Post #144: Felix Austria and Her Cousin Germania

22 Sep. 2024

“Bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria nube.”

[Let others wage war; you, happy Austria, marry!]

—Popular saying dating to the reign of Maximilian I*

     About bedrooms and bathrooms there is much to be said in any language, including the German. Let us start with the word solide: same root as in English and French, but not to be mistaken for either, especially the latter!

     When German-speakers use the term, they are not simply pronouncing something (or someone) materially robust, the literal meaning of the word, as in English or French; they are declaring it sound. Unsolide, on the other hand, like unsound, is not a physical property so much as a quality (possibly even a moral one). What is solide has proper foundations; it can be counted on; what it binds is expected to hold. Relationships, businesses, ideas, friendships, or marriages (not just the bedrooms where they are consummated) can all be solide, and indeed need to be, to the German mind, if they are to have any real worth.

     There is, in this traditional feature of German culture, much that can feel too stolid, stodgy, and stultifying. The young may run away from it, to find refuge from its unrelenting heaviness and seriousness abroad. I did so myself, with great determination. There is a lack of spontaneity, finesse, lightness and grace, in this mode of being; it is too heavy-set, even flat-footed, to impress itself much upon the imagination of the youthful and aspiring. (Great expectations are not solide at all.) As these yearning spirits too are likely to discover, however, long before they are old, there is something precious about what they previously disdained; it may be found everywhere in the world to some extent, but not very reliably.

     How radically unsolide is the airy mode that I have been deploring (#83 etc.)! Where to find sound foundations, respect for gradual maturation, an eye to constructing things upon a firm grounding, not the quicksand of fleeting tastes and trends? All that is solid melts into air, the famous passage from Marx’s Manifesto proclaims—with somewhat different intent, but let the ringing phrase stand: it can be understood in different ways (#5). Red Karl took himself to be eminently solide, both in his ideas and his person (he married an aristocrat, though not the substantial kind, and believed he had unearthed the very laws of history). He found fellow believers enough; but as to whether he saw himself accurately, opinions continue to differ widely, shall we say.

     The Viennese are wont to mock their cousins to the north and east (and their own countrymen no less, I suspect) for the heaviness of their tread. The Germans (in the narrow sense) answer that we cannot all be actors in an operetta, and that Vienna has been little more than a stage set for a good two hundred years. Much more could be said, but these are squabbles in the family. The branches are clearly distinguished, to be sure; but ask Bavarians how they feel about “the Prussians” or the Hamburgers, and you will get pretty much the same answers, with minor variations.

     The Austrians tend to wear the troubled parts of their history more lightly, but they know very well what a fiction they are living. (They are not hypocrites, it must be said, but hold fictions and their creators in the highest and most sincere regard, in Vienna especially.) The ill-fated Wilhelm II took much of the blame for the Great War, quite undeservedly; in fact he was most unwilling to get dragged into military confrontations.** What he thought he was doing was to stand loyally by an ally, the last major one, to whom he felt duty-bound. In other words, he meant to be solide. The hotheads were in Vienna and parts south.

     The chief of the Austrian General Staff, Conrad von Hötzendorf called for a Serbian war no less than twenty-five times in 1913 alone. When after many a to and fro (including a dismissal and reinstatement along the way), he finally got what he had demanded so persistently, he prosecuted the war much as he made love: with the most impetuous abandon. A few years before the war, when he fell madly in love with a married mother of six, he announced to her that he would not rest until he had won her heart, threatening to resign all his posts and retire from public life if he were to fail (no idle threat from a man liable to severe bouts of depression when he was not having one of his ecstatic moments).

     His passionate assault against her “seven-fold commitment” (as she reminded him with pique) eventually succeeded despite her protestations. For propriety’s sake, she stayed with her husband another eight years; meanwhile Conrad wrote her thousands of letters, many from the front, most never posted, some running to sixty pages. In bloodier fields of honor, he adhered to the same cult of the offensive—with less happy results. He burned through a good half-million troops in record speed during the first few weeks of fighting.*** The “honorary” status of his grave at Hietzing (all resemblance to the German verheizen is purely coincidental) was downgraded to merely “historical” just in time for the centenary of the battles in question, as if that were any way to honor the fallen, or to console anyone else.

     Once they have made clear how little they have in common with the Germans (in the familiar parlance), the Austrians will quietly concede that Hitler too was very much of their making—Braunau no less than Vienna. This failed artist in a disintegrating empire has often been misunderstood, from across the waters especially, as if he had anything to do with Prussianism. The Viennese know better: if only Hitler really had been a Piefke (and not one of their own, though the less presentable variety), they sigh in confessional moments, things would never gotten so out of hand. (No mere frivolity, this, but a central theme, and most earnestly so, in Sebastian Haffner’s seminal oeuvre, thus The Meaning of Hitler, for example (Anmerkungen zu Hitler).)

     A Prussian “Hitler” would have cashed his winnings in 1938 at the latest, not kept playing vabanque (the most unsolide thing of all†), mistaking his dark artistic visions (a failure, a criminal, or a madman is not therefore any less an artist) for political blueprints and taking everything down with him in a death cult without rival—Die Toteninsel writ large, Hitler’s favorite painting.

The Austrians know their own, for better or for worse, and their share in various messes—even if they are understandably reluctant to broadcast it to the world as the post-war Germans have done, faute de mieux. (If the shame is overwhelming, what to do but to turn it into a badge of honor via the ostentatious scope and scale of one’s contrition and atonements?) Unlike any of the major German cities, Vienna came through physically in one piece at least, if not much else.

     Disputes in a family, I said, that is given to bickering over which branch is the more distinguished and respectable (debatable); which the more elegant and charming (pretty obvious), and which the weightier (ditto: or are you quite sure that you can find Austria on a map and not end up in Czechoslovakia or on the Balkans?).†† All such squabbling ends, however, at the door to a Viennese bathroom. Cross the threshold, even at an unremarkable middle-class establishment, and the evidence is as incontrovertible as it would be in Hamburg or Munich (or even Berlin): solide. The labor is likely to have been done by Poles or Ukrainians, but the organizing principles at work are unmistakably Germanic.†††

     (Für Oscar)

*The Maximilian I, that is, who expanded the influence of the House of Habsburg through a judicious and fruitful marriage, in 1477, to Mary of Burgundy (as well as several wars) and became Holy Roman Emperor in 1508—not the younger brother of Franz Joseph who, feeling stifled in Vienna, jumped at the chance to become Emperor of Mexico in 1864, then presided over a political and military fiasco (in that way at least beginning to measure up to his brother, see below), and ended his life before a firing squad.

**The vindictive telling of history, and wartime Allied propaganda, did Wilhelm II a grave injustice by painting him for posterity in the grim colors of an inveterate warmonger. He was anything but, despite all that was disagreeable about his complicated personality. (His taste for military pomp and bluster was just that, and typical of the times everywhere in Europe.)

     Queen Victoria was not so poor a judge of character that she would have favored Wilhelm over her many other grandchildren if he had really been nothing more than the noisy oaf that he has become to us. When he celebrated his 25th anniversary on the throne, in 1913, he proudly embraced the title of “Peace-Kaiser” with good reason: he had not waged a single war. When the War he dreaded did break out, not by his contrivance at all, but clearly against his intentions (whatever misjudgments he may have contributed along the way), he was quickly sidelined by his generals, who had never considered him martially-minded enough.

     All this in contrast, ironically, to Franz Joseph in the Hofburg, who entered history as an avuncular figure despite being a much more confirmed militarist—someone unwilling (or unable), it was said at the time, to read beyond the military portions of the newspaper (roughly the sports section of the day). He was put on the throne as a reactionary hardliner in 1848 and fought several wars with declining enthusiasm, losing them all, one by one.

     It would be heartening if the martially luckless emperor succeeded better, in line with Habsburg tradition, at merry matrimony, and certainly his choice of bride seemed promising at first: the beautiful Elisabeth (“Sisi”), later most becomingly portrayed by Romy Schneider. Alas, she proved a great romantic about anything and everything except marital congress, and though she dutifully produced the required heirs, she also took to absenting herself from Vienna for months on end, hanging out with sailors and getting tattooed, dancing like a gypsy around campfires, and the like staples of the romantic imagination.

     The crown prince, Rudolf, though likewise not without initial promise, sank spectacularly under the burden of the family dynamics, his resulting emotional problems, and an aggravated drug habit even by Vienna standards—doing what he could to drag the monarchy under with him in the infamous Mayerling “incident” of 1889, a double suicide with hints of murder. It was thus that the unloved Franz Ferdinand became the fuse to the tinder box that would blow up civilized old Europe.

     Elisabeth’s colorful life came to a suitably dramatic end in 1898, when she was assassinated on the shores of Lake Geneva (nota bene, #88). A 25-year-old Italian anarchist for whom any crowned head would do saw fit to stab her with a four-inch needle-file after his original target (the Duke of Orléans, a mere pretender to the French throne) had gotten away. Since Sisi hated ageing even more than I, and she was already sixty, it was perhaps just as well for her (#142). Franz Joseph, by now mortally exhausted, groaned at the Hofburg that it seemed he was to be spared nothing in life, and soldiered on to the bitter end; the rest of Europe sighed with him, and knew mercifully little of how close at hand the end really was.

***For the corroborating facts behind what may look like a fantastical sketch, see Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers (Penguin 2013), pp. 101–105, and David Stevenson, 1914–1918 (Penguin 2012), pp. 69–73. Anyone who might object to my seemingly flippant treatment of so grave a topic is referred to my academic article on “Christmas 1914 and the Peace That Could Not Be” (Diplomacy & Statecraft, vol. 34, no. 3 (Aug. 2023), pp. 399–432) for evidence that my grief about the events of that terrible year could not be more sincere. Whatever the various actors may have to answer for, I hesitate to judge them too harshly with hindsight; for all the responsibility they bear, they look to me like shipwrecks in a tragic cataclysm that overwhelmed belle-epoque Europe not because it was so deficient, but on the contrary, because so much had been going so relatively well—incomparably better than it would for the next thirty years.

†That he always played vabanque is a boast by Hitler himself. At the time of the Munich Conference, his generals, who knew only too well how unready Germany was for a major war, were so exasperated by their “Führer’s” recklessness that there might well have been a coup if the Allies had not yielded (the abortive September Plot). About the invasion of Poland too, the generals were much more nervous than one might think in hindsight, and the move across the Ardennes in 1940 was deemed so risky that Field Marshall Fedor von Bock denounced it as “exceeding the bounds of reason” to suppose that such a plan could ever work. Unfortunately for the world, for Europe, and for Germany too, the gambles kept coming off until the last pockets of potentially effective resistance gave way and the elites too began wondering whether perhaps they really were dealing with the political and military genius that Hitler took himself to be. (He called himself the Gröfaz, an acronym for the greatest military leader of all times. No hint of irony intended.)

     The military converts began to reconsider seriously only when Operation Barbarossa turned out a bridge too far. To be sure, finer sentiments were never lacking for the better ones among them (the Stauffenberg type and variants): these men were proud soldiers eager to win honor on the battlefield, not murderous thugs who relished killing their Jewish neighbors, shooting civilians, organizing concentration camps, or starving to death enemy captives by the millions. Orders came first, however, and winning the war; all else had to wait until the tide turned on the Eastern Front and the leading men had to face the prospect of defeat and disgrace. Then quite a few did put their lives on the line, at last, to do the right thing; several refused to lay waste to great cities on the retreat, as Hitler ordered, and some finally plotted against their commander-in-chief, despite every contrary instinct inculcated by their military traditions. Only by then it was too late.

††All old Habsburg lands, it might be pointed out. Absolutely: former Habsburg lands. (Auschwitz too, I’m sorry to add.) What remains was once called rump-Austria for a reason. Beautiful country, wonderful food, sublime mountains, gorgeous cities fit for an empire—only nothing to rule over now but a dominion of postcards and selfie-spots.

†††It’s not, let me be clear, that Austria can be considered a mere extension of what we know as Germany today, let alone a subordinate part. Vienna is by historical right the capital of the German lands, if you can wrap your head around that one. The relationship between the two could hardly be closer; but it’s complicated and fractious, as is usually the case within families, even the most solide.