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.
