Thin Pink Glaze

The last​ Habsburg prime minister, Heinrich Lammasch, appointed on 27 October 1918 by Emperor Charles I, served for sixteen days. He was an Austrian jurist and long-term advocate of a league of nations, who had urged the signing of a separate peace with the Allies in early 1918. As prime minister he was accused by the Austrian press of being a ‘liquidator’, presiding over the end of empire. But in fact he defended the empire’s worth: Habsburg political culture, he claimed, was uniquely tolerant in Europe, and he noted that when the Dual Monarchy entered the war the cabinet had a Hungarian minister president (István Tisza) and a Polish minister of finance (Leon Biliński). ‘How many Irish ministers are there in Britain?’ he asked. ‘And how many Finnish ministers in Russia?’ He insisted the Austro-Hungarian Empire had made remarkable progress in multi-ethnic representation, but had received little credit for it from international observers.

Lost Fatherland is a collective portrait of 21 men who were, like Lammasch, involved in the administration of the Habsburg monarchy in its final years. The Ukrainian historian Iryna Vushko’s subjects are a motley collection of parliamentary deputies, party leaders and government ministers: Italians, Slovenes, Poles, Ukrainians, Czechs and Germans. Some were on the left: Austro-Marxists, social democrats, socialists or Bolsheviks. Others were nationalists who would later be involved in Italian fascism or Nazism. ‘Marked by the trauma of the First World War, the vanishing of their empire and the transition to post-1918 Europe,’ Vushko writes, they nevertheless produced ‘a remarkable array of political programmes’ which helped ‘sustain the various polities that emerged after the imperial downfall’.

The Habsburg system faced many difficulties, among them nationalism, ethnic tension, social unrest and economic inequality, but Vushko shows that political decisions in prewar Vienna, Prague and Trieste ‘were negotiated in crowded cafés by people who all spoke German at work and a variety of other languages at home. And although the empire’s political system was imperfect, and compromises often failed, violence was more or less unheard of.’ Until 1914, she writes, ‘the vast majority of Habsburg subjects were loyal to the monarchy and imperial institutions.’ These institutions, along with tolerance and compromise, were among the war’s first casualties.

Members of the polyglot Habsburg elite imagined many major reforms of the empire but very few in which the House of Habsburg ceased to rule. Even as they pushed for the empire to be differently organised, most of the men involved in politics neither wished nor believed it would come crashing down. The existing dualistic structure (the 1867 Compromise between Austria and Hungary had established the Dual Monarchy) was thought by many to be unsustainable as a result of rising nationalist resentment among other ethnic groups, particularly the Slavs. Archduke Franz Ferdinand, presumptive heir to the Habsburg throne, favoured a plan to extend the Compromise, arguing for a similar agreement that would grant the empire’s South Slavs a voice in governance while retaining the pre-eminence of the imperial centre.

When Gavrilo Princip shot the archduke in June 1914, it was initially unclear to many observers why it had happened and what it would mean. Adolf Hitler – who was involved in a fringe subculture of Pan-German radical nationalists who rejected the Habsburg monarchy – described his own response to the assassination in Mein Kampf: ‘I was at first seized with worry that the bullets may have been shot from the pistols of German students, who, out of indignation at the heir apparent’s continuous work of Slavisation, wanted to free the German people from this internal enemy.’ When he heard that the assassin was a Serb, ‘a light shudder began to run through me at this vengeance of inscrutable Destiny. The greatest friend of the Slavs had fallen beneath the bullets of Slavic fanatics.’ He thrilled that ‘a stone had been set rolling whose course could no longer be arrested’ and enlisted in the German army.

A different response to the assassination is found in the opening pages of Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk (1921), when the garrulous Czech learns from an undercover Austrian secret policeman that Serbs were behind the assassination. ‘You’re wrong there,’ Švejk confidently retorts, and proceeds to lay out a different scenario. ‘It was the Turks, because of Bosnia and Herzegovina.’ He then predicts a war against Ottoman Turkey, with Serbia and Russia rushing to assist Emperor Franz Joseph’s army, though ‘the Germans will attack us, because the Germans and the Turks stick together. You can’t find bigger bastards anywhere. But we can ally ourselves with France which has had a down on Germany ever since 1871. And then the balloon’ll go up.’

That there could be such different explanations for what happened reflects the multitude of visions for the future within the empire. Until the war began, tolerance and compromise kept many of those visions on hold. In Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities (1930), set in Vienna just before the war and a monument to the Habsburg polity, Ulrich, the protagonist, has been ‘accustomed his whole life long to expect politics to bring about not what needed to happen, but rather at best only what should have happened long ago’. He ‘could name a hundred’ matters that ‘awaited due processing in the Office of Dispatch in vain’. This passage comes from a chapter sketch that isn’t usually included in published versions: like the Habsburg experiment itself, the novel’s myriad subplots and threads never quite cohere. And like the Habsburg experiment, it would not be nearly as interesting if they did.

One prewar plan for bringing the Habsburg nationalities and state into a functional relationship was to offer national autonomy along federalist lines, an ideal that shaped the political outlook of some of Vushko’s subjects for decades to come. At Café Central in Vienna, Austro-Marxists such as Max Adler, Karl Renner and Otto Bauer discussed how to synthesise nationhood with socialism. They also talked about the possibility of nations receiving official recognition as non-territorial corporations: nationalities would be able to maintain their distinct cultures and languages within a broader political framework, rather than as separate, independent states.

Trotsky and Stalin took part in some of these conversations at Café Central. As a journalist living in exile in Vienna, Trotsky was impressed by the cultured intelligence of the Austrians (which he admitted was superior to his own) but saw them as self-satisfied and the opposite of revolutionary. In 1913, Stalin, who had been sent to Vienna by Lenin to research the issue, published Marxism and the National Question, which ‘represented the outright rejection of the Austro-Marxist concept of national cultural autonomy,’ Vushko writes. ‘Positing an essential connection between nation and territory, he critiqued Renner and Bauer’s concept of extraterritorial autonomy, and denounced federalisation as harmful to proletarian unity.’ Despite Stalin’s arguments, however, ‘ethnic autonomy projects that had been debated but never implemented under the Habsburg Empire finally found their realisation under Soviet rule.’

While Vushko argues that Habsburg political culture acted on occasion as a moderating influence on successor states, she also shows how the relics and frustrations of that culture hastened the interwar plunge into extremism and dictatorship. She writes about Cesare Battisti, a socialist from Trentino who was elected to the Austrian Imperial Council. Battisti initially argued in favour of autonomy for Trentino within the empire, but became increasingly nationalistic, favouring the region’s unification with Italy. When the war broke out in 1914, he applied for an Austro-Hungarian passport. Giving his solemn oath to return, he crossed the border into Italy and began agitating in the press for Italy to fight against Austria. The following year, when Italy joined the war, he volunteered for the army and is reported to have written geographical-military guides for the Italian Intelligence Office.

In 1916, Battisti was captured by Austrian troops, found guilty of treason and executed in his hometown, Trento. The hangman had to make two attempts because the rope snapped the first time. An official state photographer was on hand to capture the smiling faces of the executioner and soldiers surrounding Battisti’s propped-up corpse. This grotesque image was used as the frontispiece for The Last Days of Mankind (1918), a play compiled from documentary material that the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus collected in order to catalogue the moral catastrophe of the Great War. ‘I’m standing by the deathbed of the age with the reporter and the photographer at my side,’ Kraus wrote as he began the project. He noted that the Battisti photograph was exhibited in the ‘display windows of every enemy city’; ‘it will probably take forty years of peace to get rid of the memory.’

Kraus’s estimate was a conservative one. Though Battisti isn’t a familiar figure in Austria today, he is included in the pantheon of Italian heroes and martyrs. The centenary of his execution in 2016 was marked by the release of two documentary films, one of which was centred on the infamous photograph. Kraus himself, once a Habsburg loyalist and admirer of the military, moved to the left during the war, becoming a social democrat. Joseph Redlich, a member of the Austrian parliament alongside Battisti, was also horrified by the way Austrian and German forces went after ‘traitors’ among the Dual Monarchy’s citizens, persecuting ‘Ukrainians suspected of siding with Russia, Slovenes and Italians suspected of co-operating with Italy and Czechs potentially involved in anti-Habsburg conspiracies’. In Bohemia and Moravia five thousand civilians were sentenced to death during the war. ‘For the sake of deterrence,’ the social historian Gerhard Senft wrote in 2014, ‘the bodies of the hanged were left rotting for days on trees and gas lamp posts in the centre of towns and villages.’ In 1922 the Romanian writer Liviu Rebreanu published a novel called Forest of the Hanged, based in part on the experience of his brother, who served with distinction in the Habsburg army until he was sent to the Romanian front and decided he couldn’t fight against his fellow Romanians. He was hanged for desertion and espionage in 1917.

Before becoming prime minister, Lammasch lamented that ‘cruelty has become the norm’ and ‘law has given way to repression.’ He blamed Austria’s troubles on nationalist upstarts. Redlich, by contrast, ascribed the nationalists’ radicalisation to the failures of the Habsburg economy and governance before the war; for him, the most significant threat to the empire was German nationalism. The Austrian historian Manfried Rauchensteiner has observed that hundreds of thousands of soldiers deserted the Habsburg army in the late stages of the war: ‘There was nothing comparable in England, France or the German Reich.’ Neither Battisti’s one-time status as a parliamentary deputy, nor his flight to join an opposing army, nor even his death by hanging were exceptional.

At first, the career of Valentino Pittoni, another Italian deputy, had much in common with Battisti’s. As a young man he flirted with Italian irredentism and was drawn to socialism. In the 1890s, he became a close friend of the founder of the Social Democratic Party, Victor Adler, and a keen Austro-Marxist. As the leader of the Socialist Democratic Party in Trieste from 1902, Pittoni believed that regional autonomy was the only viable political option for the polyglot city and favoured a reorganisation of the empire that would allow national associations to exercise language and schooling rights without redrawing borders. ‘All of my projects are predicated on the belief that the course of the war will not affect the political status of Trieste,’ he wrote. Yet as a politically active Italian socialist he was viewed with suspicion by the Habsburg authorities and was twice conscripted and sent to the front. Pittoni’s troubles, Vushko writes, ‘epitomised the failures of Austrian wartime policies that eventually led to the empire’s collapse’.

After the war, the offices of Il Lavoratore, the mouthpiece of Trieste’s Italian socialists, were seized by communists and Pittoni was removed from the paper’s editorial board. Later, he learned that it was one thing to seek autonomy for Trieste and Trentino within the Habsburg Empire, and quite another to push for autonomy within the fascist Italian state. What had before seemed like a defence of Italian national interests now looked like a betrayal of them. Pittoni drifted for years until, with the help of Wilhelm Ellenbogen, another former deputy of the imperial parliament, he moved to Vienna in 1923. By that time, Red Vienna was an island of leftist experimentation within a conservative country. (Austrian politics is still sometimes compared to the rum-soaked sponge filled with nougat and jam called Punschkrapferl: brown on the inside with a thin pink glaze.) Pittoni stayed in the city until his death ten years later.

On 21 October 1916, a few months after Battisti was executed, a young man called Fritz Adler walked into a hotel dining room at lunchtime and shot dead the Austrian prime minister, Count Karl von Stürgkh. The assassination was a protest against the war; he took care not to harm anyone else. The last straw for Adler had been Stürgkh’s refusal even to consider reconvening the Austrian parliament, even though the country’s citizens were dying and starving to further the war effort, and being tried and hanged if they were suspected of insufficient effort. In Vienna, workers were consuming only seven hundred calories a day, which made Stürgkh’s lavish lunches in a luxurious hotel seem all the more disgraceful.

Unlike Battisti, Adler did not meet a grisly end; indeed, he lived to see his eightieth birthday. The contrast in their fates was the result of powerful mitigating circumstances. First, Adler’s father, Victor, was a respected political figure and made energetic efforts on behalf of his son both in court and behind the scenes. (Pittoni was among those who wrote a letter supporting clemency.) Second, public morale was extremely low. In his closing speech at the trial, Adler’s defence lawyer said that ‘we’ve seen walls of corpses piling up and are expected to remain civilised people. We’ve seen our centuries-old culture decimated, and those of us who are clever people, and by no means fanatics, feel sometimes shaken to the very core of our being.’ Even Victor Adler, who supported the empire as a supranational institution and backed the war, argued when testifying in defence of his son that ‘the air in Austria has become intolerable,’ and ‘whoever retains his sanity under certain conditions has no sanity to lose!’ The defence argued that Fritz Adler was insane, a strategy he vehemently opposed. The trial was a crucial moment in what the Hungarian sociologist Oszkár Jászi called the ‘psychological process’ of the Dual Monarchy’s undoing.

Adler was sentenced to death by hanging and transferred to a prison on the Danube. From there he wrote to Albert Einstein to say that, thanks to the simple diet, good air and plenty of peace and quiet, he was happily engaged in thinking about physics. ‘In virtually all respects, I am doing better here than in Vienna … In short, in this topsy-turvy world we now live in, it is in actual fact considerably nicer intra muros than extra.’ In November 1918, with his son still in prison, Victor Adler, so long a staunch defender of the Habsburg polity, declared that the imminent end of the monarchy was ‘a partial manifestation of the general victory of democracy’. One of Charles I’s last official acts was to grant an amnesty to Fritz Adler. Following his release, he took a train to Vienna on 10 November 1918 to see his severely ill father, who died the next day.

Charles I amnestied other condemned political prisoners during his short reign in the final two years of the war. One was the Czech nationalist Karel Kramář, who had served in the Habsburg parliament with Victor Adler and Battisti. Kramář, who married a Russian and fantasised about a Slavic empire under the Russian tsar, initially believed the Dual Monarchy could survive the war, but after a string of humiliating defeats at the hands of Russia in autumn 1914, he sought contact with its army in an effort to make common cause. It was this that landed him in custody. After being amnestied, Kramář used the narrative of his wartime persecution to help him become leader of the Czech nationalist right and head of the committee that declared Czech independence in 1918. In his inaugural speech as Czechoslovakia’s first prime minister, he spoke of the Czechs’ glorious liberation from the centuries-long ‘barbarism and oppression’ of Habsburg rule and set out to expunge the remnants of multi-ethnicity inherited by the new Czechoslovak state.

Fritz Adler left prison a hero of the Second International, but by 1922 Trotsky and Lenin had condemned him as a moderate. ‘Surviving the war was one thing,’ Vushko writes, ‘but living after it was another.’ A number of the men featured in Lost Fatherland went to extremes to prove their credentials in the new nation-states, or were sidelined by figures less encumbered with a Habsburg past. They were drawn into the national politics of Poland, the short-lived independent Ukraine, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, Italy or Czechoslovakia because their political experience and connections across the region were initially considered an asset. But soon those same credentials and connections came to be viewed with suspicion. For Kramář, who had pinned his hopes on tsarist Russia, the continuing success of the Bolshevik revolution was a disaster. He threw his weight behind the White Russians, and survived an assassination attempt by a leftist student in Prague. No matter how nationalist his politics, he was distrusted because of his previous shift in loyalties. The charge of austriacismo and its variants cut short many political careers.

Vushko emphasises that the legacy of the Habsburg Empire was ‘multifaceted and contradictory, but it would be hard to overstate its influence on subsequent history’. Trieste, once the main port of the empire and its ‘crown jewel’, became a periphery following its absorption by Italy, with other Italian ports jealously protecting their status. Partly because Trieste was ‘more Austrian than it was Italian’, the first incident of fascist squad violence took place there in July 1920, when Blackshirts set fire to the Slovene Cultural Centre. The building’s architect, Max Fabiani, who came from a wealthy Austrian aristocratic family and was educated in Ljubljana and Vienna, is credited with introducing the Viennese Secession to Slovenia. He later joined the fascists himself.

In terms of national policy, Vushko writes, the Habsburg Empire ‘had been the furthest thing from the Italian fascist state’, but nonetheless ‘the pre-1918 empire was an incubator for the fascism that arose soon after its demise.’ And because everything Habsburg had to appear worse than everything Italian, the ‘new’ territories were cast as laggards by the postwar government. Alcide De Gasperi, an Italian clerical politician who began his career as a deputy in the Habsburg parliament, was mystified by such claims with regard to Trentino. A ‘region with the lowest crime rate, a region with no illiteracy, that has had mandatory primary education for fifty years’, he wrote in 1923, ‘hardly merits the accusation of lagging behind’. In an ironic turn, Italian Trieste is now a place where the Serbian bourgeoisie like to buy property. The website kupistanutrstu.com, which offers advice to buyers, boasts that four thousand Serbs now officially reside in the city, with possibly twice that number owning apartments. Customers are told that what makes the city such an attractive destination for Serbs ‘began in the Habsburg period, when it became an important international port and centre of trade’ that manifested ‘the influence of many cultures’.

The Dual Monarchy seeded countless ideas that germinated much later. Vushko argues that the European Union traces its ‘origins to the history of pre-1918 federalism and internationalism in the Habsburg Empire’. Among its co-founders was De Gasperi. Born into a middle-class Catholic family in the ‘mixed Italian-German-Slavic area of Trentino’, he moved to Vienna in 1900. The imperial capital was then controlled by the Christian Social Party under Karl Lueger, the city’s mayor from 1897 to 1910. Lueger’s populist, antisemitic party was the largest in the House of Deputies, though increasingly challenged by the Social Democrats, the second largest party in the 1907 elections (the first with universal male suffrage).

De Gasperi was inspired by Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum novarum, which gave special attention to the ‘social question’ and the welfare of the working classes, as well as by ‘Lueger’s practical and political achievements’ and ‘the combination of socialism and Catholicism he embodied’. De Gasperi also shared Lueger’s antisemitism, though he later abandoned it. As one of the empire’s youngest deputies, he ‘envisioned the Habsburg Empire as a federation of nations and a model for the restructuring of Europe as a whole’. A ‘Catholic federative empire’, he believed, would ‘serve as a guarantor of stability on the continent’. He remained a loyal subject until the empire’s collapse, and after the war spent years in the political wilderness – including some time in prison – under the Italian fascist regime. During the Second World War he founded the Christian Democracy Party and in Idee per la Ricostruzione he published a programme for it to follow. As Italy’s prime minister from 1945 to 1953, he oversaw the earliest steps toward European integration.

In Hungary​ today, the political labels kuruc and labanc (anti and pro-Habsburg) still mean something. Earlier this year, Viktor Orbán gave a speech that mentioned the failed 1848 revolution against Habsburg rule. ‘There is always an empire that tries to take away the freedom of Hungarians,’ he said. ‘Right now, it is the one in Brussels.’ Orbán complained that ‘Brussels is abusing its power, as Vienna did in the past.’ In July 2024, his government formed a bloc called Patriots for Europe with right-wingers from other former Habsburg lands (the Czech Republic and Austria) in the European Parliament; the bloc’s vision of Europe is based on an anti-EU nationalism and nativist populism that owes a great deal to the Habsburg legacy. The bloc now includes parties from across the continent. ‘We used to think that Europe was our future,’ Orbán said in 2020 in a speech decrying ‘tired Brussels elites’. ‘Today we know that we are Europe’s future.’

How could these visions have emerged from the same Habsburg source? Vushko offers some clues. The Dual Monarchy was an umbrella that gave politicians opportunities to form both alliances and antagonisms, and then to switch to others when it suited them. Political Catholicism looked to the Church, Social Democrats could form a group made up from multiple nationalities, and nationalists could organise across political territories (as the Germans did), or form strategic alliances with other nationalities who shared some of their aims (as Italians occasionally did with Slovenes, or Poles with Ukrainians), or with socialists who supported national autonomy. The imperial government itself could also be a useful ally and antagonist: it was a means of getting things done – from infrastructure projects to trade agreements – as well as a scapegoat. Most of Vushko’s statesmen favoured the empire’s preservation, but its demise forced many of them onto very different paths. Austria-Hungary’s finance minister Leon Biliński and the parliamentary deputy Mykola Wassilko, who came from Bukovina, both preferred ‘empire over any unitary nation-state’, but ‘by late 1918 they supported two competing national camps: Polish and Ukrainian, both of which had claims on Galicia.’ Vushko also stresses that ‘the same ideologies and political landmarks in the empire’s history’ – from liberalism and conservatism to the ‘revolutions and political realignments of 1848 and 1867’ – carried ‘different repercussions for territories outside of Vienna’ and therefore displayed different characteristics in each of the successor states.

One of the most longstanding Habsburg legacies is the attribution of virtues and harms to the empire itself. The Czech political theorist Ondřej Slačálek has noted that ‘repeated comebacks of the Habsburg myth … worked to stave off [political] adulthood,’ a phenomenon Karel Čapek satirised in his comic novel War with the Newts (1936). In one scene, an intelligent newt living on a remote island has learned Czech from a book (Czech for Newts) and is excited to encounter actual living Czechs for the first time. ‘So you take an interest in our history?’ the Czech narrator inquires. ‘I do indeed,’ the newt replies. ‘Especially the subjugation [to the Habsburgs] … I’m sure you must be very proud of your three centuries of subjugation. It was a great era for the Czech people.’

We still live in the long shadow of Habsburg disintegration. In addition to the lingering legacy of 19th-century state formations, European and global politics are shaken by continuing reverberations in states that have disappeared from Europe since 1990: Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, the GDR and, above all, the Soviet Union. A decade ago, political scientists pointed to maps showing that the legacy of Habsburg rule was still visible in Ukrainians’ electoral preferences. Patches of colour revealed that pro-Russian candidates succeeded in the former tsarist territories of the east and failed in former Habsburg Galicia. Following Russia’s war in Ukraine in 2014 and the full-scale invasion in February 2022, six million people have left the country, and more than three and a half million have been internally displaced. Vienna is a temporary or permanent home to more than ten thousand Ukrainian citizens. Some of them come from western Ukraine (once Galicia) but many more have fled from the east: Kharkiv, Donetsk and Dnipro, the places hardest hit by the war.

Vushko’s first book, published in 2015, was a history of the imperial bureaucracy in Habsburg Galicia. The ‘earlier period of Austrian rule’, she wrote, ‘was not only the most cosmopolitan in all of Ukraine’s history, but also an era and space of unprecedented cultural and religious diversity, and above all peace’. For this reason, ‘memories of Austria run strong in today’s Lviv – pro-Habsburg sentiments are even stronger here than they are in Vienna.’ But now, as she writes in the introduction to Lost Fatherland, ‘Ukraine … as a land of peace, relative stability and prosperity – is no more.’ For Vushko, ‘the theme of lost fatherland has become especially resonant.’