1913 Read online

  In the kingdom of Hungary, the Hungarians pursued an aggressive policy of Magyarisation of everyone else – Romanians and Slovaks in particular – insisting on the exclusivity of Magyar culture. Other nationalities protested; Franz Joseph failed to register their anger. Despite official autonomy within the Hungarian Kingdom, the Croats were suppressed by a Hungarian-appointed ruler. Some looked towards their fellow south Slavs, the Serbs – within and outside the empire – for support. Others sought a reconstruction of the empire along tripartite lines, with Austrian, Hungarian and South Slav entities. The position of the Serbs in the empire was worst of all: divided between 100,000 in Dalmatia under Austrian administration, half a million in Hungary, a further 650,000 in a supposedly autonomous Croatia-Slavonia and 850,000 in the newly acquired province of Bosnia.15 All the while, the relationship between Vienna and Budapest remained difficult – at one point plans were prepared for the army to be used to re-establish Habsburg order in Hungary if the situation were to deteriorate.16

  Thus the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1913 was a heap of paradoxes and anachronisms, a mix of peoples and religions, a hotchpotch of political regimes and relationships, a jumble of dynastic possessions assembled by a long process of canny marriages, good fortune, and temporary compromises which then became permanent. Though some Viennese, and certainly the heir apparent Franz Ferdinand, might spend long hours poring over maps and trying to work out some ideal solution for the Habsburg lands – perhaps a tripartite federation, perhaps a federation of all the nationalities rather more like the United States of America, perhaps a unitary state – the truth was that a solution did not exist, or at least not without a major political opposition. Given the costs of full-scale constitutional reform, rebalancing here and there was the best that could be hoped for in the immediate term. Perhaps this would change when Franz Ferdinand became Emperor, a man who saw the need to cut the Hungarians down to size, and who intended to brook no opposition in doing so, to the point of considering military force.

  And yet, despite its extraordinary complexity and variety, and despite years of crisis and dark warnings about its integrity, the empire, like the giant wheel in Vienna’s Prater gardens, still turned. Discussions about the constitutional structure of the empire would go round and round in circles, but one would always end up at the same point in the end. Like the Riesenrad, the empire went on and on, through summer and winter, storm and sun. Perhaps muddling through, as the Austro-Hungarian Empire did, was a kind of system anyhow, if not a very glorious one. (The long-serving Chancellor of Austria at the end of the nineteenth century, Eduard Taaffe, referred to his technique of government as ‘preserving all the nationalities of the Monarchy in a state of balanced and well-modulated discontent’.17) In any case one could chose to ignore politics too if it got too heated or if it got too dull. ‘The first glance of an average Viennese into his morning paper’, Stefan Zweig later recalled, ‘was not at events in parliament or world affairs, but at the repertoire of the theater’.18 There were more important things to life.

  For many, the most persistent feature of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was, quite simply, its existence. Did not this fact prove the empire’s fundamental resilience? Did it not justify its continuance? Perhaps it even proved its necessity. For if the Austro-Hungarian Empire was not to exist: what then? German domination? Russian domination? War? None were attractive options, except to a minority of pan-Germans who would have quite liked to team up with their stronger elder brother. The empire at least provided a frame for steadily increasing prosperity, albeit unevenly (average incomes in the central districts of Austria were three times those in Polish-majority Galicia).19 Though primarily agrarian – over half the population of Austria and two-thirds of the population of Hungary was still on the land in 1910 – Austria-Hungary was steadily industrialising, albeit running along a slower French track than the high-speed industrialisation of Germany.20

  And, in unifying diverse forces, did the empire not create something greater than the sum of its parts – a great power which none of its constituent peoples, including the Hungarians, could conceivably hope to be without? Thomas Masaryk, later to become the father of independent Czechoslovakia, and one of the leaders of Czech nationalism in the Viennese parliament, declared in 1893: ‘we want Austria to remain a great power, but we also wish that Austria should be great and powerful inwardly’.21 He did not seek independence but, even in 1913, reform: ‘our … plans are not designed to weaken the others but to strengthen the whole. We know that if the whole is no good, we, alas, must share in it’. The problem, he said, was that the process of reform seemed stuck. Nothing seemed to really change. An Austrian statesman, he said, was like a man who had swallowed an umbrella, unable to move, afraid it might open at any instant.

  One might even hear it said that perhaps this immobility was not so bad after all. It acted as a check on overbearing government. It made for an Austria-Hungary which was rather like a large rambling house with many interconnected rooms, a place which had seen better days, and yet where it was pleasant to lounge around. In Kakania, remembered Robert Musil, ‘there was a tempo too, but not too much tempo’:

  Of course cars rolled on these roads too, but not too many! The conquest of the air was being prepared here too, but not too intensively. A ship would now and then be sent off to South America or East Asia, but not too often. There was no ambition for world markets or world power. Here at the very center of Europe, where the world’s old axes crossed, words such as ‘colony’ and ‘overseas’ sounded like something quite untried and remote. There was some show of luxury, but by no means in such overrefined ways as the French. People went in for sports, but not as fanatically as the English. Ruinous sums of money were spent on the army, but only just enough to secure its position as the second weakest among the great powers. The capital, too, was somewhat smaller than all the other biggest cities of the world, but considerably bigger than a mere big city.22

  So, the permanent crises of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, for all its internal shenanigans, were a condition, but not a necessarily terminal one. As respected British journalist Henry Wickham Steed put it in a book published in 1913:

  Errors, weakness, or prejudice on the part of the Monarch, of statesmen, or of races may, it is true, bring the Monarchy again to the verge of ruin; disaster may seem to portend the fulfilment of prophecies of disintegration; but I have been unable to perceive during ten years of constant observation and experience – years, moreover, filled with struggle and crisis – any sufficient reason why, with moderate foresight on the part of the Dynasty, the Hapsburg monarchy should not retain its rightful place in the European community. Its internal crises are often crises of growth rather than of decay.23

  In 1913, as in 1813, as in 1713, a Europe without the Habsburgs was barely imaginable, least of all in Vienna, their capital. A Viennese picture postcard of the time showed the ageing Emperor Franz Joseph bent double over a small desk, signing documents, approving promotions, agreeing to the transfer of an officer from one garrison to another. In 1908 Kaiser Wilhelm II himself had led a delegation of German princes to Vienna to pay homage to the Austrian Emperor on the sixtieth anniversary of his accession, a living embodiment of Habsburg history. The old man had already been there for an eternity. Why not another?

  In Vienna, so long used to the theatrics of Habsburgian government, life was taken as a stage on which to exercise, in public, the collective myths of Viennese life. Splendours past – or, at least, their evocation – provided a confident sheen to a more troubled present. The city’s inhabitants played their allotted roles, and congratulated each other and themselves on their performance. The city’s 100,000 annual tourist visitors from outside the empire experienced heavy doses of Viennese nostalgia – and lapped it up obligingly.24 Vienna’s mantra was perhaps best expressed in one of its most popular operettas, Johann Strauss’ Die Fledermaus, first performed in 1874, when Vienna was trying to take its mind off a stock-market crash, but jus
t as relevant forty years later: ‘Glücklich ist, wer vergisst, was doch nicht zu ändern ist’ (‘Happy is he who forgets what cannot be changed’).25

  Lev Bronstein, otherwise known as Trotsky, living precariously as a journalist in Vienna during these years, described Vienna as ‘a centre of political and intellectual interests, of love of music, of four European languages, of various European connections’.26 Although statues of Schiller and Goethe proclaimed the city as culturally German, its imperial status made it supranational, while its population made it multinational – exotic, even. The city’s gypsies and Ostjuden (eastern Jews) showed that Asia no longer started at the Landstrasse, as Metternich had declared nearly a hundred years previously – the east began in the very shadow of St Stephen’s Cathedral.

  Leon Trotsky, a Russian resident in the Austro-Hungarian capital in 1913. Lenin lived as an exile in Galicia. Stalin visited Vienna to learn about Austro-Hungarian nationalities’ policy.

  Though it still had considerable old-world cachet amongst European cities, Vienna was no longer in the same category as London either as a political force or as a modern metropolis. Its population was just two million. For better or worse, it had fallen behind Paris as Europe’s pleasure capital. Nor did Vienna have Berlin’s energy and drive. In comparison, the Austro-Hungarian capital seemed elegantly shabby around the edges these days, and much quieter. ‘Vienna has no nightlife’, complained the Wiener Montags Journal, ‘the Viennese are asleep by ten. At ten o’clock the front door is locked’, and this to avoid the superintendent’s fee, a small amount to be paid to each doorman at each apartment block after that time.27 Another article criticised Viennese dust, complaining that ‘in Berlin, where in one day there’s more people in the street than in Vienna all year round, it’s cleaner’. Another wrote that, whereas department stores in Berlin were listed as tourist sights, in Vienna they were simply ‘junk stores’. Underlying all this, of course, was the full knowledge that Berlin was the true powerhouse now, and that in the military alliance agreed between the two empires back in 1879 (just thirteen years after the defeat at Sadowa), Germany was undeniably the senior partner.

  Most Viennese nonetheless preferred their own city, with its own charm, its own imperfections, and its character – a reflection of their own. While Berlin dressed itself in military uniform, Vienna put on fancy dress. Whereas Berlin turned its energies to the thrills of power, wishing to impress others with its greatness, Vienna was a touch more modest, capable of laughing at itself even as it touted its imperial birthright. Karl Kraus, the most famous exponent of the typically Viennese art of satire, is alleged to have said: ‘in Berlin things are serious but not hopeless; in Vienna they are hopeless but not serious’.28 Perhaps, noted Stefan Zweig, having given up on political supremacy in Europe or in the world, Vienna had turned to artistic supremacy as the key to its own particular self-expression.29

  Physically, Berlin was huge and impersonal, alienating the individual by making him feel insignificant in relation to it. Vienna’s grandeur was on a more manageable scale, impressive certainly but not overbearing. (If the city alienated some of its visitors – Adolf Hitler, for example – that was because of its society, out of reach to those who could never grasp the all-too-human combination of Viennese frivolity and seriousness, one eye laughing, the other crying.) The magnificent buildings of Vienna’s Ringstrasse – replacing the city walls torn down in the 1850s – were rather elegant in an old-fashioned way, with far more aesthetic unity than the crude architectural adventurism which Karl Scheffler had identified in the German capital.

  In the old heart of Vienna there was more romance than in all of the German capital, and more room for gothic imagination. An American book on Vienna at the turn of the century recommended a tour by moonlight:

  Note the romantic beauty of the scene, the exquisite effects and unexpected revelations that meet one at every turn. One half of the town is plunged in a sea of black shadow; the other is bathed in floods of light, limpid and silvery as the dawn, and under the influence of these alternate reflections of agate and opal the bearded faces of the caryatides seem to work with the grimaces and contortions of living creatures … Utterly alone in the deserted streets, which wind about like silver ribbons, a sensation of dreamy melancholy gradually steals over the senses, and one lingers to gaze in silence over the city, sleeping beneath its silvery canopy …30

  Above all, Vienna had what Berlin did not: tradition. A popular Viennese song ran:

  There is only one imperial city,

  There is only one Vienna,

  There is only one den of thieves,

  And its name is Berlin!31

  (In the years before 1913, in reference to Vienna’s growing Czech population, the last two lines were reworked to read: ‘the Viennese are outside, the Bohemians within!’32)

  In the Austro-Hungarian capital, tradition began at the top: at the court, with Franz Joseph himself, the imperial metronome for sixty-eight years. At the beginning of the year British newspapers reported the Emperor’s failing health, but this was dismissed as nothing more than a tiresome cold, which he was finding more difficult to get rid of than in previous decades:

  The Emperor, who retires at eight, gets up before five a.m., and Dr Kerzl likes to watch him while he inhales steam. Persons who meet the doctor walking across the Castle yard of Schönbrunn forget what an early riser the Emperor is, and think he has been summoned in haste. The doctor is always with the Emperor at five in the morning, and again at noon, when the Emperor paces up and down the Great Gallery, where a small forest of pines has been placed and where he enjoys the perfume exhaled by the trees. He very much misses his daily smoke, which Dr Kerzl cannot allow while the cough shows no improvement.33

  The regularity of court life, his imperial duties performed unceasingly for over six decades, was perhaps comforting to the Emperor himself, who had little else now that his wife was gone (assassinated by an anarchist terrorist in Geneva fifteen years previously), as was his son (who committed suicide in 1889 in a pact with his much younger lover, Baroness Marie Vetsera). The Emperor had a long-standing relationship with Katharina Schratt, an actress from the Burgtheater, as was pretty much expected from any self-respecting Austrian aristocrat. But this was a relationship of diligent letters of affection, rather than one of lusty passion.34

  Even when interspersed with the occasional romantic scandal, the essentially unchanging nature of the court provided comfort to the Viennese, a calm centre in the maelstrom of Austro-Hungarian politics. The fact that most Viennese were far too low-born to ever be able to attend one of the grander court functions merely reconfirmed the point that, in Vienna, traditions were diligently maintained. John Lothrop Motley, an American ambassador to Vienna in the 1860s, had remarked that ‘an Austrian might be Shakespeare, Galileo, Nelson, and Raphael in one person, but he would not be received in good society if he did not possess the sixteen quarterings of nobility which birth alone can give him’.35 ‘Quite right’, would have been the response fifty years later of Franz Joseph, a man entirely unwilling to have his habits changed by the passage of time, who thought the telephone a nuisance, who lit the Hofburg palace with kerosene lamps not electricity, who gloried in his old-fashionedness and was, to boot, a stickler for court etiquette – indeed court etiquette of the eighteenth century, inherited more distantly from the Spanish court of the sixteenth century.36

  In 1913 his rigorous application of tradition led him to slight his nephew and presumptive heir, Franz Ferdinand, for having married a Czech aristocrat beneath his station, Sophie Chotek. This poisoned irretrievably the relationship between the two men (while Kaiser Wilhelm II cannily exploited Franz Ferdinand’s feeling by inviting the Archduke and his wife to dine with Kaiser and Kaiserin à quatre, thus emphasising that he was more a man of the times, albeit arch-conservative in his own way). Yet the habits of courtliness in wider society, even if artificial, absurdly formalised and hidebound, could be a pleasure to at least some of Vienna
’s inhabitants. Stefan Zweig was delighted when, a play of his having been accepted at the Burgtheater, he received a return visit from the director himself, an indication of Zweig’s own social elevation to the rank of gentleman.37

  The court gave its royal impress to galleries, and to theatres and, of course, to the opera house – the Hofoper – which Hitler painted many times from the outside and in which he was transported by the operas of Wagner, performed under the baton of the Austrian Jewish composer and conductor Gustav Mahler (before he was appointed as conductor at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1908).38 In 1913, the Hofoper, now under the direction of Weingartner, met the centenary of Wagner’s birth with the traditional round of his operas. Those of Verdi, composer of Aïda, were not given any special prominence – not least because Verdi’s music was so strongly associated with the Italian Risorgimento, as a result of which the Habsburgs were reduced to their twin Italian holdings of Trento and Trieste.39