Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

by Winder, Simon

  Arminius Vámbéry was a similarly modest figure, brought up in extreme poverty and hardship in northern Hungary but blessed with an uncanny facility for languages. Inspired by the Arabian Nights and also by the same Hungarian fascination with their ever more nebulous homeland, he took the startling decision while working as a tutor in Istanbul to disguise himself as a mendicant Sunni dervish and, using his ability to soak up foreign tongues, to visit the almost unknown emirates and khanates of Central Asia. So in 1861 he set out on his extraordinary journey, recounted later in one of the greatest of all nineteenth-century travel books, The Life and Adventures. This inexhaustibly marvellous, brilliantly lit and funny book is a sort of hyperpuissance of Orientalism – earthquakes, scorpions, fatal salt bogs, cruel khans and turquoise-mines. By the time he encounters a group of Turkmen raiders in Khiva emptying out bags of human heads and carefully collecting their dockets from the khan’s clerk so they could cash them in for particularly gorgeous silk robes (‘the suit of eight heads’, ‘the suit of twelve heads’, etc.), it is all getting almost too much. As he travels by camel over the Tigerland Plateau, herds of thousands of wild asses raise great clouds of dust, while in the immense central deserts travel is only made possible by the Pole Star, known in the region as the ‘Iron Peg’.

  Vámbéry never went back to Central Asia and spent the rest of his long life in Budapest promoting the idea that Hungarian and the Turkic languages share a common origin – an idea not generally viewed with favour by most philologists. It was however attractive in bolstering Magyar self-identification with Central Asia and providing fresh grounds for the burgeoning relationship between Budapest and first Ottoman and then Kemalist Turkey, a relationship which set aside centuries of mutual hatred in favour of a more nurturing, shared hatred for the Russians. This cult of Central Asia (‘Turanism’) was to rebound somewhat by refining a magnificent weapon for the Romanians, who went on entertainingly about the Magyars being merely ‘Asia’s discharged magnates’, whereas they were themselves the pure outpourings of Trajan’s centurions’ loins and the true gatekeepers of European civilization. This unhelpful debate has never been resolved.

  The world of the khanates described by Vámbéry has a very specifically Magyar flavour – he compares the Oxus to the Danube, he compares the flat, mirage-bewitched landscape near Isfahan to the Hungarian Great Plain, he seems much more excited about the novelty of the sea than a British writer would. Above all, in a highly self-conscious way, his book can now be read to describe a world rapidly vanishing in both Central Europe and Central Asia in which human communities were constrained by the capabilities of animals – the distance an animal can be ridden without food or water – a world of remote inns, bandits, chronic shortages and purely local knowledge. As telegraphs, rails, guidebooks and maps spread over the Earth, these constrained and semi-distinct environments disappeared, whether in the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria or the Emirate of Bokhara. Vámbéry got to Central Asia just in time. Only ten years after he left, Khiva fell to a Russian army, beginning a long and miserable association with Tsarist and Communist forces which has left the region a degraded ecological catastrophe.

  There is a great moment in the book where in a northern Persian village, Vámbéry, clothed in rags and muttering extracts from the Koran in his habitual dervish disguise, realizes that two locals are chatting about how he is obviously just a foreigner dressed up. Later on, in Herat, he is face to face with the sixteen-year-old Afghan ruler of the city, who prowls around him, swearing that he is an Englishman. Vámbéry is lucky to be there so early in the proceedings and to have such bizarre powers of dissimulation that he could stare down the prince, bamboozling him with Islamic proverbs. A generation later the whole place was so crawling with British spies that, in a sandy version of The Man Who Was Thursday, entire caravanserai would have been filled with walnut-juiced fake mendicant dervishes from different parts of the army or secret service, all offering each other pious blessings and engaged in a continual round of ritual ablutions, when in reality the whole lot were near neighbours back in Surrey.

  Places like Herat became the front line in a cold war between Russia and Britain, not one that featured Hungary notably. This gives a relatively unpolitical, cultural purity to Vámbéry’s Orientalism (although he was paid by the British to support their position, a fact that only came to light in 2005) and confuses the argument that Orientalism was simply a means of imperialistic manipulation and control over the East. For Austria-Hungary the stakes on the Oxus could not have been lower, but the importance of this purely cultural Orient to Central Europe was considerable. Of course it could always be just a minor grace note, such as Franz Ferdinand’s Turkishly decorated ‘harem room’ at Konopiště Castle, where he used to hang around smoking with nice friends such as Admiral von Tirpitz and Kaiser Wilhelm, rather than using it for the purposes that the room’s name suggests (unlikely, given his churchy uxoriousness). But it becomes a sort of core blizzard of sensuality and fatalism for late-Habsburg composers, most importantly through the renderings of Persian and Chinese verse by the German poet Hans Bethge, who provided the texts for Mahler’s Song of the Earth, Szymanowski’s Symphony No. 3 and Love Songs of Hafiz,1 Schoenberg’s Four Pieces for Mixed Chorus, Webern’s ‘In der Fremde’ – the list goes on and on. There is also Béla Balázs’s adorable collection of fabricated Chinese fairy tales, The Cloak of Dreams, packed with magic parasols, screaming skulls and fish made from silver which make a sound like tiny silver bells as they brush against each other in their pond. But that’s quite enough.

  I should not leave this topic though without mentioning Aurel Stein. Although he worked for the British Empire he was the acme of Central European engagement in Central Asia. A tiny bachelor Hungarian Jewish convert from Budapest, he was inspired by tales of Csoma de Kőrös and Vámbéry to march into the heart of what he winningly called Desert Cathay. There is a marvellous photo in the British Museum of his party heading off across the murderous Taklamakan Desert, all sand dunes, eerie shadows, muted heroism and camels laden with dubious old loot. He tracked back and forth over some twenty-five thousand miles during his long and restless life, battling with opium-addled diggers and the horrible spiders of the Turfan Depression, losing toes to frostbite in the Kun Lun Mountains (and only saved from losing a leg by the adventitious appearance of a Moravian missionary doctor in Leh) while discovering all manner of ancient Chinese wonders, abandoned many centuries earlier after battles with nomad raiders. Stein died in Kabul aged eighty-two while planning yet another Silk Road expedition. He was perhaps the greatest of all the Hungarians who failed to come up with any evidence for their national origins, but nonetheless did amazing things for us all.

  Refusals

  The Habsburgs always had to deal with a powerful strand within their Empire not so much of dislike of their rule but resolute indifference. There was the day-to-day refusal of many peasants to see any Imperial official as anything other than a boring menace, the sense that any outsider was bad news. This remains true today. I once chatted to a Transylvanian Székely who said how in their entirely Hungarian-speaking town anybody heard talking in Romanian was assumed to be visiting purely to defraud them or make life worse in some way. This must always have been true all over the Empire as German- or Hungarian-speaking officials fanned out, investigating recruitment or taxation or farming methods and leaving a trail of misery behind them.

  An extreme variant on the wish to be left alone came from the more severe monastic contemplative orders such as the Trappists and Camaldolese. I have had a soft spot for the former since I found myself for several years in a row selling books at a medieval studies conference in Michigan with the booth next to mine occupied by a couple of cheerful figures from the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky who sold the bourbon fudge which the Trappists specialized in – a beautifully localized adaptation both to the state they were based in (the bourbon) and to the vow of virtual silence (the fudge). This idea of a great and unbroken s
equence of prayer, stretching out over centuries and quite independent of secular vanities, was a profound challenge to any ruler and one of the reasons Joseph II stamped out such groups as ‘unproductive’: if the purpose of living within a specific geographical space was to channel resources to the centre for the greater glory and security of the state then there could be no room for Trappism. The magnificent Camaldolese abbey outside Kraków only survives today because the Habsburgs absorbed the region in 1846 and by then no longer shared Joseph II’s harsh vision.

  A larger group was the Hutterites, who originated in the Tyrol during the Reformation and whose leader, Jakob Hutter, was burned at the stake in Innsbruck in 1536. They managed both to be heretical in their beliefs and utterly enraging to any form of authority – refusing to accept orders, wear uniforms or even hold a weapon. Their communal existence, impervious to Habsburg authority, drove them first to Moravia, then to Transylvania, occasionally protected but mostly hounded. They found themselves by the mid-nineteenth century on the Nogai Steppe before sensibly having a rethink and heading to the American and Canadian prairies, where they have thrived ever since, still speaking their antique Tyrolean German.

  A more powerful affront to the Habsburgs lay in the Hungarian minor nobility, who obsessively pursued their right to hunt, drink and reproduce free of wider obligation across enormous areas of land. These local landowners had a coherent and appealing ideology, based around resistance to Habsburg rule. They gloried in great earlier revolts, viewing Franz Joseph as illegitimate (‘the Hangman’ as he was often referred to for his method of killing the Hungarian generals at Arad in 1849) and prepared to be ornery, tiresome and lazy in a way which can only be admired. There are so many great examples. György Faludy has a fine one in his memoir My Happy Days in Hell of the pre-War Hungarian petty seigneur who when the first snow fell would send his coach down into the village to collect his three favourite card-players and then not let them go until the spring thaw arrived. It is easy to see why the central administration was driven mad by these people’s refusal to give a fig about the wider world, but there is no particular reason why we should either share that annoyance or be personally upset about the tatty nature of the Habsburg tax base.

  By a long way the most powerful critique of the Habsburgs lay with the Jews. For much of the course of the Empire, Habsburg attitudes towards the Jews and Jewish attitudes to their home form a sort of Möbius strip with both sides ascribing to the other views and ideas which enforced their own world ideology. The Ḥatam Sofer of Bratislava in the early nineteenth century laid out with crushing clarity the Jews’ position: that they were ruled over by ‘the abomination of the land’, that they were the ‘captives of the war of destruction’ and that any form of innovation in behaviour was forbidden, to the point that any Jew who strayed was simply no longer a Jew but an atheist. Much of this position is still maintained by the Hasidim – that suffering purges sin and that something even as simple as a change of dress style can unravel everything.

  All Habsburg legislation in relation to the Jews was carried out effectively without reference to their needs or any real knowledge of their ideas. Maria Theresa could be anti-Semitic and obsessed, even as she removed some legal disabilities, with such issues as what action a Jew must take if he finds himself in the street as a procession of the Host goes by. Joseph II was impatient with this stuff but, as with his anti-contemplative legislation, his own improvement of the Jews’ lot was unconcerned with their welfare but obsessed with their becoming ‘good citizens’. Each stage in Jewish emancipation was pushed by bureaucratic efficiency and not by liberalism.

  The traditional Jewish view was that they were marooned in the barbaric, vainglorious and hypocritical shambles of Central Europe by God as atonement for past sins. It was correct to acknowledge the rulers who protected them, but this implied not a peep of endorsement for their laughable values. Some of Joseph II’s plans were therefore deeply threatening. If the root of Jewish survival was the maintenance of strict behaviour patterns over many generations then his ‘rationalist’ insistence that book-keeping and invoicing had to be in German rather than Yiddish or Hebrew raised terrible questions. Each removal of blocks on Jewish activity was therefore a snare – Jewish children being allowed to go to school was on the face of it an improvement, but as those schools were ostentatiously Christian in their ideology they were simply a means of destroying Jewish solidarity.

  The Partitions of Poland meant the transfer of most of Europe’s Jewish population from Poland to the Prussian, Habsburg and Russian states. The great majority fell to Russia, which had no tradition of dealing with Jews and proceeded to make a disgusting nightmare of ‘the Pale’. Berlin and Vienna had long experience with Jewish populations and simply extended their own more or less disreputable ways of dealing with them. Prussian Jews were unlucky enough to have the ridiculously low-grade Friedrich Wilhelm III, a mystical and babyish Christian who once shut down an experimental new synagogue in Berlin (which allowed men and women to sit in the same space) on the grounds that if Judaism lost its aura of irrational obscurantism it might become attractive as a faith. This binary atmosphere – either pressure on Prussian Jews to become German-speaking Prussians or the Russian view that Jews were irretrievably alien – made the Habsburg experience relatively sane.

  As the nineteenth century proceeded the old views of the Ḥatam Sofer seemed ever less plausible to many Jews in much of the Empire. The sheer poverty and remoteness of the Jewish towns on the eastern side of the Carpathians kept them relatively traditional, but as the last serious disabilities were knocked away, the world of the mainstream became irresistible. By the 1880s a quarter of Vienna-ruled Jews could speak German and over half of Budapest-ruled Jews could speak Hungarian. They became part of the great population boom and resultant rush to the cities over the century’s last decades. The scramble that so inflated the populations of Vienna and Budapest was of course mainly made up of non-Jews, but the novelty of Jews being released from the sidelines and benefiting particularly from the great boom of the period in professions previously those of a tiny group (medicine, journalism, banking) made them conspicuous. The Ḥatam Sofer’s descendants viewed these men and women as no longer Jews: some happily agreed with this view, particularly those who drifted towards socialism, but the majority saw themselves as no less Jewish than those still trapped in the yeshiva.

  Habsburg Jews as part of a multinational state were by definition better protected than those in Germany and Russia as there could be no state ideology that could plausibly discriminate more against them than many other groups. It was unthinkable in the other empires for Jews to become army officers, but there were thousands of Jewish army officers in the Habsburg forces. The final period of the Habsburg Empire was famously dominated by the achievement of its Jewish subjects – it seems boring to come up with the usual list, but a meaningful or cherishable European civilization cannot be imagined without them. Sigmund Freud’s parents moving from Galicia to Moravia then to Leipzig then to Vienna stands in for countless others. In the history of modernism, I particularly like the idea that James Joyce made Leopold Bloom’s father a ‘perpetrator of frauds’ from Szombathely.

  Even in the relatively benign Empire however there is no point at which there was anything like stability, and the ghost of Maria Theresa insisting that Jews stay indoors on Sunday out of shame at being Christ’s murderers was never dispelled. The massive surviving late-nineteenth-century synagogues in the Empire, most famously the Great Synagogue in Plzeň and the Dohány Street Synagogue in Budapest, have so many powerful and disturbing associations that visiting them is not really an aesthetic experience. But in as much as it can be, they are clearly victims of the same woeful gigantic industrial eclecticism as the museums and opera houses scattered across the Empire in the same decades. The two thousand Jews of Plzeň had the indignity of constant interference in the design of their synagogue to ensure it was as ‘Oriental’ as possible, to make it quite c
lear it could in no sense be confused with a Christian place of worship, with an early design turned down for having insufficiently exotic towers.

  This insistence on difference kept bubbling up in frightening ways. A notorious case was the revival of the blood libel in 1882 in the Hungarian village of Tiszaeszlár, where local Jews were accused of abducting a Christian peasant girl called Eszter Solymosi and getting a kosher butcher to kill her, draining her blood into a bowl for use in Sabbath matzos. The defendants were eventually let go on the straightforward grounds that there was no evidence (the girl was eventually found drowned in the river), but the media, including disturbing numbers of Catholic priests, had whipped up an anti-Semitic frenzy and there were attacks on Jews across Hungary. Scarcely credibly, at the time of my writing the far-Right Jobbik party have been promoting a cult of Eszter Solymosi’s grave and raising questions about what really happened to her in the Hungarian Parliament. The more we pride ourselves on being intelligent and thoughtful the more we turn out to be Morlocks.

  Jewish unease within the Empire was stoked by the Tiszaeszlár scandal, but at least there was a widespread official recoil from its repulsive imbecility. This did not mean Jews could feel that they stood on stable ground. The move to assimilate meant assimilation through speaking German or Hungarian, the ‘master languages’, and this meant that in a world of ever more unhinged nationalism Jews became a particular focus of hatred for politicians and demagogues pushing a Slovak, Romanian, etc. agenda, while at the same time not appeasing German or Hungarian Christian anti-Semitism. Outside the Empire horrible events filled the newspapers. Most immediately frightening were stories from Romania, where the government decided that Jews, like Gypsies, were by definition not Romanian. With the end of international supervision after 1878 the Romanians proceeded with violence, fraud and intimidation on a scale that provoked a mass exodus, with some sixty-seven thousand Jews (a quarter of the entire population) leaving for the USA. The vastly larger Jewish population in Russia was subject to repeated and ferocious violence, with thousands dead. The Empire became an island of relative decency, but with poverty as much as anti-Semitism driving huge numbers of Jews out of Galicia to the USA and elsewhere. Assimilation proved enormously successful for many, but every decade provided its own frights and challenges for Jews throughout the Empire, and nobody could assume any genuine, lasting normality.