On 9 November 1918 the Austrian Verzichtserklärung, a brief quasi-abdication, was being drafted. A few days later it would be signed—along with a still terser equivalent for Hungary—at Eckartsau castle, beside the Danube outside Vienna, by the last emperor/king, Charles I/IV, as a rough copy and in pencil.Footnote ² The Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary was dead.

We've had just a hundred years without the Habsburgs. So my focus here is squarely with the shifting perceptions of a lost polity over an extended period. An occasion to reflect on attempts at a true historical understanding of this failed monarchy, in light of its failure (which forms, of course, a crucial part of the evidence); and of the monarchy as a whole because that's what was distinctive about it. I stress that I deal in what follows with interpretations of the working of the Habsburg territories as a totality, a Gesamtmonarchie (the term that came into use during the epoch that concerns us here).Footnote ³ I mean that central system of direct and, as far as possible, equilibrated imperial rule to which the dynastic monarchy of Habsburg-Lorraine had recourse to conserve and protect its European position from the mid-eighteenth century on.

A grand subject, surely. But the relevant literature on it may strike us as comparatively and surprisingly limited. Besides much that's openly partisan, there is a great deal more that doesn't attempt to address the Gesamtmonarchie and its fate. That was simply not a concern for national historians in the region, then or later, however broad their range and incisive their analysis in other respects.

It's hardly been a theme at all, except by implication, in Hungarian historiography—and that's surely significant, as I shall suggest shortly. If Hungarian commentators looked to the bigger picture, then they did so largely in the early years after 1918; and Gyula Szekfű, Gyula Miskolczy, Oszkár Sashegyi, and a few others tended to reveal a quite different perspective, even on ostensibly “Austro-Hungarian” issues.Footnote ⁴ Much Austrian historiography has focused on the antecedents of the post-Habsburg state, especially under the Second Austrian Republic since World War II—that is also significant, and will merit further mention. Czech historiography has likewise been largely self-sufficient, even in the work of its most conspicuous cosmopolitan, Josef Pekař; but one major thread within it will be pertinent, toward the end of this article, as will be the research of Pekař's unassuming archivist-pupil Karel Kazbunda. In other Habsburg-related historiographies—Italian, Polish, South Slav, Romanian—the deeper structure of the monarchy was never a central feature (with a handful of distinguished exceptions, mainly Italian).

So gesamtmonarchisch elucidations have relied mostly on those outside the mainstream historiographical concerns of the successor states. On the one hand, old-Austrian analytical frameworks inherited from the days of the monarchy, from a historical practice that emphatically didn't write about the non-German parts of the monarchy as such, and many of whose representatives exhibit in their writing a nationalist undertow that—at least I'll suggest so later—weakens its explanatory power. The wonderful Habsburgermonarchie 1848‒1918 series,Footnote ⁵ devised in the 1970s (thus just about sustaining the apostolic succession in its continuity with the vestiges of that earlier school) and now finally in process of completion, corrected those failings, reasserted earlier priorities, and provides—within the terms of its multi-authorial collaboration—abundant building materials for fresh interpretative schemes.

On the other hand, there has been foreign scholarship generated outside the lands of former Habsburg rule, above all in countries with their own recent imperial experience, from the United States to the USSR.Footnote ⁶ This was always linked in some degree to the Austrian point de départ, both by the tradition of external commentators back into the decades before 1918, and by academics from Central Europe who chose or were forced to make careers in exile.

However comprised, it's an impressive body of learning within its given constraints, and one accumulated over many decades. How to capture some of its essence at this commemorative juncture? I've made a personal and frankly self-indulgent choice: to concentrate on three works that seem to me to deliver the most powerful and coherent of analyses and most masterful of expositions. These are three challenging, hefty tomes, each in a different language, in fact hardly ever reissued or translated, partly because of their bulk but also because they demand such close and protracted attention. All in all, perhaps none of them is much read these days. Yet their contributions were as singular as they were authoritative. This modus agendi thus also allows me, through these three protagonists, a more individualized and humanized survey of the otherwise bloodless array of causative factors and concomitant circumstances.

That schema has proved a little too restrictive, so I'll also adduce three further authors (let's think of them as “deuteragonists,” the principal supporting actors of ancient Greek drama) who ploughed more or less the same furrow with slightly less formidable powers of synthesis but at least as much lasting influence because each was less purely scholarly and more engagé. I shall use these six texts to illustrate the three themes that for me are central to the long-term failure of the monarchy, as well as to the immediate causal antecedents of its collapse. From each pair in turn I shall draw one of my “master interpretations.” Not that the authors concerned should be identified with that interpretation. It is simply one leading thesis that seems to emerge clearly from the complex accounts that they present. And as to their interplay, well, the railway town of Vinkovci in Syrmia, between Zagreb and Belgrade, offers a clue—to be explained at the end.

I shall emphasize long-term factors (at least the cumulation of different triggers), strength of national allegiances (and resentments), and the complex, sometimes contradictory character of the Habsburg imperial mission (and lack of it). Having begun as an early modernist, I'm anyway attracted to contemplation of the longue durée in modern Habsburg history. And those who seek long-term causes tend to find them. Gibbon's paradigmatic empire took an awfully long time to decline.

That cuts against the recent trend in some quarters to stress the merits and successes of late Habsburg governance; the social, economic, and cultural benefits that derived from it; the steady, perhaps even upward trajectory of the realm. In particular such commentaries tend to doubt the corrosive and oppositional force of national movements and identities, and to see the monarchy's fate as largely determined by the outcome of World War I. I too entered this field seeking to avoid any obsessions about nationality; yet for understanding the destiny of the monarchy on the map of Europe I have been persuaded otherwise. Perhaps a degree of contradictoriness is inescapable. Above all I'll be dwelling on an apparent paradox: that the rule of the Habsburgs was destroyed by its chief beneficiaries.

*

I take my three protagonists in chronological order of their activity as historians; but in reverse order of their main historical focus. The first is Louis Eisenmann, born in Alsace in 1869, just before the Franco-Prussian war. His Jewish family were optants—that is, they resettled in France after the conflict. Nevertheless, Louis became a Germanist. He then concentrated on Habsburg Central Europe and learned its principal languages; he held chairs at Dijon and the Sorbonne; he served as an expert adviser to the French government during and after the war; he edited Le Monde slave, but also the most important French journal in the whole historical field, the Revue historique. He died in 1937.Footnote ⁷

Throughout his career Eisenmann wrote extensively on current affairs, and in 1904 he presented at Paris an ostensibly legal work, his thèse de doctorat en droit. But it's squarely a work of history: Le compromis austro-hongrois de 1867. Étude sur le dualisme.Footnote ⁸ Eisenmann addresses the origins and implications of the Compromise (Ausgleich/kiegyezés) of that year. He deploys a historical analysis of relations between Austria and Hungary, or rather between the kingdom of Hungary and what the Compromise document calls “the other lands under the rule of his Majesty.”Footnote ⁹ He takes a long view of Hungary's institutional separateness and the efforts of Habsburg rulers to build a common administration: the extending arm of Viennese executive authority set against repeated dietal guarantees that the lands of St. Stephen be not ruled “ad normam aliarum haereditariarum provinciarum,” a stipulation retained when the Austrian imperial title was created in 1804.Footnote ¹⁰

Eisenmann dwells on the extremes of the 1848‒49 confrontation: equally scathing about separatist Lajos Kossuth's willful brinkmanship and the autocratic court policy of Verwirkung (constitutional forfeiture). He scrutinizes the impasse during the 1850s, with attempts to merge truncated and partitioned Hungary into a rigidly unitary Austrian neo-absolutist state. The heart of the book is a brilliant disquisition on the extended political crisis of the 1860s, as a range of federal and centralist experiments, notably enshrined in those terrible twins, the October Diploma and February Patent, eventually yielded the “dual centralism” of the Compromise laws. Here is the verdict, as a sample of Eisenmann's beautifully limpid style, on the failed efforts of the emperor's chosen premier between 1861 and 1865:

“By pursuing,” as Eisenmann here concludes, “the chimera of a constitutional centralism—which involved a contradiction in terms—Schmerling and the Germans rendered inevitable the dualism against which they had revolted.”Footnote ¹¹

What emerged? Hungary, a land dominated by a coherent noble elite, won out over the congeries of “Austrian” political groupings. Henceforth Magyar interests enjoyed disproportionate influence over both German and especially Slav ones. Hungary (re)gained a genuine but narrow and discriminative constitution. Austria was rewarded, or burdened, with sham representation that left extensive powers with the ruler. Besides, provisions for common affairs of the monarchy as a whole gave continuing immunity to the conservative springs of dynastic authority: the court, the army, the diplomatic service.

Eisenmann doesn't predict an early end to the monarchy. Indeed, he thinks some forces of consolidation have been at work from mid-century onward, especially under the impact of peasant emancipation. A few years later he would sound a good deal more sanguine about its future prospects.Footnote ¹² However, he did show in 1904 how its two “halves” had grown apart, and how Hungarian claims to full sovereignty were undermining it. Prescient comments, on the very eve of the constitutional crisis of 1905‒6, when the last great Hungarian champion of a real, substantive link to Austria, István Tisza, temporarily lost control of the domestic political process.Footnote ¹³

Enter my second witness to this master interpretation: Oszkár Jászi (1875‒1957),Footnote ¹⁴ the only other among the classic commentators on the fate of the monarchy to stress its Hungarian aspect above all others. He'd been an active participant before the war as a prominent Magyar-Jewish intellectual and was at the heart of new sociological thought and radical politics. Then he briefly became a minister in the first republican Hungarian government, before being forced to emigrate. Jászi's Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy,Footnote ¹⁵ written at Oberlin, Ohio, and published in 1929, bears the stamp of that busy involvement—it's a bit schematic and immoderate in its judgments. But the famous paradigm developed by Jászi of centripetal versus centrifugal forces (even if on close inspection we find he never quite clarifies satisfactorily which are which!) enjoyed immense influence; as did his stress on the malign effect of the sins of omission and commission by the Hungarian ruling class upon a dual system rigged in its favor.Footnote ¹⁶

Thus for the present the “Hungarian problem” was not so much chauvinistic discrimination, official and unofficial, against the nationalities, though that was already condemned at the time by Jászi, and more ominously by foreign observers like R. W. Seton-Watson.Footnote ¹⁷ The really pressing issue—stressed by Eisenmann—lay in a growing divergence and alienation from the rest of the monarchy among the ruling Magyars. We can adduce much other evidence for that. Hungarian party-political programs, as they evolved from the 1870s on, are one kind of testimony.Footnote ¹⁸ So are cultural and ideological examples: from the “holy crown” thesis, as a claim for full sovereignty only developed after 1867, but based on much bogus historical argumentation,Footnote ¹⁹ to school primers, which not only taught nothing about Austria but also were filled with stories of resistance to it.Footnote ²⁰ Even mutual economic benefits arguably tended to fuel these antipathies, as Hungarian commerce profitably outgrew its Austrian tutelage and each side sought to maximize its market advantages.

Relevant here is the lack, on either side of the internal frontier, of what Jászi called a common “civic education” (or more trendily “psychic synthesis”), for all the efforts of Adolf Fischhof and like-minded would-be facilitators. Likewise, the comparative paucity of personal or institutional linkages across the border anyway—though that subject awaits its historianFootnote ²¹—the more troubling an issue for the Cisleithanian and Transleithanian establishments insofar as such links seem to have been rather more prevalent among non-Magyar and non-German nationalities. And whose “empire” was it now? Just as Hungarian politicians categorically rejected any implication that their country formed part of an Austrian Reich, so Hungarian maps of the period increasingly showed the lands of St. Stephen as a “magyar birodalom,” an empire of their own. The priorities of Hungarian historiography, then and since, as already suggested, point in the same direction.

All this would have its forward impact on the conduct and outcomes of World War I, as we shall see. But of course, as Louis Eisenmann laid out in his luminous prose, dualism represented the attempt to resolve an earlier crisis of authority that had been set in train by the revolutionary breakdown in 1848. And that leads me to my next protagonist.

*

Josef Redlich lived between 1869 and 1936. He was thus an exact contemporary of Eisenmann: they were born and died within a few months of each other. Like Eisenmann and Jászi he had a provincial Jewish upbringing and then legal training. Redlich gained particular expertise in the principles of Lokalverwaltung, local government, with much experience of Great Britain and later (like Jászi) the United States. He pursued a political career for a time (like Jászi, and over the same years), initially in the German National-Liberal camp, later more independently. Redlich became the last Habsburg-Austrian finance minister (for two weeks in late 1918); it was he who drafted that Verzichtserklärung with which I began.Footnote ²²

Then Redlich—already a zealous and penetrating diarist—steeped himself in history and produced Das österreichische Staats- und Reichsproblem (1920‒26).Footnote ²³ He subtitled it “Geschichtliche Darstellung der inneren Politik der habsburgischen Monarchie von 1848 bis zum Untergang des Reiches” (Historical account of the internal politics of the Habsburg monarchy from 1848 till the downfall of the empire), but it remained a torso, partly—but not solely—because he resumed other commitments, and it does not extend beyond the 1860s.Footnote ²⁴ It's a challenging read; here is one sentence from the preface:

Redlich deploys an elaborate and dense treatment of immense power and subtlety, concentrating on the series of mid-century constitutional experiments: from revolutionary expedients in 1848; through the parliamentary debates at Kremsier/Kromĕříž and the octroys or governmental dictates of 1849; through plans for autonomous bodies but the reality of rigorous autocracy in the 1850s; to the more-or-less federalist Diploma and the more-or-less centralist Patent and the resultant struggles of the 1860s. Thus Redlich covers similar ground to Eisenmann; and at times they march parallel. Both stress, for example, how Hungarian aristocratic (ständisch) constitutionalism lost out at home, but was transplanted to Austria, with retrograde political consequences as provincial elites reasserted their authority in the crownlands. Both celebrate the genius of Ferenc Deák—Redlich compares him to John Hampden and John Pym—while condemning the Kossuthist hotheads. Both are more cautious about the Compromise, especially those parts of it over which Deák had no control.

However, their emphases differ. Redlich, though he addresses the Hungarian issue—that's the “Reichsproblem”—knows and cares less about it than Eisenmann except, significantly, insofar as it was still part of the greater conundrum of a viable Austrian administration (Verwaltung). So Redlich concentrates on the Austrian “Staatsproblem.” He descries the grandeur of the government's purpose: a standardized and civilized executive and judiciary, and especially a pioneering regulatory interplay between the two, amid the groundbreaking challenge from calls for linguistic, cultural, and political Gleichberechtigung, equal rights, for various national groups. That interplay, he finds, is what was neglected by the progressives at Kremsier, otherwise much admired by Redlich. He dilates with appreciation on the humane values (“Milde,” etc.) of intermediary powers in Austria; of its Beamtentum and the merits of local (semi-)autonomy, the freie Gemeinde; and of nascent federal initiatives. Yet he sees how often these were still undermined by enduring habits of bureaucratic absolutism; and how constitutional life was stunted by the rule, which began with Schmerling, of “beamtete Politiker,” or were they “politisierende Beamte”?

Redlich's most telling and nuanced commentary is reserved for attempts to resolve the Staatsproblem by recognizing continued German dominance of the monarchy. And here we begin to distinguish the outlines of a further master interpretation. I introduce it with another typically weighty sentence (it follows immediately on the one cited previously).

Redlich was not a German nationalist—even if there are hints of it around 1914 in some of his diary entries, as when he writes on the day of the Sarajevo assassination of “diese halb deutsche, mit Deutschland verschwisterte Monarchie.” The issue in his magnum opus is squarely that of domestic solutions. Yet that issue was inseparable from the place of Germans at the heart of the Austrian imperial mission, and of Austria in a wider Germanic world.

We can see the implications of that more clearly in Redlich's colleague, my second deuteragonist, Heinrich Friedjung (1851‒1920).Footnote ²⁷ Friedjung completes this quartet of historians with Jewish heritage: like Redlich he grew up in Moravia. Friedjung too was active as an advanced liberal in Austrian politics, in fact more radical as a young man than Redlich would ever be. At that time Friedjung condemned dualism so vehemently, as detrimental to Austria's identity and integrity, that it cost him his first job as lecturer at a business school.Footnote ²⁸

Friedjung turned to history and made his scholarly name with research on the same primary decades as Redlich: the 1850s and 1860s. They afforded him scope to chronicle the achievement of a duly constituted de facto German cultural and political control at home in Austria, and for his famous narrative of “the struggle for supremacy,” der Kampf um die Vorherrschaft, in Germany.Footnote ²⁹ That work, whose quality was enhanced by Friedjung's evident empathy for both the Austrian and the Prussian sides, lays out the essence of the matter for us in its conclusion. “This turn of events thus yielded one noble victim: the Germans of Austria, who were torn away from their motherland. They lost their political center of gravity at that time and have not yet recovered it.”Footnote ³⁰

Those words were written in the 1890s (when Kaiser Wilhelm II was one of his appreciative readers).Footnote ³¹ Friedjung had been drawn to the mid-century arena for Austria's last stand as heir to the traditions of the Holy Roman Empire: the attempts to revitalize and defend the Deutscher Bund as a federative structure that still embodied the legacy of the Old Reich.Footnote ³² He was too good a historian to neglect gesamtmonarchisch issues, including the need for some kind of modus vivendi with Hungary. But he became a prominent and increasingly exposed spokesman for Austria's future in harmony with a victorious Prussia and the resultant Second German Empire.

Both Redlich and Friedjung backed Austria's subsequent diplomatic assertiveness, mainly in the Balkans. Redlich advised the forceful foreign minister Aehrenthal while Friedjung made publicity for him, until he was compromised (and hung out to dry) by his injudicious use of falsified official documents in seeking to prove that members of the South Slav opposition were enemies of the state. Behind this stance lay the whole secular decline of the domestic German power-position, and a perceived need to rescue it by close alliance with Germany. At the turn of the century, Friedjung wanted his conationals, the “firstborn” among the peoples of Austria, to recover their “political hegemony.”Footnote ³³ When at the end of his life he contemplated the collapse of his homeland, the ethnic priorities remained the same: Austria was “a creation of the German nation as its advanced bastion to the south-west . . . for whose defence it also marshalled other nationalities.”Footnote ³⁴

This process played itself out against a background of hazy, overlapping, unstable identities. To be “Austrian” was still broadly a civic and territorial designation, awkwardly sandwiched between the provincial and the national (a semantic study would repay, both for the term “Österreicher,” with its cognates, and for the equivalents in other relevant languages: “rakušané,” “osztrákok,” etc.). “German” tended to trump it, culturally and maybe also politically. Indeed, the very ideology of the relaunched Austria of the 1850s had been largely purveyed by incomers from elsewhere in the Confederation; and that linkage continued to be reflected in its liberal thought.Footnote ³⁵ The harder Austria's elites sought to propagate a civilizing mission in the age of imperialism, the more their enterprise came to be perceived as a merely German one, not least by the other nationalities in the state. As the writer Robert Musil put it in 1919: “Neither the Slavs nor the Romance peoples nor the Magyars of the Monarchy recognized an Austrian culture; they knew only their own—and a German culture that they did not relish.”Footnote ³⁶

There were few outright pan-Germans in Austria perhaps (and the public antics of the Alldeutsche discouraged open adherence to such ideas), but many conscious members of a wider German community. Their attitudes could crystallize as exclusive and domineering if the pressures on it were felt to be existential. We find classic documentary evidence for that in Ernst Plener's memoirs, where he writes about German-Czech animosity over language as both vehicle and symbol in the 1880s’ debates during the campaign for German as the Staatssprache.Footnote ³⁷ Then the breakdown of public order on the same general issue at the time of the Badeni ordinances was manifestly a key episode. Moreover, we are surely right to invest with a certain aura of fatality (contemporaries did too) what has commonly been seen as the last-ditch attempt in the immediate prewar years to negotiate equal language rights for the Czechs and due democratic process within an integral Bohemian state, and thus to unblock the parliamentary impasse in Austria too. The largest cause of this failure, memorably chronicled by Kazbunda, lay in the ethnic and cultural intransigence of the German camp inside and outwith the Bohemian lands.Footnote ³⁸

Only after 1918 would “Austrianness” as—merely—Staatspatriotismus be first complemented and then replaced by a modern identity. That's something Josef Redlich helped promote, having foresworn the kind of gesamtdeutsch historiography that was led by his colleague Heinrich von Srbik. Srbik's “whole-German” views, which assigned a leading place to Austria and its political structures within the overall mission of a national Germandom, could easily assume a Nazi inflection, as Srbik demonstrated after the Anschluss. They and he came to a correspondingly ignominious end in 1945. Yet their subsequent repudiation should not obscure the earlier wide diffusion of the ideas Srbik chronicled.Footnote ³⁹ The Treaty of St. Germain created in reality only a “Deutschösterreich” (which is precisely why the war's victors denied that title to the new rump state). There's a mass of evidence both that public and, even more, private allegiances in the new Austrian republic were overwhelmingly in favor of Deutschtum, within which Austrianness comprised merely a local manifestation, and also that commitment to Anschluss formed a clear political preference.Footnote ⁴⁰

Later I shall revert briefly to this topic too, in the context of World War I. But evidently the prostration of the established order in 1848, which formed the point of departure for Redlich and Friedjung, had its own deep-seated causes. That was a particular concern for my final protagonist.

*

Carlile Aylmer Macartney was born in 1895 to a wealthy Anglo-Irish family and educated at Winchester College. In 1914, instead of taking up a place at Cambridge to read classics, he volunteered for service on the Western Front and arrived in Vienna in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the monarchy. Macartney followed a career, like Eisenmann and Redlich, as a prolific pundit and adviser on the current affairs of the region. At the same time he made himself into a major, largely private scholar, especially of Hungary, about whose very ancient and very modern history alike he wrote works of profound importance. He excelled in the theory and practice of nationalism and its relation to statehood, mainly in Central Europe. He died at Oxford in 1978.Footnote ⁴¹

The Habsburg Empire, 1790‒1918, which appeared exactly a half-century after the dissolution,Footnote ⁴² is thus a product of his later years, but Macartney tells us he conceived it at the very start, and always ambitiously, as “a history of the Monarchy as a whole, and the whole Monarchy during . . . [its] second great phase.”Footnote ⁴³ He tells a story, with enviable mastery of form, balance, and literary grace, and strewn with wit and irony. Macartney does not explicitly analyze: even at the end, in November 1918, the “old Monarchy” steals away—on page 833—without any further comment or conclusion.

Yet the whole work carries a single overarching thesis:

That is the date when Emperor Joseph II died. Whereas Joseph's impetuous and doctrinaire style of rule is presented by Macartney as the injurious facet of an otherwise largely successful enterprise, subsequent abdication from the centralizing, progressive, secular reform agenda of Joseph and his mother Maria Theresa would gradually undermine all Habsburg achievements.

Thus Macartney lays much explanatory weight upon the long barren reign of Francis II/I (1792‒1835); then upon the disastrous regency for his incapable son (1835‒48), and the failure to harness constructive impulses offered by new representative institutions in the revolutionary backlash of 1848. It was the age of Metternich and his “system” and its consequences. Macartney's narrative of these events has never been surpassed; and his measured but gently censorious verdict on Metternich's contribution remains convincing (attempts at rehabilitation, from Srbik to Siemann, ring hollow to me, a point to which I shall shortly return). Although Macartney deals in rich and elegant detail with later decades, overlapping in many of his emphases with the historians we have already considered, the core of his indictment seems to lie in and around the Vormärz.

That's clearer still in the work of Macartney's deuteragonist, on whom he drew for both conception and telling anecdote in his treatment of that period: Anton Springer (1825‒91). Son of a monastery brewer at Strahov above Prague, Springer was drawn into dissident political and clerical circles in Bohemia and beyond during the Vormärz. A radical public intellectual during 1848‒49, he then fled abroad, in due course settling in Germany where he became one of the pioneers of the discipline of art history.Footnote ⁴⁵

Springer's Geschichte Österreichs seit dem Wiener Frieden (1863‒65) is a deft, sparkling, and devastating indictment of the Habsburg ancien régime, and of the dynasty's—and Metternich's—response to the challenge, first of reform and then of revolution. Springer had an axe to grind; but his basic argument was the increasing debility of a state that had no principle of coherence, no Staatsidee: “[I]t can be no secret that the fervor with which grounds of political reason and expedience are sought for the existence and continuance of the Austrian Empire leads us to suspect the absence of any natural and absolutely necessary foundation.”Footnote ⁴⁶ That had already been the refrain of the Vormärz pamphleteers like Andrian-Werburg (as it would remain for Josef Redlich and others).Footnote ⁴⁷ Moreover, it introduced a satirical vein that would dog or enliven commentary on a perceptually accident-prone Habsburg regime thereafter, above all in the wickedly funny (and well-informed) north-German journalist Walter Rogge and the subsequent era of political cartoons.Footnote ⁴⁸

At the heart of the problem lay a “dynastic deficit”: a structure where dynastic rule had to do duty for the political and social bonds that could fuse together the congeries of Habsburg territories. This was customized empire; and the imperial decree of 1804 created only a title: an Austrian family Kaisertum, rather than an organic Kaiserstaat. Circumstances placed power in the hands of the dreary and narrow-minded Francis—who had several talented brothers but mistrusted them all. Amerling's famous portrait of the aging Francis in his regalia (including the bulky crown never used at a coronation) conveyed superbly the splendor, but also the vacuity, of his position.Footnote ⁴⁹ Then came the disarming but imbecilic heir apparent Ferdinand.Footnote ⁵⁰ Even Francis Joseph, insinuated into the role in Ferdinand's stead at the end of 1848, long earned grudging respect at best, rather than admiration or affection; later the more sentimental fidelity that attached to him was dangerously personalized rather than dynastic—and still less patriotic.Footnote ⁵¹ He likewise remained part of the problem, not of its solution.

However, this deficit reflected also the wasting asset of two traditional props of earlier Habsburg power: church and aristocracy.Footnote ⁵² Both of these the reformist rulers had sought to redirect and harness, rather than jettison. The church had suffered a protracted and damaging split between a more innovative wing under state aegis (the original “Josephinist” movement) and baroque-inspired conservatives, revivified by the ultramontane reaction of such as the Hofbauer circle in early nineteenth-century Vienna. A later leader of that tendency was Anton Bruckner's combative local bishop, Franz Joseph Rudigier. The church's hesitant and disparate reactions to the challenge of 1848 compounded the malaise.Footnote ⁵³

Catholicism substantially failed through the nineteenth century as an attribute of loyalist cultural capital, even at the acme of the 1855 Concordat, which temporarily restored much of its civil authority: the measure was designed to reassert Habsburg pietas as a political weapon in Austria, and to reintegrate supportive elements in Germany and Hungary on the basis of a common spiritual purpose.Footnote ⁵⁴ Vienna's massive and bleak Votivkirche, begun at just that time, as a thank-offering for the preservation of the young emperor from an attempt at assassination, stood as its symbol and omen. The tutelage of Catholicism tended increasingly to provoke opposition and constrain intellectual life. Besides, the loyalties of some of its more talented and discerning priests became suspect. On 28 October 1918, the first harangue that declared Czech independence from the steps of the Wenceslas monument in Prague came from a canon of the abbey of Strahov, indeed its former librarian, Isidor Zahradník: “We are breaking for ever our chains in which the faithless, foreign, immoral Habsburgs have tormented us.”Footnote ⁵⁵

The aristocracy regrouped: indeed, too successfully for the ultimate good of dynastic rule. Reinforced after the termination of the Holy Roman Empire by puissant princes from the mediatized Reichsadel, it proved a reactionary counterpoise—and more formidably than in the rest of Germany, even Prussia—to the more adaptable service nobles.Footnote ⁵⁶ The “second society” constituted by the latter expanded rapidly after 1848, as more and more military officers and state officials were admitted to its ranks according to tightly prescribed but quite generous criteria of seniority and attainment; but it failed to establish a separate, meritocratic rationale for itself.Footnote ⁵⁷

As their entrepreneurial role in the economic and cultural spheres faded by mid-century, the aristocrats became a social deadweight around the regime, which continued to accord them privileged access to the corridors of power. Their political influence was robuster in Austria than in Hungary (where the gentry partly supplanted them, while still tending to represent their interests), and strongest of all in the joint institutions of the dual state. By the same token, the public authority of nobles stood or fell in the end with that of the Habsburg regime as a whole, as was evidenced through its total repudiation in the aftermath of the monarchy's collapse, even—and most particularly—in rump Austria with the unanimous enactment of the Adelsaufhebungsgesetz in April 1919.Footnote ⁵⁸

*

These themes carry us back to the postrevolution scenarios of our other protagonists. The more so if we consider the other two pillars of Habsburg rule, the ones that had been deliberately (re)fashioned as the leading edge of its eighteenth-century reforms. Administration (Verwaltung) and the workings of bureaucracy (Beamtenwirtschaft) lay at the heart of the matter for all our analysts, as they have for more recent proponents of the theme of creative and interactive empire. There were many Beamte.Footnote ⁵⁹ They were a locus for supranational and Josephinist traditions, and for direct association with the chief “selbständiger Oberbeamter” (the famous self-description of Francis Joseph as “free-standing senior official” on a census form).Footnote ⁶⁰ Also, however, for practical contestation over language usage—doubly so when German came under threat as the administrative medium (innere Dienstsprache) throughout Austria.

And the canon of whistle-blowers within the Verwaltung must give us pause: from the withering sarcasm of Ignaz Beidtel (a Vormärz source much invoked by Macartney) to the nightmare visions of Franz Kafka, who presumably drew on his experience as an accident insurance official in the semipublic Arbeiter-Unfallversicherungs-Anstalt für das Königreich Böhmen.Footnote ⁶¹ Serious funding challenges emerged throughout Austria by the 1900s, inseparable from rising levels of corruption; they were especially pronounced in Bohemia, but affected other crownlands too.Footnote ⁶² On the eve of war Josef Redlich (by then a parliamentarian) instigated an abortive Commission for the Furtherance of Administrative Reform. Later, in his magnificently sesquipedalian prose, he delivered a classic account both of the decay of the political process in Austria from the 1890s onward, and of the subversion by mass and national party interests of the Verwaltungssystem that had to do duty for it.Footnote ⁶³ In Hungary the rapidly expanding host of state bureaucrats (közhivatalnokok; köztisztviselők), though deriving much of their ethos from Austrian models, served radically dissimilar national purposes.

The other pillar, the army, overlapped organizationally with the administrative machinery, but seems inherently different and more equivocal as an explanatory factor in Habsburg destinies. It's accordingly less prominent, whether as an institution or a fighting force, in the work of our protagonists. All of them knew about war in 1914‒18—Eisenmann was attached to the French general staff, Redlich visited the front as soon as hostilities began, Macartney fought in the trenches rather than studying for his degree—but they remained severely civilian in their emphases.

On the one hand, the Austrian army was a famously integrative force, both in the patterns of discipline and fidelity it inculcated within its own ranks, and as a bogey for real or potential malcontents. The vast Arsenal complex in Vienna (with its 177 million bricks), built in the aftermath of revolution to cow the capital's unruly inhabitants and as a central repository and training facility for a fighting force answerable only to the sovereign, symbolizes this well. That was so even if the army ultimately cultivated loyalty to a ruler and state conceived in its own image: the outcome of events in 1848 would have been very different if the high command (and perhaps the troops too) had been loyal merely to the emperor.Footnote ⁶⁴

On the other hand, even the army could be a destabilizing agency. Its “enforced supranationalism” increasingly concealed “a distinctive, anachronistic psychic Germandom,” as one commentator has put it.Footnote ⁶⁵ Its unity, especially in terms of administrative language, became a prime affront to Magyar nationalists, who attacked it on ostensibly patriotic and practical grounds, as in a pamphlet of 1905 entitled “uniform German command a danger for the responsiveness of the Habsburg army.”Footnote ⁶⁶ But more fundamentally and long term: the upkeep of the military represented a chronic drain on state finances, as we've known in exhaustive detail since the pioneering contemporary work of Adolf Beer, then above all that of Harm-Hinrich Brandt.Footnote ⁶⁷

This brings us, antepenultimately, to the international standing of the monarchy. Of course, it was widely seen abroad to be a “European necessity,” as the cliché went: an external security assessment, or assumption, that continued like a sheet-anchor to protect the Habsburgs from the worst buffets of fate during the nineteenth century (notably during the existential upheavals of 1848‒49). A large but weak state was best left to manage its own troubles because then neither it nor they would represent much danger to others. The latest argument, that Austrian policy makers could pursue a “grand strategy” of their own, seems much more persuasive for the age from Prince Eugene to Joseph II than later.Footnote ⁶⁸

Austria suffered from the chronic overcommitment of an increasingly second-order power, as recognized by commentators from Heinrich Friedjung to Roy Bridge.Footnote ⁶⁹ This was also, however, a self-imposed predicament: the fruit of its Pyrrhic triumph at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, sealed by the congress at Vienna in 1814‒15 and the problematic personal ascendency of its chief architect Metternich. On Austria's behalf, Metternich now shouldered protectoral functions across the continent, from Italy and Germany into much of Eastern and Southeastern Europe. His defenders, from Srbik—seeking a champion for his own großdeutsch convictions after 1918—to Wolfram Siemann, overlook the paradox at the heart of Austria's designated role in Metternich's grand design.Footnote ⁷⁰

Metternich clearly failed within Austria. That's mitigated for his apologists by their claim that he always lacked sufficient influence over domestic policy (thus Siemann, who therefore neglects the latter almost entirely).Footnote ⁷¹ However, even if true—and there's plenty of evidence for Metternich's frustration of reformist initiatives across the board—that's not the chief flaw. For Austrian strength was a precondition of his international system; and thus mounting Austrian overstretch—aggravated by the fiscal constraints applied by Metternich's bête noire Kolowrat—was built into that too. Hence Austria weakened “Europe,” and vice versa. The existential crisis of the Habsburg state, from which it would never fully recover, went with the establishment of a kind of European concert.Footnote ⁷² Did the dynasty ever realize that—“necessity” or otherwise—it and its peoples were being sacrificed on the altar of European stability?

In Cartesian terms, Austrian foreign policy exhibited too little mind (res cogitans) and too much extension (res extensa). That required inflated military budgets, which yet fell afoul of political opposition at home, especially the damaging constraints imposed by German liberals before 1866 and Hungarian autonomists before 1914.Footnote ⁷³ In fact, Hungarian backing for the great-power status of the Habsburgs peaked in the mid-1860s, just when they were in the process of losing much of what had remained of it.Footnote ⁷⁴

The monarchy's international stance, a more and more uphill bid to uphold prestige and reputation, thus remained till the end a function of the dynastic and imperial principle of rule—not for nothing was the Ministry of War the last department of state to shed its traditional designation of Reichsministerium. Yet that stance was also requisite to keep control over interlocking domestic concerns, as Eisenmann well understood.Footnote ⁷⁵ Hence the forward position in Germany and Italy up to the 1860s, which continued thereafter as a kind of Schicksalsgemeinschaft, on the one hand, and an uneasy alliance of rivals, on the other. Then the Balkans remained as the last imperialist objective, to contain South Slav discontents at home.

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In this combination we can discern the lineaments of the 1914 disaster for the monarchy: foreign policy still determined by the dynasty and an elite of aristocrats and civilian and military Spitzenbeamte, who continued to devote much energy to expansionist plans both before and after the outbreak of hostilities;Footnote ⁷⁶ an army starved through Hungarian intransigence of the military enhancement achieved by its rivals in the immediate prewar years, but whose operations remained shielded from public scrutiny. However the actual sequence of events in July 1914 be interpreted, and the degree of responsibility of Austro-Hungarian leaders assigned, the key is that they could not and would not contain the wider belligerence triggered by their ultimatum to Serbia.

The coming of that war is absolutely crucial for the present argument. But only inasmuch as it introduced a new and final phase of degeneration of the Habsburg polity. It was not in itself a primary determinative factor: it only confirmed and aggravated existing debility. Once combat was under way, pressures from chief stakeholders intensified, eliciting ever more ineffectual responses from the constituted authorities. Wartime stringencies—exacerbated by draconian controls from above and popular discontents from below—catalyzed structural weakness, broadly according to the same tripartite schema we've been following.

Firstly, Hungarian separatist pressures within the dualist system frustrated cooperation, most notably in the area of food supplies. Calls from Austria for political reform encountered concerted Magyar resistance, even when they did not directly touch upon dualism. In the dark days of September 1917 a suggestion of modest concessions to the Slavs evoked an immediate riposte from none other than the comparatively Austrophile Tisza to the foreign minister, Ottokar Czernin: “The dualistic structure of the Monarchy and Hungary's paritative standing within it [are] a conditio sine qua non of our coexistence with its other peoples. Hungary has entered into a voluntary affiliation with the Monarchy as an independent state; it has never acknowledged a superior central authority, nor submitted itself to majority rule. Still less can that ensue after the experiences of this war.”Footnote ⁷⁷ The conflict had hardened attitudes. Moreover, by the end such defiance assumed the increasingly explicit purpose of evading ultimate responsibility for being on the side of the losers.

Secondly, in Austria German national feeling dominated public life. That was true for the army and the military administration. It soon became apparent that those who sought Austro-Hungarian victory could only achieve it through acceptance of Germany's command organization and its war aims. Indeed, Habsburg forces were still long sustained by the traditional ethos of service; but combat willingness on the ground became eroded.Footnote ⁷⁸ In the civil sphere, regime loyalty crumbled, with abuse and oppression of its perceived foes at home and an unholy attachment to the greater German cause as its own diplomatic raison d’être evaporated. Not all those who felt a civic loyalty to the Austrian state were enthusiastic about the prospect of a triumphant Germany; but they could foresee that German defeat would ineluctably drag down their own now heavily compromised polity. The 1915 Denkschrift aus Deutsch-Österreich, part-authored by Heinrich Friedjung, exemplified the blue-sky Mitteleuropa thinking that could only exacerbate tensions in the Cisleithanian public sphere and intensify the alienation of all in Hungary except the pro-German clique around Tisza.Footnote ⁷⁹ The Czech Zahradnik (we encountered him earlier) put the point with devastating directness in the Austrian Reichsrat in July 1918: “the whole German system that ruled here in Austria, that was one of the strongest reasons why people have lost any taste for war. People have lost interest in Austria. . . . [E]ither Austria is not German . . . or it has no right to exist.”Footnote ⁸⁰

Thirdly, dynastic leadership proved narrow and faltering. Having pandered again to Francis Joseph's autocratic tendencies, government under the feeble Charles then almost replayed the vacillations of the Vormärz.Footnote ⁸¹ The last emperor had plenty of good intentions, both as peacemaker and as political reformer; but his plans lacked depth or precision, and he proved numbingly irresolute vis-à-vis both the Hungarian and the German-Austrian establishments. Detractors rumored he'd only ever read a single book on politics, one written by his own chaplain, which he gave up at page nine.Footnote ⁸² Subsequent dubious attempts to burnish Charles's saintly credentials must recognize (perhaps as part of their saintliness?) that his velleities had become irrelevant, and were deemed so by almost all parties to the monarchy's last existential struggle. By the end, “Europe's necessity” had become Europe's most dispensable political structure and was treated accordingly.

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The irreparable damage had been done at the intersection of my three master interpretations and the chief focus of my expositors: during the three decades from the 1840s to the 1860s. Those decades yielded what in 1920 one of their most prominent specialists (an ex-director of the Haus- Hof- und Staatsarchiv) called the missed opportunities, the “versäumte Gelegenheiten.”Footnote ⁸³ That suggests to me one penultimate reflection. If the monarchy was condemned by its prime beneficiaries, what of those it didn't favor, or actively discriminated against? Thus Slavs in general, according to the standard narrative, and especially those who lacked advocates outside the Habsburg lands. This meant two main groups, Croats and Czechs, whose responses were, however, not quite what they might seem.

The Croats were often invoked as (ultra-)loyalists, not least in their own selective self-presentation, as the nation of General Jelačić. Yet in the immediate aftermath of their defense of the dynasty in 1848‒49, the Croatian Party of Right, the pravaši, established a program of separatism and exclusivity more extreme than any other elsewhere in the monarchy. Inspired by the revolutionary firebrand Eugen Kvaternik, and led—after Kvaternik died in the abortive Rakovica uprising of 1871—by the magnetic Ante Starčević, they enjoyed huge influence.Footnote ⁸⁴ The pravaši soon fell into division, and they did not necessarily command a majority in the Croatian body politic; but they galvanized it, and incited a growing number within it to think the unthinkable. They could not threaten the Gesamtmonarchie on their own; but they furnished a first indication of violent secessionist ideology at its very heart.

The Czechs, for their part, were surely arch-opponents of both dualism and German domination of Austria. It was suspicion ever since 1848 of their supposedly pan-Slav and related seditious sentiments that provoked the arrests and persecution of so many of their leaders by the Austrian authorities in 1914‒15. In 1917 Czernin described the Czechs to Charles as “a band of the most insolent, dangerous and shameless high traitors,” and likened his monarch's conciliatory stance toward them as “an exact copy of the policy of Louis XVI.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Yet their program of Bohemian state rights was all about sustaining the empire. And František Palacký, in April 1848, was its epigrammatic apostle: “Truly, if there had not long been an Austrian state, we should need to act swiftly, in the interest of Europe, indeed of humanity itself, to create it.”Footnote ⁸⁶

Palacký's maxim—a dictum on the lips of others too in the 1840sFootnote ⁸⁷—is the most famous slogan of loyalism (and the whole Frankfurt Letter, from which it derives, its core text). Yet it stands as a pragmatic observation too because Bohemians in general and Czechs in particular had indeed invented the modern monarchy. They were foremost in running the entire system across Austria (at times even Hungary), from the later eighteenth century on, providing models of both procedures and mores in central and local Verwaltung.Footnote ⁸⁸ This civic agenda of Palacký's was more authentic and constructive than the quasiprofessional but partisan interpretative stance that he adopted in his magnum opus, the “Geschichte von Böhmen” that became ever more a “history of the Czech people in Bohemia and Moravia.”Footnote ⁸⁹

The most brilliant advocate of a Bohemian-led program to rescue the monarchy in its existential crisis of 1848‒49 was none other than the bilingual, binational Anton[ín] Springer, whose lectures and commentaries, inspired by romantic idealism but laced with a strong dose of Hegel, made a powerful case for Austria as a federation of its freestanding peoples. But Springer then jumped ship, ending up as a kleindeutsch Prussophile sharply critical of his former Czech colleagues.Footnote ⁹⁰ Palacký grew increasingly jaundiced too, though for different reasons; but his appeal for recognition of Bohemia's historic constitutional rights was maintained as a political campaign by his son-in-law František Rieger, the outstanding Czech public figure of the next generation; and then, as a scholarly enterprise, by the latter's son Bohuslav (Bohuš) Rieger (1857‒1907).

Bohuš Rieger is the last in my pantheon of gesamtmonarchisch authors: let's call him a supernumerary, or perhaps a “tritagonist.” Rieger was professor of law and constitutional history in Prague, addressing current issues of imperial government with powerful analyses of the evolution of state authority. At the same time, he worked on the countervailing evolution of the commune, the freie Gemeinde, though that too was coming under strain by 1900, as we know also from the parallel and contemporary researches of Redlich.Footnote ⁹¹

Rieger worked from a Bohemian perspective, in the spirit of his grandfather Palacký. He consolidated contemporary claims for the “state right” (státní právo; Staatsrecht) of the lands of St. Wenceslas. But he did so with a full grasp of the pan-monarchical context: he was a major exponent of the Reichsgeschichte, which officially promoted the res gestae of the dynasty.Footnote ⁹² Rieger conveys a sense of almost bewildered frustration that the Habsburg polity, which he affirmed, had failed to secure the future, at least for its core Bohemian-Austrian territories, by embracing the reasonable and legitimate program of its nationally instructed Czech citizens, the best guardians of both its central and its local administration.

Was this the versäumteste of all those Gelegenheiten? Josef Pekař still argued the claim for the České státní právo as backbone of Habsburg government in the very year 1917 when he and other prominent Czech intellectuals finally distanced themselves—definitively, as it soon proved—from Austria.Footnote ⁹³ For this most profound, versatile, and stylish of historians, recognition of the centrality of the lands of St. Wenceslas within the Austrian polity went with acknowledging the centrality of the Czech heritage within Bohemia. It was a patriotic cause, as against the cosmopolitan appeal to humanity espoused by Pekař's rival Tomáš Masaryk, in their intellectual tourney before the war over the “meaning of Czech history” (smysl českých dějin).Footnote ⁹⁴ The legitimacy of that claim, and the vital need for a settlement in Bohemia to secure the stability of overall Habsburg rule: those are propositions with which, in their different ways, Louis Eisenmann, Josef Redlich, and C. A. Macartney would all have agreed.

*

Finally: of course, not all Gelegenheiten were versäumt. Much was productive in the late monarchy. It's just more than fifty years since the publication of Macartney's Habsburg Empire, the last of my masterworks. Since then there has been a shift of emphasis. Cultural and perceptual turns have yielded some wonderful history writing (maybe fully the equal of the authors I've surveyed).Footnote ⁹⁵ But it doesn't—I think—have much directly to do with the underlying causes of the dissolution of the monarchy and its replacement by purported nation-states.

We do need to look beyond elites—but the monarchy's tragedy was a failure of elite governance, which drew in the masses as theatrical extras: Statisten, or at best Komparsen. We should scrutinize assumptions about the role of nationalism as a political force, while still recognizing that it could lead to squarely political outcomes in the Habsburg lands. It's an intriguing but surely a different issue whether many people had plural identities or no identity at all. My historiographical protagonists were already clear how far national movements and allegiances acted as conduits for wider cultural inclusivities and exclusivities, as well as vehicles for social and economic grievance. The centripetal loyalties of Jews were the exception to prove the rule—and maybe the spur for them in particular to write the history of the Gesamtmonarchie.

Moreover, if—as has often been opined of late—relatively little changed for many people in the region during and after 1918, that was less a matter of imperial survival than of a new order already substantially in place, including a conspicuous readiness to repudiate the Habsburgs as rulers.Footnote ⁹⁶ As Charles puts it in that “renouncement” with which I began, “I have opened the way for the peoples to their free-standing state evolution.” Revealingly the Magyar version only mentions the “Hungarian nation” (magyar nemzet).Footnote ⁹⁷ Charles spoke more truly than he realized, and he spoke for his predecessors as well. For his successors too, given the negligible impact of Habsburg monarchism in the subsequent politics of the region.

Yet there is much that feels compatible, even complementary, between the earlier and the newer approaches to the Habsburg Question. Eisenmann, Redlich, and Macartney each engaged actively with the public life of Austria-Hungary and of the Central European space in the immediate aftermath of its collapse. All my writers pursued a liberal, at times a progressive agenda.Footnote ⁹⁸ My protagonists affirmed the monarchy by the way they scrutinized its workings (albeit my deuteragonists were much sourer about some aspects of it), even as the deeper structure of their arguments strengthened the case for its ever direr enfeeblement. They may not have known all its languages (though Eisenmann set a strong example); they may not have introduced novel methodologies (though Redlich could be a powerful theorist); they may not have depicted wider society (though Macartney strove for comprehensiveness): but each of them sought to grasp the imperial essence of Habsburg rule. They were therapists, or at least etiologists, not gravediggers.

I conclude by mustering again my three “master interpretations.” The first two are the Hungarian/Magyar problem and the Austrian/German problem. Indeed by 1918 the terminology “Austria-Hungary” concealed an incongruous pair of empty identities. Although both words retained traces of earlier social and territorial denotation, the one was now nonnational, but always defaulting to Germandom, the other hypernational, and squarely Magyarized. The unique feature of the monarchy was not its linguistic and cultural diversity as such, but the absence of any preponderant groupings that still aligned themselves with the historic form of either of the duo of Habsburg states into which it fell after 1867.

Thirdly, there was what I've called the “dynastic deficit,” the growing inability of Habsburgs and their attenuating support structures to meet new challenges to their centralized government, at either practical or ideological levels. However trite may have been the continuing circulation of Napoleon's bon mot (adapted from a witticism about the French old regime), that “L'Autriche est toujours en retard, d'une armée, d'une année, d'une idée,” there was a grain of truth in it. And the wider international judgment would likewise be crucial in the end. The external historiography of the Gesamtstaat anatomizes that decline; whereas attempts to create its own serviceable past—through official Reichsgeschichte and the like—failed to supplant national and regional narratives.

And the interplay of all these factors? I have no new methodology of causation with which to close. I turn rather to a classic forensic expositor of the mens rea. The accomplices who dispatched the monarchy just one hundred years ago were like the perpetrators of that celebrated murder on the Orient Express. Its dénouement, as readers of Agatha Christie will recall, is that each one of the suspects committed the deed simultaneously. And where? Squarely on old-Habsburg soil, as the train from Istanbul halted by a snowdrift in Slavonia, just outside the station at Vinkovci.