Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

by Simon Winder

When the necropolis was built in the fourth century Sopianae must have been a fairly anxious place because of the nearness of the very restive Imperial frontier. It was not a strongpoint in any sense and if one of the Danube forts had given way then the news would presumably have reached Sopianae via a terrified horseman galloping only a few yards ahead of large numbers of terrifying horsemen.

Even on a map, Bautzen looks an unlucky place – with mountain passes to the south which would tend to channel armies passing west or east into its vicinity. And indeed, in a crowded field, Bautzen must have a fair claim to be the most frequently burnt down place in the region, both on purpose and through accident.

Town squares filled up with statues of heroic, shaggy forebears and town halls became oppressively decorated with murals of the same forebears engaged in i) frowningly breasting a hill and looking down on the promised land; ii) engaging in some ceremony with a flag or sword to found a town; and iii) successfully killing everybody who was there already.

This is entirely unlike most Central European states, which have been obliged militarily to turn round and round like a dizzy dog trying to defend its drinking bowl.

Christianity provided a written, judicial and intellectual link to the Roman Empire, but the lands which Charlemagne and his successors conquered were in many cases outside the old empire and making this new construction into the successor state was much more an act of will than a genuine revival. These notional Roman origins were always a crucial element for the thousand years that the new Empire existed. It tangled the Emperor in an important relationship with the Pope, with whom he could swap honest notes about bare-faced assertions of authority based on ancient links to Rome.

There are many jobs at Maximilian’s court which would have appealed to me. I have never really been outdoorsy enough to make a mercenary landsknecht, although their immense two-handed swords, flowing moustaches and puffed-silk slashed sleeves take some beating. Indeed this is the last period where sheer strength was essential to fighting and I really shy away from this. It would be flattering to think of being one of the Emperor’s humanists, musicians or artists, although a more likely post would have been as the trusted, albeit limited, figure who supervised his bowel movements. But then the ‘groom of the stool’ would have been a dream compared to the really horrible job of court genealogist. If ever there was a role which required fake learning and intellectual supinity it was this. Initially enormous work went into proving Maximilian’s descent from Noah’s family, which required some fairly seamless absurdity.

When the Emperor Charles IV had come up with a genealogy for himself, he had suggested that his family were derived not only from Noah but also from Saturn, but this sort of enjoyable silliness would no longer wash in the more stringent atmosphere of the late fifteenth century. Now, after much mulling over his own lineage, Maximilian decided he was not in fact descended from Noah, but from the Trojan hero Hector. Presumably the court humanists, rather than rolling their eyes and making farting noises with their cheeks, must have smiled at the Emperor’s perspicacity, bowed deeply and returned to their library to start all over again.

This settled sense of gloom around Maximilian is of course what makes him so attractive too. Some of his court music has a burnished, sacerdotal, capo di capi quality which makes everything later seem either too shrill or too pompous. To be able to ask musicians to play such stuff, while idly flicking through pictures of yourself by Dürer and taking sips from a jewel-studded goblet filled with something reassuringly exclusive is a fantasy that may not appeal to everyone, but it certainly finds a mental and emotional home in my corner of south-west London.

This for ever is hard for us to take, but the landscape was dotted with chantries which did do this job for extraordinary periods of time – the nuns who prayed for the Emperor Henry I at Quedlinburg kept at it for nearly nine hundred years before being asked to pack up.

Both Christians and Ottomans resorted to extreme levels of cruelty of a Grand Guignol kind. The bags full of Turkish noses sent by the Uskoks from Senj to Charles V in 1532 may have been one of those gifts more fun to send than to receive, but for much of the century it was in effect these bags that made it clear how useful the Uskoks were.

There is also, it turns out, a real bear-moat. I excitedly texted my family, who replied asking for clarification: was this a moat with bears in or a moat to keep bears out.

I climbed up into the top of Viscri church tower (‘You can visit nothing like this anywhere else in Europe’; ‘Oh, why’s that?’; ‘Because it is so incredibly dangerous’), a wilderness of yawing planks, spindly ladders and missing but important-seeming structural elements.

fair measure of Ferdinand’s problematic nature can be understood from his having gone on the pilgrimage to the church at Loreto. This crazy shrine was meant to mark the point where the hut in which the Virgin Mary had once lived came to rest after it whirled up into the air and, after several bounces, landed in Italy, having successfully escaped the Muslims who had invaded the Holy Land. As a rule of thumb, if you do not find the story of the Holy House completely absurd then you have failed some basic test, Catholic or not. Ferdinand believed in it fervently.

is generally reckoned that the Habsburg court was not much fun. Most gallingly it had very much less money than its seventeenth-century French rival, where state-of-the-art palaces would fill up with perfumed courtiers lightly tapping their gloved fingers together in appreciation of all the coloured fountains, special drinks, peacock-strewn parterres and mirrored halls being laid on for them. Indeed, the relentless Habsburg emphasis on prayer could have just been filling up some of the moneyless stretches of time. It certainly made a different aesthetic, with the Hofburg as a whole always having the air of cheerless functionality it keeps today. A further startling difference with France was the general lack of mistresses – the severe morality of the court was often genuine, and there was much less of the gossip or factionalism that made Versailles so distinctive. Instead, the Habsburgs had a far less threatening but baffling enthusiasm for court dwarves, a form of chic imported like so much else from Spain. These men (with names like ‘Baron Klein’) were unthreatening confidants, jesters and factotums, their size making clear their distance from the real world of high-rank noblemen. Indeed the dwarves must have been among the few who could kick back and relax at court, with most of its other members mere parts in a grinding machinery of precedence, cap-doffing, bows, curtsies and stylized movements fetishizingly borrowed from Madrid.

Enormous stretches of time, when there was no piquet and no fighting, were spent hunting. The Habsburgs were enthusiastic about some odd forms – the annual use of falcons at Schloss Laxenburg to kill herons is perhaps the oddest. Herons in flight always have an air of a spindly, poorly constructed balsawood model covered in feathers and it seems an at best tepid achievement to bring them down with a sinister, compact fist-of-fury sort of bird like a falcon. It is hard too to see the pleasure in having beaters chase dozens of deer into pools of deep water and then take them out with crossbows, or in tossing foxes in blankets before clubbing them to death (Leopold I used to enjoy this particularly, aided by his game-for-a-laugh dwarfs). Presumably these forms of the hunt were meant to show aristocratic mastery over the largest forms of life, but also not risk the Emperor with personal embarrassment. So the heron is the largest bird, but if shot in a normal way with a gun would presumably go all over the place like some exploding spindly chair and the Emperor’s hunt would appear mean rather than masterful; a proper, uncontrolled deer-hunt is simply far too dangerous and is in any event not something that can be watched by spectators, so the deer need to be brought to the Emperor; foxes are too nimble to kill in an honourable way so they need to be stunned and rolled up in a blanket. So the Emperor was obliged in everything he did to take actions which appeared masterful and y...

His second marriage (this is where things get very odd) was to his niece Mariana, Ferdinand III’s daughter. In a development that would not surprise modern biologists, of their five children only two survived: Margarita Teresa herself and her younger brother, the overwhelmingly handicapped Charles.

Leopold has been much laughed at for the way that he scarpered to Passau, but his core skills were music appreciation and paying for masses to be sung. He had been raised for the priesthood, was tiny, and never claimed to know much about guns. He had only two very young sons (from a third marriage) and no living brothers or uncles, so if Vienna had fallen he could have been executed by the Ottomans like the King of Bosnia or died in battle like the King of Hungary, and his dynasty would have ended. The little chapel to the Virgin Mary, thanking her that things worked out, which he and his wife put up in the hills above Passau, is still there and a well-judged humble gesture.

In many ways the enormously long reign of Leopold I was the acme of the Habsburg experience – lots going on, exciting geopolitical changes, good music.

I would have myself plumped for a masterful inactivity, with plenty of leisure time set aside for music, mistresses, big jewels, a private library with a very comfortable chair and lots of talented painters to chat to about the iconography to be used for triumphant ceiling-paintings featuring me. Some of this worthwhile programme would undoubtedly have appealed to Leopold, but his key decisions were taken for him: by his belligerent neighbours to the east (the Ottomans) and to the west (the French).

Putti have a peculiar and confused lineage. They have been around since Renaissance artists copied classical originals and are often mixed up with Cupid, an altogether more sexual, fateful figure, and barely related in practice to these small, tumbling babies with wings. They zoom about looking vaguely serious in religious paintings, and throw flowers, fall off clouds and perform other light duties in hundreds of painted ceilings featuring rulers and ancient gods. They can look wistfully appealing (most famously in Raphael’s Sistine Madonna in Dresden) but generally they just add lightness, charm and variety to what might otherwise be somewhat plodding canvases. They seem to have more or less disappeared around the time of Napoleon and this is probably something else he can be blamed for.

Louis and Leopold got older and older, still waiting for Carlos to die, and by the 1690s an entirely different solution had been reached, with the Spanish throne going by a neat and clever compromise to Joseph Ferdinand, a grandson of Philip IV via Leopold’s daughter. But we need to move on quickly before wearying genealogical tables are dragged out to establish why on earth that would be the case, as it just does not matter: Joseph Ferdinand suddenly and highly unfortunately died in 1699, predeceasing Carlos II himself by nearly two years – a gap just long enough for the now elderly, jaded and exhausted Louis and Leopold to initiate what proved to be the War of the Spanish Succession, the most brutal and wide-ranging conflict experienced by Europe since the Thirty Years War.

Here is St Roch with his pustulant leg and strange dog; an oddly insouciant St Sebastian; St Donatus holding an appallingly realistic human heart squeezed in his hand (or perhaps a bunch of grapes – it’s a bit dark in here); St Elizabeth of Thuringia, a princess who worked herself to death helping the sick and the poor. Here too are the towering figures of the Counter-Reformation, who devoted everything to God and transformed Catholicism: St Ignatius of Loyola, St Aloysius Gonzaga and St Francis Xavier of the Jesuits, whose exemplary and tortured lives would have been known inside out by generation after generation of Piarist-taught children. There is also an oil painting of a girl with a sword sticking into her chest which I have been completely unable to place, but presumably she must have viewed this by some obscure measure as a positive experience.

By stark contrast, by the time you climb, panting, up the forest trail to Göttweig, it is clear that decay has set in. The Abbey Church is no less grand than St Florian, and equally engaging, until it becomes clear that the painters have reached an unacceptable level of silliness: a painting of Babel which makes it look like a high-end holiday-camp, another of the Last Supper which has the air of a gala meal among friends. The last straw is a picture of the touching little scene in the gospel where Mary Magdalene in her panic assumes that a figure she sees by Christ’s empty tomb must be a gardener, before realizing that he is in fact the risen Christ. Here is Mary, and here is Jesus, but he is wearing a floppy hat and carrying a spade, neither of which features in the Bible. He is actually disguised as a gardener, a very different, eccentric move perhaps reflecting the mental confusion attending resurrection.

He built a small Habsburg navy but unfortunately the only role of small navies is to be sunk by bigger ones; it was never used and eventually rotted at anchor.

A Jesuit, appalled that Joseph had given a prominent position to a Protestant, dressed up as a ghost and lurched into the Emperor’s bedroom urging him to dismiss the heretic. Joseph simply called his servants and had the Jesuit thrown out of the window. This curious story reflects well on the new atmosphere at court, but also reflects terribly on the Jesuits, that one-time intellectual power-house now reduced to camping it up in sheets and grease-paint.

It is perhaps only possible to learn so much from a jeans patch, but the symbolic weight of that shape, wherever it is displayed, pins the wish for Hungarians to have a clearly defined, ethnically complete state. But the ‘Crown Lands of St Stephen’ are a fantasy, giving a sense of ancient destiny to an arena of political power for Budapest that in practice only existed from 1867 to 1918 and which therefore has no more God-given legitimacy than any other random date bracket. It would be an eccentric history lesson, but with scissors one could come up with jeans patches of pretty much every imaginable shape to express the borders of the true Hungarian state, and it is this tragic uncertainty that has been the true motor for the region’s fate.

In a bonanza for the Catholic fight-back a great series of subterranean tunnels was found in Rome in 1578, filled with the bodies of early Christians. It was assumed that they had been buried there because they had been persecuted and these ‘catacomb saints’ were exported by the Jesuits all over the Catholic world as superb instances of the primitive sufferings of the True Church. In fact they were the skeletons of pious but ordinary Romans who, having blamelessly lain in the dark for a millennium, now found themselves landed with a random Christian name, canonized and put on a mule cart. Clement arrived in Melk during the great refurbishment, and Frederick was a later arrival, donated by Maria Theresa in 1762. Given the huge number of bodies in the catacombs these saints could be handed out like cookies, and even today a quiet word in the right ear could probably secure one.

Joseph II’s endless schemes to swap around bits of territory and generally use the Holy Roman Empire as a sort of goody-bag had ravaged the political systems along the Rhine and to the east in ways which also affronted and confused France. He was also well on the way to wrecking the ‘magic circle’ which had until then generally protected the painfully vulnerable religious states and their tiny confederates. If in the east the Holy Roman Emperor wanted to sweep away feudal privileges and stamp out old-style clerical parasitism, then in the west the French Revolution favoured a far more extreme version of the same thing. The now friendless little states in between Paris and Vienna could perhaps be fed to any predator who made the right deal. The protections formerly available because a micro-ruler owned the nicely displayed bone of a saint, or traditionally held up a proud old banner during coronation ceremonies, suddenly seemed a bit threadbare.

The ghastly fate of Prussia, a ragged, minor French colony since its destruction at the Battle of Jena–Auerstädt in October 1806, was a horrible lesson in just how far Napoleon could go – the equivalent of a gamekeeper nailing the corpse of a crow to a fence to warn other crows off.

Her much-loved son (very briefly known as Napoleon II) became a sad footnote in royal history – a source of embarrassment but also potential danger to the Habsburgs until his death aged twenty-one from tuberculosis. His extraordinary gold crib in the Habsburg Treasury is a strange reminder of a future that never happened: Napoleon as the founder of a dynasty that ruled a united European super-state. In a peculiar piece of tidying up after the defeat of France, Hitler had Napoleon II’s body transferred from Vienna to Les Invalides to be buried near his father. No attempt was made to get hold of his heart, which still sits – in a permanent affront to all the other hearts – in the Augustinian church.

You have to pick and choose a bit with Stifter’s work – his late novel Indian Summer is a book of unyielding tedium, with a featureless narrator paying repeated visits to a house which is in a perfect relation to God and nature, with everyone tending trellises and drying fruit so that you want to scream. I was encouraged that one contemporary German critic said that he would offer the crown of Poland to anyone who could get to the end.

Stifter’s original visionary community has therefore entirely vanished, but this God–Man–Nature idea was always, outside the frame of its own artistic brilliance, a disturbing and intolerant one. It left out many Central Europeans and it made rural life a moral force in its own right (a message that even I was able to glean from Indian Summer despite an increasing preoccupation with my own mental health as I dragged through each page).

The castle is crowded with elaborate objects and paintings which seem only to mock Maximilian’s fate – many of them only installed after he left for good. There is a very strange painting of him as a teenager with his younger brother Karl Ludwig (the future father of Franz Ferdinand) inspecting the bottoms and breasts of slave-girls in a Smyrna market. I have never been able to work out how to even start researching who thought that was a good idea as a theme for a painting – perhaps it started off as a private memento. Maximilian’s time in the navy is commemorated by his having his private office as an exact copy of his office on board his flagship, with lots of nautical-looking struts – a hearty joke which must have rather paled by the time that work was completed. There is a painting of the seemingly unenthusiastic ceremonies in Venice (a small bonfire and a handful of boats – it’s no Canaletto) when he was appointed Viceroy of Lombardy–Venetia. And here too is the actual table at which he signed his assent to become Emperor of Mexico. There is also a spooky range of posh gifts which he never saw, from top well-wishers such as the Pope, plus an unused Japanese-themed smoking-room and a chapel still futilely decorated with a Mexican eagle. Best of all is an oil painting by Cesare dell’Acqua (perhaps the worst painter of the nineteenth century, albeit in a hotly contested field) showing the Argonauts in olden times rowing into the bay of Miramare and being waved at by lot...

Admiral Tegetthoff sported the same bizarre whiskers as Maximilian, as though his cheeks were being attacked by two synchronized voles.

In the aftermath of Tegetthoff’s early death, a ship was named after him and, in a final gesture of global ambition, sent up to the Arctic. In an epic of futility and ice its crew discovered a genuinely pointless archipelago now proudly named Franz Joseph Land. In the century since the Habsburg Empire came to an end, workmen across Central Europe have been busily engaged in taking down any mention of Franz Joseph on countless statues, plaques and street names across the former Empire and it is at the very least odd that the largest-scale use of Franz Joseph’s name survives in an area so remote that even its Soviet owners could never be bothered to change it. So the inheritors of the bold, imperialist and naval future for the Habsburgs were not the Venetians, and certainly not the Mexicans, but a few baffled and perhaps quietly loyal seasonal walruses.

To me – needing psychiatric assistance by now on Habsburg issues – Fafner is the nationalist critique of Habsburg monarchy. The watchers around his lair are, admittedly, sociologically unconventional, as they consist of a god, two angry dwarves and a blond simpleton – but you could see Wotan as the Aristocrat, Black Alberich as the Demagogue, Mime as the Worker, and Siegfried as the hero of the dawning age who will forge a new reality through his great deeds.

To be fair, Franz Joseph does try to use the Tarnhelm himself to improve his situation, switching from absolutism to bits of democracy, from activism to inertia, from centralism to federalism, but almost always in ways that appear too late, cynical, and incompetent. He keeps changing shape under his magic helmet, but you can still see the side-whiskers.

This cult of Central Asia (‘Turanism’) was to rebound somewhat by refining a magnificent weapon for the Romanians, who went on entertainingly about the Magyars being merely ‘Asia’s discharged magnates’, whereas they were themselves the pure outpourings of Trajan’s centurions’ loins and the true gatekeepers of European civilization. This unhelpful debate has never been resolved.

The Partitions of Poland meant the transfer of most of Europe’s Jewish population from Poland to the Prussian, Habsburg and Russian states. The great majority fell to Russia, which had no tradition of dealing with Jews and proceeded to make a disgusting nightmare of ‘the Pale’. Berlin and Vienna had long experience with Jewish populations and simply extended their own more or less disreputable ways of dealing with them. Prussian Jews were unlucky enough to have the ridiculously low-grade Friedrich Wilhelm III, a mystical and babyish Christian who once shut down an experimental new synagogue in Berlin (which allowed men and women to sit in the same space) on the grounds that if Judaism lost its aura of irrational obscurantism it might become attractive as a faith. This binary atmosphere – either pressure on Prussian Jews to become German-speaking Prussians or the Russian view that Jews were irretrievably alien – made the Habsburg experience relatively sane.

I have often turned over in my mind the idea of writing a book about zoo architecture. This neglected form of building is so rich and so peculiar and it has never really had its due. It is an amalgam of shop-window display, storage facility and prison and its most direct clients (the animals) are unable to notice it, whereas its more casual clients (the visitors) treat it as an almost invisible frame. The buildings tend to be very solid so that their inhabitants do not get out and kill everyone.

Forms of nationalism are very easy for an outsider to deride. They are obviously poisonous, depressing and end in catastrophe for everybody. There was always a Habsburg argument that nationalism could be restricted to forms of the picturesque (costumes, foods, parades – not unlike in the United States). There was a socialist argument that nationalism was a demagogic sham and a trap for the workers. There was also a liberal argument for the dangers of hating someone simply because they spoke a different language or attended a different church. But these different arguments against nationalism could, for obvious reasons, find no common ground with one another. In addition, it was very hard indeed not to become infected. What did it take in practice for a Hungarian liberal to agree that the majority Romanian areas of Transylvania should be handed over to Romania, or that the Serbs could help themselves to southern Hungary? Such views were mere eccentricity. The longer I have spent thinking about this book the more horror and disgust I feel for nationalism, which seems something akin to bubonic plague, but clearly such a perception only gets anyone so far. Even the most intelligent and articulate figures in Europe embraced it in some form and could no more shed it than they could shed their own skins.

Hugo Wolf’s work is among the most extraordinary Habsburg products of the 1880s and ’90s, with songs such as ‘To an Aeolian harp’ (‘An eine Äolsharfe’) and ‘The Converted’ (‘Die Bekehrte’) beautiful in an almost alarming, too-bright way. But the way that we experience them today is crazily at odds with their original context. For example, I enjoy listening to them in our kitchen, with a bowl of nuts and some beer, generally with the background sound of large passenger planes roaring overhead every few minutes and our second son in the sitting room playing a computer game like Afghan Rough-House or KriminalKrew. This is hard to relate to the salon of a Vienna society hostess, all ruche, inlay work and satins (and that’s just the hostess), with the recital being listened to by a handful of posh whey-faced neurasthenics. More uncanny than the need to filter out the sound of a Glock pistol dispatching Taliban in the sitting room is the simple act of repetition. Even the most poisonously demanding patron could not get the singer and accompanist to sing ‘To an Aeolian harp’ dozens and dozens of times in one evening just because they liked it so much. Our sheer familiarity with specific pieces of music in a specific performance is completely at odds with the spirit in which they were both composed and appreciated.

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.

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.

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.

It may well be that he had just waited too long and that whatever qualities he might have possessed had long curdled, lost in a maze of ritual, uniforms, masses and – above all – hunting. His shooting skills made him legendary, belonging to that disgusting and depressing era when the aristocratic hunting expedition became married to modern military technology, unbalancing the entire relationship of hunter and hunted, so that shooting partridges became like a proto-version of playing Space Invaders. Franz Ferdinand totted up the dazing total of some three hundred thousand animals killed. The little woodland critters on his Bohemian estates must have indulged in a certain amount of high-fiving on receipt of the news from Sarajevo.

Wherever Franz Ferdinand travelled he had photos taken, and corridors are filled with his global wanderings, across Egypt and Australia, Canada and the United States (where he had, to his bafflement, actually to hand in his gun before visiting Yellowstone National Park).

In the summer of 1914 Kaiser Wilhelm II and Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz arrived for a visit. This was one of the key meetings prior to the First World War and infuriatingly there is no clue at all as to what was discussed. Franz Ferdinand was against preventive war of any kind – well aware of Habsburg weakness, and impatient (by this time more than impatient) to carry out his internal reforms and regenerate the Empire as a great power on the modern German or American model. The three men, probably sitting in Franz Ferdinand’s ‘harem room’ with their cigars, would have had the most frank and interesting conversation imaginable, filled with random gusts of anti-British, anti-Russian and anti-French ranting with occasional polite pauses to allow Franz Ferdinand to be anti-Hungarian and anti-Serb. We would know so much more about the true parameters of the German–Habsburg relationship, which was to create the summer’s fatal dynamic, if there was only some kind of record.

Perhaps the cultural survival and indeed veneration of figures such as Kraus, Freud, Hašek, Kafka, Schiele and Webern flatters and distorts how we think of the Empire. It would be a grotesquely demeaning thing to set up and it would be visited by nobody, but perhaps a major exhibition should be put together celebrating all the figures who were often very successful at the time but who are now forgotten – the heroic realist sculptors, the anti-Semitic cartoonists, the insipid society portraitists, the writers of slim bestsellers on how German Austrians should join the Reich or why Jews, Romanians, Ruthenians and so on are biologically made to be untrustworthy.

So what was the right number of people to speak a particular language? All over the Empire there were different obsessions – generally fuelled by isolating a specific area like Teschen and then having a mental breakdown about some demographic shift. Nobody made choral settings of poetry pointing out that there were plenty more Czechs just down the road and that Czech culture was thriving as never before (expressed not least in the works of Bezruč and Janaček). This crazy ethnicity-meets-mathematics environment stemmed from the fall-out of intellectuals as diverse as Friedrich List and Charles Darwin, fuelled and spread (awkwardly) by literacy and forms of democracy. It was a definite problem that the Empire’s parliaments made language the route to power. This sense of an unending scramble for a place in the sun, a place that could only be reached by stamping down on the heads of others, lay at the heart of the European disaster that now unfolded. Retrospectively the Habsburg version seems a bit childishly harmless, but it was bitter and vicious enough at the time, and the Empire was the laboratory as much for Nazism as for Zionism. Schools, newspapers, elections, cafes, government jobs became battlegrounds for linguistic competition. The governments veered between repression and electoral concession.