Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

by Simon Winder

Parts of this book are devoted to picking over the truly horrible consequences of these nationalisms, but this does not mean I have some nostalgic wish to return to the time of the Empire.

To see Europe itself as an arena for slavery, punishment raids, forcible resettlement, piracy and religiously sanctioned public mutilation and execution is, to say the least, interesting. I hope I have written about it with sufficient understanding not to be offensive, but also to make it clear that such fates are central to Europe’s story and not rooted in some mere weird ‘eastern’ barbarism.

An intermittent theme of Central European history is this very high level of violent uncertainty, an uncertainty that could lead to an entire elite being wiped out.

The Habsburgs’ principal purpose was therefore military: from its origins to its collapse their empire was a machine to resist its tough neighbours and to control its often truculent inhabitants.

The annihilation of this part of Roman Europe is the founding background to everything that follows.

The Magyar defeat at the Lech proved absolutely decisive for the shape of Europe. The retreating Magyar army tried to attack the Bohemian Slavs but were again defeated, headed back along the Danube and then stuck there. Germans and Magyars found a demarcation line east of Vienna and the two groups clicked together like a seatbelt, separating the northern Slavs (Bohemians, Moravians, Poles) from the southern Slavs (Slovenes, Croats, Serbs), and inventing what became Austria and Hungary.

Géza’s decision to plump for Rome rather than Constantinople was another of those small decisions with deep consequences, tying Hungary to the west and giving its entire culture a different shape and flavour from its eastern and southern neighbours.

The long rule of the Emperor Frederick III is the point at which the Habsburg family come into focus.

But the Pilgrim’s Progress Effect has to be resisted. The goal of a dynasty is never reached – each generation has very narrow and immediate aims and these can be undermined or enhanced through overwhelming strokes of disaster or luck far beyond its control.

The history of Protestantism simply cannot be disentangled from Charles’s own prominence and power.

For Christians much of the Old Testament provided simply a picturesque and enthralling sequence of dramas suitable for wall decorations and engravings. It was understood that the Old Testament was crammed with clues that, in an immense effort of futile scholarship, were made anticipations of the New Testament. For the Jews the same material, grotesquely abused and misunderstood by Christians, was an endlessly rich source of reassurance and challenge, a constant reminder of the need for constancy in exile and the keeping of the laws maintained at such cost by their ancestors. This oddly shared inheritance, however much mutually denied and contested, is of course one of the defining and most powerful and creative threads in European history.

What is striking throughout the arguments about the right place for Jews in society is that the Jews themselves were never consulted.

There was also the usual sickness that accompanied all Habsburg thinking about Jews. As a Catholic, Joseph believed that the Jews’ adherence to their faith was a result of their legal disabilities. Once they were in the mainstream, took German names and were taught German at school

they would cease to be Jews. The Hungarians came to the same conclusion with ‘their’ Jews – full citizenship would lead ultimately to conversion. To a limited extent this did happen over the following century, just as many ethnically Czechs, Croats, Slovenes and so on Germanized or Magyarized themselves. This bad faith at the heart of the reforms – that Jews were to be welcomed into some imagined mainstream only in the hope that they could eventually disappear – was to have a long and ultimately terrible history. Jews themselves, of course, knew what was going on and a great era of debate opened as to the right response to these reforms and how much compromise might undermine the nature of Judaism.

It was the failure to agree on the next step that allowed the military their chance, and the results were ferocious.

All Habsburg legislation in relation to the Jews was carried out effectively without reference to their needs or any real knowledge of their ideas.

Each stage in Jewish emancipation was pushed by bureaucratic efficiency and not by liberalism.

Each removal of blocks on Jewish activity was therefore a snare – Jewish children being allowed to go to school was on the face of it an improvement, but as those schools were ostentatiously Christian in their ideology they were simply a means of destroying Jewish solidarity.

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.

Even in the relatively benign Empire however there is no point at which there was anything like stability, and the ghost of Maria Theresa insisting that Jews stay indoors on Sunday out of shame at being Christ’s murderers was never dispelled.

The two thousand Jews of Plzeň had the indignity of constant interference in the design of their synagogue to ensure it was as ‘Oriental’ as possible, to make it quite clear it could in no sense be confused with a Christian place of

worship, with an early design turned down for having insufficiently exotic towers.

This matters only in the very narrow sense that this was a society only really appreciated in the rear-view mirror.

This was a fundamental change in the way that populations were imagined and had a long and bitter legacy throughout the century: rulers who had before 1914 often barely impinged upon their subjects now carried out dreams of absolute control over life and death. Calculations which started with entire bureaucracies working out how to replace the regular armies erased in 1914 led by a direct line to everything from the Nazi ‘hunger plan’ to the Great Leap Forward.

What I kept coming back to, seeing all these houses whose inhabitants may since 1914 have been scooped out and replaced several times over, is that so much of the critique of the Empire was a genuinely liberal one – but liberalism itself ended up as deeply intolerant. The great effort to shake clear of the Empire’s creaking, feudal structures meant breaking through into a new world not of tolerance and equality, but of viciousness far greater than anything the old Austro- Hungarian rulers could have dreamed of.

So the question that has driven me mad through the years writing this book is the obvious one. Was it inherent in the destruction of the Habsburg Empire that Nazism would result? In the vast, endlessly complex nationalist laboratory of the Empire’s final decade, was Hitler himself in fact the quintessential product?