Adrian Buck’s Reviews > Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe > Status Update

"...the Habsburg army was understrength and underfinanced and it is a routine part of any book on the First World War to blame the Hungarians for this," cf Ring of Steel, it blames the Hungarians for everything.

"This was true too Germany, where the army also became just a pleasant rite of passage - years of hanging around in a terrific uniform and making friends..." - cf the last episode of Blackadder - "Fifteen years of military experience perfecting the art of ordering a pink gin and saying 'do you do it doggy doggy' in Swahili, then suddenly four and half million heavily armed Germans hove into view.

"As all Hungarians now lived inside the Empire any territorial extension would result in a larger percentage of non-Hungarians...This pathological, zero sum, ethnographic obsessiveness drove Vienna mad..." - zero sum is also a feature of Hungarians dealings with each other.

"...this last attempt to satidfy minorities pleased nobody: it was seen by Poles as a frightening concession and by Ruthenians as merely an unsuccessful piece of cynicism to try to buy them off." - How does this work in Switzerland?

"Franz Ferdinand was an unusual Habsburg in that he was poor at learning languages, and his complete failure to master Magyar may have been he hated Hungary so much." - I find, however, that mastering a language is the high road to despising the people who speak it. When you don't understand a word they are saying, you can imagine so much more of them.

"The entrance price was to become literate and learn a new language and this process generated a further 2,000,000 or so 'fresh' Hungarians between 1850 and 1910. The largest group in this converted total were Jews, about 700,000 followed by Germans (500,000) Slovaks, Romanians and South Slavs."

"With the wretched ease of hindsight it is obvious the land-grab of 1867 was a terriblevmistake for Hungary. Hypnotized by visions of some ancient medieval state and by apocalyptic fears of their own national extinction the Hungarians tried to create a state which was even bigger than Italy and failed."

"The strange role of Latin in Hungary had itself originated in the Middle Ages as elsewhere in Europe, but somehow it had maintained itself as a lingua franca that stretched across the kingdom, allowing Slovak to speak to Romanian. It may be just loopy obscurantism to suggest that Latin should in fact have been imposed on everybody, but it would have solved this problem, and more plausibly than...Volapük or Esperanto

"The British more or less gave up on the Austrians over their chronic indecision over the Crimean War, and this really masked the last gasp of one of the great constants of Central Europe: the British use of Austrian troops to pin down the French and get killed in large numbers, while the British helped themselves to colonies in the rest of the world."

'The Austrians owed the Russians everything for their help in defeating thr Hungarians but now, only four years later, they found themselves siding with the Allies out of fear of Russian ambition to take over Moldavia and Wallachia from the Ottomans and thereby block the Danube."