Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe (51 page)

The two halves of the Empire carried on in parallel, held together by Franz Joseph’s startling longevity. Both halves boomed, being immeasurably richer by the beginning of the twentieth century. Austria had been neutered and infantilized by its defeat by Prussia – when the new united Germany emerged in 1871 it became Franz Joseph’s central aim in life
never
to be alienated from Berlin again. It became axiomatic that Imperial security could only be guaranteed by holding Bismarck in a clingy embrace. Hungary was even further neutered and infantilized politically by being in Vienna’s shadow and using the security guarantee provided by their association to underfinance its own armed forces. This Berlin–Vienna–Budapest axis now settled in, and of course with no sense at all of what a bitter future generation would owe to it.

An expensive sip of water

It could be argued that Bohemia’s two great contributions to Europe have been to do with the manipulation of water – whether in lager or in spas. Certainly while Europe has many spas scattered in the most unlikely places, it was western Bohemia that had the most prestigious and enormous ones: Franzensbad (named after Emperor Franz I), Marienbad (the Virgin Mary) and Karlsbad (Emperor Charles IV). There was also Teplitz, which was as grand as any but suffered a catastrophic late-nineteenth-century disaster when coal miners accidentally dug into its principal underground spring and – in a spectacular subterranean burp – filled it with arsenic, corpses and pit props in a way that overnight obliged seekers of health to make other arrangements.

Marienbad (Mariánské Lázně) fills an entire valley with hotels, shops and sanatoria of the utmost haughty grandeur. A seemingly endless esplanade of white stucco flanks a park filled with splashing fountains, ancient trees and little bridges, all framed by soothing hills smothered in firs. In its pre-1914 heyday famous guests crowded in, everybody from Gogol to Twain, Mahler to Paderewski. In an earlier period Chopin took the waters and Goethe experienced his last, sad romance here. Most famously Edward VII (the last monarch actively to relish ruling Britain) stayed at the Hotel Weimar and chatted with Franz Joseph.

Things have been a bit bumpy since – with a devastating collapse in pan-European aristocratic clients after 1914, a period as a Nazi military hospital during the Second World War (Günter Grass rested up here), the expulsion of almost its entire population (who were German-speaking) after the war’s end and its battered resurrection under the Communists as a people’s spa. This last has been set aside now in favour of trying to recreate the pre-1914, Europe’s playground atmosphere. Once more people parade up and down the old Kaiserstrasse as they admire the hotels, buy jewels and amber and stop for a cake and ice-cream. Once again, genuinely dying people and mere malingerers hiss at each other across dining rooms, fortunes are lost at roulette and nannies and mistresses clutter the parks. There is lots of hilarity around the spa itself with drinkers using special china sipping cups to try the different springs as they gush from individual taps. I grew up in a spa town, so medically touted waters hold no fears, but even I had to blench at the hard-core Cross Spring, an atrocious blend of metals and sulphur, which gives its sippers some insight into the experience of a victim of poisoning.

As in its golden era, Marienbad has an attractively brittle quality based around most of its treatments being a pointless fraud. The hotel facades seem determined to outstare sceptical visitors and get them to reach for their credit cards. Marienbad doctors were famous for their ability to batten like vampires onto rich, pettish hypochondriacs and many careers were made clowning about with mud, hot water and invoice pads. As real twentieth-century medicine built its bypasses around places like this, luckily for Marienbad many people did not notice and Central Europeans still swear by treatments of puzzling lack of efficacy.

The struggle between classiness and charlatanism is as old as the very idea of the spa and there has always been an entertainingly ‘mixed’ crowd. I noticed gently walking down through the park an attractive young Russian family in expensive leisurewear, somewhat let down by the massive scorpion tattoo on the husband’s sandalled ankle. This suggested that perhaps the entire clientele once stripped off would sport acres of Russian prison tattooing and almost all be engaged in exciting fringe free-market activities.

Of course, it is profoundly boring here. You can only sip nasty water, munch chocolate cake or buy amber bracelets for a certain percentage of the day. Rubbing out a key underworld rival with a silenced machine-pistol in a mud bath – with bullets making different sounds as they clack into the tiling or plock into the mud – does not take much
time
. Even the Russian Orthodox Church, built for members of the Tsar’s family, seemed oddly listless and unengaged with its environment. I tried to shake off this sense of futility by walking in the surrounding hills which, while attractive, were very empty of spa patients, as though nobody could even bring themselves to wrestle actively with their condition, real or imagined. As usual, rambling around was rewarded, this time by an immense cemetery with battered monuments to the old German community now elbowed aside by hundreds of newer Czech graves, perfectly showing the process by which ethnic change puts down serious roots through death.

The only real disappointment was to discover that
Last Year in Marienbad
was not filmed there. This strange masterpiece has wandered about in my head for so many years that it was perversely upsetting to find that my enthusiasm for going to see Marienbad had been misplaced: it turns out it was filmed in palaces around Munich and
of course
it could not have been filmed in Czechoslovakia at the height of the Cold War – duh!

The film’s atmosphere does somehow hang around the real Marienbad, though, a sense of time suspended, of a peculiar lethargy. If towns and cities are the focuses required for us to live out our daily lives, then spas are something else: a space in which the sick are meant to get well but also where, uneasily, the well are meant to enjoy themselves in a constrained and tasteful way. They are quiet places because it is vulgar to be noisy, but it is also insensitive as people really are ill. This atmosphere hangs over Aharon Appelfeld’s short novel
Badenheim 1939
. Appelfeld grew up in the Bukovina, in the Carpathians. The Nazis murdered his mother and he worked in a labour camp before escaping into the forest where he lived for three years, still only in his early teens, surviving until picked up by the Red Army. He reached Palestine in 1946 and became an Israeli citizen. This background is essential to understanding the sheer rage of
Badenheim 1939
. A Marienbad-like spa gradually wakes up for the season, as the orchestra arrives, the cake shop opens, variety acts set up in the hotel and guests flood in. As the day in, day out routine of the spa settles down it becomes clear that the gentility and calm are an illusion and the authorities are keen to discover who among the guests are Jews.

The genius of
Badenheim 1939
is the way that it panders to the idea of the spa as a place which is necessarily harmless and charming, while allowing tiny glances of horror to intervene, which until the end almost everyone refuses to notice. It is a much more subtle book than simply an attack on Jewish passivity – Appelfeld sees the whole idea of the great Central European spa as an evasion and in effect a monstrous trick. This framework for polite, empty circulation, a regulated, closed environment for the right kind of people, now seems to stand for a lost and enviable pre-1914 world, but in practice it has always been toxic and peculiar.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Mapping out the future
»
The lure of the Orient
»
Refusals
»
Village of the damned
»
On the move
»
The Führer

Mapping out the future

The obsessive conservatism of the Empire under Franz Joseph had many sources, but perhaps the key driver was its unhappy involvement with the Balkans. The last great land-grabs under Joseph II had (in collaboration with the Russians) finally wrecked Ottoman fighting power. From Vienna’s point of view the future for the Balkans had to lie in a sort of picturesque, unthreatening decay – Turks lolling in caravanserai, sipping coffee and reminiscing about past greatness. Any other outcome was simply a threat. For the Hungarians it became axiomatic that any actual extension of the Empire would be a disaster – to bite off a bigger bit would just result in more Slavs or Romanians, who would further dilute a Hungarian presence already spread thin. Locked into such a view was its opposite: for those still actually under Ottoman rule living south of the Empire’s borders there were for many two clear goals – first to remove the Ottomans and then to liberate their fellows trapped inside the Habsburg Empire. The Habsburgs were equally clear that a Russian presence in the region was unacceptable. With the Ottoman Empire’s decay looking ever
less
picturesque, the vacuum would logically be filled by a partition between the Habsburgs and the Russians, much as with Poland. But the Habsburgs’ distaste both for further territory and for any hint that the Russians might control the mouths of the Danube led to a freakish result. Having spent centuries fighting the Ottomans, the Habsburgs suddenly became solicitous of their health and conspired with the British to prop them up and keep the Russians away. If Vienna had historically often felt humiliated by being London’s patsy, then one can only imagine the humiliation in Constantinople, as the whole place filled up with vulpine false-friends from Europe swearing eternal friendship with the Sublime Porte purely to mess up St Petersburg. It was this stand-off which created a peculiar force-field around the Balkans in which nationalisms that might otherwise have been stamped out came to full bloom. It created a slow-motion disaster for the Empire, which during a century or so first threatened (if blooms can threaten) and then destroyed it.

The four hundred years of Ottoman rule in the Balkans had created a very different society. The ruling class was entirely separate from the bulk of the population, in language, religion and culture. The areas bordering Habsburg territory consisted of Serbs ruled by Muslims, and Romanians ruled until the 1820s by Greeks (the Phanariots) on behalf of Constantinople. In the Slavic areas (Serbia and southwards – the Romanian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia never had a Muslim presence) Christians operated under all kinds of constraints, with elaborate codes for where they could live, what they could wear and what jobs they could do. A mounted Christian had to get off his horse in the presence of a Muslim, a Christian could not wear the colour green, no new Christian churches could be built (giving an ever-deeper cultic reverence to those kept going since the original invasion). This started to crumble in the eighteenth century as the stuffing fell out of the Ottoman project. Military defeat, disease, economic failure and banditry (both through renegade Turks and restive Serbs) thinned out the population, but gave particularly good reasons for Muslims to pack up and move nearer to the capital, decisions which brought economic life almost to a total halt.

The Serbs started the great home-grown rejection of the Ottomans, carving out their own autonomous zone in the early nineteenth century and in sudden surges picking up further land and independence. Western Europe always treats the Balkans as alien, and it is true that it had a very different atmosphere. A couple of examples are music and food. The court cultures of western Europe, right up to the south-east fringes of the Empire, were saturated in fine music and fine food. The entire Habsburg landscape was given a deep, even coating of musical interpretation, whether Smetana and Dvořák in Bohemia or Haydn and Schubert in Austria or Bartók and Kodály in Hungary. As soon as you head south from Hungary or the Carpathians this music stops. And with food, the greedy, complex and extravagant Habsburg world of layered cakes, a mad use of chocolate, subtle soups and fine wines goes off a cliff. This is obviously an enormous subject, ludicrously compressed here, but the very idea of such complex foods trickled down in the west from royal courts, famously with the development of the idea of the ‘French restaurant’ in the aftermath of the Revolution. Indeed, we all eagerly guzzle a range of court foods – with many Indian and Chinese restaurants in the west also serving essentially court Mughal or Qing banquet foods, albeit in mutilated forms. In the Balkans the old Muslim ruling class were so remote from the population they ruled that their expulsion or killing ended any connection with such a world, with all those pilaffs, sherbets and baklavas once enjoyed in Pécs or Belgrade retreating to Constantinople together with the great Ottoman music, clothing and rituals that had accompanied them.