THE DIETRICH W. BOTSTIBER SERIES
WHAT CAUSED THE BREAK-UP OF THE HAPSBURG MONARCHY?
WITH GERALD STROURZ AND ISTVAN DEAK
Moderator: Martin Rauchbauer
FRIDAY OCT 10, 2008
ACFNY
MB: I’d like to welcome you to tonight’s session/debate on a very important question: What
caused the break up of the Hapsburg’s Monarchy? The Austrian Cultural Forum is an
institution, a platform for contemporary art and culture of contemporary Austria but
sometimes in order to understand the contemporary we need to look at the past, our past and
this is why ninety years ago in October 1918, the world was witnessing the last weeks of
World War I but also the last weeks of the Austro-Hungarian Empire which disintegrated into
succession states. If we look at today’s states that formed and that used to form the AustroHungarian Empire: there is Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Bosnia and
Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia, parts of Poland, the Ukraine, Italy, and Serbia. Many of these
countries are now part of the European Union and we want to look also today if and what
kind of lessons we could draw from the disintegration of Austro-Hungary for our project in
Europe and the European Union. The Austro-Hungarian was a multi-ethnical, multi-lingual,
multi-religious state with a complicated constitutional and institutional set up. We want to
talk about the Monarchy tonight, look at the weaknesses but also if there were any, at the
strengths of this entity and try to answer the question why the Hapsburg Monarchy broke up
and also whether its fate was inevitable.
We have here two great historians: one from Austria, Professor and one from the
United States, who has Hungarian roots—Professor Istvan Deak. I’d like to start by
introducing Gerald Stourzh who is a distinguished Austrian historian, a Professor emeritus at
the University of Vienna, and is one of the few prominent scholars equally at home with US
history and the history of Central Europe. Stourzh was born in Vienna in 1929, and from
1951-1958 worked, with internissions, at the University of Chicago and met there many
prominent people, among them Hans Morgenthau and Austrian economist Friedrich von
Heide. He was professor of Modern and North American history at the Free University of
Berlin from 1964-1969 and then returned to Austria to become a professor of Modern history
at the University of Vienna. He is the author of several books in English and German,
including Alexander Hamilton and the Idea of Republican Government and Benjamin Franklin
and American Foreign Policy. His publications on the Austrian state treaty of 1955 formed an
equal body of work on that subject. Stourzh has won acclaim for his work on the history of
human, civil, and minority rights in Austria. Professor Gerald Stourzh is here in the United
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Transcript of the Event
István Deák is Seth Low Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University and an expert
on nineteenth and twentieth century Europe. He was born in 1926 in Hungary but left for
France in 1948 following the Communist take-over of his country. He immigrated to the
United States in 1956 and earned his doctorate in modern European history from Columbia
University in 1964. István Deák’s publications include Weimar Germany’s Left-Wing
Intellectuals; The Lawful Revolution: Louis Kossuth and the Hungarians, 1848-1849 and,
importantly for tonight’s discussion, Beyond Nationalism: A Social and Political History of the
Habsburg Officer Corps, 1848-1918. His most recent books are Essays on Hitler’s Europe and
a book in Italian on the Nuremberg trials. István Deák has published numerous articles in
American, British, Hungarian, Austrian, and other books and journals on such subjects as
Hungarian historiography, the cultural and political scene in Weimar Germany, the revolutions
of 1848, World War I in Central Europe, the rise of Fascism, collaboration and resistance in
Europe during World War II, and post-World War II judicial retribution. He is a frequent
contributor to the New York Review of Books and the New Republic. His current research
project is on collaboration, resistance, and retribution in World War II Europe. I would like
you to give a warm welcome to Professor István Deák. (Applause)
I’d like to start tonight’s discussion with a quotation from a piece of literature; from a
novel that has become a key novel for the 20th century by Robert Musil Der Mann ohne
Eigenschaften (A Man without Qualities). Many of you would know the famous opening
chapter in which he makes fun of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy called Kakania in regard of
the initial letters that stand for the famous Imperial and Royal (K. und K.) institutions and in
this opening chapter Musil says:
On paper it was called the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, but in conversation it was
called Austria, a name solemnly abjured officially while stubbornly retained
emotionally, just to show that feelings are quite as important as constitutional law
and that regulations are one thing but real life is something else entirely.
Liberal in its constitution, it was administered clerically. The government was clerical;
but everyday life was liberal. All citizens were equal before the law, but not everyone
was a citizen. There was a Parliament, which asserted its freedom so forcefully that it
was usually kept shut; there was also an Emergency Powers Act that enabled the
government to get along without Parliament, but then, when everyone had happily
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States on a book tour to promote his recently published work From Vienna to Chicago and
Back: Essays on Intellectual History and Political Thought in Europe and America which is
always available here tonight for purchase. (The University of Chicago has supplied us with
application forms that upon mailing you can receive a discount of 40%) I’d like to give a very
warm welcome to Professor Gerald Stourzh. (Applause)
The country was full of such goings-on, among them the sort of nationalist
movements that rightly attracted so much attention in Europe and are so thoroughly
misunderstood today. They were so violent that they jammed the machinery of
government and brought it to a dead stop several times a year, but in the intervals and
during the deadlocks people got along perfectly well and acted as if nothing had
happened. It was only that everyone’s natural resentment of everyone else’s efforts to
get ahead, a resentment we all feel nowadays, had crystallized earlier in Kakania,
where it can be said to have assumed the form of a sublimated ceremonial rite, which
could have had a great future had its development not been cut prematurely short by a
catastrophe.
Musil implies clearly World War I with the word catastrophe as the primary reason for the
break-up of the Monarchy. Nationalism here is seen as a resentment everybody feels for
everybody else and is described as relatively harmless. Do you agree with that Professor
Stourzh?
GS: For a start, although I am a great admirer of Musil, I’d like to begin with a couple of
disagreements. I hope, of course, István will have something to say to this question as well. I
really must say that Musil wrote these lines very much from a Viennese perspective, from a
Viennese view, or I might perhaps say a little broader, from a “cisleithanian” point of view.
Many of you know that after 1867 Austro-Hungary was a dual Monarchy and the tiny river
Leitha was the border line river between the lands of the (Hungarian) crown of St. Steven on
the one hand and the other lands under the rule of the Emperor of Austria – often referred to,
because of the border river Leitha, as “Cisleithania”, or, increasingly also as the “Austrian” half
of the dual monarchy or simply “Austria”. Officially, they were known after 1867 as “lands
represented in the ‘Reichsrat’” or Imperial Council – the name of the Parliament in Vienna,
though the name “Austria” for the non-Hungarian lands increasingly got used in official
documents as well..
I do think that this border symbolized by the river Leitha was not so unimportant
psychologically, and if Musil says “it was officially called Austro-Hungary but everybody called
it Austria,” I am not sure whether this was so in Budapest. There were certainly quite a few
people who were “Habsburg patriots”, notably in the joint Austro-Hungarian army and in the
bureaucracy in Vienna for whom the Habsburg Empire was identical to “Austria”. But Austria
in the decades after 1867 became increasingly the name for the non-Hungarian half of the
Monarchy, even in statistics, even in legal texts. I would like to add that when Robert Musil
speaks of a parliament which was so often closed while the Emperor and his Government
were able to rule with with the help of an emergency article of the constitution, this was true
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settled for absolutism, the Crown decreed that it was time to go back to parliamentary
rule.
ID: Yes, certainly, the Musil quote brings us into the heart of the question: was there such a
thing as a Habsburg Monarchy after 1867, or were there instead two separate entities? Truly,
Musil’s statements do not apply to Hungary and therefore one can well argue that two
sovereign states functioned under the rule of Emperor-King Francis Joseph, yet is also true
that there existed a kind of a common government consisting of the common foreign
minister and the common foreign service as well as the common minister of war, and the
common finance minister who served the two other ministries. Quite especially, the so-called
Common or Joint Army connected the two parts of the Habsburg Monarchy. But perhaps we
shouldn’t talk of a Habsburg Monarchy after 1867 but rather of the realm of Francis Joseph -his seemingly endless reign formed a part of people’s life; existence without him had become
nearly inconceivable.
It is certainly true that, unlike the Reichsrat in Vienna, the parliament in Hungary was not
paralyzed (except for a short period from 1904 to 1906); nor had an emergency powers’ act
become necessary because the parliament ruled supreme. But that parliament represented only
a small segment, the Hungarian-speaking social elite within the population. By 1910,
Hungarian-speakers were making up a little more than fifty percent of the population; this,
after suddenly embracing the Jewish population and declaring that all Jews were Hungarians.
But even from among the Hungarian-speakers we must deduct those who had no right to
vote and thus had no say in politics, which was the absolute majority of Hungarian-speakers.
The problem of nationalities was also quite different in Hungary from that in the Austrian half
of the Monarchy: in the Austrian Empire ethnic groups fought it out among themselves while
in the Kingdom of Hungary, the Magyar nation, or rather its social and political elite
predominated. There were a handful of Romanian, Slovak and Serbian representatives in the
Hungarian parliament, but they had no political clout, much unlike the Polish representatives
in the Vienna parliament, for instance..
MR: You are saying that in the Austrian half the nationalities were always fighting with each
other unlike the Hungarian half, but Musil’s analysis and Musil certainly was not a historian,
was that this struggle between the nationalities was in the end not so serious, at least not so
serious as to threaten the survival of the Monarchy. Would you agree with that?
GS: We have here a map of the ethnic groups or the nationalities as they were usually called –
taken from the Austrian Aacdemy of Sciences’ multivolume work “The History of the
Habsburg Monarchy 1848-1918” (vol. III) - . Actually it is a map of the languages spoken in
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only for the non-Hungarian half of the Monarchy. This was not true for the Hungarian
Parliament in Budapest at all. No emergency article existed in and for Hungary. So, though it
is lovely of course to read Musil and be enchanted by his style, he needs to be corrected.
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the monarchy, because the census was a linguistic one in both parts of the Monarchy,
though the question was put slightly differently: in Hungary, it was the “mother tongue”, in
Austria-Cisleithania it was the “language of communication”. So, these are the results, in
many colors, of the last census taken in 1910 prior to the outbreak of World War I, and as
you can see now, the non-Hungarian or the Cisleithanian part of the Hasbburg Monarchy
covered the Alpine lands,a part of the Adriatic coast, the Bohemian lands - Bohemia, Moravia,
and tiny Silesia -, it went North-East to Galicia, partly Polish speaking, partly Ukrainian
speaking, and it ended very far in the East, East of Hungary, in the small crownland of
Bukovina with the capital town of Cernowitz (today Cernivtsy in the Ukraine). It was a very
interesting place to live because in Czernowitz quite a number of nationalities, including a
large Jewish population, lived in a balance, on the whole rather peacefully, together. Then of
course, you see the vast part of the lands of the crown of St. Steven, Hungary proper
including Transylvania, then, with a special status, the Kingdom of Croatia, and hardly to be
seen here, the “corpus separatum” of the city of Fiume, today Rijeka, - and then there is
Bosnia-Herzegovina, a triangle in the south which was occupied in 1878 and then annexed
by the dual Monarchy in 1908; it was administered jointly by the two halves of the Monarchy
by way of the joint Austro-Hungarian Ministry of finance.
The Habsburg Empire, as this map shows, certainly was a multi-ethnic state. It
shows both majority and minority populations in fairly small administrative districts,
whereas traditional maps often only show the color of the majority population within a given
unity, so it may be considered a “minority-friendly” map. I give you some of the percentages
for the empire taken together: There were (in 1910) 23,9% Germans, 20 % Magyars, 12.6 %
Czechs, 3.8 % Slovaks; the Poles had a fairly large percentage - 10%, the Ukrainians, which at
the time were called Ruthenians, made up 7,9%, the Rumanians 6,4%, the Slovenes, a small
independent country today, had about 2,6% and the Italians about 2%. So, this multi-ethnic
and multi-linguistic empire was a rather brittle structure. It was brittle in various ways and on
various occasions, though it did not so badly economically around the turn of the century
and the years prior to Woröd War I. It was brittle because conflicting claims of various ethnic
or linguistic groups were growing stronger.
It is possible to distinguish certain groups of nationalities in different ways: an
important distinction can be made between nationalities who had co-nationals outside the
Empire, and those who had not. This is an important consideration. The Italians who lived in
the Adriatic area and the southern part of Tirol, notably in that part called Trentino around the
city of Trento, or most of them, were eager to join the Kingdom of Italy and it was among the
Italians of the monarchy, particularly in the city of Trieste that the well known term terra
irredenta, which literally means “unredeemed land”,was born. So, the irredenta, speaking of
the populace, the people who really wished to join another state, the Kingdom of Italy, was
considerable and that was a problem soon after the outbreak of World War I. The Poles, up in
the north had co-nationals in a larger polish speaking land ruled by the Russian empire, and a
smaller part ruled by Prussia. But then there were also some nationalities who lived only
ID: I have several comments to make in connection with Gerald’s statements, although I
basically agree with everything he has said.
First of all, let me comment on the ethnic map that he has put on the wall; it is an excellent
map in many ways; still, it is quite inadequate because it does not show population density,
the concentration of some ethnic groups in urban areas and the dispersion of other ethnic
groups in the countryside. In Transylvania, for instance, there existed mountainous regions
where hardly any people were living, and yet the maps show those regions as populated by
Romanians. Meanwhile, cities inhabited mainly by Hungarians and Germans do not indicate
the comparative density of the population. This is the kind of shortcoming, incidentally, that
the Hungarian territorial revisionists tried to point out after World War I by introducing
another color, white, for those areas in which very few people lived, whether Romanians or
not Romanians.
Actually, ethnic transformation in the pre-World War I years occurred less in the rural area than
in the cities; Prague, whose inhabitants in 1850 spoke overwhelmingly German, by 1900 had
a great majority of Czech speakers. Budapest, whose inhabitants in 1850 spoke mostly
German, had become a Hungarian-speaking capital by 1900. In Transylvania,
Hermannstadt/Nagyszeben/Sibiu was originally a German city; by the late nineteenth century,
it had become largely Hungarian, and today its inhabitants speak Romanian. Because the
cities often experienced not one but several ethnic transformations, we must always ask
ourselves what period in history we are dealing with. What counts is, however, that
ultimately the countryside conquered the city: the Romanian-speaking countryside took over
the historically German-Saxon Hermannstadt, just as the Hungarian-speaking countryside took
over Budapest. By 1900, in the Hungarian capital, even such shopkeepers who used German
or Yiddish at home, had been driven by economic interest and the wishes of the authorities
to put out their signs in Hungarian.
Gerald has also stated that the different nationalities struggled with each other; this is of
course true, but I would like to add that it was less the nationalities as a whole than their
leaders who were doing the struggling. Sometimes there were so few of these self-appointed
leaders that when, in the spring of 1848, the leaders of the Czech national movement
assembled in Prague, one of them exclaimed: “If this ceiling collapsed, it would be the end of
Czech national movement.” True, the national idea gradually spread to larger and larger groups,
but we should still remember that as late as 1900, the majority of the Habsburg Monarchy’s
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within the confinements of the Habsburg Empire like the Czechs, or the Slovaks, or the
Slovenes, or the Magyars certainly. With the Romanians we have again the situation that a
larger part of their con-nationals lived in the Kingdom of Romania. Maybe István, since we are
speaking of Romanians and Magyars, might like to add some reflections on it.
Or how about the urban proletariat whose major care was not for nationality but for work and
bread? Moreover, many people had several nationalities; indeed, one must wonder how it
was possible for a city like Kaschau/Kassa/Košice in today’s Slovakia to be German-speaking
in 1850 when it was under Austrian control; Hungarian-speaking in 1900 when it was a part
of sovereign Hungary; Czech-speaking in 1920 after it had been incorporated into newlyfounded Czechoslovakia; again Hungarian-speaking in 1940, after Hungary had re-annexed
the territory, and Czech-, or rather Slovak-speaking after the Allies had returned the city to
reconstituted Czecho-Slovakia? To be sure, there had been emigration, immigration, flights,
deportation, the Holocaust, and other horrors during those years; still, it is impossible to
account for all these transformations without conceding that many people in such areas
which had exchanged rulers, also changed their nationality according to the wishes of the
authorities, or as it seemed to be in their own best interest.
We must also consider that the pre-World War I Magyar elite never accepted the notion of
Hungary being a multinational state. They claimed that the inhabitants of Hungary were
Magyars or Hungarians, many among whom spoke a language other than Hungarian. (Note
that the Hungarian language does not distinguish between Magyars and Hungarians.) Hence
the uproar in Hungary in 1903, and the threatening with a revolution when in an order to his
troops, issued at Chlopy, the emperor-king talked about the different nationalities or
Volksstämme of the Monarchy who struggled viribus unitis, with united forces, for a great
common goal. In Hungarian eyes, Hungarians were not a nationality or a tribe but Hungary
was a sovereign nation. Therefore, the armed forces of the Monarchy could not possibly be
an assembly of nationalities; in Hungarian eyes, the army connected two sovereign states, the
Hungarian and the Austrian. As Professor Stourzh has so well explained, the Austrian half of
the Monarchy attempted to accommodate the different nationalities; Hungary tried to make all
the nationalities its own.
MR: What then was the stake Hungarians had in the Monarchy? Why did they after 1867
stay?
ID: One thing the Hungarians would not admit was that their survival as a medium-size
power depended on their membership in the Dual Monarchy. They were, of course, aware
that one half of their country’s inhabitants were not Hungarians, and that such of Hungary’s
neighbors as Serbia and Romania, tolerated the vast presence of their co-nationals in
Hungarian territory only because the Habsburg Monarchy had a big army, the Common Army,
which would defend Hungary against all its domestic and foreign enemies. But all this the
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inhabitants were peasants for whom nationality and nation had remained very vague
concepts. In some regions of Austrian Galicia, for instance, peasants had absolutely no idea
of their nationality; when asked, they usually declared that they were “from here.”
Hungary well might have become the first country to secede from the Monarchy, in case the
Monarchy no longer served its interests. After all, Hungary had a strong and well-trained
administrative machinery, a powerful land owning class, a new and aggressive bourgeoisie,
and a relatively large number of educated people. Moreover, it was beginning to have its own
army. In 1912, the Hungarian National Guard, called honvédség, was granted its artillery and
technical units, in addition to its already existing infantry and cavalry regiments, thus
becoming a force capable of fighting its own wars.
.
GS: One should perhaps say that one of the peculiarities of the Habsburg Empire was that
there was a joint, common Austro-Hungarian army, about which István has written an
important book as we said before, and both halves had in a way their separate armies: the
Honwéd that was just mentioned, and the less spectacular or less known Austrian
“Landwehr”. But there were even separate ministries for the honvédség and the Landwehr in
the two halves, so the military set-up was as many other things, as one could also read in
Musil’s book, was a very complicated set-up. I would like to raise one point. I would like to
argue that the interest of Hungary, or to be more precise, the interests of the Hungarian ruling
elite for staying in the larger Habsburger empire in spite of all kinds of conflicts that erupted
every 10 years at least, when parts of the Austro-Hungarian compromise had to be
renegotiated, had very much to do with foreign affairs. There was the age old fear of Russia,
and the Hungarians most particularly had suffered greatly at the time of the revolution of
1848-1849, when the Austrian Emperor called in Russian troops to intervene, to help the
imperial forces to put down the Hungarian revolution. These were really dreadful memories,
but the danger of an expanding Russia with interests in east central and south-eastern Europe
remained all along, I think one may presume, and that was also the idea of Western
statesmen, that the Austro-Hungarian Empire had a function to fulfill as a major block in
Eastern Europe, blocking further advances of the Russian Empire.
MB: Let’s talk about WWI what role the army played there? Robert Musil called the AustroHungarian army “the second weakest army in Europe,” I think, he must have meant Italy as
the weakest, as Italy was the one country Austria-Hungary managed to somehow prevail over
it even in WWI. There is a very moving other piece of literature, a drama by a HungarianAustrian writer Franz Theodor Csokor: November 3rd 1918 (1936). It was performed in the
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Hungarians could not publicly say because it would have amounted to the admission that
Hungarian greatness derived from Vienna -- and through Vienna, from the German empire
which was Austria-Hungary’s only ally. What the Hungarians were publicly saying instead
was that their country remained in the Dual Monarchy because of its traditional association
with the Habsburg dynasty and with Austria. The trouble was that as time went by, an ever
larger segment of the Hungarian elite wanted to reform the 1867 agreement, or even to
abandon it, trusting growing Hungarian wealth and military power.
GS: I admit that I have been impressed for years by the symbolism of this scene of the play
November 3rd 1918, which I have seen on various occasions; it has been performed in Vienna
on several occasions. Of course this point raises a question that goes beyond our theme
about the break-up of the Monarchy. The loyalty of Jews in Austria and Hungary to the
Habsburgs was considerable, because they had been responsible for granting final legal
equality for Jewish persons as of 1867, giving them full citizens’ right, equal rights with every
other citizen. There are many sources with which I am familiar, where the ruling monarch
Francis Joseph was thanked and praised in most impressive words for what he had done, and one has to add, what the parliaments of both countries at that time had done for the
cause of Jewish emancipation. It was the era of liberalism, a liberal era prior to the
subsequent growth of anti-Semitic forces, which arose in both halves of the monarchy,
though I am bound to say that anti-Semitism became a stronger force in the Austrian parts
than in the Hungarian ones. There were many Jewish persons serving in the joint army.
Maybe István would like to say more about it, I’m sure he knows more about the army.
ID: Should we talk about the Jews or about the army?
GS: Well, now about the Jews and then we ought to go on about the army.
ID: Certainly. Following the introduction of universal military service in 1868 in AustriaHungary, a young man could count on spending three or sometimes four years in the military,
an experience which greatly influenced the rest of his life. He had had to postpone whatever
profession he was engaged in; on the other hand, military service was widely perceived as a
test of manhood. I would not say that the thing was universally popular; many young men
avoided it by escaping abroad, to America for example; universal military service was a great
source of immigration to the United States whether from Austria, Russia, or Italy. Still, it was
generally taken for granted that a young man would eventually wear the emperor-king’s
uniform.
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late 1930’s in the Vienna in the Burgtheater and the most famous scene in the drama is the
funeral of a colonel. November 3rd, 1918 was of course, the day of the armistice, and we are
close to the Italian front and there is a small Austro-Hungarian battalion and the colonel in
command has just committed suicide. His troops are gathering around his grave and they
are from all parts of the Monarchy. They take turns throwing earth into his open grave, saying:
“Earth from Hungary. Earth from Poland, Earth from Carinthia. Slovenian Earth. Czech Earth.”
The shovel is passed on to Dr. Grün, the Jewish regiment physician. After a moment of
hesitation he says: “Earth from Austria.” This points on one hand to the strong cohesive
function of the army for the Monarchy, but also to the Jews, of whom it was often said to
have identified most strongly with the empire. Is this true?
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Obviously there were Jews among the soldiers, beginning in the late eighteenth century.
The initial dilemma of the Jewish recruits was how to obey the dietary laws and how to
avoid service on the Sabbath; also, whether one could shoot at a co-religionary in the enemy
army. With the gradual secularization of society, religious restrictions were becoming less of a
problem and, by the 1840s, one found a few Jewish officers in the Habsburg army, even in
the cavalry, which was the most traditional and most exclusive branch of service. Later, many
Jews profited from a special provision of the military regulations according to which young
men with a high school degree, or its equivalent, had to be in full-time active service only for
one instead of three years. These so called einjáhrig Freiwilligen, one-year volunteers
(although they had been drafted into service like everybody else) enjoyed such privileges as
the right to attend officers’ functions; to wear tailor-make uniforms (if they could afford it), to
qualify for reserve officer’s school and, after a few years of reserve service, to become
commissioned officers. Most importantly, the one-year volunteers were seen as gentlemen
and consequently as persons possessing honor. In extreme cases, they were allowed, nay
they were obliged, to defend their honor in a duel. As members of an unspoken elite
fraternity, that of reserve officers, they were considered marriagable in the best society and
qualified both for state service and prestigious jobs in the private sector. Considering that, by
1900, Jews made up between twenty and thirty percent of the Dual Monarchy’s high school
students, it was inevitable for a relatively large number of them to become one-year volunteers
and thus also reserve officers. They had joined the Monarchy’s exalted elite. Even if in reality a
huge chasm separated a Jewish reserve lieutenant in wagon transport, for instance, from an
aristocratic career officer in, let us say the mounted field artillery, the latter had to be careful not
to show contempt for his Jewish fellow officer, or he risked challenge to a duel. Because
Jewish officers tended to learn how to fight with the sword, injury or even death could result.
Note that, by 1900, one in five reserve officers in the Habsburg Monarchy were Jews at a
time when the proportion of Jews in the general population was four per cent
.
World War I brought about another extraordinary development, namely that a large part of the
junior career officer group was killed in the first months of the war, and that their places had
to be taken by reservists, that is civilians in uniform, a very large proportion of whom were
Jews. As the surviving career officers increasingly turned to training and general staff work
behind the lines, the command of smaller combat units was left to reserve officers: teachers,
free professionals, civil servants, better shopkeepers, and businessmen. In 1918, 25,000 of
the 150,000 reserve army officers were by religion Jews. The number does not include those
of Jewish origin who had converted. In the same war, there were only a handful of Jewish
reserve officers in Prussia and not many more in Russia or Great Britain. The only army with a
similarly high proportion of Jewish officers was the Italian. Most of the Jews in the
European armies were reservists but interestingly, both the Italian and the Austrian army
during World War I harbored a significant proportion of higher ranking Jewish career
officers. The Italians counted fifty Jewish generals; the Austro-Hungarians had fewer of
Not all the generals of Jewish origin had converted: Feldmarschalleutnant (two-star general)
Eduard Ritter von Schweitzer never converted; nor did another general who became a Zionist
in old age.
MR: Professor Deak let stay for a moment with the army. You mentioned the terrible toll the
war took on the officers and the soldiers and certainly on the civilian population as well. It is
often said that the Austro-Hungarian army during First World War was not very well
equipped, faired very poorly in the battles and it was always the Germans who came to a
rescue them. Is that a correct assessment?
ID: Certainly, the further East one looks, the worse the army’s equipment. Given the
circumstances and the geographic location of Austria-Hungary, its army was neither good nor
bad; rather, it was typical for the area. The Russian army was certainly worse in terms of
equipment, training, and morale. To the west, the German army was distinctly superior
because that country had a wonderful industry and a well-educated, patriotic and ethnically
nearly uniform population. The Austro-Hungarians had less of an industry but that industry
was far from being worthless for the war effort. For instance, the 30 and a half cm mortars
manufactured by Skoda in Bohemia were considered a most formidable weapon even on the
Western front. For the economic status of the Monarchy, the army was quite sufficiently
equipped.
There was an additional dilemma, that of the Monarchy’s ethnic diversity. The eleven major
and the numerous minor nationalities caused an insoluble problem for mutual comprehension
in the trenches. In my father’s howitzer artillery battery during World War I, the battery
commander was an Austro-German career officer; all the other officers were young engineers,
like himself, from Budapest. The gunners were mostly Croats, and the horse grooms were
Ruthenes from northeastern Hungary, How did they communicate? In the pre-World War I
period, communication was made possible by every recruit having to understand at least
eighty command terms in German, and by every officer having to learn the language or the
languages spoken by the men. If soldiers in the regiment spoke three or even four different
major languages, the officers were supposed to learn and speak them all. Needless to say,
what the officer learned was not Czech or Polish or Croatian but a mish-mash of Slavic words
and terms, commonly referred to as Armeeslawisch. Still, officers and men could understand
each other, mostly with the help of non-commissioned officers. But in the war-time army,
which was almost totally civilian, there was no time for all the reserve officers to learn to speak
good German, which was the language of service, and to learn the languages spoken by the
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them, but Samuel Hazai, a converted Hungarian Jew whose original name was Kohn, rose to
the rank of a four-star general, and in 1917 Emperor-King Charles appointed him to the
second highest command position in the armed forces.
Whether the Czech troops, for instance, were massively disloyal to the Monarchy is a matter
of endless dispute. That many Czechs surrendered does not mean much because so many
others also surrendered. More than two million Austro-Hungarian soldiers fell into Russian
captivity; yet even more Russian soldiers fell into Austro-Hungarian and German captivity.
Why, because surrender on the highly mobile Eastern front was much easier than in the
trenches of the Western front where massive surrender was almost impossible. Most soldiers
in the East fell in captivity not because they had decided to do so, but because they had been
ordered to surrender by their own superiors as happened at Przemyśl fortress, in today’s
Ukraine where, in March 1915, 126,000 Austro-Hungarian soldiers marched into captivity at
the orders of their commanding general and with the consent of the emperor.
During the war, a veritable population exchange occurred between Russia and AustriaHungary; prisoners of war were made to till the land where the owner was at the front;
prisoners also worked in the mines and the factories. Quite a few of them ended up marrying
war widows in the enemy camp. Remarkably, 8.5 million Austro-Hungarians were put into
uniform during the war which amounts to seventeen percent of the population, higher than
the proportion of those who had been drafted or volunteered in Western Europe.
Despite massive casualties, with over a million men killed, and despite massive desertions
toward the end of the war as well as the lack of food, equipment, and rolling stock, four
million Austro-Hungarians were still in military service. The war ended on November 3rd,
1918, and yet even on that day there were still troops willing to fire their weapons on behalf
of a Monarchy that had already ceased to exist. Some mutinied in those days; many more just
wanted to go home. Should we be more impressed by those who turned on their
commanders in an attempt to create a new national state or a socialist international, or,
alternately, should we be more impressed by those willing to fight for the emperor-king until
the very last minute?
In the last days of the war, the Hungarian government ordered soldiers from Hungary to return
home from the Italian front; many German-Austrians also left the trenches.. So when,
following armistice, the Italian army captured 437,000 Austro-Hungarian soldiers, in gross
violation of the armistice agreement, most of the captives were Czechs, Poles, Ruthenes or
Ukrainians, Slovaks, Italians, Serbs, and Croats, that is people who, according to Allied
propaganda were now the protégés of the Allied Powers. Nay, they had actually won the war.
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men. There is the story of the two Austro-Hungarian officers, a Hungarian and a Czech,
trapped in the same foxhole for days without being able to exchange more than a few words.
Yet the Czech officer would have been able to understand the language spoken by the Russian
enemy.
MR: We will soon open the floor for questions. I would like to ask you about the situation at
the beginning of the war, Robert Musil called the war in hindsight a “catastrophe,” we all
know Karl Kraus’ Die letzten Tagen der Menschheit, The Last Days of Mankind, describes the
terrible mistakes also that led into the war but at the beginning of the war in August 1914,
there was so much enthusiasm for the war within the whole Monarchy. What did the people
expect from the war, because it was really Austro-Hungary that was one of the main movers
that led to the outbreak of the war?
GS: Certainly one must say quite clearly that the initiative for the outbreak of the war came
from Austro-Hungary, particularly as far as war with Serbia was concerned. we cannot go into
all the details of the assassination of crown prince Franz Ferdinand at the end of June 1914 in
Sarajevo, but with the backing of the German government, - there were contacts between the
German government and the Austrians in early July of 1914 -, the Austrians did get from
Berlin a guarantee that in case Russia would get involved, Germany certainly would enter the
war. This responsibility I think must be very clearly stated. The outbreak of the war generated
among many people great outbursts of patriotism; even Sigmund Freud wrote in a letter
shortly after the outbreak of the war that for the first time he was really happy to be an
Austrian - even Sigmund Freud, as skeptical a person as could be, was carried away by this
initial enthusiasm. I’ll give you just one example, a rather moving and peculiar example: a
distinguish historian who died some years ago, Adam Wandruszka, and whom you might
have known, István, was born on August 6, 1914. His father was an officer in the Austrian
army, who was killed very soon in the first months of the war in 1914. But the young boy
born in August 1914 was given the name of Adam symbolically, to signify that this war was
a new beginning, a beginning of a new world, and a new man being born in the first days of
the war, and thus he should be called Adam. In the view of the catastrophe of the war and
what happened afterwards, it is almost unbelievable that such a thing happened, but it did. I would like, though, as our time is running out, to say some words on the reasons for the
collapse, and I hope that István will join me in this.
From a purely military point of view, the war was lost for the central powers, because
Germany suffered defeat on the Western front in the summer 1918, and in addition, because
the unrestricted submarine warfare that started in 1917 had really failed. One should perhaps
say that around the end of 1917 and the beginning of 1918, that is to say rather late in the
war, and with all kinds of symptoms of exhaustion both in the army and particularly the
civilian population, of which I shall say few words in a minute, in spite of these phenomena
the military situation was not so bad. Russia, due to the Communist October Revolution
had pulled out of the war by end of 1917, and at that time not a single enemy soldier stood
on the soil of the Monarchy, which had not been the case in various previous phases of the
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Only the German Austrians and the Hungarians within Austria-Hungary had lost the war. We
must admit that the contradictions and the ironies of the situation were mindboggling.
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war, because fairly soon Russian troops had actually reached Hungary, parts of Galicia had
been overrun, Bukovina went back and forth, Lemberg and Czernowitz changed occupants.
After many lost battles in Italy there had toward the end of 1917, been the twelfth battle of the
Isonzo or Soča river which was victorious for the Central Powers, Germans and Austrians
fighting jointly; incidentally it was a battle where the number of Italian prisoners and
deserters was tremendous and went into hundred thousands on the Italian side. So the
situation wasn’t so bad, but things changed radically in 1918. and I don’t even want to speak
about the Western Front and the Germans; things changed.
Now there are generally speaking two schools of thought about the collapse of the
Monarchy. One school argues that chiefly external factors were responsible, that the Monarchy
was destroyed or broken up from abroad by the enemy powers. The other theory says that
chiefly responsible for the final collapse were internal reasons: hunger, disintegrating
elements, not only in the army, like desertion, about which we just spoke, but also because
of hunger that was really very great and got ever greater among the civilian population. I
would like to say that these external and internal elements are of course intertwined with each
other, it is difficult and one should not try to separate these spheres too much, though it is
sometimes done. As far the external forces are concerned, one should keep in mind that the
Western Powers, notably France, England, and America for a very, very long time into the last
year of the war 1918 really considered the continuation of the Monarchy as a factor. The
Western Powers went over to the idea of the break-up of the Monarchy very late in the spring
and summer of 1918. The one Western Power that first operated with elements factors
which were really driving towards the break up of the Monarchy, was Italy. The Italians, as
you know, in 1915 joined the Allies though they had been allied to the Central Powers before;
the main question of course was the demand to get Italian speaking territory united with to
Italy. The Habsburg Empire hesitated for a very long time, also because the Hungarian
Government feared that if a big chunk of Italian speaking territory were given away, the
Romanians would come and ask to join Romania. The fact is that these national questions
were quite interdependent. It was impossible to look at the Italian problem, which was a
great one, in isolation from other parts of the Monarchy. So then, as you know, the Italians
joined the Western Allies because they promised them in a secret treaty of London of April
1915 more in the Adriatic, in Southern Tirol, and finally up to the Brenner. The fact that the
Allies were bound to fulfill this treaty concluded with Italy in 1915 is considered by some
historians as an important time bomb which did not explode in 1915 but exploded in 1918
pushing to the break-up of the Monarchy.
There is one other peculiar thing which I would like to mention, a failed attempt at
Austro-French negotiations about the possibility of a separate peace. The young emperor
Charles thought about it, he was less loyal to Germany than his predecessor Francis Josef, he
was very devoted to peace, he thought about separate negotiations and taking AustroHungary out of the war, which might have had very difficult consequences. What happened:
the emperor Charles in secret negotiations wrote a handwritten letter to the French premier
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Clemenceau where he said that he would by all means at his disposal support demands for
the return of the Alsace-Lorraine to France. In April 1918 through some indiscretion - it is a
complicated story, I’ll make it short - this came into the open and the French Prime Minister
Clemenceau, who was wildly furious about the indiscretion of the Austro-Hungarian Foreign
minister, felt that the Austro-Hungarians had broken their promise of secrecy, and he
published this handwritten letter. This of course was a horrible thing vis-à-vis the Germans
because the trusted ally Austria and the emperor of the trusted ally said that he would support
French claims on Alsace-Lorraine. Now the Emperor denied actually that this part of the letter
was really true. He involved himself in lying which for a sovereign ruler is a very bad thing.
The result was a disaster, a disastrous fall of the prestige, of the reputation of the Austrian
emperor, Hungarian King and of the government in general. The trust in Austro-Hungary as a
possible partner in negotiations dropped totally. So, this was one turning point which led
first the French and then very soon the British and the Americans to support more thoroughly
and more energetically movements for independence of some of the nationalities concerned.
The Czechs had been particularly active and also particularly adroit through some of their
leaders who had fled to the West: Thomas Masaryk and his lieutenant at the time, Edvard
Benes. The French went ahead, followed by the British and the Americans in the late spring
and summer, and in the fall finally also recognizing Czechoslovakia as an independent state.
There had been in Pittsburgh in America an agreement between the Czech and Slovak exile
leaders that there should be a joint Czechoslovak state, which as you know came into
existence. So, as you see from thr external,outside aspect, the existence of the Monarchy was
put into question rather late in the game, but then e things went very fast from late spring into
fall of 1918.
Internally, there were many reasons for the final collapse, and there are some younger
historians who are particularly strong in social history, who argue very strongly that the
deterioration of the food situation and hunger, which was a factor as of 1916 and a terrible
factor by middle of June 1918 has been a very important thing. A young American historian,
Maureen Healy, in a very interesting recent book on Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg
Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I, has described how hunger worked as a
socially disintegrative factor because now everyone was fighting against everyone. The rich
against the poor, the poor against the rich, because the poor felt that the rich still had more to
eat than the poor. Many Viennese fought against people living in Vienna, but whom they
suddenly did not consider Viennese, be it the Czech or the Jews. There were many Jewish
refugees from Galicia in Vienna, and shouting went louder and louder, “Throw out the Jews,
they should go back where they came from, because they eat away from what we’ve got and
which is not enough for ourselves! Throw the Czechs out!” The social aspect of hunger tied
up with the linguistic and nationality: hatred against the Czechs, hatred against the Jews,
hatred against the rich, hatred against the merchants, hatred against the Hungarians who
supposedly did not send enough agrarian materials across the Leitha border into Austria.
There were mass strikes around the beginning of 1918 (the impact of the October Revolution
ID: I see that the audience would like to ask some questions; therefore, I’ll try to make my
comments short. I absolutely agree with what Gerald has said. I have got an anecdote about
starvation in the Habsburg forces. At the Piave River, near Venice in northern Italy, to which
the German and Austro-Hungarian troops had advanced in 1917, the soldiers were so
famished in the summer of 1918 that when a new offensive was being prepared, the officers
had to promise them food in abundance, not from the army’s own stocks, but from the
Italian, French, British, and American trenches opposite. So the emaciated men, whose
average weight was down to 120 pounds, went forward and got killed or wounded in the
forlorn hope of reaching the enemy hoards of salami and sardines.
How could one fight a war in such conditions? And yet in October 1918, when the Italians
finally moved forward in the famous battle of Vittorio Veneto, there were still many AustroHungarian troops willing to defend the fatherland; whatever they understood under this term.
Maybe the soldiers were simply afraid of their commanders and the military police. Or they
worried about getting killed in the moment of surrender. One thing is certain, before the last
days of the war, wholesale mutinies occurred only in the Austro-Hungarian navy; just as in
the German navy. But then the navy was a special case; during the war its ships had hardly
ever left the ports; food supplies were even worse than in the army; because there was
nothing for the sailors to do, they talked politics.
Note that the February 1917 Russian revolution had been welcomed by many AustroHungarians because it seemed to represent an opening toward a more democratic and just
future. But the revolutionary Provisional Government disappointed the people both at home
and within the Central Powers because it continued the war. Finally, the Bolsheviks put an
end to Russia’s participation in the war. How much effect these events had on the soldiers of
Austria-Hungary is hard to say, although many took part in the spontaneous fraternization on
the Eastern front. Yet the revolutions definitely had an enormous effect on the AustroHungarian POWs in Russia who were now drifting home, and among whom many
communist agitators could be found. The new great hope was international workers’
solidarity and peace. The Czech, Polish, and South Slav national takeovers in the fall of 1918
actually dissipated these internationalist dreams. As the Princeton University historian Arno
Mayer wrote in his Wilson versus Lenin; at the end of the war, the Western powers did their
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1917 and the return of prisoners of war from Russia must also be taken acount of), then
again in the middle of the year. The social situation deteriorated greatly and it has been said
by Maureen Healy that the collapse of the Monarchy was even more deeply internal than
previously imagined. The state was discredited not only in the eye of the minorities and in
other parts of Austria and in the minds of the weary troops at the fronts, but also in market
places, apartment houses, school yards, streets and pubs of its own imperial capital. This
disintegration, this downfall must be stressed very much. Please, István, take over.
MR: I think we should take some questions now.
Gentleman in front: I appreciated your wonderful sense of irony about all these events,
Professor Deák, I’ll add a footnote: in 1848 in Prague they there was held the famous panSlavs’ congress in which various Slavs gathered to protest German tyranny, but the language
of the proceedings was German because it was the only language they had in common.
Professor Stourzh, a few years ago in Vienna you told me something quite interesting that
might be of interest to pursue; you said that newly emerging states nowadays are studying
very carefully the Habsburg nationality laws because there were enclaves into enclaves, this
group within that group and it was a very complex legislation. I just wonder what’s
happened, is that still the case and could you cite examples? And have these laws proved
somewhat effective? Can we compare that model of the way the Swiss handle their
nationalities? The German speakers in Geneva cannot demand language rights because they
know perfectly well that they have their own cantons.
Gentleman in the back: I am actually from the land that created The Good Soldier Schwejk
which is a very important book illustrating the madness of the last days of Austro-Hungarian
empire. My question is more complex, since you listed all these statistics of the presence of
the Jewish population in that time Austro-Hungarian empire what is the reason, why was
such an outbreak of anti-Semitism that led to in World War II, the Austrian population,
especially in Vienna, to behave rather shamefully towards the Jewish population?
GS: Well, there are two questions now; both really are not directly, but indirectly connected
with our theme of the break up of Habsburg’s monarchy. There were, notably in the nonHungarian part of the monarchy according to the constitution of 1867, interesting rules trying
to guarantee the equal rights of the various ethnic groups or linguistic groups. One article of
the Austrian constitutional law for the equal rights of the citizens, Article 19, actually
recognized the equal rights of the various nationalities and of the various languages used in
the particular lands, particularly as far as schooling and public authorities were concerned. It
should be stressed (as the great Hungarian sociologist Oszkar Jászi has done) that the two
halves of the dual monarchy had a quite different structure: while Hungary was a national
state with national minorities, Austria was committed by Article 19 to be a genuinely
multinational state. The problem how to guarantee the rights of minorities in particular areas
was a great one, because these nationalities were the majority or minority in one particular
city, in one particular community, or in one province, but they were not as such organized
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best to help nationalist bourgeois revolutions within the former Monarchy. The new great
enemy was now international socialism and communism. In 1919, the Western powers
supported the Czechs, Romanians, and the South Slavs in their fight against Communist
Hungary in the hope that their new-fangled East European allies would keep in check both the
Bolsheviks and the German and Hungarian territorial revisionists.
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legally. However, there were spokesmen and sometimes associations who took certain issues
to court. There were courts in the Austrian part of the empire which were willing and able to
judicate on questions of linguistic conflicts, which de facto were ethnic conflicts. Success for
minority groups or for their spokesmen who were able to get their case through the court
successfully, were quite frequent. I’d like to stress one thing: these not unsuccessful attempts
at judicial conflict-resolution in the linguistic and ethnic field were in pre-1914 Europe a new
and unique thing; now we have the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg and
various other institutions like constitutional courts. –
Political conflict resolution was not unsuccessful in many cases in Bohemia, even
better in Moravia and particularly in the Bukovina. Major attempts were made prior to World
War I to pacify hostile population groups such as Moravia Germans and Czechs through
ingenious and complicated systems of separate constituencies,so as to avoid national, ethnic
mud-slinging during election campaigns; this was successful. There was a certain amount of
pacification in the lands where this was done. There were only two vast political
compromises, in Moravia and Bukovina; there would have been a third one in Galicia, but
then the war broke out. However, this pacification was done at the price of a kind of
separation or isolation; the various nationalities lived even more their own lives, and this is I
think one important point about pre-World War I Austro-Hungary: nationalities increasingly
lived their “separate lives”. István said before that “peasants did not care so much” about
national or linguistic questions, but there was an ethnic and linguistic mobilization going on
in the years prior to World War I: Schooling became separate, learning the other language of
the same land was not obligatory, it could not be done in an obligatory way, so there were
‘walls of glass’ going up, in the cities, I admit, sooner than in the countryside.. This is not my
invention; ‘walls of glass’ described the situation in the city of Prague where Czech speaking
and German speaking people walked the same streets, but they did not go to the same
schools, did not shop at the same shops, did not go to the same theatres, though they lived
in the same city. ‘Walls of glass’ went up in Prague and elsewhere. What I just said
positively about the methods of legal adjudication of language conflicts was certainly not in a
position to solve or to pacify really deep conflicts, when for whatever reason a certain grade
of emotional involvement had been reached. I don’t have enough detailed knowledge to
answer the question about the present situation in various of these countries be it Slovenia,
Hungary, or Slovakia. One does read in the newspapers time and again that conflicts or
polemical voices flare up in these countries. As to the Jewish problem, - perhaps we could
discuss it separately, I am quite willing to discuss it. I havenot forgotten it.
I would like to say one last thing, I think Austro-Hungary could have gone on perhaps
for some time, we don’t know for how long, but as long as conditions in Europe would have
remained able. One great Austro-American historian whose name I would like to mention,
Robert Kann, - his major work on the nationality problem of the Habsburg Empire was
published by Columbia University Press in 1950, and he was teaching in New Jersey at
Rutgers University - Robert Kann has convincingly argued that as long there were stable
MR: Professor Deák, one last question, I think we should not leave without asking the
question of the legacy of the Habsburg monarchy for today. The twentieth century saw other
multi-ethnic entities collapse the example of the Soviet Union is mentioned, Yugoslavia is very
often mentioned, closely connected historically to the Habsburg legacy. Do you think the time
of multi-ethnic states is over? We see on the other hand the European Union which is a
supra-national entity and has been largely a success story? Do you think that today a multinational, a multi-ethnic state is something viable?
ID: Certainly, the European Union is a wonderful development. Recently, I travelled from
Vienna to Budapest without anyone asking for my passport; yet I was used to being stopped
at the border by morose Hungarian guards, who, when they saw my name, became doubly
suspicious. Being a fellow Hungarian; I must be an enemy. This has changed magnificently.
Returning to the whole issue, did the Monarchy have to fall apart? I can’t imagine that it could
have survived in the long run; first of all because monarchies tend not to survive unless under
a monarch deprived of all power and influence; secondly, multi-national or rather, supranational states have all come to an end in Europe. Austria-Hungary was not the only multinational state: the Ottoman Empire also fell apart. Time had come in 1918 for the creation of
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conditions in Europe and in the environment of the Habsburg monarchy, peaceful and to
some extent positive developments were possible. In the moment in which instability rose
and instability evolved into a war, the chances were much worse.
Once war had broken out, as Kann has convincingly argued, win it or lose it would
have been bad for Austro-Hungary. Lose we know has been bad for Austro-Hungary, because
for the reasons mentioned it did collapse and it did break up. Win it did not but we may, as
Kann has done, speculate: if Austro-Hungary in alliance with Germany had won the war, an
axis, I’m afraid I must use this word which I don’t like very much for other reasons, an axis
between a very powerful Germany and an allied Austria would have strengthened the German
element in Austria greatly. German political parties during the war in Austria were actually
thinking about much closer economic ties to Germany, they developed programs which were
really quite hostile to the Austrian Slavs, particularly to the Czechs. Austrian Germans, as long
as they still thought some victory might have been in sight, became quite overbearing. The
presumption was, in case of a German-Austro-Hungarian victory, the dominant if not to say
hegemonial status of the German speaking part, and in Hungary possibly the Magyar part.
Other linguistic and ethnic groups would have been weakened. So the loyalty, such as it was,
for instance of the Czechs, to a victorious German-Austro-Hungarian coalition would have
been very doubtful. One might think, here you notice I engage in an exercise usually
forbidden to historians, the IF-question, so presumably or possibly a great deal of upheaval
might have followed a German victory in alliance with Austro-Hungary, because so many
Slavic peoples in particular might not have accepted the increased dominance or hegemony of
the German speaking population in Central Europe. Thank you!
The Habsburg monarchy had prevented or at least delayed ethnic cleansing; that was its great
achievement. Some say that ethnic cleansing is an inevitable process and therefore a
historically useful development. I don’t think so; if nothing else, ethnic cleansing has made
East Central Europe a much duller, a less colorful place; it has set back the economy and
culture by many decades. The last multi-national state in the area was actually not the
Habsburg monarchy but Tito’s communist Yugoslavia. Tito openly admitted that the country
had many nationalities and turned Yugoslavia into a genuine federation. The Habsburg
Monarchy had been kept together by the presence of an old emperor, Yugoslavia by the
presence of a grand old leader. With the death of Francis Joseph and of Tito, their empires
just withered away.
The empires were replaced by real or pretend-nation states; there is, however, a new trend
today, that of the European Union. What is its future not even its own leaders can say. How
well will it weather the new economic crisis, for instance? Still, the Union can already boast of
some magnificent achievements; I don’t think that the peoples of Europe appreciate these
achievements as much as someone like myself who has fled from there.
.
MR: We started with Robert Musil and I’d like to end with a line by Robert Musil and how he
answered our question of today why the Habsburg Empire broke up: “Despite so much can
be said against it, Kakania was after all a country of geniuses, which is probably what
brought it to its ruin.” Professor Deák, Professor Stourzh thank you very much!
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nation-states or rather, the creation of states that pretended to be nation states.
Czechoslovakia, which called itself the state of the “Czechoslovak nation” -- which in reality
never existed -- was no less multinational than the Habsburg Empire had been. Yugoslavia
was even more of a mixture of nations than the Habsburg Monarchy. New, enlarged Romania
and new Poland harbored enormous ethnic minorities. The Hungarians on the other hand lost
most of their ethnic minorities; for them, this was an unmitigated tragedy, whereas for the
Czechs, Poles and South Slavs the presence of ethnic minorities would only later become a
tragedy. The solution that all attempted was ethnic cleansing which had begun during World
War I, continued in the interwar period, accelerated during World War II, culminated after the
war , and came to an end – if indeed it did -- in the late 1990s.