The politician who helped negotiate an end to WWI, little known outside Central Europe, figured prominently in the new film version of All Quiet on the Western Front.


I'd like to take the occasion of this 105th anniversary of the 1918 Armistice to recall a largely unsung hero of the conflict: Matthias Erzberger. Born in 1875 in what is today the federal state of Baden-Würtemberg, he joined the Catholic Centre Party and was elected to the Reichstag in 1903.

Though he’d advocated annexing Belgium and other territories at the start of the Great War, Matthias Erzberger began openly arguing for a negotiated settlement in July 1917, in part because he could see that the stalemated position of both sides in the conflict meant that further loss of life would have been useless. He shared Austro-Hungarian documents related to the fruitless of continued military campaigning with the German military, which helped shatter their illusions that their war aims were achievable.

Eventually, when Imperial Germany found itself in a totally losing position, Erzberger was sent to negotiate with the Allies in the Forest of Compiegne. It was felt that he, as a Catholic from the southwest region of his country, would be more amenable to his French than a Prussian officer. According to the Wikipedia entry on him, he was also seen as an “unassailable man of peace.” (He was one of the few statesmen from the Central Powers who had earlier attempted to dissuade their allies, the Ottoman Turks, from engaging in the Armenian genocide.)

While based on the original book version of All Quiet on the Western Front, published in 1929 by Erich Maria Remarque, the 1922 film version directed by Edward Berger adds scenes of the final negotiations for the Armistice. The young soldiers in the book (German title Im Westen Nichts Neues), discuss the politicians’ approach to the war, as opposed to that of those fighting in the trenches, but nowhere does that work actually depict the higher-ups. Berger decided to show Erzberger negotiating in a train car, and at one point the politician is even represented as accusing his fellow Germans of acting out of “a false sense of honor.”

Erzberger was assassinated by German nationalist terrorists, who viewed him as a traitor, the Organization Consul, in 1921. He is widely regarded today as having spared Europe from further senseless death by preparing Germany for its inevitable defeat.

Or so the headline might have read, 130 years ago, though Franz Ferdinand d’Este had not yet bagged quite such a large total. But he’d already chalked up exotic game like elephants and kangaroos on his world tour of 1892-93 before arriving in North America.

I discovered these intersections among history, ecology and cognitive dissonance thanks to my own travels and PBS’s recent documentary, The American Buffalo. Part Two of the series covers late nineteenth-century conservation efforts. Ironically, some rugged frontier types who had engaged in wanton slaughter of bison in the 1870s numbered among the species’ most avid preservers by the end of the century – once they’d recognized the looming danger of extinction.

One such personality was Buffalo Jones, a Kansas settler and hunter-turned-breeder, appointed Yellowstone’s first game warden by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1902. Around 1890 he’d complained that a military detachment stationed in the park shirked its duty of wildlife protection.

As I heard these accounts, I wondered if the program narrator would mention Archduke Franz Ferdinand, as I was already familiar with his passion for hunting and his visit to North America in the 1890s. When his name didn’t come up in the documentary, I did a little online research and found that, indeed, there was a connection between this member of the Habsburg family and one of America’s most well-known national parks, which I’ll return to later.

But first, a little background...

I’d been curious about the Archduke since high school lessons on the outbreak of WWI, but it wasn’t until about fifteen years later, that I first visited Konopischt, his estate outside Prague. By this time, I’d spent five years teaching English in Slovakia, which like the Czech Republic had been part of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, and had steeped myself in the history of that empire.

On that occasion, Konopischt was a side trip, allowing only enough time for a self-guided stroll through the Archduke’s collection of armor, one of the largest in Europe. Though brief, it was an eye-opening snippet of his world. Thanks to an inheritance from his cousin, Duke of Modena and last male of the House of Este, he’d become one of the wealthiest men in Austria in 1875, which explains how he’d been able to afford all the chain mail suits, helmets, swords and jousting lances of various periods.

In 1889, as a result of the suicide of another relative, the Crown Prince Rudolf (at his hunting lodge, no less), Ferdinand became heir apparent to the imperial throne of Austria. Just three years later, he embarked on a round-the-world trip, encouraged by relatives to become a man of the world and gain a perspective on international affairs.
But much of this time was spent indulging his passion for the hunt. I became acutely aware of this fact while viewing an exhibition at Vienna’s Hofburg complex. I wandered through the halls and rooms with their fifteen-foot ceilings and parquet floors, marveling at the items on display: a stuffed kangaroo, numerous photos of Ferdinand hunting with dignitaries from India, Java and elsewhere, a picture of him standing in front of a dead elephant, one boot triumphantly planted on the beast’s front leg.

That was during my 2014 trip, an exploration of Austro-Hungary for the centenary of the events that had led to WWI. I also took the occasion to re-visit his castle/hunting lodge for a second time. Touring the main living quarters, where numerous stuffed animals and antlers line hall and stairways, I learned that he’d killed roughly 275 thousand animals in his lifetime, a record catalogued by servants. He was known for a short temper – and I wondered if his hunting mania wasn’t an outlet for bottled-up violent tendencies.

While sightseeing at the castle on that later trip, I viewed a display of items related to Ferdinand’s childhood and partly Czech origins, as well as those of his wife, Sophie Chotek. Despite her Bohemian background, she was still not considered high-ranking enough to marry the heir apparent. The match was finally approved by Emperor Franz Joseph, the Archduke’s uncle – but only after the heir apparent signed an agreement renouncing the right of the couple’s children to succeed him. The exhibit at Konopischt, “United in Life and Death,” reflected on the fact that she was assassinated alongside him, in the back seat of a convertible, in Sarajevo. It all seemed to point to a softer side of the crown prince.

So when I first saw the PBS documentary two weeks ago, I sought supplemental history, and so stumbled upon a site I hadn’t yet discovered in all my background reading on the subject. Called franzferdinandsworld.com, it chronicles the round-the-world journey with his own diary entries. The one for September 22, 1893 first complements “the richness in game of the park is quite respectable thanks to the severe hunting prohibition. The last specimen of the once innumerable wild buffalo herds spared the senseless destructive urges of the rude farmers and cowboys are living here.” He also comments that “elsewhere close to extinction if their hunt is not stopped [are] otters, martens, muskrats, ermines, hares, rabbits, badgers, iltisses and even some species of porcupine.”

I’d never realized that, despite his seemingly insatiable appetite for shooting such creatures, he got the concept of sustainability. And then he goes on: “Despite the tables affixed everywhere displaying “No Shooting” and even thought the army battalion [stationed here] is also tasked with prohibiting any hunting, there is much poaching going on. Thus I have heard that a gang has killed 500 wapitis and transported them across the border.”

One might also wonder whether he believed that such game ought to be reserved for people more like himself. But there at least you have, in addition to a nice Austrian-American historical connection, a bit of enlightened opinion from an archduke much better known for six-figure hunting.

The day after the commemorations of the Sarajevo assassinations, I attended Mass at a local Franciscan Monastery, then moved to new lodgings with a mountain rescue guy named Neno. He took me to a cottage to the east of town (part of the Serbian quasi-autonomous region of Republika Srpska) for hiking. I got to see steep karst crags, a mountain goat, and the dark ridges miles beyond. And I got my first taste of descending a talus slope.

Enjoy the pics!

And enjoy my book, with details of the complete journey...

Continuing with the pictorial retrospective on the 100th anniversary of Franz Ferdinand's assassination, here are images of the end of the "celebration" - and other attractions in the Sarajevo area. 

Czech novelist Milan Kundera passed away July 11 at the age of 95. He was certainly one of the most influential Czech writers of the second half of the twentieth century. In terms of international notoriety, he was surpassed only by Václav Havel, the playwright, essayist, prisoner of conscience, and first post-Communist president of Czechoslovakia.
Kundera became globally famous largely thanks to his status as émigré writer in Paris, and to the American production of his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being. That book and film centered largely on the impact of the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, which crushed the liberalization of Alexander Dubček, on the work’s central characters. Some go into exile in Switzerland, only to find that they “can’t hack it” abroad. So they return to their homeland, where their travel papers are promptly confiscated. The hardliners are back in power, now enforcing “normalization,” a return to authoritarianism, censorship and doublespeak.

To me, that book encapsulated the plight of dissidents – or any non-conformists – in the former Czechoslovakia. Havel himself was even offered the chance to emigrate – the Communists wanted to get rid of him, they so feared his influence. But he declined, and once said that he was a “Bohemian bumpkin” more at home even in a country that wouldn’t allow publication of his books. (Like Kundera, he was able to get his books published elsewhere in Europe and North America.)

Kundera felt so stifled that he finally emigrated to France in 1975, acquiring citizenship in 1981 and writing in the language of his adopted land as early as 1986 with his article “The Art of the Novel.” He later said his works should be considered part of French literature. That would certainly seem to apply to his later works. I’ve had the difficulty, when seeking to read Kundera in his native language, that some of the Czech titles turn out to be translations (and not by the author) of French originals. (Incidentally, I had the opportunity to meet the English translator of Unbearable Lightness, Michael Heim, at an academic conference in the early 2000s.)

After 1989’s Velvet Revolution, Kundera returned to Czechoslovakia, and his Czech citizenship was finally restored in 2019, but he still spent most of his remaining three decades in France.

My general take on Kundera’s legacy is that he has made significant contributions to Czech and French lit, as well as to the world’s émigré and dissident lit. He deals well in themes of alienation and belonging. Unbearable Lightness does a good job in depicting secret police agents filming an adulterous affair in order to blackmail the victim into cooperating, the use of kompromat, including honey traps, being typical for such regimes.

I’m not crazy about Kundera’s obsession with sex – and baser instincts generally. His atheism was rooted in his insistence, for instance, that no god could ever have invented anything as absurd as the human need to defecate. Pardon me, but I scat, therefore God does not exist is a flimsy philosophical argument.

There is one matter for which he should be – and largely has been – forgiven. In October 2008, documents surfaced which seemed to indicate that he had turned in a defector who had returned to Czechoslovakia and was staying in the dorm room of an acquaintance. (I was in Slovakia for a two-month stint at the time, and it was very much in the news there.) It is unclear from the record whether or to what extent he cooperated with authorities, and a number of globally famous authors such as Salman Rushdie supported the author in a public statement at the time.

Oddly, the incident took place in 1950, the same year Kundera was expelled from the Communist Party, which he had joined in 1947 at a time of youthful idealism. He was readmitted in 1956 and finally expelled again in 1970. But he was active in the reform movement of the 1960s, and gained considerable attention for his speech at the Fourth Congress of Czechoslovak Writers in 1967. So, even the year before Dubček’s liberalization, he was arguing for cultural independence from larger countries.

After the Soviet invasion, in December of 1968, Kundera wrote an important essay called Český úděl or “Czech Destiny,” echoing the theme of that writers’ congress speech. I quoted a powerful sentence from the column in my post for the 50th anniversary of the invasion, and it bears repeating here:

             I am convinced that a world in which the voice of Guatemalans,
             Estonians, Vietnamese, or Danes were heard no less than the voice of
             Americans, Chinese, or Russians would be a better and less sad world.

Whatever his faults, he should be remembered most of all for writing such as this.

The date of the assassination, June 28, is here, time for a 9-year retrospective on my experiences on the 100th anniversary in 2014. I'll make this text brief and say that it was an occasion of mixed feelings - for me personally, as well as for the many groups that came to commemorate: Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks, Austrians, Czechs, and Hungarians (all peoples of the former Austria-Hungary), as well as for thousands of international visitors. Some expressed sadness, at least one of them morbid humor, others historical resentment. The main sentiment was hope for a more peaceful future.

Please see the slideshow for more details, as well as my original post from June 28, 2014, which includes, among other things, footage of the Vienna Philharmonic's performance. For a full set of my impressions, read Travels with Ferdinand and Friends: A Centennial Journey Through Austria-Hungary, available at Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble and Amazon.

I made it from Pécs in southern Hungary - please see my previous post - with two days to spare. I'll let the pics and captions do most of the talking for this post.

Tomorrow's post will be on the anniversary of Archduke Franz Ferdinand's assassination, June 28.

If this intrigues you, you will definitely want to buy the book at Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble or Amazon.

The name Villány may look like something sinister to English-speakers, but unlike "villainy," it's pronounced with only two syllables, the ny combo being pronounced like a Spanish ñ. And the town, and easy daytrip from southern-Hungarian provincial cities like Szeged, is quite friendly. Though you might not find that much English spoken, as it caters mostly to Hungarians and was historically a bilingual town with a substantial German population. 

That said, when I made the train trip from Pécs (see my previous post), the Gál Pince's owner was eager to use his English as he introduced me to a meggyes or black-cherry pálinka (schnapps). I then slipped over to the Hétfogás fogadó, or "Seven-tooth Inn," for a meal, washed down with a kékfrankos or "Blue Franconian" wine, common in Central Europe. 

The next stop was the Fritsch Pince (pince means "cellar" in Hungarian), where I had to struggle with my Hungarian. The owner was patient with my slightly-above-beginner Magyar language skills. I wondered, following decades of Western inculcation with the idea that "red wine is served at room temperature," why his reds were cool. Not the least bit perturbed, he responded matter-of-factly that it comes out of the cellar.

No kidding, I thought. Common-sense, but a paradigm shift for me. In years since, I've noticed that many reds at room temperature tend to "burn" a bit on the tongue. Once recently, noticing this effect, I asked the server to put the remainder of the bottle in the fridge, and after 10 minutes it was perfect. The "acidic" effect had been reigned in, and the mellower flavors could shine through.

I can't guarantee you'll have an experience like mine, but if you get off the beaten path in a town like Villány, I'm sure you'll find plenty of menus in English - even if you have to point to communicate your choice to the server.

These discoveries and other delights for the eyes and the tongue are covered in more detail in Chapter 3 of my book: "Hungary: Polysyllables, Paprika and Pálinka." I suggest you browse the slide show above - all pictures click through to Travels with Ferdinand. You'll want to order and read the entire text!

Next up: Awaiting an Awkward Centenary - Sarajevo!

The southern Hungarian city of Pécs certainly deserves its reputation as a European Capital of Culture - it shared that honor with Essen, Germany and Istanbul in 2010. This was my last stop before Sarajevo on my tour, as I noted during my post at that time, Pécs, Hungary: Gateway to the Balkans.

It's a university town, loaded with theaters, gorgeous architecture, and the Zsolnay Museum complex, which features all manner of ceramics, as well as leather working and other artisanal items. The Zsolnay family travelled the world learning techniques for ceramics, and innovating on them in ways that are now much imitated nowadays: note the iridescent effect of the eosin glazing on the Art Nouveau vase in the pictures above.

So much too feast your eyes on - truly one of my favorite stops from the tour! I'll even make a separate post on the nearby town of Villány, to which I made a side-trip. Then it'll be on to Sarajevo, so keep your eyes peeled! And be sure to follow me on Facebook!

Revisiting the 2014 trip that turned into the book Travels with Ferdinand, the second stop is Martin, Slovakia's historical capital of culture, where I taught English from 1990-92. During the second academic year, I joined a civic chorus, Martinský spevokol. After a season of performing at various cultural events in Slovakia, as well as participating in a choral festival in neighboring Hungary, we had a goulash party in June 1992. You can read about my 2014 reunion in my book, where the goulash party forms the kernel of Chapter 2. 

You can see my original post about the 2014 event here. I'm providing pictures above, including an illustration of the path of the 2014 trip. I've also added a pic from the goulash party I attended back in 1992, which was a farewell for me.