Danubia
A Personal History of Habsburg Europe
Simon Winder
Picador 550pp £18.99
In his delightful Germania (2010) Simon Winder gave his ‘personal’ history of Germany from Charlemagne to Hitler, taking as his starting point for each episode some evocative place one can visit today. Significantly the book has no illustrations, thus inviting the reader to see the vividly described locations in the mind’s eye.
In this equally delectable volume he applies the same technique to what he calls ‘Habsburg Europe’ – the central European lands ruled by the Habsburg dynasty from the 13th to the 20th century. Although the period dealt with is shorter than that covered by Germania, the task he sets himself is more challenging, for not only is the Habsburg inheritance now divided among a dozen or more states, but the people living there are mostly quite different from the populations of a century ago, owing to an orgy of ‘ethnic cleansing’, which convulsed the region between 1918 and 1948. He gives a fascinating overview of this ever-shifting agglomeration of territories and peoples and the dynasty that held them together.
The Habsburgs themselves were mostly an uninspiring lot and apart from a few remarkable personages, such as the dynastic strategist Maximilian I, the half-mad antiquarian Rudolf II and the doughty Maria Theresa, who survived disaster to become an enlightened despot, he does not tell us much about them as individuals. Nor does he give us more than the broadest lines of political, diplomatic and military history (though he does this well). His aim is to convey the atmosphere of particular places in the shadow of particular events. A wall-painting in Graz captures the mixture of plague, harvest failure and miltary disaster which afflicted the city in 1480; a castle in today’s Czech Republic contains Europe’s last ‘bear-moat’; a chapel now in Serbia, in the form of a Turkish tent, commemorates the Treaty of Karlowitz, at which the Habsburgs finally achieved ascendancy over the Ottomans in 1699.
If Winder has a theme it is the problem created by the mix of nationalities. This did not matter in the early days, for the notion that one nation should rule over others was commonplace up to the 17th century. Also, from 1350 to 1750 the Habsburg domains were the great ‘plug’ that prevented the Ottoman Turks from pouring into Europe, and Christian nations were usually willing to subsume their independence to withstand the infidel onslaught. As the Turks were rolled back in the century following their unsuccessful siege of Vienna (a close shave) in 1683, however, fierce competing nationalisms emerged throughout the Habsburg lands. During the 19th century nationalist academics argued that their peoples had historic rights to various territories (usually including vast areas claimed by other peoples), but Winder shows that such claims were ludicrous: after chaotic centuries of internecine warfare, resulting in the frequent devastation of districts and endless shifting around of populations, all Balkan ‘nations’ were effectively mongrels and no one could really claim a historic right to anything.
Winder describes how the nationalist madness grew ever more virulent in the approach to the First World War, sowing the seeds of the ghastly atrocities committed in the name of nationhood in the 20th century. He says rather less about the fact that the ‘Austrian’ half of Austria-Hungary (not the Hungarian, which was repressive and intolerant) seemed to be coping quite well with the problem in the decades before 1914, moving towards a position which recognised equality between the various languages and nationalities. He does point out that Franz Ferdinand, the imperial heir whose assassination provoked the war which finished the Habsburg Empire, aimed to create a ‘United States of Austria’, which sounds rather like the European Union (under whose aegis almost all the former Habsburg domains now co-exist). But he refrains from speculating that the nationalist horrors of the past 100 years might have been averted had Habsburg rule continued.
This book does not claim to be a comprehensive account of its subject and is amusingly idiosyncratic. One cannot quarrel with Winder’s choices (though it is surprising that a history of the Habsburgs should not mention the Congress of Vienna, at which, under their auspices, the world was remade in 1815). I particularly enjoyed his reflection that travelling around the modern Balkans, one can usually tell which areas were once under Habsburg rule from the quality of their food and their music.
Michael Bloch worked for the Duke of Windsor’s executors in the 1980s and wrote six books about the ex-king and the ‘woman he loved’. He has edited the diaries of James Lees-Milne, and written his biography.