Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

by Winder, Simon

  These amazing museums are the winding-up of the great collections – a final public presentation of his ancestors’ manias, from Ferdinand of Tirol’s heroic armours to Franz I’s rocks and ammonites. This relentless cataloguing and displaying, this fixing onto walls of specific sequences of pictures by Rubens or of death’s head hawkmoths, was a pan-European obsession in the nineteenth century. The sheer, wearying vastness of corridor after corridor and the bombastic marbled framework adds to a sense of stuffy backwardness, but the display process was actually revolutionary. Everything that had once been private or restricted was now on public display. Rudolf II’s mania for Spranger’s porny Roman goddesses, Ferdinand II’s devotion to big altarpieces, sudden gusts of oology, a bouquet of flowers made from precious stones given to Franz I by Maria Theresa – these all now became part of public sensibility. This was a dizzying sea-change matching and entangled with other later-nineteenth-century issues such as loss of faith, or the spread of literacy and electricity which, when taken as a complete package, make the changes we are undergoing in the early twenty-first century seem comically trivial.

  The floridity of these buildings has always been used as exhibit A in suggesting a bogus and cloying past from which the great experimenters of the fin de siècle were trying to tear themselves. Perhaps the acme of this is the Musikverein in Vienna, which may have miraculous acoustics but is also a temple to the bad taste of the 1860s. While half enjoying a Schubert concert there recently, I was frequently distracted trying to imagine the origins of the nude female caryatids that line the walls. These gold oddities are not exactly erotic, as from the waist down they are mere tapered plinths. Their identical faces are unnerving too. But they are chiefly striking for their breasts, and I would love to have access to the minutes of the working committee for the Musikverein at which these breasts must have been discussed. Presumably, once the reckless and by no means in-the-bag decision to have nude female caryatids lining a public building had been taken, there must have been a number of awkward debates about the breasts, with different factions arguing for different levels of realism, heft and enjoyableness, and concerns raised as to how much they might be a distraction at Brahms’s next recital. The end result was a fatal compromise whereby the breasts stayed, but only as rather odd cone shapes. Still, the agreeably starchy atmosphere of Vienna’s temple to music is undoubtedly enhanced by rows of gold breasts dominating the interior. If a concert there was filmed in the spirit of a 1920s surrealist experiment, with a bearded man in white tie crazily pounding away at a piano while row upon row of immobile haute bourgeois gawp and yawn and sex-doll-like caryatids loom above them, it would have seemed authentically avant-garde – and yet the whole place could not be more High Victorian.

  The confusion of motive and motif in the Musikverein represents a sort of dam-burst for Imperial taste throughout its delirious final half-century. The Empire almost disappeared under naked female allegorical statues representing Plenty, Harvest, Drama, Justice and a variety of river systems. Wandering the streets of Lviv today perhaps the chief hazard is being hit by a falling piece of allegorical woman. Almost every pediment or turret has a tribute to the limber models and girlfriends of late-nineteenth-century sculptors, who must have been working on an industrial scale. City budgets today which should go on hospitals or roads must presumably be redirected to the near-hopeless task of keeping under safe repair the complex stone coiffeurs and sternly pointing fingers of the Spirit of Galicia or Industry Allied to Art. It is odd that a century associated with repression, hypocrisy and buttoned-down reserve should have left behind it such a nubile trail. This atmosphere of thinly veiled sex-put-to-allegorical-use trailed its way into everything, always with the same weakly insistent Classical gloss. Painters like Hans Makart created an endless sequence of nauseating, lurid canvases of a kind which seem to mock all the art traditions of the past, and can hardly be looked at now, the pigment equivalent of the massive Ring buildings. He can easily be seen as a beaux-arts dinosaur, but he was hugely popular and the break between Makart and later modernist heroes is much less clean than one would hope.

  There is a fun argument – which seems plausible to me – that there must have been a highly secret group who agreed that, from 1860 or so, all public commissions in the Empire would be for incredibly lavish, hot-house and over-ornate buildings, statues and frescoes. These would end up putting such overwhelming intellectual and aesthetic pressure on the Empire’s genuinely creative artists that modernism would be forced into existence, the result of a near-cosmic aesthetic struggle-session whereby if you heaped up so many tons of malachite and/or allegorical girls representing the Vistula River, Art would suddenly break through to the other side. This secret group has never admitted its existence, but if the Empire ends up as the truest home of the clean modernist line, the flat roof and the plain chair then, wandering around its cities today, it seems easy to see why. Branches of the group provided valuable help in places like Berlin and Brussels, where there is a similar sense of huge, heaped-up, flaccid, wretched buildings (Berlin Cathedral!), but the Habsburg Empire is without doubt its headquarters.

  This is where we are beset by the demons of what-we-now-know. It is possible to see a heavy and discredited official Imperial culture undermined by end-of-century mischief-makers, a clean demarcation between ‘Victorian’ and ‘modern’, but if we do so we have merely inherited the self-flattering rhetoric of the period. We see these objects because they are all that remains of a culture made up as much of conversation, reading the newspaper, family visits, public processions, preparing food, attending church or temple. We have almost no access to the sensibilities that might have been moved to helplessness by a Wolf song or Rilke poem, but which may have been equally or more engaged by the performance of a specific actor, or by Easter mass or by news of the Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia. It was these unknowable sensibilities that cross-hatched over this whole era, providing all kinds of continuities, both among patrons and among artists. In a way, many of the great works of the Empire’s final period are directly and straightforwardly the descendants of Makart’s bacchanaliae and the decorations of the Musikverein. Klimt was taught by Makart and while his manner is his own, much of his subject matter and approach could not be more old-fashioned. Mahler’s symphonies are a musical equivalent of the Ring buildings, with their demand for Imperial levels of resource (and Mahler himself of course spent most of his life in the employ of the court). And if Makart had lived long enough he would have been entirely in favour of removing the ban from Mahler’s conducting Salome at the Hofoper, as it provided just the kind of sex-death spectacle long familiar to its fans in other forms. Even Freud’s revolutionary work in that sense has its roots deep in Habsburg culture, with the human mind revealed as a previously unguessed-at mass of richly decorated surfaces, hidden props and repaintings.

  I do not mean to suggest here a sort of hyper-conservatism where all change is merely minor adaptation – but even figures such as Webern or Schoenberg who live and die by being new can be seen, in their different religious interests, their demands on their musicians and on their audiences, as enshrining a sort of elaborate refinement that is almost camply backward. So much of the great artistic life of Vienna, Budapest and Prague consisted of ‘luxury modernism’ reliant on small groups of patrons quite as pettish and weird as any of their predecessors. We are today looking at scraps which survive because of the material they are made from: the infinitely reproducible book or music score, the ability to turn Klimt’s pictures into posters, drinks mats, key-fobs, paper napkins. These are allied to the survival of specific spaces and skills: museums, publishers, printers, musicians who have at different points in the twentieth century been acutely constrained, twisted and censored across much of the former Empire. The world of this culture’s original audience – complex, multilingual, religiously diverse, experimental and self-confident – has vanished under annihilating hammer-blows. It was more silly, self-contradictory, occasional
ly mediocre and in many ways provincial (for every eye across Europe focused on Vienna, a thousand must have been focused on Paris), with the clear artistic shape we can see now very unclear then. Klimt’s and Schiele’s real fame was posthumous, indeed even post-1945. During Mahler’s lifetime many Viennese lovers of music admired him far more as a conductor and impresario than as a composer, but he was also hated by many, for his arrogance and bombast, and as a Jew, a Jew destroying German music. Mahler and Wolf between them are two of the last and greatest enactors of the love affair between the outer rim of German-speakers and the German heartland – as magician-setters of poems by the Franconian Rückert, the Frankfurter Goethe, the Silesian Eichendorff and the Swabian Mörike. Their settings of these poets alone make Mahler and Wolf figures who in my own, somewhat skew-whiff pantheon, have special places right at the top. But the meaning of being a German and a Slovenian for Wolf and a German and a Moravian and a Jew for Mahler was becoming ever more problematic, and had implications from which both men were sheltered only by their premature deaths.

  Monuments to a vanished past

  The Habsburgs used a very successful series of strategies to keep everything together. They engulfed nationalism in what could be thought of as ‘threatening niceness’ – concessions, co-option, investment, occasional arrests and lots and lots of barracks. The traditional bulging-eyed, heavily uniformed philistinism of much of the court and government became ever more accentuated. This created an odd sort of protective cover for all sorts of remarkable artistic and intellectual experiment, with the clashing, overlapping national groups all scoring off each other, but in a mutually defeating way. The authorities were rather like those Australian scientists who kept on importing new creatures to eat pests, which in turn became new pests – each clever manipulation and promotion of an ethnic or religious group scuppered the most immediate threat, and then created a fresh problem. By 1914 it is fair to say that the air was heavy with irrationality, but there was little to suggest that the Habsburgs were played out. Mischievous or aggressive public symbolism could be threatening, but it was all a long way from a genuine crisis like that of 1848, and without the War it could have gone on for many years. At no point were Habsburg security forces stretched and, given the monsters that were about to emerge from their caves, it is unsurprising that these decades appear now as a sort of Arcadia.

  Within their short period of triumph, from 1867 to 1914, the Hungarians ran amok. This atmosphere is still preserved in the wonderful group of buildings in Budapest from the 1890s, built for the delirious celebration of one thousand years of the Hungarians in Europe. The enormous Millennium Monument features a group of charismatic statues of shaggy chieftains on their horses, a riot of barbaric yet noble splendour. The arrival of the Magyars is shown as providential, as Central Asian fighting men, who are also intensely European, yet also moustachioed sort of Red Indians, reaching the Promised Land. This is quite as chiliastic and extreme a vision as Herzl’s, and definitely has little to do with Habsburg ideas about sharing nicely. In a classic example of how Franz Joseph milked this sort of nuttiness, he placed himself at the heart of celebrations that by definition had a heavy undertow of anti-Habsburg sentiment; if only because these established a prior claim and a separate Magyar trajectory. It was partly Franz Joseph’s sheer lack of imagination, but also cunning policy, that he ignored potential insults and took all the fur-and-antler flummery of the Hungarian aristocrats as toothless pageant rather than fiery nationalistic reproach. The Millennium Monument has been much hacked about, as would be expected of such a politically freighted site. It used to have some Habsburg statues but these were taken down and replaced with a sequence of great Hungarian leaders culminating with Kossuth – all figures who would not have allowed a Habsburg even to feed their dog. The Vajdahunyad Castle next to the Monument carries on the same theme: a group of replicas of famous Hungarian buildings from around their territory brought together and rebuilt. This was a temporary, wooden exhibition, but its popularity was so huge that it was rebuilt in stone with some of the flavour of a proto-Disneyland. The centrepiece is a copy of the Romanesque church at Ják – much more convenient and snug than the original and with the clear message of Hungary as a beacon for Christianity, just as the repro bits of Transylvanian castle show it as the shield of Christianity. These monuments are now in many ways painful to look at as Hungarians have had such a grim time since this period of exuberance. But at least we can now enjoy them just as witty and bonkers works of art rather than as pieces of heavy chauvinism.

  For the Austrian ‘half’ there is similarly no sense at all of restraint or retreat in the Empire’s last decades. The small, remote province of Bukovina had been picked up as a negotiating thank-you present from the Ottomans in 1775 and was a shambles of mutually antagonist minority groups held together by a Vienna-backed hierarchy. Intelligent concessions and divide-and-rule kept Bukovina going and created pro-Austrian groups who clung together out of fear of the obvious alternative rulers on the province’s borders: Russia and Romania. The capital, Czernowitz, received the standard full kit: electric tramways, an opera house, a whole lot of art nouveau, a bust of Schiller and a comically dreary Austria Monument, put up in 1875 to mark a century since the Turks ceded the territory, and featuring a statue of a lumpy woman with an ivy-entwined sword and a palm-leaf. When the Romanians invaded in 1918 the Austria Monument bit the dust – but its torso was rediscovered in 2003, with copies being sent across Europe as a symbol of Bukovina’s links (by now somewhat thin) with the West. Inevitably an artist took one of these torso copies and put a head in a burka on it, perhaps the most leaden and pathetic piece of conceptual art yet attempted, but equally perhaps a witty genuflection to the nullity of the original monument itself.

  It is hard to completely enjoy Czernowitz (now the Ukrainian city of Chernivtsi) as its fate in the twentieth century has been so awful. The survival of so many attractive buildings and spaces is obviously trumped by the non-survival of most of the population for whom these were built. Gregor von Rezzori (his very name a perfect Habsburg amalgam) in his great, astonishingly vivid memoir of growing up there, The Snows of Yesteryear, described the complex world which still existed in Czernowitz even in the 1920s, in the person of his childhood nurse:

  I was nourished by her speech. The main component was a German, never learned correctly or completely, the gaps in which were filled with words and phrases from all the other tongues spoken in the Bukovina – so that each second or third word was either Ruthenian, Romanian, Polish, Russian, Armenian or Yiddish, not to forget Hungarian and Turkish.

  Almost all these languages have now disappeared from Bukovina and the very existence of von Rezzori’s family appears strange. Following the Russian invasion of 1914, the von Rezzoris were able to call on the huge geographical reach of the Empire, fleeing through a Carpathian pass and settling in houses first in Trieste and then Lower Austria, before returning to now Romanian-ruled Bukovina, with the author ending up at school in Transylvania. This incredibly broad fluid Habsburg frame of reference would be barred by innumerable hostile borders until 1989.

  The traumas of much of the western parts of the Empire are better concealed by more recent prosperity and rebuilding, but the haggard nature of so many Galician and Bukovinan towns makes it much more raw and obvious that these are places where everything has gone just completely wrong. Contemporary Chernivtsi makes its money as an enormous market on the edge of the European Union, with products trucked in from as away far as south-east Asia to leak across the chaotic borders into Romania. This at least makes it a busy, bustling place with a real, albeit semi-criminal, purpose. Much of Chernivtsi, with its battered pavements, snarled-up traffic, broken-down lorries, heaped boxes and enormous roadside advertisements, has a very Indian feel and it is curious to come face to face with such clear evidence that townscapes are a side-effect not of culture (‘Indian chaos’) but of specific formulae involving local GDP, tax revenue and government reach.
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  Chernivtsi is home to one completely astonishing building which has somehow survived all the numerous regimes2 that have swept the city: the Metropolitan’s Palace. This surreal marvel is a summa of Vienna’s attitude towards its role and its commitment to pharaonic architectural overreach, not unlike the British building New Delhi just as their own rule over India was about to stop. By some measures the Metropolitan’s Palace was the most expensive construction project in the entire Empire and yet it was built for what was never more than a charismatic backwater. Its origins lay in the aftermath of the 1867 Compromise. Habsburg Orthodox populations had previously been subordinated to the authorities in the now Budapest-ruled Serbian town of Sremski Karlovci. For the Austrian half the solution lay in upgrading Czernowitz (already a significant religious focus) as the Vienna-ruled equivalent. The strange geography of the new state here achieved its strangest form. Vienna’s continuing direct rule over Galicia and Bukovina brought into existence a four-hundred-mile scythe of territory between Russia and Hungary, at the far tip of which was Czernowitz. In a tidy piece of madness the new Metropolitan See was responsible for the Orthodox populations of both Bukovina and Galicia, and Dalmatia – with all the many thousands of square miles of territory between the territories under Hungarian rule. Baffled Adriatic Serbs now suddenly found themselves owing allegiance to a man living in the Ukrainian borderlands.

  The Metropolitan Palace, as it gradually took shape in the 1870s, seems to have got completely out of control, the building equivalent of the sorcerer’s apprentice unable to stop the spell he has unleashed. The result is a Burgundo-Hanseatic-Grenadan-Hutsul-Byzantine mishmash of a heroic kind, and a classic piece of Habsburg collaboration: with a patently insane Czech architect, Josef Hlávka, armies of medievally inspired German and local decorators and specialists and seemingly no one doing the budgeting. Gregor von Rezzori’s father had an office there for some years and it must have fitted perfectly with his historicist-reactionary enthusiasms. The complex has come through some terrible times, but is now one of the world’s most attractive university buildings. With its little courtyards, magic garden and loopy eclecticism, the whole place made me wish to be reincarnated as a Ukrainian undergraduate. Indeed, so charismatic and enjoyable is Hlávka’s vision that it seems a bit pointless for architects to come up with new, less good solutions for institutional needs – instead of just being hidden away in Bukovina, exact copies should be made for any city that wants one.