The Lost History of 1914

by Jack Beatty

  Franz Ferdinand handing a bouquet to his uncle. Francis Joseph was relieved when he learned of his nephew’s assassination on June 28, 1914. In Vienna’s parks the bands played on. Sunday promenaders on the Ringstrasse showed little grief. Franz Ferdinand lacked charm; case closed for the Viennese. He also had crazy ideas. One was to save the empire with a template borrowed from the United States.

  The great fear of Francis Joseph’s old age was that his nephew’s children would foul the lineage of the seven-hundred-year-old empire. That accounts for the hard words attributed to him when, on the evening of June 28, 1914, he read the telegram reporting the murder of that nephew, Franz Ferdinand, and his wife in Sarajevo.19

  “Horrible! The Almighty does not allow himself to be challenged with impunity … A higher power has restored the old order which I unfortunately was unable to uphold.” The higher power had waited exactly fourteen years. Yielding, by one account, to Franz Ferdinand’s threats to shoot himself (like Crown Prince Rudolf, Francis Joseph’s only son) if forbidden to marry the woman he loved, on June 28, 1900, the emperor officially sanctioned Franz Ferdinand’s union with Sophie Chotek, a member of the minor nobility.20

  Francis Joseph’s life was regulated by the exacting Spanish Court Ceremonial of his ancestors. On July 25, 1914, the day he approved the ultimatum to Serbia, for example, in a handwritten note to his chief aide he “prescrib[ed] the dress to be worn by the wait staff that night.” This stern code required him to exact a price for allowing Franz Ferdinand to marry beneath him—renunciation of his unborn children’s rights to succeed him on the throne.21

  Ever since yielding to his nephew as “a new proof of my special affection” the old man had ruminated that Franz Ferdinand would break the contract and bequeath the House of Habsburg to Sophie’s inferior spawn. Via assassination the Almighty had lifted that cloud over his mind. To his daughter, who found “Papa amazingly fresh” the day after Sarajevo, he confessed, “For me it is a relief from a great worry.”22

  Franz Ferdinand’s body was spared the interment ritual prescribed for archdukes—that is, his corpse was not deposited in the vaults of the Capuchin Church, nor his heart conveyed to a silver urn at St. Augustin’s, nor his intestines stored in a silver vat at St. Stephen’s cathedral. After a “third-class funeral” lasting fifteen minutes, during which, one of the deceased’s aides recalled, Francis Joseph glanced around the Hofburg chapel “with complete indifference,” Franz Ferdinand and Sophie were buried together at Artstetten, their estate in lower Austria.

  The barbarous ritual of dispersing parts of the royal body deserves comment. Like the Corpus Christi procession through Vienna’s Old City, it is redolent of Europe’s feudal ethos, a cursed inheritance of “ ‘premodern’ elements [that] were not the decaying and fragile remnants of all but vanished past but the very essence of Europe’s incumbent civil and political societies.” From this culture of the undead proceeded the self-destruction of an ancien régime that, a century after the French Revolution, still practiced power politics by a code of honor that put “courage above survival” and still held otherwise modern nations in its death grip. Count Ottokar Czernin, a Franz Ferdinand ally and Austria-Hungary’s last foreign minister, spoke not just for the Habsburg monarchy but for Europe’s aristocratic order when he said, “We were at liberty to choose the manner of our death, and we chose the most terrible.”23

  Besides anxiety over bad blood tainting his line, Franz Ferdinand’s death relieved Francis Joseph of a threat to the empire’s cornerstone, the Augsleich—the 1867 Compromise with Hungary—that Franz Ferdinand abhorred as the empire’s curse. Farsighted contemporaries agreed. Writing in 1911, the British Balkan hand Hugh Seton-Watson called “the fatal dual system” with Hungary the “ruin of modern Austria.” For Joseph Redlich, a liberal parliamentarian and Francis Joseph biographer, “Hungarian policy … had long constituted the root evil from which the whole body of the realm was sickening.” Baernreither hoped that Franz Ferdinand would live up to the claims made by his allies and reform dualism once he became emperor: “For him, and for us, it is a life and death question.”24

  From the 1500s until Napoleon abolished the “union of crowns” in 1806, Austria and Hungary were equals under the Holy Roman Empire. The successor Austrian Empire absorbed Hungary, which nearly broke free in 1848–49, but Austria suppressed the revolt with Russian troops. After Bismarck, in the second of his wars of German unification, defeated Austria in 1866, Francis Joseph, to secure his realm for a new war on Prussia, agreed to Hungarian demands to restore the union of crowns. Under the Compromise, each country had its own prime minister and parliament, with the “common monarchy” made up of the emperor-king, and Vienna-based ministries of foreign affairs, defense, and finance.

  “The mysteries of this Dualism (the technical term for it) were at the very least as recondite as those of the Trinity,” Robert Musil noted in a passage of The Man Without Qualities, a Viennese epic set in the last days of Austria-Hungary, that encapsulates the comic civic punctilio exacted by the hyphen:

  The Austro-Hungarian state was so oddly put together that it must seem almost hopeless to explain it to anyone who has not experienced it himself. It did not consist of an Austrian part and a Hungarian part that, as one might expect, complemented each other, but of a whole and a part: that is, of a Hungarian and an Austro-Hungarian sense of statehood, the latter to be found in Austria, which in a sense left the Austrian sense of statehood with no country of its own. The Austrian existed only in Hungary, and there as an object of dislike; at home he called himself a national of the kingdom and lands of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy … meaning that he was an Austrian plus a Hungarian minus that Hungarian.25

  Francis Joseph never got his war of revenge on Bismarck; Hungary vetoed it. And every ten years, when the Compromise came up for renewal, the Hungarians threatened to secede unless he met their demands.

  Many were trivial. Budapest objected to substituting the article “and” for the hyphen in naming government departments like “The Bureau of Standards for Austria and Hungary.” It lodged a “vehement protest” to a grieving Francis Joseph to add the legend “QUEEN OF HUNGARY” to “EMPRESS OF AUSTRIA” on Sisi’s coffin.26

  Two demands, however, were serious. Hungary was increasingly unwilling to provide recruits for the Imperial Army. In 1903–06 the Hungarian Independence Party went further, calling for a separate Hungarian army. To head this off, Francis Joseph seriously considered a military coup against the Budapest government but decided in the end to play the democracy card.

  Hungary was run by and for its Magyar landed gentry. In the Budapest parliament, 392 deputies represented the 8.5 million Magyars; 21 deputies the 8 million non-Magyars. To break the Magyar monopoly of power, Francis Joseph threatened to decree universal suffrage in Hungary. Stephen Tisza, the Magyar leader, said that would amount to “castrating the nation.” The Magyars blinked, agreeing to maintain a common army though dragging their feet and making a row over the language of command. Francis Joseph had long since blinked over their second demand, to Magyarize Hungary’s non-Magyars—Germans, Slovaks, Serbo-Croats, Ruthenes, and Rumanians.27

  To Joseph Redlich this was the emperor’s “gravest political sin.” The Magyars ruled the minorities at bayonet point and suppressed their languages and cultures. When their representatives complained to the emperor, he turned them away. “Any appeal to him as Austrian emperor about Hungarian matters was prohibited, for that was the Hungarian king’s responsibility.” But Francis Joseph was the Hungarian king. Nevertheless, “he refused to interfere in Hungarian affairs—if it was on behalf of his other peoples.” Though it made a mockery of “the Austrian idea,” he stood with the Magyars. Not only did he refuse to meet with three hundred Rumanian delegates protesting Magyarization, he allowed them to be prosecuted for treason. Preserving the Compromise required it.28

  Exaggerating truth, Franz Ferdinand shared with Kaiser Wilhelm his conviction that “all the difficulti
es that we have to face in the monarchy have their origin with the Magyars.* Who is behind the Slav danger? [The separatist agitation of the Bohemian Czechs, Bosnian Serbs, and Hungarian Croats.] Where is the core of this evil? Who has been the teacher of all those elements that succeed by revolutionary … excess? The Magyars. The Slavs act that way only because they imitate the conduct of the Magyars and because they see how the Magyars get all they want by their shameless conduct.”29

  Rancor inflected that acute political judgment. Just as Pancho Villa named his mule “Wilson,” so to mark the thousand-year anniversary of the Magyar conquest of their Danubian lands, Franz Ferdinand rebaptized his “Boreo” (borro) to “Millennium.” The archduke had seen the Magyar supremacy at work among the 3.2 million Transylvanian Romanians in Hungary. “Rumanians have been persecuted and oppressed with cynical disregard for justice in Hungary under every Ministry … in matters of education, constant imprisonments, and arrests,” he wrote to Count Berchtold, the foreign minister of Austria-Hungary. “I will never forget the time when I paid an official visit to Romania and at every station our indigenous Romanians in southern Hungary and Transylvania wanted to welcome my wife and me and bring us flowers.” But “they were driven off the train platform by local authorities and guards with bayonets … It is easy to conceive the population’s legitimate bitterness at being prevented from bringing flowers to their next ruler by Magyar bayonets.” The flowers were eventually delivered. At the short requiem service held in the Hofburg chapel on July 2, 1914, representatives of the Hungarian Romanians laid floral wreaths bearing the legend TO OUR LAST HOPE, IN LOYAL DEVOTION on the catafalque of Franz Ferdinand.30

  Was he worth their loyalty? Unpopular in life and unmourned in death, “Franz Ferdinand lacked everything that counts for real popularity in Austria; amiability, personal charm and easygoingness,” recalled Stefan Zweig, who observed the archduke, “with his bulldog neck and his cold staring eyes” and his wife in their box at the theater, “never casting a friendly glance toward the audience or encouraging the actors with hearty applause.” The couple “had no friends” and “the old Emperor hated him with all his heart because he did not have sufficient tact to hide his impatience to succeed to the throne.” Franz Ferdinand was in a hurry in a country where nothing happened fast (“red tape was legendary: at Vienna twenty-seven officials handled each tax payment”), and the old emperor never died. Convinced that no one liked him, Franz Ferdinand gave up trying to be liked. Tetchy, he was notoriously sensitive to slights, especially to his wife.31

  The chamberlain of Francis Joseph’s court, Prince Montenuovo, saw to the slights. As curator of the Spanish severities, he tried to prevent the marriage by circulating a photograph of Sophie touched up to make her look like an aging slattern. “The Emperor did what he could to mitigate the situation by creating her the Duchess of Hohenberg,” Rebecca West wrote. “But the obsessed Montenuovo hovered over her, striving to exacerbate every possible humiliation, never happier than when he could hold her back from entering a carriage or cutting down to the minimum the salutes and attendants called for by any state occasion.” Franz Ferdinand avoided Vienna to spare her these insults.32

  Slaughtering animals purged some of his anger—on a record day at a Czech castle he “bagged” 2,150 pieces of small game—but he was always molten. “He was capable of flying out at people and terrifying them [so much] that they lost their heads completely,” wrote Count Czernin. Franz Ferdinand could sound terrifying. “When I am Commander-in-Chief I shall do as I will; if anyone does anything else, I shall have them all shot,” he remarked to General Conrad von Hötzendorf, the chief of staff, whose chronic agitation for war with Serbia (and Italy!) antagonized the archduke.33

  Franz Ferdinand’s letters reveal him as an irascible reactionary dreaming of an alliance of the three dynasties—Habsburg, Hohenzollern, Romanov—against modernity. They also reveal him to be an anti-Semite. So was Kaiser Wilhelm. But the archduke possessed what the kaiser lacked—vision. Historians agree that he was an unpleasant personality. There is less consensus over whether his vision, by offering the minorities their “last hope,” could have held together an empire made up of nothing but Irelands. His death, Joachim Remak asserts, “was more than an excuse for war; it was one of its major causes.” If he had lived, would the war, too, belong to the lost history of 1914?34

  “There are three possible political systems in Austria—Centralism, which gives the hegemony to the Germans; Dualism, which divides it between the Germans and the Magyars; and Federalism, which secures equality of rights to all the races of the Empire,” a prewar Bohemian historian wrote. Franz Ferdinand, who as a young man crossed the United States by train, sought an American solution for the monarchy—Centralism, plus Federalism. In a 1906 essay, “The United States of Greater Austria,” a member of his inner circle presented the autonomy enjoyed by American states in domestic matters and Swiss cantons as a template for the empire’s regions and nationalities.35

  The American solution was Franz Ferdinand’s answer to the so-called South Slav Question, the empire’s greatest challenge. In 1908, Austria annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina from Turkey, saddling Austria with a restive Slavic population—the Bosnian Serbs—who looked upon the Kingdom of Serbia just across the Drina River from Bosnia as the homeland of their religion, language, and culture. Secret societies in Serbia fanned this sentiment in Bosnia, eventually “exasperating Austrian policy enough to start a world war.” The alternative to the American solution was war with Serbia.36

  “I stand or fall by a Habsburg federal Empire,” Franz Ferdinand told Baron Margutti. He went on: “It would mean that the Slav problem would solve itself. The Czechs would be separated from the Germans of Bohemia and enjoy autonomy. So would the Croats, the Slovenes, and the Hungarian Serbs. Then all these peoples would exercise so strong an attraction—by their very mass—on the Serbs of the Kingdom that the latter would seek national unity within the Monarchy, i.e., in a centripetal sense, and not in a centrifugal sense by the incorporation of our South Slavs with the Serbs of the Kingdom.”37

  Was federalism the answer? Seton-Watson thought it might be. “I had pinned all my hopes for the future upon him,” he wrote just after the assassination but before its cataclysmic sequel. “He represented a progressive idea in the Europe of today, and all Europe is the loser by his death.” The Magyars, the emperor, and the Serbs all feared it might be.38

  At the time of the annexation of Bosnia, a Hungarian politician recognized the impetus it would lend to the archduke’s anti-Magyar campaign:

  Thus Bosnia and Herzegovina must be regarded as the nucleus of a future Southern Slav Kingdom and as a third part of the Monarchy—namely, the foundation upon which ‘Greater Austria,’ the favorable scheme of the Heir Apparent, is to be erected … The equality of rights enjoyed by Hungary will obviously be curtailed when she will be compressed between the Slavs of Bohemia in the north and the Slavs in the south … I regard the annexation as a second Mohacs, the battle at which the independent Kingdom of Hungary was destroyed by the Turks in 1526.39

  Regarding it as a second Mohacs, the Magyars were the stumbling block to Franz Ferdinand’s American solution to the South Slav problem. As the archduke wrote to Kaiser Wilhelm, it followed that “to conduct a vigorous foreign policy, beneficial to all the peoples … there is only one remedy and one requirement; that is to break the predominance of the Magyars.” By “break” he meant use force: “Very well. Hungary will have to be conquered once again at the point of a sword. I do not see how it would be possible to escape from this necessity.”40

  Francis Joseph dreaded the chaos the archduke’s reform plans would wreak. In his eyes the Compromise had preserved Austria as a Great Power. The American solution would be the shipwreck of his life’s work. A contemporary Austrian historian agrees: Franz Ferdinand’s extralegal measures against Hungary “could have called forth … a dangerous external crisis … It would have needed no world war to blow up the monarchy.�
�� Franz Ferdinand’s death had relieved Francis Joseph of that “great worry.”41

  The seven teenage Bosnian Serb terrorists stippled throughout the crowd lining Sarajevo’s Appel Quay to welcome Franz Ferdinand on June 28 plotted to kill him to prevent his American solution. “I have no regrets because I am convinced that I have destroyed a scourge and done a good deed,” Gavrilo Princip, his nineteen-year-old assassin, said to investigators. “As future Sovereign he would have prevented our union [with Serbia] and carried out certain reforms which would have been clearly against our interests.” His fellow conspirator, Nedjelko Carbrinovic, concurred: “The Archduke proposed the creation of a federal monarchy which was … a danger to … Serbia.”

  The assassins were trained and armed in Belgrade by the Black Hand, an underground terrorist organization, led by one Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijevic, aboveground the chief intelligence officer of the Serbian army. And Dimitrijevic, too—codenamed “Apis,” the sacred bull of Egypt, by his fellow conspirators—regarded the archduke’s plan as a threat to the project of Greater Serbia, the drawing in of the South Slavs into a Yugoslav state led by Serbia. Apis, his nephew told the historian Luigi Albertini, “had grasped all the danger of the Archduke’s plan. Austria meant to bring about a Southern Slav union within the framework of the Danubian monarchy.” Apis “was seriously perturbed by the information, continually brought to him by Serbs and Croats from the Monarchy, of the growing sympathy which that program roused among the Slav subjects of Austria. That was why he decided to seize the first occasion to eliminate Francis Ferdinand.”42*