Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires

by Justin C. Vovk

  On October 29, the Croatian parliamentary body, the Sabor, met in Zagreb where they severed all ties with Austria-Hungary. The Habsburg kingdoms of Croatia and Dalmatia declared themselves independent from the empire. They proclaimed themselves the Common Sovereign National State of the Slovenians, Croatians, and Serbs. On the same day, students, factory workers, and their supporters revolted in Vienna. By the next day, the military had joined the revolution and were marching through the streets with an army of soldiers numbering in the tens of thousands. Later that day, the head of Austria’s National Council, Franz Dinghofer, declared that the legislative body “would take over the whole administration of the country, ‘but without the Habsburgs.’” Within a few days, the eastern empire was dissolving. The Polish National Council took the reins of administration, as did the Ukrainians, who proclaimed the West Ukrainian Republic at Przemysl. On October 31, the empire’s Romanian subjects declared their independence.

  At Gödöllö, Charles and Zita were shocked and saddened by the reports flooding in, but the situation would continue to go from bad to worse. The next day, Charles was forced to surrender his sovereign powers in the Balkans by a delegation representing the newly formed State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs. This nation would join with Serbia on December 1, changing its name to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. It would informally be known as Yugoslavia, a name that would not become official until 1929. In the east, the Ukrainians founded their own national republic. This was especially bittersweet since the leader of the Ukrainian nationalist cause was a Habsburg—Archduke Wilhelm. Once it was obvious that Hungary, the Balkans, and the eastern realms were beyond hope, Charles and Zita left Budapest, worried about the deteriorating political situation in Austria. In spite of the revolts, Gödöllö was still considered safer than any place in Vienna. The empress made the difficult decision to leave her children at the palace under the care of her brother Prince René, the court chamberlain, Count Hunyády, and the staff. Zita explained the reasons for her decision this way:

  It was a dreadful decision to have to take but we did it deliberately. It was the only way to show the Hungarian people that their King and Queen did not intend to flee Hungary for good. It would have been the last straw had that idea spread about! But our children were not left there as hostages against our will. Nobody asked that they should stay. It was our decision and it was helped by two things. First, at that particular moment, the situation in Vienna looked if anything even more dangerous than in Budapest. We were not moving from trouble into peace but from one storm into another. Second, our children were by now so used to their parents being continually on the move that they were in no way anxious or frightened at being left alone.1066

  When the imperial couple arrived at Schönbrunn Palace late on the night of October 30, Vienna was eerily calm, as if it could explode at any moment. There was little doubt that night that the age of empires was about to meet its climactic end. If Zita expected their first night back in Vienna to be calm, she was mistaken. No sooner had they returned to Vienna than Budapest exploded into violent revolution. Crowds looted, plundered, and murdered innocent people, but their greatest animosity was directed against the Habsburgs. “The emperor had not got to bed in Schönbrunn until long after midnight on 30 October,” Zita recalled. “In the small hours, just as he had fallen asleep, an urgent telephone call came through for him from Budapest. It was General Lucacics, the commander of the garrison there, who told me, beside himself with agitation, that revolution had broken out in the city and that he simply had to speak to the emperor.” Zita, in her usual direct manner, cut straight to the heart of the issue: “I was naturally very worried about the safety of my children.”1067

  As soon as she hung up the phone, Zita called Gödöllö to raise the alarm. The chaos in the streets was making its way up to the palace. The children and their attendants were bundled up in the night and set off in a cavalcade of automobiles for Vienna, where they arrived many hours later. To speed up their journey and keep the children safe, the imperial crests on the sides of the cars were painted over. As morning dawned on October 31, the republicans had full control of Budapest. Michael Karolyi telegraphed to Berlin, “Revolution in Budapest. National Council has taken over the government. Military and police acknowledge National Council completely. Inhabitants rejoicing.”1068 With each hour that passed, the Habsburgs’ empire unraveled more and more. Kingdoms, grand duchies, principalities, and whole ethnic groups declared their independence, leaving the monarchy without a leg to stand on. From Prague in the north to Sarajevo in the south, protests, riots, and revolutions were breaking out everywhere.

  On November 1, 1918, Emperor Charles I contacted President Woodrow Wilson without any conditions for negotiations. Austria-Hungary, or what was left of it, was now agreeing to the Allies’ terms unconditionally, which included national self-determination for all of the empire’s ethnic groups. In all but name, the First World War had ended. Charles had no choice but to finally concede defeat. All of the empire’s territories had broken away, creating half a dozen ethnically diverse nations spread across central and southern Europe. Charles issued another manifesto in which he did not abdicate but, instead, renounced his participation in government. Upon signing the order, he ended six hundred years of Habsburg rule in Austria. His reign was the shortest in Habsburg history, lasting just under two years. Though he could have fought to the bitter end, he announced, “Filled, now as ever, with unwavering devotion to all my peoples, I do not wish to oppose their growth with my own person … The people, through its representatives, has taken over the government. I renounce all participation in the affairs of state.”1069 Not wishing to vanish from the public eye completely, Emperor Charles opted to leave Vienna but remain within Austria’s borders.

  The next day, November 2, was a depressing one at Schönbrunn. Beginning with the Hungarian Battalion, one regiment after the other abandoned the imperial family. Zita explains the last day her family spent at the palace as follows:

  Our own life guard troops were also disappearing, but it was the departure of the Hungarian battalion which first created a really dangerous situation. The whole palace was now open. There were not even sentries at the main gates. The only people permanently at Schönbrunn from now on – apart from the Emperor and myself and our children – were about half-a-dozen ladies-in-waiting and aides, a few remaining servants and retainers and the life guards officers who stayed behind after their men left.1070

  That night, Charles, Zita, and their children fled Schönbrunn Palace. Before their departure, they attended a special Mass to pray for their safe return soon. Unsettling echoes of the Russian imperial family’s dramatic fate haunted the Habsburgs. The empress later said that the “whole day was a nightmare.”1071 As they packed everything they could take, shouts could be heard outside calling for the imperial family’s blood. Later that evening, the emperor and empress entered the Hall of Ceremonies, where the loyal staff who had stayed with them was dismissed in a series of emotional embraces. Charles and Zita took the time to shake hands with every person there, offering each of them a personal farewell. As Zita and her family left the palace, they marched down the long stairwell to the inner courtyard. Flanking them on either side in full honor guard were cadets from the nearby Maria Theresia Military Academy, who had unexpectedly shown up earlier that evening to defend the imperial family. According to the empress, the young men, many of whom were teenagers, stood there “with tears in their eyes, but still perfectly turned out and guarding us to the end.”1072 As they reached the bottom of the stairs, Erich Mann, one of the cadets, snapped to attention and saluted the emperor and empress. Although Zita understood the magnitude of their situation, Charles did not. One witness observed that even though the emperor “was in fact leaving for good, and was never to recover even one of the several crowns he had been forced to abandon, he did not realize the finality of the occasion.”1073

  Amid a flood of tears, the family finally en
tered their automobiles bound for the imperial hunting lodge at Eckartsau, near the Hungarian border. Decades later, the memory of their flight from Schönbrunn remained fresh in Zita’s mind: “It was dark by now, and a misty autumn night. The emperor and I and all the children except Karl Ludwig squeezed into the back of one car with Count Hunyády at the front. In the next one came the infant Karl Ludwig and the children’s nurses … I did not risk driving out of the main gate in front of the palace. Instead we continued parallel with the main building along the broad gravel path that leads to the eastern side gate. We slipped out of this and left the capital by a special route. Late that night—without any trouble or incidents—we arrived at Eckartsau.”1074

  Arguably, the fall of the Habsburgs created more shock than any other dynasty deposed at the end of the First World War. They had reigned the longest, the fiercest, and the proudest of any of Europe’s modern dynasties. A British newspaper described theirs as “the oldest and most eminent dynastic name in European history.”1075 One Habsburg historian poignantly summarized their downfall with these words:

  For centuries, Christians regarded the Holy Roman Empire, ruled by the Habsburgs, as the opposite of a sign of the apocalypse: so long as it existed, the world would not end. In the early nineteenth century the Holy Roman Empire had been dissolved, but the Habsburgs, under Franz Josef, had recovered and endured, throwing a grey cloak of timelessness over the shuddering body of a continent changing itself from within. Now, with empires destroyed and dynasties dethroned, progressive time began. It was socialist time, the promise of new beginnings for oppressed classes at the end of a feudal age; national time, the conviction that peoples could move forward from a dark past of imperial oppression into a brighter future of state independence; or liberal time, the confidence that new republics would create the conditions for lasting peace in Europe and the world.1076

  As a symbol of their nearly millennium-long reign, the Habsburgs had chosen a black, double-headed eagle as their crest. The day that the Habsburgs were forced to vacate their throne would be forever remembered as the fall of eagles.

  In Germany, the appointment of a new government headed by Prince Max of Baden did not solve any problems. Like Vienna and Petrograd, a dangerous cloud of anarchy swirled. Streets were empty because there was no fuel for automobiles. The sidewalks were crowded with “heart-broken women,” who had deprivation written across their “faces like masks, blue with cold and drawn with hunger.” The protests outside government buildings earlier in the year were replaced with bellicose demonstrations in city squares. Bands of mounted police were now forced to patrol the capital day and night. They looked on the people uneasily but were unable to act against their growing hostility.1077 Despite his claims of bridging the gulf between the monarchy and the Leftist groups, Prince Max immediately sounded out the Allies for peace terms. Their demands were steep. On top of already harsh political and economic reparations, President Wilson issued a series of notes declaring that the German Empire must become a full democratic republic devoid of its emperor. The most inflammatory of the notes, sent to the German government on October 14, referred to the “destruction of every arbitrary power anywhere that can […] disturb the peace of the world” and added that “the power which has hitherto controlled the German nation is of the sort described here. It is within the choice of the German nation to alter it.”1078

  “It aims directly at the fall of my house, and above all at the abolition of the monarch!” Wilhelm angrily declared when he saw Wilson’s note.1079 Dona was equally outraged, decrying “the audacity of the parvenu across the sea who thus dares to humiliate a princely house which can look back on centuries of service to people and country.”1080 When word of Wilson’s terms leaked out to the public, political rallies sprang up everywhere. As the people gathered, they cried out, “Down with the Kaiser.”1081 Berlin descended into being a city on the brink, with riots on a scale it had not seen in seventy years. The people’s fury, held in check for so long, was set to erupt, fanned into a flame by the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

  The collapse of the German Empire began in the north with the imperial navy, whose sailors revolted on the night of October 29. Some forty thousand sailors and soldiers succeeded in taking Germany’s two largest seaports, Wilhelmshaven and Kiel, after the commanding officers ordered a final kamikaze mission against Allied naval forces. Thousands of sailors took to the streets of Kiel singing “La Marseillaise.” By the first week of November, the empire’s outer territories were engulfed in the sea of revolutionary fever that was sweeping across eastern and central Europe. Hanover, Frankfurt, and Munich were firmly in the hands of the revolutionaries, who were calling themselves the Workers and Soldiers Councils. On November 7, public services in Berlin came to a standstill. Railway lines were cut to prevent monarchists from sending for reinforcements. In Brunswick, Wilhelm’s son-in-law Ernest Augustus abdicated his ducal throne, ending his daughter Sissy’s role as Duchess of Brunswick. The dukedom of Brunswick had been a particular hotbed of revolutionary activity. Throughout the war, protestors had taken to the streets outside the Brunswick Palace chanting for reform. Once the German Revolution began, the people of Brunswick were among the first to rise up. Within two weeks, German revolutionaries managed to force the abdication of every one of the empire’s royal rulers. By the end of the week, the Stadtschloss in Berlin was flying the revolutionary flag. Dona was personally offended when her brother-in-law Prince Frederick Leopold hoisted the revolutionary banner above his hunting lodge at Glienicke. “The red flag floated over the palaces, while royal mottoes vanished from the courts, the newspapers and the commercial world,” wrote Ralph Haswell Lutz in his study The German Revolution.1082 Violent riots broke out as monarchist and rebel forces exchanged cannon fire across Berlin.

  At the time, Dona was still recuperating from her heart attack. Upon her return from Wilhelmshöhe, it was deemed too unsafe for her to return to Bellevue in Berlin, so she returned to the Neues Palais in Potsdam. It was here in October 1918 that Dona was reunited with her husband. It was the first time they had been together since Wilhelm’s nervous breakdown, recovery, and subsequent departure for Spa. Given the revolutionary atmosphere in Berlin, it was decided the emperor needed to return to face the oncoming storm in person. As much as Wilhelm II was being faced with the most difficult moment of his reign, many people were closely watching Empress Augusta Victoria. To the people around her, she exhibited a calm, grave exterior, but the voices that were now crying out for her husband’s abdication both angered and frightened her. She was worried about Germany and the effect that Wilhelm’s possible abdication would have on the country. Princess Ina Luise of Solms-Baruth, one of Dona’s ladies-in-waiting, wrote to Princess Daisy of Pless, “About the Emperor, I hope and pray he will be firm, and won’t abdicate; they were quite resolved to be firm, and the Empress told me to say everywhere that she stands firm.”1083

  With the revolution spreading, Wilhelm decided to leave Potsdam for his military command at Spa on October 29. When the uprisings began, and before they spread to the rest of the empire, it made sense for the emperor to be closer to the epicenter. But once it was clear this was more than an isolated revolt, Wilhelm and his advisors felt the greatest place of strength from which he could preserve his reign was military headquarters. The decision to leave Potsdam was not one the emperor came to easily. It required heavy prodding from both his advisers and his wife. Dona loathed being parted from her husband, but she believed that if he had any chance of restoring order, he would have to appeal to the army and hope to trigger an uprising in favor of the monarchy. When Wilhelm found his wife to say good-bye, she collapsed into tears. “This is the end,” she sobbed; “now I have no more hope.”1084 It was the last time Augusta Victoria would lay eyes on the man who was both her husband and the German emperor. The next time she saw him, he would simply be Wilhelm Hohenzollern.

  As soon as Wilhelm reached Spa, he sent Dona two letters. The first
, written on November 7, never made it to Potsdam because the postal stations nearby had been seized by the revolutionaries. His second letter, written and sent the next day, made it through but contained the direst reports.

  My letter of yesterday did not come through as there is insurrection in Cologne and the station is occupied. The people have all gone insane! They have proclaimed a republic in Munich, as the King [of Bavaria] is supposed to have abdicated. I don’t know if this letter will reach you. God be with you and us. I am gathering all the troops from the front together, so as to march on Berlin with them as soon as an armistice has been declared. Our sons must take over your defence until we can come to your help from here. If it’s no longer safe for you in Potsdam, then you must go with the children to Königsberg or Rominten if necessary. I cannot judge matters from here. All connections are so uncertain …1085

  With the emperor out of the capital, Prince Max again received pressure from the Allies on November 9 that the only way to ensure peace would be if Wilhelm abdicated. Knowing that he would never willingly abdicate, Max took it upon himself to force the emperor’s hand. He composed a personal letter calling on the emperor to step down.

  Your abdication has become necessary if civil war in Germany is to be avoided … The great majority of the people believe that you are to blame for the present situation … Today I can no longer hold my protecting hand before the wearer of the crown … We are heading straight for civil war …