the end of Vienna’s role in western Europe, with only a handful of southern German monarchs staying independent. Italy, despite defeat, took over Venetia through the humiliating agency of France and came a further large step closer to unification. Napoleon realized far too late that he was now left quite alone with a monstrously enhanced Prussia on his border – a fact which would be resolved with the destruction of his own regime and the abasement of France four years later. This disappearance of Austria from western Europe really is one of the great shifts in the continent’s history. It may have long ago been removed from the old Austrian Netherlands (now independent Belgium) but before 1866 there were Austrian troops up in Holstein and in the Confederal fortresses along the Rhine. All this went up in a puff of smoke and the attitude and thinking which had linked Franz Joseph back to Maximilian I and Charles V was at an end. This was hardly to be regretted, but it was startling: the Habsburg Empire was now merely a regional power, and a cowed one.

  Meanwhile the Military History Museum was gamely continuing to finish its decoration and put further white marble Habsburg military heroes in its lobby. Ever more lavish display
cases were installed, full of the notably gorgeous uniforms of the past – plus medals, sashes, battle paintings, elegant weapons, captured Turkish tents. There must have been really awkward conversations around the ticket booth by the late summer of 1866 as almost every aspect of the museum now appeared coarsely sarcastic. Last time I was wandering around the museum there was a temporary exhibition of such oddness I cannot help thinking of it as having been a dream. This featured a video of an Austrian army fashion show held in the grand hall in 2006. There, below frescoes of the frowning generals of the Thirty Years War and heraldic shields of the old Empire’s territories, was a stage draped in camouflage. With Euro-style electronic dance music playing, army recruits uneasily strutted back and forth modelling the latest range of Austrian military wear: fatigues, combat gear, skiing clothes, military bras, SAS-type clothing, plus drop-dead formal wear for that special occasion. The effect was stunning – momentarily it all seemed an outrage to end all outrages: the silliest possible spectacle, with girls and boys pouting and waving their bottoms around, making a chimp-house of the entire Military History Museum. Wake not the ghost of Prince Eugene! But by the time they sashayed off, it seemed in fact perfectly judged and in the living spirit of the Battle of Königgrätz. Here was an army whose principal use was as a sequence of bodies on which to project attractive, matching uniforms rather than to fight. This is, of course, admirable – there is nothing at all to be said for being a country good at fighting, and the rapid collapse at Königgrätz with a brisk surrender to follow prevented many more battles and deaths. The fashion show cheerfully embraced both modern Austrian neutralism and a past of upbeat incompetence.