"The Crossroads of Civilization
By Angus Robertson
Pegasus, 448 pages, $29.95
From the 13th century till the end of World War I, a Habsburg ruled the Austro-Hungarian Empire with Vienna as its capital city. For a couple of centuries, another branch of the family ruled the Spanish empire with Madrid as its capital city. No other royal dynasty has a record that can match that of the Habsburgs. By way of a thought-provoking memorial, the crypt of the Capuchin church in the center of Vienna has the coffins of 149 members of the Habsburg family, 12 of them emperors.
The Habsburg emperors were conservative in every way; almost without exception they upheld the status quo. True reactionaries, they had an army that did what had to be done. Catholic, they were defenders of the Papacy. Liberals could never decide who was the worst oppressor of his subjects, the Habsburg emperor, the Romanov czar or the Ottoman sultan. Prime Minister William Gladstone was much applauded when he said, "There is not a spot upon the whole map where you can lay your finger and say: 'There Austria did good!'" Henry Wickham Steed, editor of The Times and an authority on influencing public opinion, urged that the Habsburg monarchy be abolished. He could write, "The name 'Austria' meant every device that could kill the soul of a people, corrupt it with a modicum of well-being, deprive it of freedom of conscience and of thought, undermine its sturdiness and turn it from the pursuit of their ideal."
When the monarchy was abolished, regrets were few and far between. Ilsa Barea's "Vienna" (1966), otherwise the most fair-minded account of the city and its life, hardly bothers to do more than take the Habsburgs at face value. As the monarchy was turning into a republic in the final days of 1918, Ilsa, a socialist, had joined a demonstration; when the police opened fire she stood her ground and saw others run away down a side-street.
Angus Robertson, in "The Crossroads of Civilization: A History of Vienna," is out to give the Habsburgs the credit he thinks they deserve. A journalist, he worked for the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation and received the country's highest decoration for his services. Then he was a member of the British parliament and afterward of the Scottish parliament. As a writer, he deals in superlatives. The Habsburg court was "one of the most powerful and grandest in Europe." The Empress Maria Theresa was "one of the greatest European monarchs that ever reigned." Josef Schoner, a civil servant who kept a wartime diary, became "one of Austria's greatest post-war diplomats." Stalingrad is "not only the biggest battle of the Second World War but the biggest battle in human history."
Mr. Robertson holds that the key to the Habsburgs' greatness was sheer continuity and the stability that comes with it; he even ascribes to them a sense of mission. Lasting from 1618 to 1638, the Thirty Years' War typically characterized by him as "one of the bloodiest wars in human history," finished in the Treaty of Westphalia. This established the political and religious sovereignty of the state, still today an essential part of world order. Mr. Robertson jumps to the conclusion that from then on it was "clear that Vienna was a key diplomatic capital."
The historic achievement of the Habsburgs was to hold the line against the Ottoman Turks. Across the border in Hungary, mosques and minarets still survive from the Ottoman occupation of that country. The Ottomans called Vienna "the Golden Apple" and in 1683 an army of 150,000 laid siege to the city. It was touch-and-go. John Sobieski III, king of Poland, saved the day by commanding "the largest cavalry charge in history."
There is something valid in Mr. Robertson's endorsement of the city as a civilizational crossroads. The Vienna Arsenal, now a museum, lists on its walls the adventurers and mercenaries with French or Irish names who came to serve the Habsburgs and were rewarded with titles. The Irishman Francis Taaffe, for instance, became a field marshal and was sent on diplomatic missions. His descendant, the 11th Viscount Taaffe, known as Eduard Graf von Taaffe, won two terms as prime minister of Austria.
Evliya Celebi was a member of an Ottoman diplomatic delegation on a visit to Vienna in 1664. Bernard Lewis, in his ground-breaking book "The Muslim Discovery of the West" (2000), shows how exceptional Celebi was. He was an explorer and travel writer and took the world as he found it. Curious when other Ottoman travelers or ambassadors felt superior to everything European, he described architecture, the cathedral, the clocks and the medicine. All the same, he saw something that he thought extraordinary. "If the Emperor encounters a woman in the street . . . he stands in a posture of politeness. The woman greets the emperor who then takes his hat off his head." Another century had to pass before Mozart could put Ottoman Turks into his operas as either noblemen or buffoons.
A good many English men and women left records of what they had seen and heard in Vienna, and Mr. Robertson quotes extensively from such sources. One of them was the famous 18th-century bluestocking Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, wife of Edward Montagu, a British ambassador. Lady Mary found that the Habsburg emperor had a very obliging manner and that the empress was "charming." In the early 1820s, Martha Wilmot, married to a chaplain in the British embassy, witnessed the Holy Thursday ceremony of the emperor and empress washing the feet of 12 old women and 12 old men. William Henry Stiles, charge d'affaires in the American embassy at the time of the 1848 upheavals in Europe, wrote what is described here as a classic because it sheds light on "the principles and practice of the United States towards foreign revolutions."
The Congress of Vienna in 1815 was a jamboree that put an end to the Napoleonic wars, made what looked like a lasting peace in Europe, and propped up the thesis that the Habsburgs were master diplomats. In reality, the 18-year-old Franz Josef came to the throne after the revolution of 1848 and gave the Chancellors Felix Schwarzenberg and Klemens von Metternich the freedom to build the sort of conventionally repressed society that so infuriated the likes of Wickham Steed. By then, aristocrats and churchmen and intellectuals all over the Empire were certain that every people should have a nation-state of its own. The nationalism of Hungarian, Czech, Serb and other minorities within the Empire had to be reconciled with the nationalism of the German-speaking majority. In the process of becoming a nation-state for all Germans, the kingdom of Prussia went to war with Austria and its empire. Heavy defeat in the battle of Koniggraetz in 1866 left the Habsburg Empire at the mercy of events. A single gunshot fatally killed an Austrian Archduke in 1914. That was enough to bring down the Empire.
Franz Josef was honorable but limited and, worse, unfortunate. His wife was assassinated, and his son and heir committed suicide, taking his mistress with him. "I am spared nothing," Franz Josef said of himself. All the same, his Vienna could boast of Johann Strauss (father and son), Mahler, Lehar, Freud, Schonberg, Gustav Klimt, Karl Kraus, Stefan Zweig and a few million civilized people. Josef Roth, author of the literary masterpiece "Radetzky March" (1932), remained loyal to the Habsburgs till he died.
The Austrian republic never had time to prove itself. The scene when Hitler revealed to Chancellor Schuschnigg his intention to invade was "amongst the most grotesque diplomatic dressing downs ever recounted." In the name of German nationalism, Hitler corrupted a nation evidently willing to be corrupted. There was virtually no resistance to his program of mass murder and war profiteering. Mr. Robertson pays tribute to a now little-known man who retained a moral vision, Ho Feng-Shan, the Chinese Consul General in Vienna. He issued life-saving visas to Shanghai. Closed down by the Nazis, he opened another consulate at his own expense.
After 1945, Mr. Robertson writes, the Allies divided Vienna into zones and it became the international capital of espionage, the shadowy world of Graham Greene's "The Third Man": Mr. Robertson devotes a chapter to defectors, intelligence agents, and traitors like Kim Philby. In their own zone, the Soviets erected a statue of a Red Army soldier supposedly liberating the city from the Nazis; it was placed on a pillar that is higher than the buildings around it. This symbol of subjection is still in place, inevitably making a comment on the national character.
Bruno Kreisky, chancellor from 1970 to 1983, did what he could to convert the truth that Austrians had been enthusiastic fans of Hitler into the falsehood that they were his victims. Kurt Waldheim went further. He served for three years as a Wehrmacht staff officer in Yugoslavia; there is evidence that he was a war criminal. Although he was by that point president of Austria and had served as U.N. secretary-general, in 1987 the U.S. Department of Justice placed Waldheim on a list of persons denied entry to the country. Guilt and remorse were not for him. He remained in office till 1992, setting his countrymen an example of how to hide responsibility for their actions.
Mr. Robertson's approach to the Vienna of today is frankly promotional. There is an element of wishfulness about it. The city's historic institutions and palaces still have an imperial look but they no longer serve the purposes for which they were built; the life has gone out of them. Bureaucrats of one sort or another have taken the place of princes and counts. More than 40 international organizations have headquarters in Vienna and employ at the last count 6,422 people. In 2017, 9,400 conference days involved more than 142,000 participants. These international organizations are regulating things that may or may not need regulating, but inexplicably their ceaseless activity makes Mr. Robertson think that the future is bound to be even more glorious than the past.
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Mr. Pryce-Jones, who was born in Vienna in 1936, is the author, most recently, of "Openings & Outings: An Anthology."" [1]
1. REVIEW --- Books: From Glory To Ruin To Mediocrity
Pryce-Jones, David.
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 20 Aug 2022: C.7.
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