The Empire ended and its subjects looked out onto a new and – as it would prove – terrible world.
Conclusion
If I think about how I have divided up my time in researching this book, I am struck by the enormous accumulation of hours just spent walking. In city after city a much more characteristic activity than any other was the criss-crossing of residential areas. It became a sort of sickness. I would just take a rough compass direction and make sweep after sweep through areas of private homes – Communist-era tower-block estates, rows of tiny nineteenth-century artisanal housing, streets filled with the decayed great villas of the old haute bourgeoisie. Shortly after the end of the Cold War, I spent some days staying as a guest of an elderly couple in the suburbs of Dresden. Their house was extremely bare. They had no phone and no television, and were kind, gentle and stunned by the utterly unexpected change of regime, a change to which they could hardly react. Their lives orbited around a small allotment in the next block from their home. This allotment had been converted into a demented, Technicolor arbour crowded with trellised flowers so brightly coloured they were hard to look at. In the summer the couple would take out a couple of fold-out chairs from a tiny shed and sit under the flowers.
I mention this because it has stuck in my mind for some thirty years, but also because it seemed such a reasonable response to an impossible situation. All over Central Europe there are countless such gardens. On many streets the pavements have been made wide enough to plant flower gardens and everywhere there are tiny plots that receive the most lavish care and thought and contrast drastically with the many, often very haggard public spaces.
Wandering along these streets I found myself endlessly rolling over in my mind the same quite simple questions, goaded by the usual mixture of the clinking and banging of washing-up, barking dogs, children’s voices, music from a radio. Each of these towns is a place filled with the normal life almost everyone aspires to – a daily round of family and work, food and sex, conversation and sleep. But they are also places that have been subjected to waves of utter catastrophe, of a kind outsiders such as me cannot begin to understand. The sounds of washing-up, dogs, kids and music would have been consistent for all of the last century, but the identity of those making those sounds would have been different. There can hardly have been a home in the former Empire into which the most terrible forces – intellectual, political and military – did not reach a hand. This would have begun in 1914 with the first of a flood of telegrams announcing the death or mutilation of family members but the demands made on all these homes now went on for generations. This is most obviously the case, of course, in the great former Jewish sections of cities such as Prague, Vienna, Budapest and Kraków – here a various, thriving, vigorous culture had been annihilated within twenty-five years of the Empire’s end and millions of people murdered for mystical and intellectual reasons so perverted that they raise effectively unmanageable questions about the real nature of Europe’s civilization. The Kazimierz district of Kraków remains intolerable – the sounds of family life are the same, but they are made by different people. But this is true across the entire region. In cities like Lviv or Ivano-Frankivsk almost the entire population was killed or expelled – for being Jewish, for being Polish, for being German, for being wealthy, for being pro-Nazi or pro-Communist. The Galician Jewish town of Kolomyya is now a bustling, messy Ukrainian town, but with no Jews at all. When the Cold War ended its statue of Lenin was taken down and the pedestal turned out to be filled with old Jewish gravestones.
Almost everyone within the old Empire seems to have taken turns to be destroyed by one aspect of the twentieth century or another. The Lychakiv Cemetery in Lviv is in this sense one of the most remarkable, over-charged sites of memory in the world – an extraordinary domain in which it is possible to confront the many groups, racial, linguistic, social, which created the uniquely complex and curious culture of Galicia, but who were almost all destroyed. The battered, moss-caked and pompous family mausoleums of the city’s great Polish families rub shoulders with Protestant, Uniate and Orthodox graves. The huge memorial built in the 1920s to mark the successful defence of Lviv (or rather Lwów) by its Polish citizens against invading Ukrainian troops has (amazingly) been recently rebuilt. For decades this was a ground zero of nationalist political terror, smashed to pieces in turn by vengeful Nazis, Soviets and Ukrainians and ultimately turned into a truck depot. It is a measure of the post-ideological exhaustion of the present day that the Ukrainian and Polish governments were able to agree to the grandiose monument’s rebuilding (it was reopened in 2005) – but also an indication that the issues around the monument are at an end as, after all, Lviv no longer has any Polish population.
The poet Adam Zagajewski wrote in 1991 an essay called ‘Two Cities’ about his memories as a very young child of the mass expulsion of surviving Poles from Lviv after the Second World War. In one of the biggest of many acts of overwhelming brutality, Stalin decided to solve the problem of the mixed Polish–Ukrainian areas of old Galicia by moving the entire Polish state west into what had been German territory – much of it the old Habsburg territories of Silesia seized by Frederick the Great. The surviving Germans in these Silesian towns, many of which were little more than rubble, were all kicked out and expelled Galician Poles moved in. Many Poles were relocated to places like Gleiwitz, which now became Polish Gliwice, some three hundred and seventy miles west of Lviv. Zagajewski’s essay is about the extremes of the human experience in Europe and is remarkable in all kinds of ways, but the image that sticks in the mind is of those new inhabitants of Gliwice who refused to admit that they had even moved. They talked to their neighbours as though nothing had happened, wore their ancient clothing, referred to each other by now meaningless courtesy titles and tried to imagine that nothing had happened to interfere with the Habsburg idyll in which they had grown up. Effectively they walked around Gliwice imagining that its geography was that of Lwów. And, of course, they all tried as hard as possible not to notice the arrival of the People’s Republic, a new system to replace the horrors of Nazism, and itself representing, in Zagajewski’s words: ‘fear, blood draining out of the face, trembling hands, talking in whispers, silence, apathy, sealing windows shut, suspicion of one’s neighbours, signing up for the hated Party membership’.
* * *
The speed of this absolute catastrophe, from 1914 to 1950 or so, engulfed virtually everyone within the Habsburg Empire, for different reasons. Hundreds of instances race through my mind all the time and could just turn everything into a jumbled catalogue of horror of a pointless kind: the German towns with no Germans, the Polish towns with no Poles, the Hungarian towns with no Hungarians. But also, of course, the countryside: the countless tiny Jewish villages scattered across Galicia and Bohemia. In London a museum in the Westminster Synagogue preserves 1,564 Torah scrolls, mainly from Jewish villages in Bohemia, and which are in most cases all that remains of places which until the creation of the Nazi ‘Protectorate’ were an integral, quintessential element in European life.
From the end of the Great War onwards there was always a sense of puzzlement in the West as to why the new post-Habsburg politicians seemed so unreasonable – why the occasional pleasant figure, generally an aristocrat, ‘of good will’, would so rapidly be submerged by others who seemed little more than wild beasts. Red terrors and White terrors, mass mobilizations, ethnic violence and an obsession on both left and right with military posturing plunged most of the old Empire into a nightmare which, with ever more inventive twists and turns, went on for generations. But these were all figures fighting over a faded and decaying remnant. This can be seen in the coldest way by population figures. Vienna, the great Imperial capital, emptied out, its population dropping by some three hundred thousand in the inter-war period, its vast bureaucratic buildings half empty, its economy in ruins. Budapest, the second Imperial capital, had by contrast a ballooning population, but only because hundreds of thousands of Hungarians f
led into the city from Serbian and Romanian reigns of terror in what had just ceased to be southern and eastern Hungary.
These traumas created an immediate nostalgia and a sense that something extremely precious had been lost. It is striking in many of the remarkable novels from the 1930s how many celebrate almost obsessively the broad range of possibilities that had once existed in the former Empire, the geographical sprawl of which had now been replaced by the small and dirty cages of the new nation states. In one of the greatest Hungarian novels, Desző Kosztolányi’s charming Kornél Esti, the hero waves goodbye to the amusingly named pubs in Budapest (the Torpedo, the Vitriol – ‘a low dive’) and heads off to the coast. In a magical scene of yearning he travels down through the pre-War Empire, waved on by a friendly Croat guard, to the Hungarian Adriatic port of Fiume, where a Hungarian flag flaps cheerily over the deep blue sea. For the novel’s original readers this would have been very hard to read, with the route now filled with implacably hostile and triumphalist new Yugoslav and Fascist Italian owners. Another of Kosztolányi’s novels, the wonderful Skylark, together with much of the rest of his work, is set in a fictional pre-War southern Hungarian town based on his birthplace of Subotica, now also under Yugoslav rule. Joseph Roth, whose novels tried to embrace as much as possible of the old Empire, shared this pan-European yearning. In The Emperor’s Tomb the narrator living in Vienna gets together with his chestnut-seller cousin from Slovenia to visit a Jewish coach-driver in Galicia (in Roth’s favourite, back-of-beyond, fictional frontier town of Zlotograd). Writers such as Stefan Zweig, Alexander Lernet-Holenia and Miklós Bánffy also fill the 1930s with characters travelling back and forth across the Empire. They celebrate the friendly relations between different nationalities and a sense of tolerance or at least indifference which had now completely vanished in favour of a heavily fanged nationalism. Bánffy’s scenes of pre-War young noblemen in Kolozsvár getting friendly policemen to clear the pavement so that they can sing with a gypsy-band beneath the windows of girls they love were crazily impossible in the newly Romanian-ruled city of Cluj at the time he was actually writing.
But of course much of this fiction would shortly in turn be buried under a fresh, even greater wave of horror, which gives the books a painful charm greater than the writers even intended. Indeed, it was perhaps the aristocrats in Bánffy’s Transylvanian Trilogy who bugged me most as I wandered gloomily through the endless streets of these at-best haggard towns. What I kept coming back to, seeing all these houses whose inhabitants may since 1914 have been scooped out and replaced several times over, is that so much of the critique of the Empire was a genuinely liberal one – but liberalism itself ended up as deeply intolerant. The great effort to shake clear of the Empire’s creaking, feudal structures meant breaking through into a new world not of tolerance and equality, but of viciousness far greater than anything the old Austro- Hungarian rulers could have dreamed of.
Austro-Hungarian liberalism rapidly splintered with the end of the Empire into mutually enraged forms of exclusionary nationalism or Communism. The numbers of those who remained committed to something even slightly inclusive rapidly dropped to almost zero, leaving only a handful of aristocrats like Bánffy. As soon as the Emperor Karl’s rule collapsed there was no model available for a serious democracy – or at best democracy became a casual weapon reached for by a majority group so they could impose themselves on smaller groups. Even Czechoslovakia could not manage its minorities. As with the other successor states a key early move there had been to demolish every trace of the Habsburgs. In the far western German-speaking town of Eger (now Cheb) this meant demolishing the statue of the modernizing, pro-German Joseph II in the main square. Attempts to do this resulted in riots that burned down the only Czech-language school. Czech troops swamped the main square like an occupying army. Once the battered statue had been disposed of, Eger became a hot-bed of German resentment, effectively not part of the Czechoslovak state, with even Czech road signs torn down. In short, Franz Ferdinand’s vision of German Bohemia immediately came true. Throughout the 1930s the town noisily celebrated being the place where the German hero Wallenstein had been killed by Habsburg cowards, for which could be read the neo-Habsburgs in Prague. With absurd Wallenstein festivals and marches, with the people of Eger dressed as soldiers of the Thirty Years War, this all shifted by easy stages into Sudetenland enthusiasm for Hitler. These people were never reconciled to the Czechoslovak state. Cheb is now yet another town entirely filled with new people, another disaster, with every single German killed or expelled.
So the question that has driven me mad through the years writing this book is the obvious one. Was it inherent in the destruction of the Habsburg Empire that Nazism would result? In the vast, endlessly complex nationalist laboratory of the Empire’s final decade, was Hitler himself in fact the quintessential product? So many of his obsessions, tics and visions seem rooted here and not in Germany itself. Were his Habsburg obsessions injected into Germany, much as the German General Staff injected Lenin into Russia? Like all such questions, in the end it cannot be answered.
A reliable sense of settled gloom can always be had by standing in the half-complete mess of Heroes’ Square in Vienna. It was here that Hitler had perhaps his greatest triumph, in the spring of 1938. German Austrians had met the notionally invading Nazi troops in a delirium of mass joy, their humiliation in the grubby little Republic of Austria at an end. By the time that Hitler appeared on the balcony of the Hofburg, looking out onto the square at an adoring crowd of some two hundred thousand, many thousands of others (leftists, monarchists, Austrian patriots, Habsburgs) had been arrested and ferocious anti-Jewish violence had broken out. On crossing the Austrian border with his motorcade, Hitler had first gone to visit the graves of his parents in Upper Austria and then visited Linz, where he had been a student. But it was Vienna where, as a subject of Franz Joseph, he had spent his early twenties as a humiliated semi-vagrant. Standing on the hideously ornate and tacky Hofburg balcony he effectively became Franz Joseph, but a Franz Joseph who would rule a reconstituted Empire just on behalf of its German element, in grudging cooperation with the Hungarians – the other ‘Nibelung’ race – and ending the politics which had dominated pre-1914 Vienna: Jews and Slavs would now once more be put back in their places.
Heroes’ Square is a miserable spot. An old barracks and parade-ground cleared into an arena for Imperial splendour, it was only part-built when the Empire ended, leaving just two bathetic statues, one of Prince Eugene, the other of Archduke Charles, and it is now a car park subject to gusts of wind which whirl together dirt and discarded plastic cups. I have always been bothered most by the sight from the square of the huge Nazi-era Flak Tower, lurking like something from The War of the Worlds behind the museums. Most of these towers have been demolished, but this one, oddly, has survived – a huge concrete structure used as a high platform for anti-aircraft guns and as an arsenal and bomb-shelter. It was built with these practical purposes in mind, but it was also meant to stand there for ever as a symbol of Viennese fortitude, so that future generations in the Nazi Empire would admire it, just as they admired the statues in Heroes’ Square of Vienna’s two greatest earlier defenders, or the spot on the Kahlenberg where the princes met before racing down the hill to destroy the Ottoman armies besieging the city. The Flak Tower was meant to be faced with marble, but the marble was marooned in its French quarry as one of the minor casualties of D-Day and then, for obvious reasons, never delivered. Wandering around the square, the Flak Tower is an insistent and nasty presence on the horizon. I remember sitting on the Hofburg steps with my wife on our honeymoon, staring at it – a romantic moment. On every visit since, over some twenty years, I have found myself looking up to see if the Austrians have at last demolished it. But it is still there.
Notes
Introduction
1. In alphabetical order: Austria, Belgium, Croatia, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, the Nethe
rlands, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland, and Ukraine plus briefly the entire Spanish overseas empire. The family also came to own Portugal and its empire as well as, more permanently, Spain and its empire through Charles V’s son, Philip.
Chapter Five
1. The Venetian Republic also held back, surprisingly – very much a case of the doge that did not bark in the night.
Chapter Six
1. The somewhat unfortunate name is originally in English and is not a silly translation.
2. Even Ferdinand’s death was musically good news, provoking Schmelzer’s matchless Lament on the Death of Ferdinand III with its atmosphere of a ghostly, just deserted ballroom.
Chapter Seven
1. Luckily the air clears of confusing Ferdinands very shortly.
Chapter Eight
1. Just to be quite clear, I say ‘German’ and ‘Hungarian’ assuming a silent ‘-speakers’ or ‘-speaking’ as this addition would be so cumbersome. I am of course not suggesting the existence of Germany or Hungary in a modern sense. This needs constant self-discipline. Carinthians or Transylvanians had all kinds of loyalties, but none of these were directed at later generations of nationalist historians.
Chapter Nine
1. And indeed his skull did show a pronounced bump of excellence in the area devoted to music – the sheer stupidity of phrenology must make us freeze with anxiety about the dim things we unthinkingly buy into today.
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