05 Sep 2013 04:21:57
In Chernivtsi I saw the huge and extraordinary Jewish cemetery, testament to a civilisation expunged. Just outside the Ukrainian resort of Tatariv, I saw the cemetery of Austro-Hungarian soldiers who fell there in the first world war. In Transylvania, I looked at monuments to Romanian and Hungarian heroes. In Trieste, once the empire's great port, I watched a christening at the Serbian Orthodox church.
With the anniversary of the outbreak of the first world war under a year away, books about 1913 and 1914 have been tumbling off the presses; Danubia is related but different, and fills the gap on the history shelves with a fresh look at a region and a dynasty of which most of us in the English-speaking world are quite ignorant.
Winder, whose Germania was also billed as a "personal history", set himself an enormous task. For even though the Habsburgs ruled much of central and eastern Europe for centuries (let's leave out, as Winder does, the Spanish branch of the family and the Americas), it is hard to write a coherent history of such an otherwise incoherent swath of Europe, from Belgium to Bukovina.
Winder is at his best when, in the manner of an engaging teacher, he gives it to you straight. The Habsburgs' influence over history from the 1360s to 1918 was overwhelming, he says, "but often the 'great events' of the continent's history were generated as much by their uselessness or apparent prostration as by any actual family initiative".
Indeed, he remarks, "it is quite striking how baffled or inadequate many of the Emperors were, and yet an almost uncountable heap of would-be carnivorous rivals ended up in the dustbin while the Habsburgs just kept plodding along."
After the revolutions of 1848, he argues, "much as the new regimes tried to pretend otherwise, everything became about national identity". Groups were in competition for "authority, autonomy and economic control". It is impossible, he says, not to feel a "sense of dread about the gap between the excitement of 1848 and the degree to which we now know it was firing the gun that would initiate many of Europe's most terrible events".
As for today's tendency to look back on the empire with rose-tinted glasses, it is interesting how, as he notes, the narrative of the "vigours and wonders" of its last decades, "when Freud waved cheerily from a tram at Schiele" and so on, was one created almost entirely after the disaster of the first world war, and much later in Britain.
No one would want to go back to the aristocratic and feudal world of those decades, Winder contends, but still he is clear about the odd process by which the Habsburgs began to be regarded as the liberals who had successfully juggled competing nationalities, while after 1918 came the "small and dirty cages of the new nation states".
Winder's history could in fact have benefited from being even more "personal". He has clearly been everywhere, and it is a shame we don't get more of an idea of what it was like for the "ordinary people" who lived in the places he visited at any given time. Though we do get his amusing thoughts on the "cone-shaped" breasts of the nude caryatids in the Musikverein concert hall in Vienna, and on the risk of being hit "by a falling piece of allegorical woman" in Lviv, where "almost every pediment or turret has a tribute to the limber models and girlfriends" of the sculptors who created them "on an industrial scale".
Less amusing is the feeling that the journey takes an awfully long time. It take hundreds of years, or rather hundreds of pages, before we get to the era after 1848, when the book really takes off. Winder is a publishing executive (at a different publisher), and one wonders whether his editors, like Habsburg court flunkies embarrassed before the emperor, were simply frightened to tell him that some passages go on too long.
As I did on my trip, Winder looked up the 1911 Baedeker guide to Austria-Hungary and "shook his head in disbelief at the futility of trying to encapsulate so much in just one book". Paying no attention, he decided to move ahead regardless. I felt the same about reading Danubia. Keep going: it is worth it in the end.
