Europe: A History (168 page)
Prussia’s conversion to German reunification took place in the 1860s, largely as a means for breaking out of the German Confederation and the hopeless entanglement with Austria. In the early years of William I (r. 1861–88) Prussia’s affairs had reached a very ambiguous condition. The authoritarian establishment had been strengthened by the military reforms of von Roon, whilst the
Landtag
elections had produced a liberal majority headed by the
Fortschrittspartei
of Waldeck. In 1862 Otto von Bismarck (1815–98) was appointed Premier to sort out the resultant crisis, if necessary by unconstitutional measures. His aim was to put Prussia ‘in the saddle’ in Germany, and Germany in the saddle in Europe. Immense friction was being caused by the joint Prusso-Austrian administration of Schleswig-Holstein. William I could not decide whether to lead the Confederation or to leave it to Francis-Joseph, as he did for the Frankfurt Furstentag in 1863. All these issues were settled by Bismarck’s determination to create a new North German Confederation without Austria, and by the masterly use of limited war. In 1864 Prussia attacked and defeated Denmark for annexing Schleswig. In 1866, when Austria referred the Schleswig Question to the Confederation Diet, Prussia promptly walked out, attacking and defeating Austria and Austria’s German allies. The lightning victory at Sadová, near Hradec Králové (Königgrätz), ensured Prussian supremacy, and the formation of the North German Federation. In 1870–1 Prussia attacked and defeated France. In the ensuing euphoria, Bismarck arranged for the Federation to admit the South German states and for William I to be proclaimed German Emperor. Germany was reunited; the conservative citadel was triumphant, and the liberals baffled.
[HERMANN]
GATTOPARDO
M
AY
1860.
‘Nunc et in hora mortis nostrae
. Amen.’ The daily recital of the Rosary was over. For half an hour the steady voice of the Prince had recalled the Sorrowful and the Glorious Mysteries; other voices had interwoven a lilting hum from which, now and again, would chime some unlikely word; love, virginity, death. During that hum the whole aspect of the rococo drawing room seemed to change. Even the parrots spreading iridescent wings over the silken walls appeared abashed. Even the Magdalen between the two windows looked penitent…
Now everything returned to its usual order or disorder. Bendico, the Great Dane, came wagging his tail through the door by which the servants had left. The women rose slowly to their feet, their swaying skirts baring the naked, mythological figures painted all over the milky depths of the tiles. Only an Andromeda remained covered by the soutane of Father Pirrone, still deep in extra prayer.. ,
1
Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, was performing the ageless family rituals at his villa above Palermo. Sicily was passing through the uneasy interval between the abortive rising in Messina in April and Garibaldi’s landing at Marsala on 11 May. The Prince, known from his coat-of-arms as ‘the Leopard’, was entering the twilight of the Bourbon monarchy, of feudal privilege, and of his own blighted emotional life.
Historical novels come in many categories. The cheap ones pillage the past to provide an exotic backdrop to unrelated fiction. Some use it as a neutral stage to impart conviction to the discussion of timeless issues. A few can enrich one’s understanding both of history and of humanity. //
Gattopardo
(The Leopard), published in 1958, was the posthumous work of Giuseppe Tomasi (1896–1957), Duke of Palma and Prince of Lampedusa. Rarely has a novelist shown such empathy, such historical sensitivity.
May 1910. Don Fabrizio’s three maiden daughters still live at the Villa Salina. The relics of the family chapel have to be cast out, having been declared false by the Cardinal Archbishop. By chance, Bendico’s fur, long preserved as a rug, is thrown out with them. As the carcass was dragged off, the glass eyes stared at her with humble reproach. What remained of Bendico was flung into a corner of the yard. During its flight from the window, its form recomposed itself for an instant; in the air there seemed to be a dancing quadruped with long whiskers, its right foreleg raised in imprecation. Then all found peace in a little piece of livid dust.
Poi tutto trovó pace in un mucchietto di polvere livida.
3
The Polish national movement had the longest pedigree, the best credentials, the greatest determination, the worst press, and the least success. It traced its origins to the anti-Russian confederations of the eighteenth century, and it bred an armed rising in every generation between the Partitions and the Second World War—in 1733,1768,1794,1830,1848,1863,1905,1919,1944. It nourished a precocious brand of nationalism which was already maturing in Napoleonic times. At heart this had little to do with economic rationale, everything with the will to preserve culture, identity, and honour.
The Polish risings of the early nineteenth century aimed to restore the crucified commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania. They were driven on by the mystical images of romantic poetry, by the conviction that Poland, ‘the Christ of Nations’, would have its ‘Third Day’:
Hail, O Christ, Thou Lord of Men!
Poland in Thy footsteps treading
Like Thee suffers, at Thy bidding
Like Thee, too, shall rise again.
35
The principal actions were directed from the Congress Kingdom against Russia, although Poles from Austria and Prussia also took part. Sympathetic outbreaks occurred in Lithuania, Byelorussia, and Ukraine. In November 1830 a wild conspiracy, provoked by rumours of the Tsar’s plan to dispatch his Polish army against Belgium, sparked a Russo-Polish war. The Tsar rejected the advice of a government in Warsaw taken over by the conservative Prince Czartoryski and refused all dialogue. So matters were left to the intransigents. On this occasion the professional Polish army had a real chance of victory, but was gradually outflanked and overwhelmed. In September 1831, when the Russians stormed the last emplacements near Warsaw, they found the corpse of General Sowiński still upright among the fields of dead and dying. The old Napoleonic officer had ordered his men to plant his wooden leg ‘firmly in the Polish soil’, so as not to bow to tyrants. The constitution of the Congress Kingdom was suspended. All insurgents were deprived of their freedom and their property. Ten thousand exiles found their way to France; tens of thousands more were marched to Siberia in chains.
HERMANN
T
HE
Hermannsdenkmal
, the monument to Arminius, stands on a lofty outcrop above the wooded slopes of the Teutoburgerwald near Detmold in Westphalia. It commemorates the victory in
ad
9 of the Germanic chieftain Hermann, or Arminius the Cherascon, who somewhere nearby annihilated the invading Roman legions. A colonnaded pedestal supports a gigantic statue in beaten copper nearly 30 m in height. Ten times life size, Hermann frowns under his winged helmet as he brandishes a huge sword of vengeance over the plain below.
The monument took nearly forty years to build. Like the classical Temple of Walhalla (1830–42), built by the King of Bavaria on a bluff overlooking the Danube near Regensburg, it was conceived in a generation that remembered Napoleon and the wars of liberation. But it was not completed until Germany was united and German nationalism was assuming a more muscular form. The designer and prime mover of the project, Ernst von Bandel, had repeatedly failed to find the necessary finance. He finally succeeded by raising subscriptions from schools throughout the German empire. Hermann was unveiled in 1875, a fitting symbol of the Empire’s new-found pride.
In the heyday of nationalism, every self-respecting nation felt honour-bound to find heroes suitable for commemoration; and public monuments served a definite social and educational purpose. The
Hermannsdenkmal
led the field in a special pseudo-historical genre that swept Europe.
1
In Germany it had several rivals, including the
Niederwaldsdenkmal
on the banks of the Rhine, the equestrian statue of Emperor William I on the Kyffhauser Mountain in Thuringia, and the
Völkerschlachtdenkmal
(1913), which was erected by a league of patriots in Leipzig on the centenary of the Battle of the Nations. In time and spirit, it closely resembles the statue to that most unparliamentary of kings, Richard Cceur de Lion, erected beside the Houses of Parliament in London, the Grunwald monument (1910) in Cracow, and the monument to Vercingetorix on the Plateau de Gergovie near Clermont-Ferrand.
Perhaps the ultimate in the political aesthetics of national sentiment can be found in the monument to Prince Llewellyn’s dog, Gelert, which was erected at Beddgelert (Gelert’s Grave) in North Wales in the 1790s.
2
The greater the pathos, the remoter the time, and the more the Romantic generation enthuse over these reminders of their roots.
Polish activities in 1848 were dampened by the fiasco of an intended general rising two years earlier, when the Republic of Cracow had sealed its fate by not controlling the revolutionaries. Thousands of nobles had been massacred in the surrounding Galician countryside by peasants abetted by Austrian officials. Poland’s contribution to the ‘springtime of other nations’, therefore, was one minor disturbance in Posnania, two outbursts in Cracow and Lemberg, and a major contingent of exiles, headed by General Jozef Bern, which fought for Hungary.
In January 1863, the Congress Kingdom erupted once more, frustrated by the contradictions of the ‘Tsar Liberator’, Alexander II. Whilst emancipating the serfs of his Empire, Alexander was not prepared to grant the Poles a constitution. Two years of patriotic demonstrations in Warsaw led by priests, pastors, and rabbis ended with the formation of a secret National Government. Sixteen months of fierce guerrilla warfare ended with the executions of the insurgent leaders on the walls of the citadel. On this occasion the Congress Kingdom itself was suppressed. Eighty thousand Poles made the terrible journey to Siberia—the largest of all political contingents in tsarist history.
In 1905 the torch of patriotic insurrection was taken up by the Polish Socialist Party. Waves of strikes and street battles in Warsaw and Lodz long outlasted the contemporary Russian revolt in St Petersburg. Huge conscriptions of sullen young men from the Polish provinces filled the ranks of the Russian army, fighting with no great conviction against the Japanese in Manchuria.
The persistent defeats of Polish nationalism fostered two important developments. Later generations of patriots often chose to work for their country rather than fight for it. Their concept of ‘organic work’ aimed to strengthen economic and cultural resources, and to curb all political demands beyond local autonomy. This became the standard strategy for all national movements whose military and diplomatic support was deficient. At the same time, ‘integral nationalism’ made its appearance in each of the nationalities of the Polish lands. Lithuanian, Byelorussian, Ukrainian, and Zionist Jewish nationalism each took a stance which effectively paralysed any sense of a common struggle. Dmowski’s Polish nationalists fiercely contested Piłsudski’s Polish independence movement. Its slogans demanding a ‘Poland for the Poles’ revealed deep anti-German, anti-Ukrainian, and antisemitic complexes.
Within the Russian Empire, important gradations could be seen in official attitudes to the rising tide of nationalism. Byelorussians and Ukrainians were simply not permitted to possess a separate identity. Poles, until 1906, were not permitted any form of political expression. Yet in the Grand Duchy of Finland, Finns enjoyed the autonomy of which many of their neighbours were deprived. The Baltic Germans, largely Lutherans, enjoyed the religious and cultural toleration that was denied the other inhabitants of the Baltic provinces. ‘The prison of the nations’ had many bars, and many holes in the wall.
The national question in Austria-Hungary was particularly recondite. The
Ausgleich
of 1867 was intended to moderate the problems; in practice it rendered them insoluble. There was no chance that the German-speaking élite could.
impose its culture throughout Austria, let alone extend it to the whole of the Dual Monarchy. After all, ‘Austria was a Slav house with a German façade’. In practice the three ‘master races’—the Germans, the Magyars, and the Galician Poles— were encouraged to lord it over the others. The administrative structures were so tailored that the German minority in Bohemia could hold down the Czechs, the Magyars in Hungary could hold down the Slovaks, Romanians, and Croats, and the Poles in Galicia could hold down the Ruthenians (Ukrainians). So pressures mounted as each of the excluded nationalities fell prey to the charms of nationalism. What is more, when Habsburg politics were complicated by the introduction first of the
Reichsrat
or ‘Imperial Council’ and eventually, in 1896, of universal suffrage, the three ruling groups could only maintain their supremacy by an endless game of deals and compromises. The Austrian Germans, who dominated the court and army, could only fend off the fiery Magyars by upholding the interests of ultra-conservative Polish aristocrats from Galicia. As a result, the Poles remained the most staunchly
Kaisertreu
element to the end. The Magyars were eternally dissatisfied; German opinion in Austria was increasingly drawn back to the old idea of a Greater Germany, and the Czechs in particular felt hopelessly trapped. Francis-Joseph I (r. 1848–1916), who described himself as ‘the last monarch of the old style’, ruled over a truly multinational state, where the imperial hymn could be sung in any one of seventeen official languages, including Yiddish. He was popular exactly because of his political immobility. Under the surface, the untreated ills were starting to fester. As one Prime Minister was ready to admit: ‘It is my policy to keep all the nationalities in the Monarchy in a balanced state of well-modulated dissatisfaction.’
36
[GENES]
Europe was filled with national movements which do not feature in the textbooks. Many of the smaller communities willingly confined themselves to cultural tasks. In Provence, Frederic Mistral (1830–1914) was able to organize the revival of Provencal language and culture and yet be elected to the French Academy. In Wales, the custom of an annual
Eisteddfod
or bardic meeting was revived in 1819 after centuries of abeyance. The pseudo-druidical ceremonies initiated at Llangollen in 1858 became an essential feature of the series. In Germany, Slavonic Polabs, Sorbs, and Kashubs, resurrected their ancient Slavonic cultures. The Polabs had survived in a tiny enclave round Liichow near Hanover; a collection of their literature and a grammar-book were published with Russian assistance in 1871. The Sorbs of Lusatia, who numbered perhaps 200,000, established a
Macica
or ‘cultural society’ at Budisyn (Bautzen) in 1847. The Kashubs of Pomerania did likewise.
