Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

by Simon Winder

Czechs sat quietly at home reading about Hussites slaughtering German invaders, Ruthenians reminisced about massacres of Polish landowners and Romanians and Serbs listened to epic poetry about their ancestors’ unlimited ferocity-cum-nobility. All these fantasies would be put to the test. But nobody at the time could have imagined that they would end up most potently in the hands of the Germans – in some ways the least thought-about minority in the Habsburg Empire: a Western ruling elite, but equally fulfilling every role from shopkeeper to ordinary soldier to agricultural worker, dotted irregularly everywhere from the Tyrol to the Carpathians.

Perhaps the single most striking aspect of the last decades of the Empire is the speed with which its concerns became fatally irrelevant to the rest of Europe. After its crushing by the Prussians in 1866 the Empire continued to behave like a major predator, without noticing that it had become a prey animal – a lion that was actually a gnu.

the Habsburgs had gone from being a pan-European power in the 1850s to a local one, frightened of its neighbours. It is perhaps an implausible image, but Austria-Hungary and Germany in global terms had in a generation become the Babes in the Wood, clinging to each other, surrounded by colossal powers operating in a global, not a European framework. In a world in which America and Russia were both deliriously expanding and where colonies were seen as the currency of economic, masculine assertion, Austria-Hungary and Germany hardly counted, with even Belgium a more convincing Imperial power. Of course, these were Babes backed up by Škoda and Krupp, but in both Vienna and Berlin there were acute anxieties that their styling themselves ‘Empires’ seemed increasingly sarcastic, given their now relatively small, boxed-in landmasses. It is strange that the term ‘World War’ in 1914 did not really apply to the Central Powers, who essentially fought a war merely around the rim of their European borders. This sense of encirclement, decline, of an agenda shifting against them had a powerful impact on Vienna, Budapest and Berlin’s ever more irrational world-view.

One final act of will by the Habsburgs led to the creation of Albania. The Albanians were a group who moved from having no agreed form for their alphabet in 1909 to full independence five years later. They were an extraordinarily cosmopolitan and widespread people and had had a powerful impact on Mediterranean history, both fighting for the Ottoman Empire and undermining it – Albanians had ruled Egypt and fought and administered everywhere from the Red Sea to the Caucasus. A large part of the world had been open to them and the collapse of the Ottomans was a disaster. They found themselves shut into a tiny and vulnerable national area for the first time,