Embers of Empire: Continuity and Rupture in the Habsburg Successor States after 1918

Abstract

Embers of Empire arrives as a timely salvo in the ongoing historiographical cannonade to knock down the edifice of “1918”—that barrier year of dichotomous befores-and-afters in European history. Acknowledging that recent decades of revisionist scholarship have given the late Habsburg Monarchy a cleaner bill of health than was long assumed, the editors pose this as their central question: If indeed the empire was not simply doomed to fall by nationalism’s hand, did its “structures and the habitus linked to them last even beyond the collapse of the ancien régime in 1918” (2)? This is not in itself an original question, but the volume’s twelve chapters represent a novel set of approaches to find a more durable answer. Most laudably, they are committed to a search for concrete imperial legacies, reflected in fresh evidence. They set aside literature and intellectual history, in which a handful of writers have played an outsized role in setting and sustaining the “Habsburg myth,” for a view of how things played out on the ground, across multiple regions of the former empire (3).The book is divided into four thematic clusters, each of which has a distinctive and cohesive feeling uncommon in collections such as this one. Part I examines the empire-to-nation-state transition from a series of high-detail zoom factors, all of which put the lie to any notion of a smooth, uniform process. In the opening chapter, Gábor Egry casts around Slovakia/Upper Hungary and Transylvania, taking soundings at the local level. He exposes the confused, adverse conditions in which municipal authorities, compelled to act in lieu of a coherent central state, often worked from pre-1918 patterns rather than revolutionary ones, or even cooperated across ethnic lines, despite antagonistic nationalizing pressures emanating from Prague or Bucharest. Clare Morelon’s installment focuses solely on Prague, where, she demonstrates, the lingering material effects of the war not only muddled the formal revolution but indeed corroded its legitimacy in the streets, where militant workers rallied around Hussite symbols, Masaryk became a kind of ersatz Kaiser figure, veterans appointed themselves police, and any hint of authoritarianism was slammed as “Austrian.”The third chapter takes a biographical turn. Here, Iryna Vushko follows the career of the Polish politician Leon Biliński, from his time in the Reichsrat and turns in the imperial cabinet to his improbable postwar success. Despite the liability of his kaisertreu aura, Biliński proved indispensable to the young Polish republic: his ministerial résumé made him, alone, experienced enough to carry the Finance portfolio. The chapter from Marta Filipová takes on an entirely different kind of subject—the international exhibition—as a marker of continuity and change. Comparing the representation of Czechs and Slovaks at prewar exhibitions (such as the Jubilee Exhibition of 1891 in Prague) to those after (e.g., Brno’s Exhibition of Contemporary Culture in 1928), Filipová finds that the post-1918 shows placed greater emphasis on innovation and modernism—but that, in their treatment of Slovaks, Germans, and Masaryk (again, as pseudo-Kaiser), they shared many “formal and ideological” tendencies with their Habsburg-era predecessors (108).Part II concentrates on the Habsburg military: what the numerous successor forces inherited from it—or didn’t—and the divergent fate of those who served in it, above all the officer corps. Richard Bassett’s chapter proffers an engrossing and learned, but ultimately impressionistic, ramble from one post-imperial country to the next, pointing out where the legacy of the k. u. k. army, “spiritually, mentally, and practically ill-adapted to the modern era,” can be observed after 1918 and where the new armies showed themselves to be so palpably different (122). The next chapter, from Irina Marin, sketches out a preliminary prosopography of the Romanian officer elite, first as it formed under the Habsburg monarchy, then as it joined its Old Kingdom counterpart after the war. Marin posits that the merger was a complicated one, as the men who began their careers as loyal servants of a supranational dynasty had to transmogrify themselves into unhyphenated Romanians at the expense of their previous standing as members of a unique social caste. John Paul Newman investigates the congruent—and more foreboding—trajectory of former k. u. k. officers in Croatia who eventually joined the Ustaša. Newman locates one kernel of the movement in the pro-Habsburg, anti-Serb Frankists, who, after 1918, cast the war as a Croatian defeat and the creation of Yugoslavia as the moment Belgrade clapped a yoke on the nation, not the act of “liberation and unification” heralded in the dominant narrative.The essays in Part III test the persistence of three “imperial pillars”: the Catholic Church, the aristocracy, and the Habsburg dynasty itself. Michael Carter-Sinclair’s contribution tracks the Austrian clergy’s opinion of the republic, based on pastoral letters and other public expressions. What emerges is a church at least nominally receptive to the regime change—and to democracy per se—through the mid-1920s, especially while the electoral power of the Christian Socials held Red Vienna in check. However, Carter-Sinclair finds that following the burning of the Palace of Justice, the suppression of the Social Democrats, and the formation of the Ständestaat, clerics abandoned even superficial tolerance of democracy to openly embrace authoritarianism. Konstantinos Raptis then surveys the post-1918 destinies of the members of house Harrach, one of the central noble families under the monarchy, with some cameos from Schwarzenbergs, Fürstenbergs, and others. Despite the abolition of their titles, their lowered political and social standing (no more court, no more Hofballs), and reduced income (higher taxes, limited land reform), the Harrachs and families like them continued to lead lordly lifestyles; it was the next war that proved really fatal. History was not as kind to Emperor Karl I, however, whose death is the subject of the chapter by Christopher Brennan. Trawling the Austrian press for reflections on the exiled monarch’s ragged end in 1922, Brennan concludes that he was “everything to everyone,” depending on ideological position—“sinner” to socialists and pan-Germans, “saint” to Catholics and loyalists, and “cipher” to the dismissive—yet claimed by none as a relevant symbol for the future (247).The volume ventures, at last, into the realm of memory in Part IV. Christoph Mick profiles the creation of Vienna’s two major public memorials to World War I: the one in the Central Cemetery, commissioned in 1924, and the better-known Heldendenkmal (Heroes’ Monument) on the edge of the Heldenplatz, completed in 1934. As Mick makes clear, neither succeeded as a unifying space of Austrian national remembrance. The former, explicitly pacifist product of the socialist city council, failed to “unite the nation through suffering” (265); the latter, erected by the Austro-fascist state, conceptually ran aground on the twin shoals of explaining the war’s ultimate purpose and of connecting the current regime to the old. Finally, in an appreciably ironic twist, Paul Miller delivers the last installment by surveying the place of Franz Ferdinand in Austrian memory. Spanning from the war itself to the present day, Miller’s investigation uncovers an archduke whose legacy has been “bound more to the afterlife of the assassination than to [his] actual life” (290). To the extent anyone remembered him after his death, it was perhaps most consistently—albeit problematically—as the war’s “first victim” (305). Capping off the volume, Pieter Judson extends a brief but pithy afterword, in which he offers the preceding essays as evidence for the strength of Habsburg continuities and for understanding the ruptures “not simply . . . in terms of nationhood and national revolutions” (322).For scholars working in the field of late- and especially post-Habsburg history, this book will serve as a sort of conference in capsule and indeed a model specimen thereof: the kind of gathering that inspires new ways of framing a familiar topic and, best of all, gives a dozen deeply researched demonstrations of how to put that framework to good use. It is a book the field has sorely needed, and can now claim. There is, however, one major desideratum: a greater presence of Hungary and Hungarians. While neither are totally missing—as reflected in the chapters by Egry, Bassett, and Marin—it is a pity not to have at least one further case study challenging the absoluteness of 1918 (to say nothing of 1920!) as a caesura in Hungarian historiography. This absence, plus the fact that the editors do not address it, is evidence that the Leithanian divide remains strong—to the profit of historians on neither side. Work remains to be done to prevent Hungarian history from falling into academic isolation; hopefully, this volume can point to ways of keeping it, as it were, in the neighborhood conversation.