Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe (36 page)

These manoeuvres between Germans and Hungarians (with other minorities effectively invisible through overwhelming legal disabilities, religious isolation and illiteracy – a situation that would soon change) gave a recognizably more modern form to the Habsburg lands. In many ways it was not until the nineteenth century that the Hungarian regions became fully settled again and this enormous, cellular, diurnal process has to be imagined ticking away in the background. Gradually, a zone that had been perhaps the worst place to live in Europe for at least two centuries took on the appearance that makes it so attractive now. The Hungarians had survived, but whether this was thanks to the Habsburgs or despite them, and within what boundaries, has been the basis of violent argument ever since.

The Gloriette

A visit to the Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna is in many ways a disappointing and confusing experience. Here is the heart of the Habsburg world – a sumptuous summer residence expressing both grandeur and leisure. And yet even a completist such as me cannot get very excited by the building itself. Franz Joseph spent far too long there and much of it is tainted with his own dreary, railway-waiting-room aesthetic. Even the more showy bits decorated by Maria Theresa have a cold dullness to them. The highlight is probably the up-to-the-minute bathroom features put in for the Empress Zita during the closing stages of the First World War, which fully embrace the trivial nature of her and her husband’s brief regime. Those running the palace seem aware that it puts on a poor show, so they have tried to improve it with displays of things like old carriages. Most strange of all is a special exhibition of the Empress Elisabeth’s hand-made saddles which set up such a sexual-fetishistic and oddly direct relationship between the late Empress and the person staring into them that it is hard to know what to say.

Wandering around Maria Theresa’s rooms one has a niggling feeling that the Habsburgs are getting a bit tone deaf when commissioning artists and decorators – with a bit more cash and a lot more taste everything could have been so much better. This frustration evaporates once outside, where it becomes possible to appreciate the beauty of the palace building itself, but even more to enjoy the amazing grounds. I have gone on at too much length in my last book about the miracle zoo with its breakfast house and radiating pavilions filled with rococo exotica. But most wonderful of all in the palace grounds is the Gloriette, a pleasure house and viewing platform on the steep hill above the palace. The Gloriette has many functions, but it is principally a colossal sigh of relief expressed in tons of stonework for the rescue of the Habsburg monarchy from destruction at the hands of the Prussians. It celebrates the Battle of Kolín, where in 1757 Frederick the Great, during the Third Silesian War, at last met his comeuppance and was forced to abort his invasion of Bohemia. This was, of course, a very rare Austrian victory and Frederick himself could have, if he had wished, built an entire shopping centre out of Gloriettes back in Berlin. But, aside from a brief incursion to besiege Olomouc (whose craggy cliff-wall defences can still be seen today and where he took some shots at the Plague Column), the threat to Habsburg territory was now over. There were many Austrian humiliations at the hands of the Prussians still to come but these were generally in Silesia or Saxony.

The Gloriette is in many ways a perfect example of mix-and-match Habsburg cheese-paring, with many of its architectural details, including its charismatic carved bull skulls, hacked out of Maximilian II’s old Neugebäude Palace in the suburb of Simmering. But its extravagant and charming pointlessness makes it nearly as fine a monument to Maria Theresa’s reign as her breakfast house in the zoo and a happy contrast to her fusty and banal interior decorations. An Allied bombing raid on Vienna wrecked the Gloriette, as well as killing the rhinoceros in the next-door zoo. There is a pathetic photo of the rhino’s keeper posing with its armoured corpse, together with a more enjoyable one of Red Army troops with the giraffes inside their enclosure – presumably nobody was in a position to tell them they were not allowed within the fencing. The Gloriette was rebuilt after the War, and with its great swags of carved Roman weapons and massive eagle, it is now a rather odd sort of cafe. It stands there as an absolute and permanent statement of belief in Austrian victory and confidence, in the face of any number of actual catastrophes and defeats. Once they had finished mucking about with the giraffes, presumably the Soviet troops must have enjoyed wandering over to see the ravaged heap of the Gloriette. Silesia was never retrieved but the rest of the Maria Theresa’s inheritance had survived an overwhelming assault by a great coalition of its enemies.

The war on Christmas cribs

Tucked away in the midst of the magniloquent, trippy interior of Melk Abbey are two visitors from an earlier time: Clement and Frederick, the catacomb saints. In a bonanza for the Catholic fight-back a great series of subterranean tunnels was found in Rome in 1578, filled with the bodies of early Christians. It was assumed that they had been buried there because they had been persecuted and these ‘catacomb saints’ were exported by the Jesuits all over the Catholic world as superb instances of the primitive sufferings of the True Church. In fact they were the skeletons of pious but ordinary Romans who, having blamelessly lain in the dark for a millennium, now found themselves landed with a random Christian name, canonized and put on a mule cart. Clement arrived in Melk during the great refurbishment, and Frederick was a later arrival, donated by Maria Theresa in 1762. Given the huge number of bodies in the catacombs these saints could be handed out like cookies, and even today a quiet word in the right ear could probably secure one. The Jesuits got a bit out of control as they were also dealing in bits of the martyred St Ursula and her eleven thousand virgins (a spectacular skeleton-pit fraud dug up in Cologne, the equivalent for the Catholic Church of Spindletop for the Texas oil industry). In any event, the two skeletons at Melk lounge in their glass caskets, covered in peculiar body-stockings and jewels, their skulls resting on lurid pillows, and looking oddly like Marlene Dietrich in
Rancho Notorious
.

Maria Theresa’s donation of St Frederick was already a pretty retro gesture by the 1760s as Catholic intellectual and emotional culture had moved on. The Jesuits were suppressed across Europe by the Pope in the following decade, except (in a perverse result) in Prussia and in Russia, where Catherine the Great once may have been anti-Catholic but was damned if she was going to be told what to do by some man living in Italy. A new austerity and prayerful privacy reigned. Oddly, this shift moved almost in lock-step with the growth of public musical theatre, as though the now idle impresarios of the Catholic Church found fresh work in opera and oratorio. It is strange that the hysterical emotionalism of, say, Mozart’s
Don Giovanni
or Haydn’s
The Creation
should channel much the same extreme atmosphere that places such as Melk had done in earlier decades but in a new form. I do not know if it would be possible to make a real link, but it does look as though out-of-control fervency had simply moved house.

Joseph II himself exemplified this move towards a more intellectual Church. Often wrongly thought of as anti-Catholic, he simply wished to sweep away the dirty clutter of superstition and peeling gilt that made places like Melk seem deeply old-fashioned by the time of Maria Theresa’s death in 1780. She herself had been sceptical of many of these traditional accretions, but Joseph took the reaction to bizarre lengths. By some definitions one of the most talented of Habsburg rulers, Joseph in everything he did seemed to lurch and overreach. The shape of his reign was a very odd one. After Franz I’s death in 1765 he became Holy Roman Emperor, seemingly re-establishing the Habsburg grip on a stable basis. But he then spent some fifteen years under his mother’s tutelage, a ruler who by this point knew how to make things work merely by lifting a finger. To make things even worse he had to deal with his mother’s contemporary, Frederick the Great, who hung like some appalling spectre over his life, the man who had humiliated his family, but who was also a figure to be admired and whose rationalism and austerity formed a rather sadly obvious model for the strange young man. How different the future if Joseph had modelled himself on his own father and just lolled about eating sweets and looking through a magnifying-glass at bouquets of flowers made out of jewels. Instead, Joseph was racked by an action-this-day fever to modernize and overhaul the lands which, in his view, had failed his dynasty.

The Catholic Church – an institution in every way the ideological partner of the monarchy – was thrown into chaos by a great heap of edicts from Joseph. He had views on everything from banning the making of cribs in the Tyrol to forcing priests to switch to practical and hard-wearing leather vestments (there is a hilariously sad example in Melk). Monasteries viewed as not directly serving the community were shut and the whole tradition of purely private contemplation reaching back to the origins of Christianity was nearly stamped out. As the Jesuits had also been suppressed an enormous number of buildings became available for use as schools, barracks and offices, ushering in the paper- and personnel-driven modern state. The effects can still be seen scattered all over Central Europe, with religious-looking buildings turning out to have oddly secular functions. In Olomouc there is still a carved stone on the side of what is now the Regional Museum declaring how Joseph II had shut down this Convent of the Poor Clares to make it into a school for the town. Jesuit churches were reassigned – so the church which had for many years had its hands full looking after Frederick III’s entrails in Linz now became the city’s cathedral. The Catholic Church was a landowner on a vast scale, owning half of Carniola and at least a third of Moravia: Joseph was driven mad with rage by what he viewed as idle ecclesiastical land and grabbed whatever he could. It was a truly revolutionary act, and it was one which would prove to have an unexpected and devastating effect on the rest of the Holy Roman Empire.

Just as bad for Joseph were all those days spent in pointless processions and pilgrimages, days when the population could be building the economy. Most of the Habsburgs’ own intricate religious calendar was dumped and processions and pilgrimages were banned or heavily regulated. Many Catholics agreed with much of what he was doing. Atheists remained an almost invisibly small group, and the form of renewal Joseph was carrying out had an entirely respectable Catholic pedigree. This was a process that had begun under Maria Theresa. As an odd side-effect of her ownership of the Austrian Netherlands, the Catholic renewal movement of Jansenism which originated there had made rapid inroads in Vienna. Jansenism, with its cold austerity and cult of the parish priest, was baffling to fans of gold vestments and flying babies, and attracted much suspicion. The old joke was that Jansenism was like the route of the Danube – it starts Catholic, it then becomes Protestant, and it ends up infidel. But Maria Theresa was herself convinced: a fair test of its legitimacy. The rise of Freemasonry has conventionally been seen as a secular challenge even to an overhauled Catholic Church, but given how much great Catholic music Mozart wrote or that two abbots of Melk Abbey itself were buried with their Masonic aprons tucked into their coffins, this is doubtful. What shook off most of his supporters was, as usual, simply Joseph’s relentless, impatient and humourless failure to prioritize. Dismantling greedy Church land-holdings should have been his great achievement, but this got tangled up with stupid rages about Christmas cribs and badgering priests to dress in leather. The end result was not enlightened reform but a chaos of miserable and upset subjects to no great purpose.

Beyond the Church, Joseph slashed at all privileges and ossified habits as though through sheer willpower he could change his domains from a congeries of particularist, multilingual estates into the coherent single entity that he wanted, a proper state, like Britain or France. This was a ridiculous aim: the only coherence enjoyed by the Habsburg lands was that they had fallen into his family’s lap. It was typical of Joseph that this never occurred to him – he never seems to have wondered whether in practice rationality was the Habsburgs’ worst nightmare. A well-educated, aspirational, unsuperstitious people might well develop other interests than simply offering support for Joseph’s latest whim. The sheer stubborn mess of the territories defeated him, but it is interesting that he tried, and he was the last Habsburg except the abortive Franz Ferdinand to throw himself at his inheritance to try to give it proper shape. Symbolically he did this by refusing to be crowned King of Hungary, moving the various state crowns to Vienna and insisting that the Monarchy now was a single and unitary state. German would now be the Monarchy’s official language and Hungarians would be forced to use German in all official dealings. Serfdom was to be abolished, the clergy were to be taxed, the nobility were to lose their legal privileges, corsets were to be banned as a threat to childbirth, churches could be built by non-Catholics, the crusty ‘Spanish customs’ of bowing and scraping at court were to go.

These changes have been overshadowed by the French Revolution and by Joseph’s premature death and the subsequent overturning of many of his edicts, but their impact at the time was astounding. If you were a nobleman and a Hungarian, had a lot of serfs and liked corsets and Tyrolean cribs you must have been permanently speechless with horror. It was as though through sheer will-power Joseph was going to take on every sectional group in the country. When he died of overwork, personal misery and tuberculosis in 1790 there must have been many mourning subjects who allowed themselves a small glass of something to mark the occasion.

Joseph’s removal of a great range of legal disabilities from the Jews is one of the changes for which he was most revered, with Galician Jews for generations seeing Joseph as one of the great figures in their history. In the mid-nineteenth century the Jewish section of Prague was renamed Josefov in his memory. Some of these disabilities were so grotesque that it is hard to engage with the idea that they ever existed. Jews could now remove the yellow star from their clothing, move freely around the Monarchy, open their own factories, employ Christian servants, and attend university and visit theatres. They were also permitted to leave their homes on Sundays and on Christian festivals, bans previously in place on the grounds that as Christ’s murderers it was offensive for them to be seen in public. These changes inaugurated a new and powerful relationship between the Habsburgs and the Jews which ultimately resulted in the greatness of Central Europe’s late-nineteenth-century culture. Joseph’s motives, however, were as usual to do with efficiency – he wished to make Jews into fully productive citizens and he wanted them for his army. 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. Germanization too was a philosophy with a catastrophic future, with its inbuilt assumption that it was the task of other languages to lie down and become extinct. In the 1780s however these were just a couple of strands in the mayhem of Josephine reform, with decrees streaming out of the Hofburg – the Schönbrunn Palace having been mothballed as inefficient and old-fashioned – at an astounding rate.