BOOK REVIEW: ‘The Hapsburg Empire: A New History’

OPINION:

THE HAPSBURG EMPIRE: A NEW HISTORY

By Pieter M. Judson

Belknap/Harvard University Press, $35.00, 592 pages

Visitors to present-day Vienna sometimes feel as if they have wandered into a vast, open-air museum, or perhaps a particularly well-managed theme park. With good reason. Although their empire ended nearly a century ago, most of the city’s greatness — artistic, musical, architectural and intellectual — was achieved under Hapsburg rule, which spanned nearly 650 years, from 1278 to 1919. Surviving bits of ancient battlements, the gothic splendor of St. Stephan’s Cathedral, which weathered two Turkish sieges and became a symbol of European Christendom’s successful resistance to Islamic invaders, the splendid baroque and rococo palaces, and a magnificent array of 19th century galleries, museums, theaters, concert halls and municipal parks: All are part of the Hapsburg bequest to the city they transformed from a medieval backwater to the capital of a great empire. Besides being an imperial power center, Vienna under the Hapsburgs was also one of Europe’s vital cultural centers, if not equal to, certainly second only to Paris.

For countless central and eastern European scholars, artists, writers and musicians, all roads led to Vienna where a son of Polish Jewish merchants like Sigmund Freud could achieve fame as the father of modern psychiatry and a transplanted north German composer of humble origins like Johannes Brahms would find the perfect showcase for his talents. Brahms was so fond of his adopted fatherland that he once said that each time he crossed the border from Germany he felt like kissing the Austrian customs officials. An old friend of mine, Austria’s last waltz and operetta king, Robert Stolz (1880-1975) confirmed that particular quote and was in a position to know since Brahms was a friend of his father’s and often visited the Stolz family’s music academy in Graz, Austria’s “Second City.” As a small child, Robert was even treated to the sound of a Brahms’ lullaby, played on the piano by the composer himself.

The Hapsburgs’ was an empire like no other and Vienna was an imperial capital like no other. At its height the empire extended deep into Germany, Hungary, Poland, the Ukraine, what is now Belgium, Italy and Bohemia. For a relatively short time, it also included Spain and its vast colonial territories in the New World. Even after a period of gradual decline beginning in the latter half of the 19th century, on the eve of World War I it was the second largest European land mass, exceeded in size only by the Russian Empire, although less populous and economically developed than the arriviste German Empire headed by the upstart Hohenzollerns. An old bit of doggerel popular with the Viennese summed up their attitude pretty well:

“Es gibt nur ein Kaiserstadt und dass heisst Wien;

Es gibt nur ein Raubersnest und dass heisst Berlin!

(There’s only one imperial city and it’s called Vienna;

There’s only one robber’s nest and it’s called Berlin!)”

Most modern histories of the Hapsburg monarchy tend to treat it as a doomed anachronism, a feudal grab bag of ancestral holdings with nothing in common but a shared landlord and hence destined for dissolution with the rise of militant nationalism in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Such histories often read like long, slow-motion autopsies. For that very reason, they are misleading. Pieter Judson’s meticulous new history of the Hapsburg Empire takes a more nuanced, informed view of a state entity that, all things considered, demonstrated a remarkable ability to recover from disaster and adjust to new challenges throughout its long history.

Absent the tragic, traumatic shock of World War I, the Austro-Hungarian monarchy might well have continued to evolve as a Danubian common market and imperial commonwealth with a central monarchy responsible for defense, diplomacy and international trade, but with internal self-rule and cultural pluralism among the empire’s ethno-linguistic population groups — notably German speakers, Magyar-speaking Hungarians, and several categories of Slavic-speakers (including Slovenes, Croatians, Poles, Ukrainians, Czechs and Slovaks). One of the saddest ironies of World War I is that the assassination that triggered it eliminated the reform-minded heir to the Hapsburg throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, a leading proponent for just such reforms. The Hapsburg Empire has been gone now for nearly a century but its melody lingers on — not only literally in the “serious” music of Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner and Mahler and the shimmering, lighter confections of Strauss, Lehar and Stolz, but figuratively in many of the legal codes, social values and small graces and courtesies still to be found in that vast but vanished domain.

• Aram Bakshian Jr., an aide to Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan, writes widely on politics, history, gastronomy and the arts.