Is Britain having a Habsburg moment? It’s a chilling thought, given the story of that central European empire which came to a cataclysmic end just over a century ago, shredded by war and irreconcilable internal tensions. And yet, a glance at the bookshelves and screens of Brexit Britain reveals a certain fascination with the state — and fate — of Old Vienna.
Two writers in particular are enjoying something of a revival among British readers: Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth. Contemporaries, friends and fellow-exiles from Nazi persecution, they wrote some of the most elegant, and melancholic accounts of “old Europe” and its demise. I have lost count of the number of people — including, strictly between us, one at the very top of this newspaper’s editorial operations — who have confessed to be savouring the charms of Zweig’s classic The World of Yesterday. Similarly, Roth’s works, including his masterpiece The Radetzky March, are finding new readers, partly thanks to new, better English translations of his tales of imperial decline.
Meanwhile television brings the drama Vienna Blood, in which a sharp young Jewish medic draws on the newfangled ideas of a certain Dr Freud to help a more seasoned detective solve a series of grisly crimes. This is served up in a high definition melange of old formalities, lust, violence, seething anti-Semitism and modernism. We are presented with a city that is seemingly at the centre of it all and yet teetering on the edge. For some historical context, the BBC helpfully resurfaced a documentary series by Simon Sebag-Montefiore tracing the rise and fall of Vienna, from grandeur to gutter politics.
Seen from the perspective of the UK today, it all holds a grisly fascination. The issue of grand decline has been one of the hardy features (cited as both cause and symptom) of the agonisingly drawn-out Brexit process.
Frank Tallis, a clinical psychologist and the author of the series of novels on which Vienna Blood is based, sees “tremendous parallels” between life in pre-1914 Vienna and his home city of London in 2019. The energy and creativity of a world city testing the frontiers of new ideas and expression. The tensions and undercurrents bred by wrenching social and economic change and inequalities in a city with a burgeoning population. The enduring formalities, codes and snobberies pitched against groundbreaking and innovative ideas.
He also highlights specific points where he sees similarities between then and now, from rising anti-Semitism to the growing incidences of mental illness. This was (and is?) “reflective of tensions in broader society, the stresses of ‘end times’”.
Andrea Capovilla, head of University of London’s Ingeborg Bachmann Centre, highlights another parallel: the shift in status for certain minorities. “You think that you are resident of a country — and then things change.”
For Roth and Zweig, who took pride in being Austrian, this came through anti-Semitism, at first dismissed only to become life-threatening. For Ms Capovilla, who came to the UK from Austria 30 years ago, it is the fate of the 3m or so EU citizens living in Britain — those who, as Prime Minister Boris Johnson would have it, treated the country “as their own” but who now find themselves in unsettled status. She is careful to add that the parallels should not be pushed too far.
Before the comparisons become too frenzied, there are perhaps some more humdrum insights to be drawn from the old Austrians.
In Roth’s The Emperor’s Tomb, a sort-of companion novel to The Radetzky March, the main character, a dandy whose main aim in life seems to be to cut a dash in the café (that very Viennese stage of mannered vanities) introduces his farmer cousin from Slovenia into metropolitan society. The cousin spends his winter touring the empire, roasting and selling chestnuts with an old mule and a cauldron. It provides a decent income and gets him through.
After the war, however, he finds his livelihood shot. The collapse and dissolution of the empire has spawned countless new states, each with their own visa and customs arrangements. The single Habsburg market is no more. Unable to roam, his chestnuts rot and his livelihood is lost. Customs alignment anyone?
