performed out of filial piety. My father had never been an easy man to get on with, so the visits had become less and less frequent with the years.
We had last met in Vienna back in July, when he was invited to my investiture as a Maria-Theresien Ritter, and also to my wedding two days later. In the event the wedding had been cancelled—or rather, much reduced in scale and moved to a suburban registry office—and the old man had been cabled not to bother coming. Not that he had minded a great deal: he disapproved of the marriage on eugenic principle—mingling good Germanic blood with that of a Magyar-Romanian minor aristocrat from Transylvania, even though it was patently obvious that both he and I were solid square-faced Slav peasants. Remarks had been made about “the degenerate mongrel aristocracy of the Habsburg corpse-empire; the sweepings of Europe gathered up by Vienna and set to rule over the solid fair- haired peasants and burghers of the Germanic borderlands.” In fact he had not been too keen on the Cross of Maria Theresa either: “a piece of worthless Habsburg tinware manufactured in the Jew-shops of Vienna” was how he had chosen to characterise the Old Monarchy’s highest military honour. I believe that he bore no particular animus against Elisabeth as a person—after all, being a degenerate mongrel aristocrat was not her fault—but there was no warmth either. Before he had turned to German Nationalism my father had once been a Czech liberal nationalist, and he still retained a Czech democrat’s somewhat less than total admiration for countesses, even where (as in this case) the countess had renounced her title and was about as devoid of snobbery as it is possible for anyone to be.
In any case, the old boy had more important things on his mind at present than his son’s new wife: he had just become the local organiser of the recently formed Deutscher Volksbund in this part of Moravia. It was a mark, I suppose, of how far the Habsburg state had fallen into senile decay by the year 1916 that it could now look through its fingers when a quite high-ranking provincial civil servant became a part-time functionary of an extreme German nationalist organisation which, if not exactly a political party, was not far off being one. In days gone by Vienna had been intensely mistrustful of any nationalist activity, German quite as much as any other sort, and would not have tolerated it for one moment in a civil servant. The old doctrine was that whoever entered the service of the House of Austria ceased to have a nationality. And to be fair to them, nearly everyone lived up to that high ideal. But now it seemed that after two years of war and a humiliating chain of defeats rectified only by German troops and German brains, the Dual Monarchy was fast becoming a spiritual colony of the Greater German Reich, which already extended from Flanders to the marshes of the Tigris.
The Deutscher Volksbund claimed to be nothing more than a patriotic organisation of German-speakers within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But you would certainly have been hard put to it to see any sign of that in our house on the Olmutzergasse. It had been turned into a shrine to the Goddess Germania, with more than a hint of Wotan- worship. Portraits of Hindenburg and Ludendorff hung on the walls, draped in black-red-gold banners. A smaller portrait of the German Kaiser hung below them. Garlands in the black-white-red of Prussia bedecked a full- length portrait of Oberleutnant Brandys, the spike- helmeted hero who was supposed to have captured Fort Douanmont at Verdun virtually single-handed. Everywhere, posters for the German Flottenverein and the 7th War Loan and the German Women’s League; posters exhorting Gott to straff Engeland and for people to give their Gold in exchange for Eisen. A vast map of Europe covered the whole of one wall. On it the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires had been merged with most of Belgium and sizeable chunk of northern France into one dingy uniform expanse of field grey surrounded by barbed wire and with its borders bristling with bayonets. Beneath it was a legend in Gothic script: It has come at fast, never to perish—% reich °f ninety millions. In the alcove in the hallway, where once the family’s statue of the Madonna had stood, was now a wooden pedestal bearing a German steel helmet—the kind Oberleutnant Friml and his marauders had been wearing a few days before—with a slot cut in the top for coins. A plaque fixed to the pedestal proclaimed: The most sublime shape our century has yet produced: not the work of an artist's studio, but forged from the union of the German spirit with German steef. It was all intensely depressing.
Worse was to come that first evening as I took Elisabeth for a stroll around the town. The atmosphere of the place was oppressive in the extreme. It had never been a particularly friendly place as I remembered it: like many towns and cities in the Old Monarchy, it had been disputed territory between two nationalities, or in this case, between three of them— German, Czech and Polish—who each had their own name for the place and each claimed it as their own exclusive property. In the years before the war the heavy presence of official Austria, in the shape of its gendarmes and civil servants—and in extremis, its soldiers in the barracks on the Troppau road—had preserved an uneasy quiet in Hirschendorf, broken only by the occasional riot. But now that Austria-Hungary was at war in alliance with Imperial Germany, the German faction in Hirschendorf was letting it be known in no uncertain manner that they were on top and intended staying there. In pre-war Austria the Germans had felt themselves an increasingly threatened minority in a country that they had once regarded as their rightful property. But now the tables had been turned: the Czechs and Poles and Slovenes and all the rest of the impudent riff-raff were now themselves minorities—and small ones at that—in a Greater German Reich of ninety million people.
Certainly no opportunity was being missed in Hirschendorf in the summer of 1916 to ram that message down the throats of the non- Germans. The town’s Czech newspaper had been closed down under emergency powers and a number of Czech nationalists had been arrested by the military and interned. The local Polish organisations had been forbidden to hold meetings and were being watched by the police. Also the statue “The Spirit of Austria” had been removed from the public gardens in the middle of the town square.
The statue had never been much of a success. It had been put up at Vienna’s behest in 1908 to mark the Emperor’s sixtieth jubilee and to try and promote some nebulous concept described as “the Austrian Idea” among the Monarchy’s quarrelling subjects. Commissioned from the studios of the sculptor Engelbrecht, it represented a willowy young female nude in characteristically flowing Wiener Sezession style, holding aloft a very clumsy-looking broadsword, hilt-uppermost, as if someone had absent-mindedly left it on a tram and she was calling after them to attract their attention. It was an innocent enough piece of statuary, in fact quite graceful and pleasing to look at, even if no one could ever quite work out what naked young women holding swords had to do with Old Austria. But somehow, far from promoting a spirit of unity and mutual tolerance, it had managed only to provoke the warring factions into an even more bilious passion. Each nationality became obsessed with the idea of claiming the statue for themselves, and the favoured method was to creep up in the dead of night with paint pots and adorn the young woman with a striped bathing costume: either black-red-gold if it was the Germans, or red-white-blue if it was the Czechs, or simple red and white if it was the Poles. The municipal cleansing department must have spent thousands of kronen over the years in paint removers and wire brushes.
But now “the Spirit of Austria” was no more. Both she and the square’s other statue, Imperial General Prince Lazarus von Regnitz—“noted in the wars against the Turk”—had been melted down to make driving- bands for artillery shells, and her place had been taken by a monstrous wooden “Denksaule”: a hideous commemorative column with a bust of Field Marshal von Hindenburg on top and with medallions of Ludendorff, the Kaiser, Frederick the Great, Bismarck, Wagner and other German heroes around the sides. It was studded with iron nails driven in by those who had donated money to the War Loan and other such patriotic funds. Stupid and dodderingly oppressive as it might have been, the Old Austrian Monarchy was a state conceived on a human scale, and had undeniably displayed a certain taste in artistic matters. Now it seemed that we were being engulfed by the very grossest sort of Greater German vulgarity: the bloated blood-and-iron bombast; the increasingly crazed gigantism; the total lack of any sense of proportion.
And around this idol to the Germanic war-god set up in Hirschendorf town square there limped its human votaries: the soldiers in shabby field grey enjoying what might be their last leave; the women in black whose husbands and sons had already had their last leave; the overworked housewives and their ill-nourished children; and the men in the hideous blue uniforms of the wounded, some with empty sleeves, many with dark glasses and white sticks, some on crutches or (in one case) legless and pushing himself along on a little wheeled trolley. As Elisabeth and I sat on the terrace of the cafe-hotel “Zum Weissen Lowe” and drank our raspberry-leaf tea, we saw a proclamation being posted up on the side of the government offices on the other side of the square. It announced the hanging in Olmutz jail the previous day of five local men who had deserted to the Russians in 1915 and then been recaptured in Volhynia wearing the uniform of the Czech Legion. The proclamation was only what the law required, I suppose, and would have been pasted up even before the war. But now it was accompanied by five photographs in close- up, each showing a black-faced man dangling by his crooked neck from a gallows.
The proclamation was taken down the next day so as not to add a sour note to the celebrations of the Emperor’s birthday. I had to turn up of course, in best Flottenrock complete with sword-belt and the Cross of Maria
