Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe (62 page)

Across Transylvania, wandering through the endless display cases of river-fish tridents, enema pumps and horse-brasses it has to be said that there is always going to be something interesting. Even the jaw-slackening Sighişoara Museum has its moment of greatness. Up inside the battered and superb great watchtower, there is a display of cuttings about the Transylvanian visionary Hermann Oberth. As a teenager before the Great War, Oberth became obsessed with the idea of space travel and doodled on bits of paper, inventing the multi-stage rocket. By the age of fifteen he had created a rocket powered by guncotton. During the war he experimented with ideas about weightlessness and invented a small liquid-fuel rocket. By the early 1920s he was sketching out space stations, lunar-landers and spacesuits and the physics behind a giant space mirror that would control the temperature of the Earth. Oberth was a terrible figure in many ways but from his mind stepped most of the basic principles of the space programme. He was Wernher von Braun’s teacher and involved with both Nazi and then American rocket designs. It could be claimed that it is very peculiar that most of the intellectual and practical thinking behind the quintessential two-edged twentieth-century achievement was set out in such a notionally dozy and remote part of the world as Transylvania. But then I hope that by this point in the book I have made some kind of case for even places like Sighişoara being in practice at the very heart of Europe. I have lost count of the number of times I have found myself somewhere satisfyingly ‘remote’ only to realize, by being there, that it has become nearby. If the key origins of V2s and ICBMs lie in southern Transylvania then we probably need to think about our history books differently.

I realize with a chill that this section could go on almost indefinitely and it would be possible to bludgeon the reader with items from page after page of my notes, which should perhaps just be quietly binned. I see a note here, for example, I made in Sibiu:
Picture of eighteenth century horse-driven mint: four horses needed to work coin-stamping machine! Use to kick off section on coins?
But this all has to stop somewhere.

Just in passing, given the stresses and terrors inflicted on this part of the world, it must be pointed out that what have tended to survive for display in Romanian museums are very heavy or rugged objects. Through the brutal winnowing process of the past century, things too heavy to loot or too inert to burn now have a disproportionate hold on the displays. Not just swords and tankards and metal dishes, but such surprises as a heavy stone that convicted malefactors had to wear round their necks with the notice ‘Live a Christian life and beware of evil – then the stone will not hang on
your
neck’. Or perhaps the most enduring of all – the enormous statues created during the Great War to raise money for war bonds. For a certain sum pledged the individual could hammer a nail into the wooden statue, generally of a medieval knight, sometimes with the family name written on the nail’s head. As thousands of nails accumulated, the statue became a sort of iron monster. This was an Austro-Hungarian invention copied by the Germans. There is a just spectacular example in the Altemberger House Museum in Sibiu, an implacable sort of crusader-robot about ten feet high with a blankly sinister armoured face. These creatures have a strange claim on our attention – their materials have kept them, bar a little oxidizing, just as they were, as expressions of willing or unwilling local patriotism, to raise money for the Empire to fight the Russians. Their iconography is meant to whip up a sense of the crusader West fighting the barbarian East, of Christian morality against pagan depravity. This is obviously trash history, but also quite interesting as so many of the combatants on both sides did see themselves as medieval knights. There is, for instance, a statue in London’s Hyde Park showing the British as St George and the Central Powers as a dead dragon, a mere heap of superbly rendered metal scales. This was a universal cliché. So these money-raising robots are a very clear-cut reminder that the Central Powers saw themselves as on the side of right, fighting for specific and noble values against the barbarians that surrounded them. The nails are a final monument both to an Empire about to cease to exist and a community (in Sibiu’s case half German and a quarter each Romanian and Hungarian) which invested (literally) in that Empire and which has also ceased to exist.

Psychopathologies of everyday life

Writing about the last decades of the Empire is a useful way of delaying the point at which it implodes. There is no point in rehearsing yet again the vigours and wonders of that period before 1914, when Freud waved cheerily from a tram at Schiele and the Second Vienna School sang a capella to delighted cafe-goers. Fuelled by waltzes, nicotine and sexual perversion, the Empire hurtles to its doom leaving an astonishing meteor streak across the sky.

It would be absurd to deny that this was a very remarkable culture, and indeed it is the reason (as for everyone) why I first became interested in the Empire. But I have become ever more struck by how much this narrative was almost entirely created
after
the War – and indeed in many cases, particularly in Britain, was still being constructed into the 1990s. For Britain, Austria-Hungary could probably have been summed up as a barracks-ridden, aristocratic and actively philistine place. There was some appreciation of Vienna’s music, but this was generally viewed as having a merely museum-like quality – the land of Johann Straus II and Brahms. Budapest and Prague, which we would now think of as crazily wonderful, hardly figured. Even the one great musical sensation from Austria-Hungary, Strauss and von Hofmannsthal’s
Der Rosenkavalier
, ecstatically received at both Covent Garden and the Met in 1913, added to the sense of decay by being set in the era of Maria Theresa and, however ironic and beautiful, to the sense of its being an embalmed culture, which even had to bring in a German composer to provide its music.

It is really very alarming to see just how little anybody knew or cared about Austria-Hungary. A giant figure such as Mahler (who died in 1911) was valued as a conductor (the reason he went to New York) and some of his music was known, but most of his symphonies did not receive their British or American premieres until many years later – in the UK the Second Symphony only in 1931 and the Third only in 1961. The
Adagietto
from the Fifth had been played on its own as a ‘lollipop’ at the Proms before the war – which seems about right – but the whole symphony was not played until 1945. The US was similarly slow to get to grips with this music. And as for what we would now see as the great tumble of extraordinary music from Schönberg, Berg, Zemlinsky, Webern and others, it was almost as though it did not exist. The pieces which for me at any rate are the terrible soundtrack to the end of the Empire, Berg’s
Three Pieces for Orchestra
or Zemlinsky’s startling Second String Quartet, were unplayed. Bartók’s
Duke Bluebeard’s Castle
was written in 1911 but was not premiered until 1918 in Budapest which, in the context of the time, did not make this a hot ticket for Allied music-lovers. It was eventually given its stage premiere in the US and UK in the 1950s.

Writing from the period was also quite disregarded. Kafka had published a handful of stories (
Description of a Struggle
and
The Judgement
) but it was many years before these were familiar in the West. Freud, in his late fifties when the war broke out, was, outside very narrow circles, more or less unknown –
Interpretation of Dreams
and
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
were only just being published in New York. Painting and architecture fared no better. We may all love Klimt now, but at the time he was completely swamped by the overwhelming, blazing presence of the Paris art scene. Adolf Loos had built nothing yet outside the Empire and perhaps the two most appealing figures of the entire period, Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser, were busy conjuring up wonders at the Wiener Werkstätte more or less ignored by the wider world.

So the society which now strikes us as headily varied, tolerant and inventive carried on its work almost unnoticed in London or New York. This matters only in the very narrow sense that this was a society only really appreciated in the rear-view mirror. The horrors of the War and the subsequent civil wars, massacres and invasions sealed into place something which subsequently appeared lost and precious, a process built on and elaborated by countless exiles and by the two great post-War authors Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth, the latter not really being widely read in the West until the 1990s. The steady accumulation of interest in the Empire was, of course, long delayed by distaste for the region, which bridged much of the gap between 1918 and 1939. During this time figures like Bartók and Schönberg became admired partly
because of
their own loathing of their countries’ regimes. This distaste was naturally maintained easily across 1939–45 and then left the entire region derelict and friendless (again, except through émigrés) until the end of the Cold War. So a process began in 1914 of turning Central Europe into Eastern Europe, where cities such as Lviv, Debrecen or Cluj, which had been part of a culture rooted in mainstream European values, and part of a framework that made towns from northern Italy to Transcarpathia look pretty much the same, were banished into outer darkness.

But it is perhaps just as striking that the inhabitants of Austria-Hungary themselves did not seem to know what they would be missing. Many of the creative figures we now most admire were at the time part of very small coteries and it was probably true that the dominant tone of the Empire really
was
much more set by parade-grounds and barracks, perhaps with a spa attached. But also it was a place absolutely dominated by nationalist issues to which everything else seemed subservient. The parliaments in both Budapest and Vienna were reduced to virtual paralysis by waves of fury about schooling, military languages of command and so on, with deputies banging their desks, throwing ink-pots, fighting duels, and having to be periodically shut down by troops. We may value a handful of remarkable individuals who were made by the Empire, but their shared strangeness (and frequent Jewishness) shows the pressures of living in a Europe which was harsh, ignorant, callous and militarily obsessive. Perhaps the cultural survival and indeed veneration of figures such as Kraus, Freud, Hašek, Kafka, Schiele and Webern flatters and distorts how we think of the Empire. It would be a grotesquely demeaning thing to set up and it would be visited by nobody, but perhaps a major exhibition should be put together celebrating all the figures who were often very successful at the time but who are now forgotten – the heroic realist sculptors, the anti-Semitic cartoonists, the insipid society portraitists, the writers of slim bestsellers on how German Austrians should join the Reich or why Jews, Romanians, Ruthenians and so on are biologically made to be untrustworthy.

One interesting example of the era’s real concerns is shown in Janáček’s spectral choral piece from 1909
The Seventy Thousand
. Janáček is a perfect example of a great composer only fully discovered in the West in the 1980s whose work now so retrospectively colours the early twentieth century as to provide a sort of soundtrack for it.
The Seventy Thousand
uses a startling blend of male voices, in whispers and shouts, to create an atmosphere of despairing hysteria. Janáček has a benign air, almost entirely because in old age he looked like a children’s toy, but in practice he was a thoroughly unpleasant Slav nationalist of a dotty kind.
²
This piece is very odd, a setting of one of Petr Bezruč’s bestselling
Silesian Songs
, about the fate of Czech-speakers in the Duchy of Teschen/Těšín/Cieszyn. The song saw the Czechs as crushed between the two millstones of German and Polish and doomed to disappear:

One hundred thousand of us have been made German

One hundred thousand of us have been made Polish

…

A crowd, we look on vacantly

Just as one calf watches the slaughter of another.

So what
was
the right number of people to speak a particular language? All over the Empire there were different obsessions – generally fuelled by isolating a specific area like Teschen and then having a mental breakdown about some demographic shift. Nobody made choral settings of poetry pointing out that there were plenty more Czechs just down the road and that Czech culture was thriving as never before (expressed not least in the works of Bezruč and Janaček). This crazy ethnicity-meets-mathematics environment stemmed from the fall-out of intellectuals as diverse as Friedrich List and Charles Darwin, fuelled and spread (awkwardly) by literacy and forms of democracy. It was a definite problem that the Empire’s parliaments made language the route to power. This sense of an unending scramble for a place in the sun, a place that could only be reached by stamping down on the heads of others, lay at the heart of the European disaster that now unfolded. Retrospectively the Habsburg version seems a bit childishly harmless, but it was bitter and vicious enough at the time, and the Empire was the laboratory as much for Nazism as for Zionism. Schools, newspapers, elections, cafes, government jobs became battlegrounds for linguistic competition. The governments veered between repression and electoral concession. In February 1914 a classic Habsburg gesture was made in Galicia, when the parliament in Lviv at last allowed in some Ruthenian deputies, albeit not in proportion to their share of the population and with Poles still having the whip-hand. With, as it turned out, only months to go before the Russian invasion destroyed Galicia this last attempt to satisfy 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. Similar elaborate and angry dances were going on between Germans and Czechs in Vienna and Hungarians and Romanians in Budapest.