The Austrians

The Wall Street Journal praises Gordon Brook-Shepherd’s

THE AUSTRIANS

“British historian Gordon Brook-Shepherd puzzles out [the Austrians’] long struggle to find their own role in the world . . . . Mr. Brook-Shepherd is uniquely qualified for this task, having drenched himself in the mystery of Austrianness for some 50 years and written more than a dozen books on the subject. . . . Connoisseurs of Austria and its delightful and infuriating inhabitants will agree that Mr. Brook-Shepherd has got it just about right.

After guiding the reader through the little medieval Duchy of Austria, he unfolds the fantastic expansion of this improbable Germanic settlement into the core province of an immense conglomerate of lands and kingdoms. . . . In due course, the Austrian people were dragged by the Habsburgs into defending Europe against the infidel (the Ottoman Turks) and staving off the hegemonic drive of the kings of France.

It is easy to see why the Austrians never became a nationality in the sense that the French and English did and have suffered down the centuries from a nagging identity crises. This unhappy feeling has been only partially balanced, Mr. Brook-Shepherd notes, by a proud historical sense of the grandeur and misery of being Austrian. . . .

In the first half of his book, Mr. Brook-Shepherd presents the events and personalities that shaped the Austrian world—and often the wider world as well—over the first 900 years of its millennium. In the second half, he portrays the difficult destiny of the Austrians in the 20th century, beginning with the fin-de-siècle mixture of glorious cultural flowering and corrosive pessimism, and the consequent desperate frivolity. . . .

His chapters on the ghastly denouement of World War I— which began in an Austrian province—are among the best in print, as is his account of the breakup of the empire in 1918, after 700 years, and its replacement by a small country divided into three irreconcilable camps: the Catholic, the German-nationalist (soon pro-Nazi) and the revolutionary Marxist-Socialist. . . .

At a certain point, though, Mr. Brook-Shepherd shucks his gloom and begins what might be called the “Radetzky March” of postwar Austria. He notes that, in time, a new, self-reliant, unambiguously patriotic Austria was born in the overwhelming disillusionment with everything to do with Hitler. . . .”

By the same author

RUSSIA’S DANUBIAN EMPIRE

THE AUSTRIAN ODYSSEY

WHERE THE LION TROD

THE ANSCHLUSS

DOLLFUSS

EAGLE AND UNICORN

THE LAST HABSBURG

BETWEEN TWO FLAGS

UNCLE OF EUROPE

THE STORM PETRELS (Soviet Pre-war Defectors)

NOVEMBER 1918

VICTIMS AT SARAJEVO

ROYAL SUNSET

THE STORM BIRDS (Soviet Post-war Defectors)

THE LAST EMPRESS

MAPS

FOREWORD

1996, THE YEAR IN WHICH the Austrians celebrated a thousand years of their recorded existence, seemed a good time to try to sum up their struggle to find their own role in the world. So far as I am concerned, this will be a signing-off as well as a summing-up. Half of my sixteen books have concerned their Habsburg dynasty, the Danube Basin over which it ruled, the Great War which consumed it, and the Austrian Republics which succeeded it. If I put pen to paper again (and that is still the antiquated way I work), it will not be on this subject, on which I have said all I can.

This book is not, however, an exercise in repetition. To begin with, it is the first attempt to tell the millennium story of this fascinating (but often maddening) people right down to the present day, always in terms of their unceasing search for their own identity. Their quest for nationhood has been blocked on the one hand by their multi-national training and traditions, and on the other by the fateful Germanic tie that runs throughout their history. The quest starts afresh now that they are part of a united Europe alongside Germany, with their Danubian neighbours eventually to join in as partners.

The book has a unique feature in that it combines half a century of academic research on the subject with a similar span of personal experience of the country and its people. First as a General Staff officer on the post-war Allied Commission in Vienna, then as a foreign correspondent and, in recent years, as the writer and presenter of various television documentaries on the Monarchy, I have been in continuous contact with Austria and its joys and problems ever since 1945. So much so that the original concept of the work, as agreed with the publisher, was that this fifty-year period should be cast in autobiographical form.

The idea was abandoned at my own suggestion, and this for a variety of reasons. To begin with, though I was a lieutenant-colonel at a precocious age in Vienna, this was a rank at which one could observe and execute policy, but not shape it. Even less did that apply to the twelve succeeding years (1948–60), when I ran the Central and South-East European Bureau of the Daily Telegraph, again based in Vienna. I witnessed many of the seminal events of those years – notably the struggle of Tito’s Yugoslavia with the Kremlin, and the Hungarian revolution – and was able to indulge in some fascinating ‘extra-mural’ activities in the region. But, for the most part, one was on the outside looking in. Too many memoir-writers from the media have tried to inflate their own importance by pretending that, for them, it was the other way round. I wanted to avoid that distortion.

I mention all this because I fear that the reader may well find it irksome that there are so many references in the latter part of the book to my key sources being also my personal friends. I can assure him that this number could, without difficulty, have been trebled. So far as possible, I have confined such references to footnotes linked to direct quotation of original material. Thus, as regards the Monarchy, I have drawn on a friendship of some thirty years with that wonderful royal figure, the former Empress Zita of Austria-Hungary (who only died in 1989, aged nearly ninety-seven), and her eldest son Archduke Otto Habsburg, thankfully still alive and thriving today as the senior member of the Strasbourg European Parliament. Between them, they provided not only a wealth of their own reminiscences but the fullest access ever given to any outside eye to the Habsburg family papers, one of the richest of Europe’s unpublished royal archives.

I got to know well most of the leading figures of the First Austrian Republic (1918–38), including the ill-fated Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg, while researching my book The Anschluss and a biography of Engelbert Dollfuss. During the Second World War I had been in touch – though intermittently and at far remove – with developments in Austria while serving with Military Intelligence in London. For obvious reasons, my contacts with the leaders of the Second post-war Republic have been the most extensive. I even had the privilege of being ‘per du’, i.e. on the closest friendship terms, with both the great right-wing Chancellor Leopold Figl and his equally formidable socialist rival and successor Bruno Kreisky. (This caused much raising of eyebrows in both camps: the Austrians of the day were not used to their great ideological gap being bridged by anyone.)

I have had dozens of friendly helpers in the preparation of the present work. I would like to single out, on the diplomatic front, the Austrian Foreign Minister, Dr Alois Mock; his genial Secretary-General, Dr Wolfgang Schallenberg; and three successive Austrian envoys to London, Ambassadors Thomas, Magrutsch and Hennig. Dr Bernard Stillfried has been of great assistance in the cultural field, and Dr Man-fried Rauchensteiner, Director of the Military History Museum in Vienna, equally valuable on matters of military history. Fritz Molden and Carl Szokoll were among those who, from their own vivid experiences, provided insights into Austria’s brave but blighted wartime resistance movements. The Governor of Styria, Dr Josef Krainer (whose father I well remember, holding that same post before him), gave a frank picture of Nazi and post-Nazi life in one of Austria’s key provinces. I owe special thanks to Sektionschef Dr Neumayr and his charming deputy, Dr Ingeborg Schweikert, in the Federal Chancellory for organising my recent researches in Vienna.

In London, I have profited from the encyclopaedic knowledge of an old friend, Hans-Heinrich Coudenhove, who pointed out several errors of spelling, time and place in the first draft. This agreeably continued a family tradition: it was his father, Gerolf, who translated two of my earliest books into German, placidly amending the text as he went. Both of my admirable editors, Richard Johnson and Robert Lacey, also gave close attention to the final draft, which was somewhat late in arriving and considerably over-length when it did. I am sure there are still some slips which have eluded all of us. This, after all, is an immensely complex picture: a thousand years of European history passed through the prism of the Austrian experience.

I am aware of inconsistencies as between the English and German spelling of names. They are deliberate in the sense that the form chosen is the one with which I am comfortable. I feel equally at home with Franz Josef or Francis Joseph, but could never think of Karl Lueger, for example, as ‘Charles’, or Georg von Schönerer as ‘George’. The word ‘England’ is used because that was how Great Britain was generally referred to, especially on the Continent, at that time (though ‘British’ was sometimes used as an adjective). As for our sovereigns, Victoria and Edward VII were almost always spoken of as Queen and King of England – and thought of themselves as such.

Finally, I would like to give yet another vote of thanks to my longtime secretary Susan Small, who has once again turned an untidy manuscript into a perfect typescript – this time working from her new home in South Africa. Chapter after chapter has winged its way safely, if not speedily, from the Chilterns to Cape Town and back. Only after the last one had returned did it occur to me that we might have used fax.

GORDON BROOK-SHEPHERD
Turville Park
Oxon

Foreword to the Paperback Edition

It is pleasant to be able to report that in the short space of time between the appearance of the hardback and paperback editions of this book, Austria has been able to smooth away one awkward trace of its past. The present republic inherited, along with its post-1918 constitutional laws, the demand that any member of the former Habsburg dynasty who wished to return to the country should renounce not only all dynastic claims, but even the membership of his own family.