From The Paris Review:
Alone in Vienna, January sky smoothed and silvery over a thin lip of sunlight, streets windless, I sat in the Café Museum before a strudel and a cup of milky coffee, reading an Austrian novel propped open and freshly coffee stained. I was perfectly, touristically happy, a state in which even the most prosaic things partake in the novel glory of a place. I had just dispatched a schnitzel the size and shape of a small umbrella, beaded with oil, as well as a pilsner whose gold-brown glow rhymed with the schnitzel, the coffee, and the dusk lights—everything, in fact, seemed fringed with burnt gold. The booth was crushed crimson velvet, soft but thinly packed and straight-backed, a blithe discomfort surviving charmingly out of the past. Similarly, the waiter—bow-tied, bald head monumentally mounded and catching the light like marble—was unaccommodating and gruff in a manner that seemed, at the time, a piece of old-world charm. Across the street, washed hospital white, the Secession Building, house of Gustav Klimt’s luminous Beethoven Frieze, was wrapped in a mesh tarp and looked like the depression of a pulled tooth covered in gauze.
I found it all beautiful. And yet, as I sat and sipped and sighed like a sentimental character in a nineteenth-century novel, the twentieth-century novel I was reading, Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard, in which a narrator attends a dinner party with old artistic friends he despises, was heaping scorn on this very city: “This dreadful city of Vienna,” “Going for a walk in the Graben, I thought as I sat in the wing chair, means nothing more nor less than walking straight into the social hell of Vienna.” Adolf Loos, the architect and designer of the very Café Museum I sat in, I later learned, had derisively called Vienna a “Potemkin city.” I left the Café Museum and walked to the Inner City as dusk clasped around the metropolis, in a trance, blessing all the facades.
Once I noticed Bernhard’s disdain, I saw it everywhere. Vienna is an important city—birthplace of psychoanalysis and Zionism, the great and prideful musical hub of the nineteenth century. From 1890 to the 1950s it produced an astonishing group of writers, a group as brilliant as those produced by any other city—Karl Kraus, Joseph Roth, Robert Musil, Elias Canetti, Sigmund Freud, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Arthur Schnitzler, Hermann Broch, Thomas Bernhard, Elfriede Jelinek—and, in some way, they all seemed to despise the city in at least equal measure to their affection.
In Karl Kraus, stern judge of fin de siècle Vienna and éminence grise of all Vienna-despising Viennese, his Vienna-dislike appeared as pure vitriol. For almost two decades, he single-handedly published his magazine Die Fackel, relentlessly attacking Habsburg politics as well as the Viennese press and art world, embroiled in perpetual feud for his venom. As Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin relate in Wittgenstein’s Vienna, when a prominent writer died in 1919, the Viennese Neue Freie Presse, a favorite Kraus target, refused to cover the funeral because Kraus had delivered the eulogy.
. . . .
Kraus wrote histrionic essays denouncing writers like Heinrich Heine—only, it seems, because other Viennese loved him. He endlessly ridiculed instances of venality, hypocrisy, and jingoism in the Viennese press. He poured disdain on the popular feuilleton essay—generally short and light cultural pieces—denouncing them as hideous exercises in empty verbiage and shameful navel-gazing. Taking great glee in puncturing the pretensions of the artistic Viennese, one of Kraus’s most famous aphorisms reads, sardonically: “The streets of Vienna are paved with culture, the streets of other cities with asphalt.”
. . . .
Psychoanalysis and Zionism were both products of fin de siècle Vienna, and the underlying assumption of both was that life as they saw it in Vienna was intolerable and unsustainable. The Jews of Europe are blindly sitting on the rim of a volcano, Herzl pronounced. Civilized society is the unstable facade of a roiling infantile psychosexual drama, Freud theorized. Arthur Schnitzler wrote novella after novella of men stumbling or stalking through Vienna, losing themselves to dreamy insanities. The great Viennese writers seemed to constantly be grabbing the lapels of their peers and shouting, “Awake
. . . .
Even after disaster did come, in the form of World War I, forebodings of future disaster continued to prevail in Vienna, heightened even. The other Great Powers suffered tremendously in the war, but it was only the Habsburg Empire that was territorially dismantled. Vienna went from an imperial capital of a multicultural polyglot empire to a city on the edge of the German world, a position that brought new anxieties—always anxiety.
Link to the rest at The Paris Review
Tom Simon, I disagree with much of your histories. Disagreement among historians is common. I disagreed with an historian who criticized Caesar for his lack of a general staff; the general staff was created by the Prussian Army in the 1860s; does not mean the functions were not performed before, but only that those who did them were not called a ‘general staff’. I disagreed with many over interpretations of the actions in the American War of Independence. I disagreed vehemently with the chair of the history department at my alma mater about everything (the man was an ignorant and arrogant idiot); for example, he claimed that a British soldier needed 4 minutes to reload a musket.
BTW saying the German colonies don’t count is a silly argument. Of course they count. If we exclude colonies because they were uneconomic then all the Belgian colonies are out, and so are the French and Italian colonies. For that matter, how many British colonies were money-making concerns? Certainly not Belize or Bermuda. Newfoundland?
It was not by external provocation that the Habsburg fell apart. It collapsed because the people valued nationalism more than empire. (How do you get Italians to fight Italians? You don’t. Many Italians from the empire served in the Italian army.) Read von Trapp, To the Last Salute. The Austrian Navy had a saying: We have no nation. That was a patent nonsense. The official language of the Navy was German, and the assumption was that every sailor spoke German. But von Trapp had 4 Czechs in his tiny U-boot crew of 18 who spoke no German. He communicated with them through a petty officer. His travails on his last journey home illuminate the collapse of the empire into its constituent nations.
RE: Soviet Bavaria (tangentially)
There was also a short-lived communist uprising in Vienna. It failed to seize power.
I do not see what purpose your interpretation of history serves, but if it gives you comfort, so be it. But there are others.
Anon, The Habsburg Empire existed for all that time only because the hand of the emperor fell lightly on the people. When it made demands and hardships, the people revolted.
The idea that the Austrians saved Christianity from the Ottoman invasions is one I think the Poles will dispute (John Sobieski).
The idea that the people of the empire were united by Catholicism is laughable.
My point was and is that once pressure was applied, diversity and multiculturalism split the empire apart. It is still fracturing the Balkans today. Were I an Austrian, I would be glad to shed of them.
Matt Levin, the author of this screed, does history as well as he does prose. His text sports similes and metaphors the way a French admiral sports sashes and medals. (And I apologize for my own simile.)
No, it bloody was not. To wit, the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire, the German Empire.
Glibness is not a sufficient substitute for knowledge. Or truth.
Yes, it bloody was. Turkey remained as the heartland of the former Ottoman Empire, Germany remained as the heartland of the former German Empire, and the Russian Empire lost nothing but a few bits along the European periphery. The emperors fell, but the empires, in substance, remained. Only Austria-Hungary was completely broken up, for the reason that there was no heartland.
Moreover, only Austria-Hungary saw its industrial centres divided from one another by borders and tariffs. When Europe rearmed in the 1930s, none of the bits and pieces of Habsburg territory had the industrial capacity to defend themselves, except Czechoslovakia – whose allies betrayed it in a way that the Kaiser in Vienna had never thought of doing.
As a young reporter in the 1920s and 30s, William Shirer was stationed in Vienna at various times, and came to know the city as intimately as a foreigner ever can. Some of his observations and insights made it into the earlier chapters of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, where they make interesting reading – and substantially corroborate Levin’s claims.
No, it bloody, frelling was not.
The Russian Empire survived the humiliation of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk but fell to revolt within. The Empire did not survive. The USSR emerged from its ashes in 1922.
The Ottoman Empire was dismembered by the British. The loss of territory it suffered by the Treaty of Sevres was only an admission of faits accomplis. The British allowed Mehmed VI to keep his throne and titles, but the Turkish War of Independence put an end to the caliphate. And blessed be the name of Ataturk for that. The Ottoman Empire survived the war in name only, not in fact, and the facts soon caught up with the lie.
The events of the first week and a half of November 1918 brought an end to the German Empire. The Kaiserliche Marine refused orders and revolted. The Kaiser sent off a delegation to get an armistice with the Entente powers. Next, the Kaiser and all Prussian princes abdicated, and that ended the Empire. The Social Democrats proclaimed a republic on 09 November. The Kaiser’s delegates concluded an armistice on 10 November that took effect on 11 November. (I wonder about the legality of that armistice since the authority that had appointed the delegates no longer held power. But nobody cared to raise the question at the time.) Germany fell into a bloody civil war that even saw the rise and fall of a Bavarian soviet state. The Treaty of Versailles dismembered the dead German Empire: Alsace and Lorraine returned to France; the new Poland got Silesia (a big surprise to the von Richthofen family) and parts of eastern Prussia; Danzig became a ‘free city’; and East Prussia was separated from the rest of Germany; all German overseas territories were lost. What emerged after the First World War was not Imperial Germany.
As for the Austrian Empire, the Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs revolted in late October 1918 (and the Slovens, Croats, and Serbs announced their intent to join with Serbia!), and the Hungarians followed soon after. As a result, Hungarian regiments were permitted to leave the line in November 1918. The effect on rest of the Austrian army was predictable. They left, too. The Austrian army dissolved. (It is a testament to the leadership of the Italian army that it took a week to advance 20 kilometers against an enemy that was walking away from it.) The Austrian Empire dissolved into its constituent nationalities. It was not dismembered by the Allies. It fell apart from within. The Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye and the Treaty of Trianon merely put on paper what was already accomplished fact.
And it was not the only empire to fall and lose territory, the opinions of William Shirer and Matt Levin notwithstanding.
(Note: For those who applaud diversity and multiculturalism, the Habsburg Empire tried it. The end is instructive.)
The Russian Empire lost a tiny percentage of its territory and not much more of its population and industry. There was no interregnum, there were no ‘ashes’: Bolshevik rule was continuous (except in White-ruled areas during the Civil War) from the October 1917 revolution onwards. The formal establishment of the U.S.S.R. was merely a renaming of the Russian state for propaganda purposes, paying lip service (and nothing more) to a few of the subject nations by pretending that they were republics in an equal union with Great Russia.
Yup. It lost its Arab provinces, which had been ineffectually administered and were, at that time, of little economic value – and went into full-scale rebellion as soon as the British sent them a trifle of military aid. The Turkish heartland remained intact, and it was there that Mustapha Kemal staged his coup against the monarchy.
Again, Germany lost less than a tenth of its population and industry. German rule was continuous. The Kaiser was not so much overthrown as sent packing by the High Command of the Reichswehr, which then thrust upon the Reichstag (and the Social Democrats) the odium of forming a provisional government and suing the Allies for peace.
It is instructive to read what the German generals expected at the hands of the Allies compared with what they actually got. Much ink has been wasted on the so-called vindictiveness of the Versailles treaty. In fact it left Germany nearly intact, still incomparably the strongest power in Central Europe, and fully capable of pursuing revenge once allowed to rearm. I have not the documents to hand – packed in boxes – but German generals were using phrases like ‘the fate of the Jews’ to describe what they thought the Allies were going to do. They believed that the German nation would be uprooted and scattered across the earth – would lose its independence utterly – that all its territory would be divided among the victors. None of these things happened. Instead, the peace treaty insulted the Germans just enough to make them hanker for a rematch, without doing them any significant damage.
Alsace-Lorraine, by the way, had been French for over a century before Germany forcibly annexed it in 1871. The territories ceded to Poland were largely those with a majority Polish population, virtually all taken from the Poles in the partitions of the eighteenth century. The other territory lost, in Schleswig-Holstein, had been taken from the Danes in the 1860s. The overseas colonies had been in German hands for less than forty years all told and were probably a net economic drag on the empire. They had been acquired for reasons of national prestige; European powers at that time wore colonies like jewellery. Their loss counted for nothing.
The Bavarian soviet republic was a joke; it never effectively ruled much more than the city of Munich, and was put down within a month – as soon as Berlin could send troops to restore order. The troops had been needed, before that, to crush the Spartacist uprising. None of these events represented a loss of German sovereignty over German territory; they were acts in an abortive civil war.
It fell apart under strong foreign provocation. The Allies had expended great effort to stir up agents provocateurs against the Austro-Hungarian government, just as the Easter Rising against the British in Ireland was supported and partly instigated by the Germans. Wilson’s ‘Fourteen Points’ were often cited by the ‘maverick’ parties in Austria-Hungary as grounds for ethnic separatism – and were used as justification for the terms of the Trianon treaty, which in actual fact was a massive betrayal of those principles.
Now here’s the thing: of those four empires, the Austro-Hungarian was the only one that was nothing but a congeries of ‘constituent nationalities’. The core of the empire had been formed by the union of the Austrian and Hungarian monarchies under the House of Habsburg in the 16th century, a union that was dissolved only at the end of the Great War and under the same pressure from the Allies. Moreover, the South Slav regions were forced into a union with Serbia and Montenegro, which they did not want; Transylvania was handed over to be ruled by Romania, which the Magyar population did not want; and the Slovak region of Upper Hungary was forced into a union with the Czechs, which the Slovaks did not want – all in the name of ‘national self-determination’!
Germany, Russia, and Turkey continued to exist as strong, centralized national powers. Austria-Hungary disappeared entirely. Austria itself was no more the successor state to the Habsburg Empire than Czechoslovakia or Yugoslavia. It was merely the bit that contained the former imperial capital, which was far larger than the remaining Austrian economy could comfortably support.
I’m not sure whether the Habsburgs are the best examples of your point, since the Empire existed for over four centuries prior to its collapse, so they must’ve been doing something right for all that time.
They defended Christianity in Europe and were a great civilisation for art culture and trade, and helped to beat back the turks from Europe, at a time when the various other European factions were too busy feuding to notice.
The collapsed was mainly initiated by external powers Who hated Catholicism.
In that case, religion was the glue that held the empire together but in modern times, religion is becoming less relevant so people are Fracturing into smaller groups.
The UK did not do too well either. The Irish Rebellion in the middle of the war started the slide to an independent Ireland.