But these different arguments against nationalism could, for obvious reasons, find no common ground with one another. In addition, it was very hard indeed not to become infected. What did it take in practice for a Hungarian liberal to agree that the majority Romanian areas of Transylvania should be handed over to Romania, or that the Serbs could help themselves to southern Hungary? Such views were mere eccentricity. The longer I have spent thinking about this book the more horror and disgust I feel for nationalism, which seems something akin to bubonic plague, but clearly such a perception only gets anyone so far. Even the most intelligent and articulate figures in Europe embraced it in some form and could no more shed it than they could shed their own skins. Once the language you used (and the newspapers and books you read) and the religion you grew up with became part of a public sphere, rather than an entirely local issue, there was no going back. Plzeň was a perfect example. After years of escalating Czech language demands, the Badeni Decrees of 1897 announced that in Bohemia all government business had to be conducted by men who could speak both Czech and German. This was an intelligent retreat from the previous all-German position, but overnight turned Germans (who generally had not learned Czech at school) into second-class citizens and Czechs (who had been obliged to learn German) into the new masters. Bohemia was torn apart by riots and boycotts and the Decrees were withdrawn. But what was the solution, if Plzeň’s richest and biggest employer and his employees were Czech? And what did this mean for Bohemian Germans, who now felt baffled and abused, and could contrast their fate with that of other German-speakers just a few miles down the road, in the Second Reich?
It was only a keen sense that without the Habsburg umbrella fratricidal hatreds could run riot that kept discipline across the Empire. Many dreamed of a nationally pure independent homeland, but many too stayed aware that the region’s tangle of ethnicities made that idea very dangerous. Even as central a figure as Tomáš Masaryk, who served in the Parliament in Vienna from the 1890s, recognized that Czech independence was unrealistic: Prague may have been overwhelmingly a Czech city, but the islands of German-speakers in places such as České Budějovice, Brno and eský Krumlov meant that even if Bohemia could somehow cut away the German-speakers along the western and northern borders (the Sudetenland) some form of compromise with the remaining Germans was necessary. It was only the cataclysm of the Great War that changed Masaryk’s thinking.
Much of the nationalist running within the Empire was made by the groups who were causing ‘trouble’ for the dominant German and Hungarian nationalities and had external sponsors. Serbia and Romania had many co-nationals within the Empire who might have had until now almost unrelated histories but who, it was suggested, should now unite with others who happened to speak the same language. Ultimately many Habsburg Serbs and Romanians would come to agree with this assessment – but until the disasters of 1917–18 most did not. There was little in the brutal way that Belgrade or Bucharest ran their affairs that made them look preferable as rulers. For example, the 1907 peasant rebellion in Romania, which ended in a bloodbath that killed some ten thousand people, gave a serious pause for thought and added to the sense (which was also felt by many Habsburg Serbs) that the national flame was perhaps in rather more competent hands inside the Empire, even with all its humiliations, than in the uncouth nation states.
It is often said that Vienna was brilliant at playing the different nationalities off against each other, manipulating them like circus animals with a mix of treats and threats. In practice, for much of the time Vienna was merely incompetent, battling to deal with a cauldron of socio-economic change and sometimes taking blind stabs at a solution (such as the Badeni Decrees), which merely caused further chaos. The situation in Bohemia, though, was characteristically difficult in a way that helped Vienna. Short of a language-based civil war to clear the province (which happened in 1938–45) there was genuinely no answer to the conundrum. In Galicia it was fun to support Ruthenian cultural expression to keep the Poles worried, but the only ‘solution’ to the region’s problems was the declaration of a total ethnic and class war – and, again, this did in due course happen. Whether these were permanently preventable is too frightening and tangled a counter-factual to have any meaning. Both the Austrian and Hungarian sides of the Empire spent inordinate amounts of time scribbling calculations of relative ethnic strengths on the backs of envelopes. The first German ethnic political parties in Vienna’s half made the ingenious suggestion that Dalmatia should be handed to the Hungarians and that Galicia should be made a separate administrative kingdom: with all those Slavs gone a German majority could then turn on and overwhelm the Czechs and Slovenes. The Hungarians, doing their own maths, were understandably just as keen not to be handed Dalmatia. It was very useful to Franz Joseph to see how many of the Slav groups owed a natural allegiance to him because of fear of what their German and Hungarian masters would do if unchecked by the genuinely supranational element in the Hofburg. But even this allegiance was a wobbly one. The Poles may have been trapped by circumstances, but what if the millions of other Slavs – Czechs, Slovaks, Ruthenes, Slovenes, Croatians, Serbs – were to feel that their oppression by the ‘master nationalities’ could be ended by another external sponsor, perhaps by Russia?
The Führer
Germans too were of course moving into ever bigger towns, with places such as Linz, Graz, Wiener Neustadt and Steyr growing as well as Vienna. Steyr is in fact an excellent parallel to Czech Plzeň: a matching but ethnically German military-industrial complex. In Steyr’s case this was based around the sprawling gun works. Local supplies of iron had meant that Steyr had produced weapons since the Middle Ages, but in the usual nineteenth-century way growth now became frenzied, with many thousands of workers turning out rifles and automatics designed by Ferdinand Ritter von Mannlicher. In the local museum there is – aside from innumerable examples of Mannlicher and his successors’ gun designs – one very remarkable object. This is a photo showing a delegation of Abyssinians visiting the Steyr Mannlicher works in around 1910. They are photographed during a machine-gun demonstration. The gun is just about to be fired and most of the photo consists of men in top hats, tailcoats, pince-nez and elaborate facial hair putting their fingers in their ears. The members of the delegation are picturesque and remote in a different way, but one Abyssinian, a young man with a cartridge belt and strikingly short hair, just happens to be staring at the camera. He is someone quite different: his level, cold glare makes him look like a visitor from the future, a 1960s African Marxist in a crowd of decayed stuffy nincompoops. This is a photo that should be on the wall of all schoolrooms where history is taught. I do not mean for anti-colonial reasons, but because of the cross-currents that swirl around the image: the terrible weapon on display being treated as a trade item; the way that the Austrian industrialists look more ‘exotic’ now than the Abyssinians; the assumption that the Abyssinians must have been patronized and even derided by their hosts, but it was the hosts who within a decade would be destroyed, with Steyr Mannlicher shut down by the Treaty of Versailles. It is interesting, too, simply to think about why the picture was taken in the first place.
German-speaking political alienation from the Habsburgs stemmed both from a general lashing out at other minority groups, as in Bohemia, and from a new working-class self-assertion in the Austrian industrial centres. A powerful narrative of German grievance began to be articulated from the 1870s onwards. When German-speakers had been splintered between numerous different European small states, being a German in the Habsburg Empire had been a badge of pride. The rise of Prussia had challenged that pride, but now the creation of the German Reich actively ridiculed it. Were Austrian Germans to become mere marginal Alpine picturesques like the Swiss?2 In Bohemia, an ancient part of the old Holy Roman Empire, German towns were becoming overrun with Czechs demanding their rights; in Carinthia it was the same with Slovenes. The Germans glared at the Hungarians’ half of the Empire, which they saw as a parasitic burden on G
erman-speaking tax-payers; and at the Jews, who seemed to be newly confident in ways that Germans increasingly were not. As Franz Joseph’s government made ever more frantic attempts to balance nationality against nationality, it found to its dismay that it was in the process shaking loose its German core.
One chilling sample of this new streak of German paranoia was Georg Ritter von Schönerer, an Austrian landowner who, like many, was traumatized by the Battle of Königgrätz and came to worship Bismarck, feeling that Germans trapped within the Habsburg Empire should break free of Franz Joseph’s dead hand and unite with their fellows. Schönerer was a terrifying figure: racked with hatred for the Habsburgs, for the Catholic Church that backed them up, for Czechs who should know their place, for liberals, for socialists – and above all for Jews. As head of the Pan-German Party and an MP he was a key figure in fuelling the violent loathings that made the Parliament in Vienna into a dysfunctional shambles, destroying any sense of rational debate or give-and-take. He invented the ‘Heil’ greeting and had the title of ‘Führer’ bestowed on him by his followers. He saw himself as the protector of all Germans, succeeded in getting a prime minister dismissed and created for German-speakers their own fangs and paranoia quite as bad as anything offered by other linguistic groups.
Schönerer was too haughtily aristocratic to be a mass figure, but he did not need to be as he was trumped by ‘Handsome Karl’, Karl Lueger, the Mayor of Vienna. He lacked Schönerer’s eccentricity, and was ostentatiously pro-Habsburg and a populist of genius. More than anyone in the pre-War world he seized the opportunities provided by the new mega-cities, working to make Vienna a bearable place for its hundreds of thousands of new inhabitants through vast waterworks and tram systems. Much of what still makes Vienna work is thanks to Lueger. From 1897 to his death in 1910 he dominated the city. He was devout, a great organizer, adored by the Germans and nearly as anti-Semitic as Schönerer – whose campaign to ban the arrival of more Jews in Vienna he had supported in the 1880s.
While I am writing this there is a campaign to rename the road now called the Doktor-Karl-Lueger-Ring. Lueger once referred to the Jews as ‘beasts of prey in human form’, said that wolves, leopards and tigers were closer to humans than Jews, and agreed that a good solution to the ‘Jewish problem’ would be to put them all on a big ship and sink them at sea. It does not seem too uncontroversial to say that the nature of these comments probably trumps his role in improving Vienna’s sanitation systems. It is impossible not to feel that by walking on ‘his’ section of the Ring, or by looking up at his grand statue facing the Stadtpark you are effectively being forced to endorse him.
Schönerer and Lueger disagreed on many issues but between them developed a particular model for Austrian German politics and a separate ethnic awareness that hardly existed before. Until then, to be a German inhabitant of the Empire was an undefined and effortless tag, as it had always been. To be a German anywhere in the Empire had given certain, seemingly natural privileges and implied particular forms of organization. Other ‘races’ suffered from religious disabilities, illiteracy or poverty in ways that kept them below and separate. As the nineteenth century progressed this ceased to be true, with groups who had been mere labourers or serfs or shut out from most professions suddenly feeling just as entitled and articulate, just as well-dressed and culturally astute as their former masters. In 1908 the teenaged Adolf Hitler arrived in Vienna, one of many thousands of badly off German-speakers from Upper Austria looking to the big city to find their fortunes.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The sheep and the melons » Elves, caryatids, lots of allegorical girls » Monuments to a vanished past » Young Poland
The sheep and the melons
At numerous points while writing this book I have had real difficulty believing my luck. Despite ludicrous setbacks, humiliations and the curse of my language incompetence, I had a motive and excuse to visit many miraculous spots. I never felt this more strongly than in the central Romanian city of Sibiu.
Sibiu is a classic ‘Saxon’ foundation under the protection of the Hungarian kings, ruled under a German legal code (‘Iglau law’) which defined the settlers’ obligations and privileges. As Hermannstadt it became a major German settlement, and only Braşov was further east. In few places is there still such a strong sense of this past, with its colossal, glowering Saxon church, its Upper Town on a great block of rock and its Lower Town with its crooked and sunless streets (where I stayed in a small guest-house and each morning seemed a new gift as I would step out into what appeared to be one of the Expressionist sets from Paul Wegener’s movie The Golem). Battered watchtowers, like brick and wood prototypes of the Martian Tripods in The War of the Worlds, still stand sentinel, looking out towards the mountains for long-vanished Wallachian and Turkish enemies, and street after street is crowded with architecturally chaotic but somehow inspired buildings.
That Sibiu changed in the first half of the twentieth century from a south-eastern Hungarian border town to a central Romanian one is just one small example of the horrible wrenches experienced by the inhabitants of the Empire. The dominant group in Sibiu, the Saxons, like all dominant groups, claimed some immemorial stability and social order, using history to shore up their unique ownership of the town since the fifteenth century or earlier. This was untrue, as Sibiu’s past was, as one would imagine from its location, an absolutely chaotic skein of revolts, battles, convulsions, plagues and religious tension. But perhaps until the mid-nineteenth century it could still broadly be said that Sibiu was a German-speaking town roughly fulfilling its old function as a guild-based entrepôt, making and circulating things and services, still guarding against Wallachia, then under an uneasy mix of Ottoman and Russian rule and potentially in the military front line again after the Crimean War broke out in 1853.
What began to happen in the later nineteenth century in Sibiu, as in hundreds of other places across the Empire, was a demographic revolution. It seems so important somehow for Europeans to imagine themselves as stolid, immobile and timeless – and yet almost everywhere people were on the move. A special case has always been made for sheepishly acknowledging that millions of European fellow countrymen were hot-footing to port cities to head off to settlement colonies, but there is a blankness about the same process when it happened within the continent. A marvellous (and ginormous) history of Europe from 1850 to 1950 or so might just completely ignore kings and queens and be filled with Irish building London, Neapolitans heading to Lombard factories and Slavic and Romanian peasants heading for Habsburg towns. The same push-and-pull that made uprooting to the Americas or the Pacific plausible for millions also drove an internal mass movement. Sibiu was always small but its size nonetheless ballooned, from some thirteen thousand people in 1850 to nearly thirty thousand by 1900. The ethnic composition changed, with the Saxon population nearly doubling, but the Romanian more than tripling. In the same period a small Hungarian population of fewer than one thousand grew to nearly six thousand. In miniature therefore Sibiu laid out the almost impossible problems facing forms of governance in the Empire. By luck Sibiu, as part of Transylvania, was ruled directly by Vienna into the 1860s when democratic (or at least mildly democratic) elections were proclaimed in 1861 to be held in 1863.
The year 1861 turned out to be the crucial year for Romanians. In the deal that would be done in 1867 to create Austria-Hungary, Transylvania was assigned to the Hungarians. But by 1867 this scheme was too late – the Romanians had found a political voice and objected violently to being handed over to their new Hungarian overlords. In 1861 the remarkable Transylvanian Association for Romanian Literature and the Culture of the Romanian People (ASTRA) was founded in Sibiu. It started from an extremely low base in Transylvania, but with the most simple (and therefore exciting) tasks to be done – schooling in Romanian, the establishment of a basic Romanian literature and the creation of a separate Romanian economic sphere away from German or Hungarian concerns. The amazing polymath George Bariţ was a pe
rfect example of this generation of Romanians, working on the first Romanian encyclopaedia, teaching, writing, energizing, going to Vienna to represent his constituency before 1867 blocked that off – and working first as secretary and then as president of ASTRA.
Bariţ was much hated by Budapest as a key figure in pleas to Vienna not to put Transylvania under Hungarian rule, but figures like him multiplied uncontrollably and in 1892 the great Transylvanian Memorandum was sent to Franz Joseph asking for equal Romanian rights. The absolute failure of this appeal (which Franz Joseph refused to even read) and the imprisonment by the enraged Hungarians of most of those who signed it showed the unresolvable nightmare of ethnic entanglement now unfolding. With the wretched ease of hindsight it is obvious the land-grab of 1867 was a terrible mistake for Hungary. Hypnotized by visions of some ancient medieval state and by apocalyptic fears of their own national extinction the Hungarians tried to create a state which was even bigger than Italy and failed. The many Hungarians who lived in Transylvania were in incoherent blocks that could not be put together into anything defensible. Even worse, they were in any event used to living under diverse regimes and with strange neighbours, so even fellow Hungarians could not be relied on in practice to view Budapest’s rule as a plus.
This hindsight is useless and even by 1867 it cannot have been clear how the pace of change would crush everyone. We can now see that ASTRA and its associates were going to be important, but it would have required a strange sort of genius to have understood this at the time – some schools and a little Romanian-owned paper-mill were not something to warn the Chancelleries of Europe about. But events moved on. By 1900 the neighbouring Kingdom of Romania was a substantial, fully independent state and providing a welcoming home for any Transylvanian Romanians fleeing their Hungarian overlords. And within Sibiu alone Romanians had come a long way from being a semi-literate and impoverished group spurned or used casually by Saxons and Hungarians alike. Indeed ASTRA had inspired millions of Romanians both inside and outside the Empire. This was the result of Bariţ’s activism but also of the actions of his great ASTRA contemporary Andrei Şaguna. A monk and bishop, he had through relentless petitioning and planning (and motivated in part by a total hatred of Hungarians, a hatred which was warmly reciprocated) gained official recognition in 1864, with only three years to go before the shift to Budapest rule, of the independent Romanian Orthodox Church. By 1900 the results were clear in Sibiu, with building proceeding on an ASTRA museum and on a spectacularly beautiful Romanian Orthodox Cathedral, which now forms part of a sort of religious Restaurant Row, with almost all conceivable denominations having a major church within about five minutes’ walk of one another.
Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe Page 43
