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Austria-Hungary's Nations: From Resentment to Reconciliation?

16/11/2018

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Part 3 of a 3-part series.

​Please read:
Part 1: "End of WWI & of Austria-Hungaria: But the Tragedy Continues"

Part 2: "The Troubles of (Dividing) Empire"

Although multi-ethnic society under Habsburg rule gives many positive examples of supranational ideals, in practice there were a lot of historical inequalities that led to its breakup. 

Czechs had resented Austrian domination, especially since the Battle of the White Mountain, the first big conflagration in the Thirty Years’ War. In the aftermath, rebelling Bohemian Protestant nobles were punished severely. The main offenders had their severed heads placed atop pikes on the entrance to Prague’s Charles Bridge as an example for all who passed by. Worse still, for the Czech nation, was the confiscation of Protestant Czechs’ property and their replacement with German-speaking Catholic landlords. The Czech language fell into disuse in education and administration.

Some Czechs like to say that the Austrians banned their language for three centuries. The truth is a bit more complicated. Czech language enjoyed a resurgence in the nineteenth century. At one point, imperial officials required that all functionaries in Bohemia and Moravia would have to know Czech as well as German. The German bureaucrats, many of whose families had held cushy posts for generations, were outraged. Czechs, who were much more likely to be bilingual, would be at a distinct advantage. We should also consider the fact that, by 1900, Czech literacy had reached 97 percent, whereas among Germans it was only one point higher. Property requirements for suffrage had been eliminated in Austria; every male 23 or older had the right to vote.

But things were different in the Hungarian part of the dual monarchy, which had been created in 1867 to give the Maygars—really just the aristocrats—more autonomy vis-à-vis Vienna. And these elites resisted the sort of universal male suffrage that had been enacted in the Austrian part of the empire, in spite of Emperor Franz Joseph’s urging.

Here’s another point at which narratives can get oversimplified. Many Slovaks claim that “the Magyars oppressed us for a thousand years, tried to force us all to speak their tongue.” There is scant evidence that in the first few centuries after the Hungarian conquest there was any attempt to Magyarize the Slavic population.

Ludovit Stur, the leading nationalist who codified the Slovak language in the 1840s, wrote a treatise called the “Old and New Age of the Slovaks,” in which the “old” age was the first centuries after the establishment of the Kingdom of Hungary, a polyglot society which used Latin as a lingua franca for high-level official communications. Of course, few people received any education—and those who did got it through Latin—so there is no argument about Slovak-language schools versus Hungarian-language instruction. It was only in the eighteenth century—the beginning of Stur’s “New Age”—that Magyar first became privileged over Slovak (or Croatian or Rumanian). The process of Magyarization—of forced assimilation to the Hungarian language—didn’t get seriously underway until the 1820s or so. And this happened through institutions of the church—including Protestant churches, as Stur well knew from his own experiences—at least as much as through institutions of state. At least until the Hungarian government began shutting down Slovak secondary schools in the 1860s, two decades after Stur’s death.

So while oppression of Slovaks was relatively new, Czechs had had legitimate grievances going back to 1620. But most of the institutional discrimination against the latter had been eliminated by 1900, even if the Czech still had a lot of catching up to do vis-à-vis the Germans.

It’s also worth noting that government discrimination against Jews in Austria-Hungary had been eliminated by Franz Joseph’s decree in 1860. Other forms of progress, such as health insurance for working-class subjects, had been implemented. It was a land that Jewish-Viennese writer Stefan Zweig could call “World of Security,” the title to the opening chapter of The World of Yesterday. The book describes growing up during the reign of Franz Joseph and seeing this homeland ruined. Another Jewish Austrian, Joseph Roth, wrote in a preface to his novel The Radetzky March that he “loved this homeland with all its faults.”

Because much of what followed was far worse than Habsburg “oppression”: Hitler and then forty years of Communist-Party rule.

One other question that might be raised is whether the Danubian monarchy could have reformed itself, could have presided over a looser, more democratic confederation. Both Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Emperor Karl had such aims. Indeed, the creation of the Dual Monarchy of Austria-hyphen-Hungary had led some to believe that a Trial Monarchy, with Slavs as the third pillar of the state, was the next step. Plans for Franz Joseph’s coronation as King of Bohemia around 1870, which would have been a nod in the direction of the Czechs, were scrapped for fear of upsetting the Magyars. Bedrich Smetana had even composed the opera Libuše for the occasion, which never happened.
With or without speculating about might have been, we should seek a more nuanced understanding about what really was.

There have been two positive developments in this direction, both attempts to restore those toppled statues. In Prague, sculptor Petr Vana has worked fifteen years without pay to create a replica of the Marian statue. But the debate rages, with one artist comparing it to restoring a Stalin monument. Others argue that it should stand on the square along with John Huss, the fifteenth century reformer, as a sign that the city welcomes a variety of religious opinions.

In Bratislava, Martina Zimanova has created a scaled-down replica of the Maria Theresa statue based on photos and remaining fragments. It stood in front of the downtown Hotel Carlton near the National Theater for a while. But this past March 15, the city council decided it should move to a less prominent location.

Perhaps one day, if the wounds of the past don’t fester too much, Czechs and Slovaks will reconcile with the imperial past. Maybe they’ll even learn to be proud of it.
3 Comments

The Troubles of (Dividing) Empire

15/11/2018

1 Comment

 
Continued from 11/11/2018, part 2 of 3

Please read:
Part 1: End of WWI & of Austria-Hungary: But the Tragedy Continues

Part 3: Austria-Hungary's Nations: From Resentment to Reconciliation?

Perhaps the death-date for Austria-Hungary should be March 23-24, when Karl departed by train for Switzerland. But even afterward, he made two ill-fated attempts to regain power in Hungary. After the second, the dominant powers of Western Europe exiled him to the Portuguese island of Madeira, hundreds of miles from land, where he couldn’t cause any more “trouble.”

But that post-war history is full of other troubles, one that most modern accounts, attempting to justify the new Wilsonian order of “nation-states” like Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, omit. It was a tumultuous time. Two days before Karl’s departure, a Hungarian Soviet Republic was declared. It lasted only until July. In Czechoslovakia, professors—mostly German- and Hungarian-speakers—had lost university jobs for refusing to pledge allegiance to the new government. Ethnic Hungarian railway workers in Slovakia went on strike in February 1919 to protest these and other measures. Later that month, they were joined by ethnic Germans protesting in Bratislava. Things got out of control and a military unit fired on the crowd, killing seven and wounding twenty-three.

While typical twentieth-century narratives celebrate the creation of the new European states, they rarely mention incidents like the Polish-Czechoslovak War of 1919, a dispute over the border between those countries. Poland, of course, had been partitioned in the late eighteenth century among Austria, Prussia, and Russia, a shameful event which caused the Polish Commonwealth to disappear from the map. One can only sympathize with the desire of the Polish people to reconstitute a state which had existed for centuries, and which, with its Sejm, or Parliament, and its electoral monarchy, was one of the most progressive lands in Europe in the Renaissance and later.

But the precedent for a Czechoslovak state lay on much shakier ground. There had been a “Great Moravian Empire” in the ninth century, but “empire” is a dubious term. It encompassed only parts of today’s Czech and Slovak Republics, but it played a key role in the development of Slavdom when Prince Rastislav invited two monks from Byzantium to come as missionaries and develop a Slavic liturgical and biblical language. That was in 863. But the conquest of the Central Danube Basin by the Magyar tribes in 896 brought the principality to ruin and drove a wedge between West Slavs (Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, and smaller groups) and their South Slavic cousins such as Croats and Serbs. Germans also helped put an end to the Slavic state north of the Danube.

Czechs and Slovaks had looked back with longing at Great Moravia for several centuries, exaggerating its importance. As their national aspirations gained momentum in the nineteenth century, this re-writing of history became part of their narrative, one that had to be strongly cultivated in the new Czechoslovak state. Even if skeptical about some of this narrative, one has to be sympathetic to the fact that Hungarian and German domination really did prevent several Slavic peoples from refining their literature and culture. And these Germans and Magyars subsequently looked down on Slavs and somehow less “civilized.”

So Slavic resentment is understandable. But is it exaggerated?

It’s useful to consider the pros and cons of two views.

According to one, the old Habsburg Monarchy was the “cage of nations”—of Czechs, Serbs, Romanians, and others yearning to establish nation-states, which theoretically meant that everyone within the borders spoke the same language. It was a concept that had been growing at least since the French Revolution, and the old “feudal order” stood in the way of their creation.

But the reality is that much of the territory was so mixed there was no way to draw borders which would have nothing but Czechs on one side, nothing but Germans on the other, or that would perfectly separate Slovaks from Magyars. The most defendable borders the Czechs could have had were the Sudeten and other mountain ranges to the north, northwest, and southwest. But those areas were heavily populated by German-speakers, so these people had to be included in the new state.

A more favorable view of the old order is that it transcended nationality by providing a higher loyalty, to the idea of supranational state under a monarch. A thoroughly romanticized view would have it that everyone “lived in peace and harmony” in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, under the benign sway of Maria Theresa or Franz Joseph.
The reality is that the nations of the empire did not get along that well – especially since some of them, particularly the German-Austrians and Hungarians, had been privileged in ways that kept them on top socially, financially, and politically. Germans, for instance, dominated the Austro-Hungarian army corps all out of proportion to their numbers in the population, followed by ethnic Magyars. 

This three-part series will finish next Monday with "From Resentment to Reconciliation?"
1 Comment

End of WWI and of Austria-Hungary: But the Tragedy Continues

11/11/2018

2 Comments

 
First in a series of three this week.
Please see also: Part 2: The Troubles of (Dividing) Empire
              Part 3: Austria-Hungary's Nations: From Resentment to Reconciliation?


I founded this website in anticipation of my 2014 trip to Sarajevo for the centenary of Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination, and to other European destinations marking the outbreak of World War I. Unfortunately, I couldn’t be in Paris today to mark the end of the war. For millions, the end of suffering, dying and killing. But only for 20 years.

France's President Macron used the occasion to warn of growing nationalism today. Indeed, it was nationalism that started the war. And regardless of your opinion—positive or negative—of Austria-Hungary, it was a nationalist’s bullet that plunged the empire into war, and nationalism that tore it apart in the end. Arguably, the state had been a bulwark against nationalism.

In my last blog post, I cautiously celebrated the centenary of Czechoslovakia’s founding. ‘Cautiously,’ noting that the country had real freedom for barely a quarter-century total, from 1918-1938, in the aftermath of WWII from 1945-48, and again from 1989-92. And I lamented that, even though it was probably the most democratic state to emerge in Central Europe after WWI, it was fraught with problems.

It’s those problems I’d like to focus on today (and in the coming days in the continuations of this post) in reflecting on the passing of Austria-Hungary.

I say ‘today,’ but there is no precise date for the last day of that empire. Czechoslovak statehood had been declared on October 28, 1918, in anticipation of the armistice. When that came on November 11, the last emperor, Karl, signed a carefully worded statement granting the German-Austrian people the right to form a new state. He also relinquished the reins of government, but he avoided the word ‘abdication.’ Although some saw it as just that, he continued to believe he was a rightful sovereign. He also released a similar declaration to the people of Hungary two days later.

Mary and Maria Theresa: Two Statues Fall
Some Czechs might want to consider November 3 as the end of the empire, for that’s the day on which they symbolically toppled it on Prague’s Old Town Square. The object in question was a Marian column, erected in 1652 to celebrate the end of the Thirty Years’ War. For Czech Protestants, at least, it was a vestige of Catholic Habsburg domination. Crowds gathered with ropes to pull it down and both the statue of the Virgin and the column broke into several pieces which are today found in the Lapidarium of the National Museum.

While the column may have represented the victory of Catholic forces in a very religious war, it also expressed gratitude to Mary for saving Bohemia from the marauding of Swedish troops. Whether Czech Protestants really welcomed these fellow believers from Scandinavia is a matter that doesn’t seem to get much debate. At any rate, the mob which pulled it down destroyed a priceless piece of baroque sculpture. The instigator, so I’ve read, later regretted it.

Similarly, a group of Czechoslovak legion soldiers in Bratislava tied ropes to a statue of Maria Theresa in October 1921 and pulled it down with a truck. This empress had been crowned Apostolic Queen of Hungary—one of her numerous titles—in 1841 in Bratislava. At the time the city was called Pressburg in German, Presporok in Slovak, and Pozsony in Hungarian. It had served as the capital of the Kingdom of Hungary since Turks invaded Budapest in the mid-sixteenth century.

Curiously, there is little reason to consider her coronation, the subject of the statue, as a symbol of oppression. After all, she issued an edict, De Ratio Educationis, calling for education in pupils’ native tongues, something Slovak rights activists had to keep struggling for. The fact that the coronation ceremony took place in St. Martin’s Church in the center of town ought to be a proud part of Bratislava history.

But the rub is that Pressburg/Presporok/Pozsony was a trilingual capital, and that had to change in the new nation-state. It was re-christened Bratislava, and eventually became overwhelmingly Slovakized. Homogenization was the new trend. The old empire had at least represented pluralism – even if its record was inconsistent.

I’ll take up some thornier issues in my next post. Look for it Thursday!

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    Mark Eliot Nuckols is a travel writer from Silver Beach Virginia who is also a musician and teacher.

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