The Habsburg International
Hari Kunzru is a novelist, journalist and professor based in New York.
Searching for a phrase to describe the period of his youth before the First World War, the writer Stefan Zweig hit on “The Golden Age of Security.” For a wealthy young man, growing up in Vienna, the capital of the Habsburg Empire, “the state itself was the ultimate guarantor of durability.” It offered an ancient monarchy, a stable currency and a social order in which everyone knew their place. Zweig’s was a world in which “everything had its norm, its correct measurement and weight.” Austria-Hungary under the Emperor Franz Josef was a multinational state, one of the largest and most populous in Europe. Its subjects spoke German, Hungarian, Czech, Serbo-Croat and at least half a dozen other languages; its territory included many large and historic cities — Prague and Krakow, Trieste and Budapest; trade flowed freely within its borders.
Zweig’s teenage years were spent arguing about literature and art with a coterie of similarly privileged young men, before achieving precocious success as a poet. The young aesthete’s Jewishness was no obstacle to advancement in the arts, though government and diplomacy would have been off limits. His father, despite his money and social position, would never have dreamed of eating with the nobility at Sacher’s Hotel, home of the famous Sachertorte, “out of a natural instinct for preserving a distance.” It was, as Zweig remarked, “only in art that all the Viennese felt they had equal rights.”
Austria-Hungary’s entry into the First World War, after the assassination in Sarajevo of the heir to the Imperial throne, brought about the sudden and catastrophic collapse of this apparently robust society, producing bewilderment and disorientation among its former citizens. By 1919, the Empire had been dismembered, and Vienna was a hungry and dilapidated city, thronged by demobilized soldiers and prisoners of war. “For the first time,” Zweig wrote, “I saw in the yellow, dangerous eyes of the starving, what famine really looks like.”
Zweig’s melancholy autobiography, The World of Yesterday, in which he records these observations, is one of several great works of literary nostalgia for Austro-Hungarian imperial certainties. Like Josef Roth’s Radetzky March and Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, it lovingly details a cosmopolitan social world that had vanished irredeemably into the past. There was a utopian dimension to the way the Habsburg world was remembered, not just by novelists, but by political thinkers too. Because it was a unified state made up of many nationalities, it stood in poignant contrast (at least for those prepared to overlook its rigid hierarchies) to the strife and fragmentation left by the First World War. Could that duality – national identity and transnational commerce - provide a path to a future twentieth-century internationalism? The treaty of Saint Germain-en-Laye, which formally dissolved the Empire, also recognized the new League of Nations, the first international organization dedicated to world peace. The Habsburg ghost haunted - and arguably still haunts - many internationalist projects, on the left and the right.
The Viennese economist Friederich Hayek, newly discharged from service in the war, wondered if “it might be possible in governmental functions to separate the two things - let the nationalities have their own cultural arrangements and yet let the central government provide the framework of a common economic system.” His colleague Ludwig von Mises, born in Austro- Hungarian Galicia, was an enthusiast for international institutions, and for separating economic decisions from the hurly-burly of national politics. “For the liberal,” he wrote in 1928, “the world does not end at the borders of the state ... His political thinking encompasses the whole of mankind.” Such thinking seemed imperative. Across the world, the exports had dropped by a quarter at the outbreak of the war, and global trade would not reach pre-war levels of growth again until the 1970’s. Before the war the Empire had been the largest free trade zone in Europe. Now it was divided into six states, with hard borders and often punishingly high tariffs on goods crossing them. Writing in the 1940’s, the socialist economist Karl Polanyi, born in Budapest, looked back on the end of the Habsburg economic order as a sort of bourgeois apocalypse. “Nineteenth century civilization has collapsed,” he announced in the opening sentence of The Great Transformation, a treatise that was originally titled Origins of the Cataclysm. For Polanyi, the next world order would rest on directing global markets towards socially-useful ends.
It was not just economists who dreamed of a new internationalism. The Viennese philosopher of science Karl Popper sought a “cosmopolitan scientific community, laboring for human progress.” The artist Oscar Kokoschka, born in Lower Austria, approached the League of Nations on behalf of an organization they named the Institute for World Culture, dedicated to “establishing global cultural consciousness” on the basis of Kokoschka’s all-caps concept WORLD SCIENCE. In a letter to the Secretary General Kokoschka and a colleague claimed a central role for Habsburg experience in the coming epoch, “showing the direction in which this old outpost of civilization may once more be called upon to perform an important function in the future organization of the world.” For all these men, the vanished Habsburg social order offered a model for what Musil called “a world political goal.”
Nowhere felt the disaster of the Empire’s dismemberment more keenly than the Habsburg rump state of Austria, which was struggling with hyper-inflation, hunger and political discontent. Zweig describes a culture of hoarding, where the currency was more or less worthless and people looked for stores of ‘real value’, ‘even a goldfish or an old telescope.’ For Zweig, the collapse was moral as much as economic, a world turned upside down. “A man who had saved for forty years and had also patriotically put money into the war loan became a beggar, while a man who used to be in debt was free of it. Those who had observed propriety in the allocation of food went hungry, those who cheerfully ignored the rules were well fed ... There were no standards or values as money flowed away and evaporated; the only virtue was to be clever, adaptable and unscrupulous, leaping on the back of the runaway horse instead of letting it trample you.”
Despite this experience of social dissolution, Zweig himself passed some happy and successful years living in a substantial house in Salzburg, as his fame grew and he became one of the most widely-translated authors in the world. He took the opportunity to travel, and mixed in exalted international circles. “I met the most distinguished men of every nation without having to seek them out... I saw the palaces of the Faubourg St. Germain, the palazzi of Italy, all the private collections.” Around him, as he recalled in his autobiography, the proverbial storm clouds were gathering. “My house in Salzburg was close enough to the border for me to see, with the naked eye, the mountain where Adolf Hitler’s own Berchtesgaden house stood.”
In the interwar period Zweig’s neighbor had come to see globalism not as a lost ideal to be lamented, but as the root cause of German misery. He was not alone. The rise of autarky, the doctrine of national self-sufficiency, is compellingly described by the historian Tara Zahra in Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the Wars. Instead of connection, many people thought the future lay in disconnection. Just as President Wilson had pledged to put “America First” and maintain neutrality in the First World War, so nationalist leaders across Europe made similar promises to promote self-sufficiency and resist international entanglements, both political and commercial. Whether it was the nascent technocratic “Neoliberalism” of Hayek, Mises and other economists of the Austrian school, or the World Communism of the Soviet-directed Third International, any kind of globalism was suspect in the eyes of the nationalists and populists. On the right, anti-globalists typically thought of the nation as the primary victim - under siege from Jews, Bolsheviks, migrants and international finance capital. For the left it was the worker who was threatened, often by a similar cast of characters.
In Austria, gripped by Hungerkatastrophe, much of this national identity politics revolved around food. Life there was particularly miserable. Austrians had an independence they hadn’t sought, and which had brought widespread destitution. One solution to the food crisis was what was sometimes referred to as ‘inner colonization’, or the development of under-utilized land for settlement and agriculture. In the wake of the defeat, hungry veterans and unemployed people started to build informal shack settlements at the fringes of cities. Soon they were organized and receiving government loans to start farms and gardens. It was a movement that brought together blood-and-soil nationalists with socialists, anarchists, and people who were simply desperate. One of the founders of the Austrian Association for Settlement and Small Gardens put it baldly. “The less food Austria has to get from abroad, the better it is for the national economy.” The head of the architecture division of Vienna’s Municipal Settlement Office, the government body tasked with administrating the settlements, published an opinion piece on the need to develop new food sources. “One used to speak of Austrian cuisine,” he wrote, with more than a hint of wistfulness. “Only to day we have realized that this cuisine was only possible because there was a state form called the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy ... Moravia, Poland and Hungary sent the flour, Southern Moravia and Bohemia plums, Bohemia and Moravia sugar .. we have now lost everything that nourished us. And that means reeducation. We need to create our own national cuisine. The Bohemian dumpling, the Moravian buchtel, the Italian schnitzel, all the things that were an unshakeable part of Viennese cuisine for centuries must now be replaced by local foods.”
That hungry official was Adolf Loos, the celebrated architect whose stark, unornamented structures were at the vanguard of the new Modernist style. Loos saw the settlement movement as a harbinger of revolutionary transformation, in which the urban proletariat would learn or re- learn some of the habits of the countryside. In 1921 he wrote “This new movement, which has infected all of the residents of the city like a fever ... demands new humans” with “new nerves.” These new men and women would cook their autarkic local food in rationally-organized kitchens, designed by Loos and his collaborator, Margarete Schütte- Lihotsky. Housing for the new model worker was to be austere, even deliberately Spartan; Loos insisted, for example that settlement homes should not have indoor bathrooms.
The Settlement movement soon turned sharply rightwards, and its message became straightforwardly anti-urban and anti-Socialist, paving the way for a later Nazi rural settlement project that was only open to families with the right politics and “German or similar blood.” By the end of 1939, officials were asking their superiors to speed up the removal of Jews in order to make room for new Aryan settlers.
Zweig’s first experience of Fascism had been appropriately cosmopolitan. In the Piazza San Marco in Venice, he witnessed what today we might call a flash mob, the sudden appearance and dissolution of a parade of “young men in good order”, singing the Giovinezza, the future anthem of Mussolini’s Italy. He was not unimpressed, and as late as 1941 still thought it worth mentioning that Il Duce had been one of his early Italian fans. Soon enough, the same kind of well-drilled Fascist youth were appearing closer to home. Zweig began to see them in the small towns on the German side of the border, and one day witnessed a coordinated attack on a meeting of Social Democrats “by trucks...full of young National Socialists armed with rubber truncheons.”
When his mountain neighbor came to power, Zweig found his books banned, and sometimes burned. “Medieval customs were back in fashion,” he wrote, in the tone of strained irony that typified his response to Nazism. “I have a copy of one of my books through which a nail was driven.” In 1934, his Salzburg house was searched for weapons, a form of harassment that was also a political shot across his bows. He could not understand it. There had to be “some reason why a man like me, who kept his distance from all politics and had not even exercised his right to vote for years, should have been singled out.” Outraged, he left for London, where he was to live for the next six years, until he fled to New York, not wanting to risk internment as an enemy alien.
Zweig was shattered by the loss of a Europe with which he identified himself to such an extent that, as one exile quipped, when it “began to split up into little cubicles” he felt it as a “physical dismemberment.” Writing in 1941 he commented bitterly that “not one of the hundreds of thousands, even millions of copies of my works ... can be bought in Germany today ... It is a long time since the readers and friends who write to me have dared to put my reprehensible name on an envelope.” He characterized himself as a writer who “walks behind his corpse in his own lifetime.” Klaus Mann used a similar image to describe his fellow refugee. Zweig’s biographer, George Prochnik, recounts (in The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World) that, meeting him on 5th avenue in 1941, Mann thought Zweig looked like ‘a sleepwalker’. Another exile described Zweig asking him why he thought they should both carry on living. “We are ghosts,” Zweig told him, “or memories.”
Klaus’s celebrated father, the novelist Thomas Mann, could confidently declare that wherever he was, so Germany was too, making him a powerful symbol of resistance to Nazi cooptation of German national culture. Zweig, who admitted to a “near-pathological dislike of letting my person stand in for my reputation” was constitutionally incapable of performing a similar role. In the face of the mounting horrors of Nazi rule, he refused to condemn Germany, behaving as if -- out of tact or good taste -- it were possible to avoid politics, even as his world was crumbling around him. In May 1933, the day after his books were burned in Germany, he wrote that it was important to “wait, wait, keep silent and silent again.” American reporters pressing him for a denunciation of Nazism in 1935 were stunned by his announcement that “I would never speak out against Germany. I would never speak against any country.” Zweig’s unwillingness to make political statements was widely interpreted as careerism. In 1937, the exiled communist journalist Kurt Kersten described how “we watched writers who sought consciously to avoid all controversy abstaining from even the slightest allusion and pretending that the blows they too received were nonexistent, who adopted a studied, seemingly aristocratic demeanor as a cloak for the impotence of their capacity to react.” Whether or not he was referring directly to Zweig, by the mid-thirties, the celebrated writer’s reputation, so important to him, was badly tarnished.
Wounded by the attacks, Zweig retreated into rose-tinted nostalgia. “Before 1914,” he wrote, with a kind of privileged naivety, “the earth belonged to the entire human race. Everyone could go where he wanted and stay there as long as he liked. No permits or visas were necessary, and I am always enchanted by the amazement of young people when I tell them that before 1914 I travelled to India and America without a passport. Indeed I had never set eyes on a passport. You boarded your means of transport and got off it again, without asking or being asked any questions; you didn’t have to fill in a single one of the hundred forms required today. No permits, no visas, nothing to give you trouble; the borders that today, thanks to the pathological distrust felt by everyone for everyone else, are a tangled fence of red tape were then nothing but symbolic lines on the map, and you crossed them as unthinkingly as you can cross the meridian in Greenwich.”
With the Anschluss, Zweig lost his Austrian nationality and became stateless, obliged to apply to British authorities for new documents, going overnight from being a ‘foreign guest with something of the status of a gentleman” to “an emigrant, a refugee ... a lower although not dishonorable category.” This tangle of red tape was Zweig’s nightmare. He diagnosed himself with Burophobie, a terror of bureaucracy and resented the assault on his dignity represented by the new national immigration controls. “Incorrigible representative of a freer age that I am, the would-be citizen of a world republic, I regard every one of those rubber stamps in my passport as a brand.”
Zweig had always performed charitable work, and his substitute for political engagement was facing his Burophobie and using his money and connections to help his fellow refugees. He wrote letters, arranged visas, accommodation and funds, though increasingly he felt overwhelmed and worn down by the neediness of the people who arrived at his door. “It exhausts me to have to see five or six people every day,” he wrote. “People all want something, and like dogs not yet house-trained leave traces of their mess, their cares and worries, behind.” Though he was in relative safety, his own family was still trapped in occupied Europe. Zweig had separated from his wife Friderike and begun a relationship with his secretary, later his second wife, Lotte Altman. When the Anschluss took place in 1938, Friderike was visiting her daughter Alix. making it impossible to return to Austria, She settled there and stayed until three days before the fall of Paris in 1940, when she got a pass to go to Montauban, near the border with Spain. Zweig managed to secure visas for her group to go to the USA, but to get there they had to reach a neutral port to take a ship across the Atlantic. Though Spain and Portugal were both Fascist dictatorships, Zweig had written a laudatory biography of the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, and the Salazar government was willing to grant transit visas. Zweig put them in touch with the American journalist Varian Fry, who was running a rescue network out of Marseilles. Fry helped the women join a group that included Heinrich and Gollo Mann and Alma Mahler. They crossed the Pyrenees on foot, with only what they could carry in their packs, In Lisbon, Zweig’s Portuguese publisher lent them money to buy clothes, and they boarded a Greek ship. Four months after leaving Paris, they were safe in New York.
Zweig was never able to find his footing in the US. Hoping to make himself less available to the stream of visitors who took up his time in Manhattan, he and Lotte moved to a gloomy house in what his friend, the novelist Romain Rolland, termed the banlieue sinistre of Ossining, Then they left altogether, moving to Brazil, a country which would be the last of Zweig’s substitutes for the lost utopia of his youth. In Brazil, Land of the Future, a travelogue he published soon after his arrival, he painted a picture of tropical harmony. “Whereas our old world is more than ever ruled by the insane attempt to breed people racially pure, like race horses and dogs, the Brazilian nation for centuries has been built upon the principle of a free and unsuppressed miscegenation, the complete equalization of black and white, brown and yellow.”
Critics charged that this was an overly-rosy picture of Brazilian society. The dictator Getúlio Vargas had declared himself the leader of an Estado Novo or New State, shut down the legislature and imprisoned political opponents. He had also suspended Jewish immigration, which led some to wonder if Zweig’s paean of praise for Brazil was connected in some way to his receipt of a permanent residency visa. In Petrópolis, then a bucolic town forty miles from Rio de Janeiro, Zweig was unable to forget the gulf that separated him from the cultural milieu that had formed him. His friends tried to cheer him up, but he was overwhelmed by despair, and unsettled by threatening letters from Nazi sympathizers. One morning in February 1942, he took the final corrected manuscript of his autobiography to the local post office, to be sent to his New York publisher. The next day he and Lotte took an overdose of Veronal. In a suicide note, Zweig thanked “this wonderful land of Brazil...nowhere else would I have preferred to build up a new existence, the world of my own language having disappeared for me and my spiritual home, Europe, having destroyed itself.”
After the war, the surviving Habsburg intellectuals were scattered. Many joined the “University in Exile” opened under the auspices of the New School for Social Research in New York. Von Mises took a professorship at NYU. Hayek went to the London School of Economics and then the University of Chicago, helping to found the Mont Pèlerin Society, an elite forum for Neoliberals, dedicated to the preservation of ‘the central values of civilization’ by a defense of private property and the rule of law. Polanyi was offered a teaching position at Columbia University. However, as a former communist, his wife, Ilona Duczyńska was denied a US visa, so they moved to Ontario, and Polanyi commuted across the border to his job in New York. Karl Popper escaped to New Zealand, where he wrote The Open Society and Its Enemies, proselytizing for a dynamic, global political order, dedicated to moral universalism. Oskar Kokoschka. labeled a degenerate by the Nazis, escaped to Switzerland.
Though Zweig didn’t survive to see it, internationalism was revived after the war. The Geneva Conventions, the United Nations, and international organizations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund all bear, in their different ways, a faint Habsburg imprint. Later, after the fall of the Soviet bloc and the accession of Eastern European nations to the European Union, commentators, looking for a supra-national political model, began to invoke the old Habsburg polity. Yet with Brexit, the ‘migrant crisis’ and a revival of national populism, the needle is swinging against it once again.
I actually loved this, and I think, similar to the author, that the fall of the Habsburgs says a lot about where we're at now.
Great stuff. The needle isn’t merely swinging, it is lurching away from internationalism.
Quinn Slobodian’s “Globalists” opened my eyes to the source of the viciously anti-democratic impulses behind the works of Hayek and von Mises — grateful to have this description of the collapse of the Empire to further appreciate the earthquake of ideas and their aftershocks still playing out today.