Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

by Simon Winder

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.