Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

 

By Simon Winder (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 551 pages, $30)

Reviewed by Jules L. Wagman

British author Simon Winder has cooked up a tasty Habsburgian goulash.

He starts with Austrians, adds Hungarians, Serbs, Croatians, Czechs, Jews, Bulgarians, Poles, Slovakians, Slovenians, Gypsies, Romanians and several other all-but-forgotten tribes, stirs them for several centuries and dishes out a delicious Cook’s tour of central Europe from the end of the Middle Ages to the present.

Danubia is best enjoyed by sitting back and savoring the people, ideas, places, events, objets d’art and junque. It’s a real goulash. Don’t expect dates of battles or well-reasoned analysis.

Winder wrote a similar book, Germania, equally madcap. He takes to the byroads to see what turns up, the more illogical and unbelievable, the better. His joy is wandering about central Europe, finding stray royals, castles, keeps, abbeys, battlefields and museums. He has an interesting take on the empire which birthed World War I and, he declares, planted the seeds for World War II.

He blames railroads for much of Europe’s troubles, declaring that trains let people easily leave their villages and move en masse to the cities. He writes ominously, “In 1908 the teenaged Adolf Hitler arrived in Vienna, one of many thousands of badly off German-speakers from Upper Austria looking to the big city to find their fortunes.”

Winder emphasizes the large number of languages, nationalities and tribes simmering through the centuries of Habsburg rule in central Europe. The only identity that people really understood was their language, which could have been German, Hungarian, Slavic, Yiddish or anything else. The official schoolroom language was a major issue.

Marking the imperial court were aristocrats jostling for position while the countryside remained comparatively empty, tempting the covetous eyes of invaders from anywhere, everywhere and especially, for centuries, from the Ottoman Empire. How the Habsburgs remained in power for so long baffles him.

In 1916, the “incompetent” Russians, led by a “brilliant enough” general, mounted an offensive while the Austrian general staff was at a “gala dinner” 400 miles behind the front. The generals couldn’t be bothered to interrupt their festivities and the front “crumbled like a pastry shell,” with 250,000 Austrians captured.

In the end, the German army came in to stabilize the front but not before casualties totaled 750,000, more than half of them prisoners, and the Habsburg army “more or less ceased to exist as an independent force.”

Danubia is a first-class book for someone planning to visit central Europe, or just enjoying history. The gems Winder turns up are not to be found anywhere else. For example, the tomb of the great composer Joseph Haydn in the “Mountain Church” in Eisenstadt contains his body and two heads. The explanation is too long for a book review, besides it’ll be fun to read on pages 282-3.

Eisenstadt, southeast of Vienna, was the home of the famed Esterhazy family. They were Hungarian nobles who grew fabulously rich by ingratiating themselves with both the Holy Roman Emperors—the Habsburgs—and the Roman Catholic Church.

Winder doesn’t think much of Vienna’s showy public buildings, calling them overblown. But he concedes that they have aged well since being built in the 19th century and they look better now as relics of that bygone era.

It’s possible to get lost in the first two hundred pages while Winder takes innumerable side trips but everything begins to fall into place around the year 1600 and after that the fun really begins.

Jules L. Wagman has been reviewing books since 1966.

© 2014 Jules L. Wagman