Forbidden Music (4 page)

The Congress of Vienna

The beginnings of this complex story go back a century, and bring us to the years following the final defeat of Napoleon. In 1814, Prince von Metternich, Austria's Foreign Minister, invited representatives from all of Europe's 200 sovereign States to convene at what became known as the Congress of Vienna. Despite the large numbers represented, the only significant negotiators at the Congress remained the principal European powers: Austria, Prussia, Russia, Great Britain and the restored monarchy of France. The Congress, which met over a period of two years, did not so much attempt to re-establish the pre-Napoleonic status quo as to divide the post-Napoleonic spoils of war.

In 1806, Napoleon had created or changed the status of a number of German states along France's eastern frontier by joining several of them together to form new kingdoms or duchies. Each new state was accorded a higher status than previously held so that their new rulers would become dependable allies against the Habsburgs. This so-called ‘Rhine Federation’ was not just a military alliance, but also brought with it the ‘Code Napoleon’, which resulted in a remodelling and liberalisation of both social and legal systems. Thus, the expectations of these states at the Congress of Vienna were high. The advantages they had gained could not simply be declared null and void. For the aristocratic old order, however, the aim was a return to the near-feudal system of pre-Napoleon times.

In order to understand how Europe organised itself, it is important to register the difference between a ‘state’ and a ‘nation’: a ‘nation’ is what in German is called ‘Volk’ or a people. A nation is perceived as homogenous and normally shares a common language from which springs a common culture and, often, a common religious faith. A ‘state’ is the political structure that is mounted on top of either a single nation or group of nations. It is the political unit we call today ‘a country’. A ‘nation state’ is the convergence of a single nation into its dedicated state. European leaders at the time of Prince Metternich's Vienna Congress saw no apparent contradiction in political states being imposed upon any number of diverse nations. For this reason, Metternich and his fellow reactionary aristocratic rulers opposed the dreams
of single-nation statehood which was growing more attractive as an idea among the many smaller nations spread throughout various historic, pre-existing states. In Metternich's view, a Europe of numerous nation states could not guarantee any meaningful balance of power. It may have been historically inevitable for France, tsarist Russia and England to be nation states, but it was an arrangement that was felt could never work for German-speaking central Europe.

For Metternich and the old order, it was far better to continue having subjects rallying around something inclusive, such as an emperor, rather than citizens rallying around something as exclusive as a state. After all, the French Revolution had shown how badly things could go when the nation gained control of the state.

Prussia, Austria and the Rhine Federation

By the end of the Congress of Vienna, German-ruled Europe had settled into three fundamental geopolitical units: Prussia and Austria constituted two of these and stretched respectively from the Slavic north-east and south-east towards the third unit which consisted of the cluster of states that previously formed Napoleon's Rhine-Federation. From 1815, they all regrouped as the German Federation with its proto-parliament called the Bundestag, a two-house assembly in Frankfurt which met at the palace of Thurn and Taxis. In truth it was hardly more than a talking shop of querulous fiefdoms and mini-states all pushing and shoving for advantage with the biggest players, Austria and Prussia, in the upper ‘Presidium’ making the major decisions.

The Bundestag representatives weren't elected and it was very far from being ‘democratic’ in the modern sense. As unlikely as it may seem today, these various states, including Prussia, muddled along under the respected but distant Austrian emperor who historically had been the inclusive figurehead of all the German-speaking people of Europe. Napoleon's defeat of the Austrian Emperor Franz II and the dissolution of the Habsburg Holy Roman Empire in 1806 still left the Austrian Emperor with an historic entitlement unmatched by other German rulers. The Holy Roman Empire had existed since 962 and had maintained its seat in Vienna since the sixteenth century, though it had long ceased to be either ‘holy’ or ‘Roman’. Even by 1806, it was an anachronism.

One bit of diplomatic horse-trading to come out of the Congress of Vienna was a foretaste of what a unification of the German mini-states under Prussia might become: it was agreed to hand the Rhineland to Prussia as a sop for agreeing to let Russia take Warsaw. Significantly, this included the Ruhrgebiet,
an area rich in mining and industry that guaranteed Prussia great wealth and allowed it in the coming decades to rise above rival German states. The result of this decision, added to the other regions that already made up the patchwork of Prussia, was the near encirclement of the independent states of the northern and central German Federation. As a purely German State, Prussia, despite its smaller share of Slavic holdings in the north-east, now far exceeded Austria, whose realm reached into Italy, Hungary, and deep into the Slavic East.

Biedermeier Life and the Revolution of 1848

The years 1815 to March 1848 are often referred to as the ‘Biedermeier Age’, portrayed usually as a period of comfortable bourgeois self-satisfaction. Indeed, the very name of ‘Biedermeier’ was concocted by the satirist Ludwig Eichrodt as a composite of two smug figures named ‘Biedermann’ and ‘Bummelmeier’ (‘Bieder’ in German means ‘conventional and stuffy’). Nevertheless, the Biedermeier years were anything but stolid and comfortable. The period immediately following the Congress of Vienna often evokes cosy images of ‘Hausmusik’ and intimate performances of Schubert Lieder and chamber works; yet Hausmusik, or musical evenings in private homes, were about the largest assemblies allowed by Metternich's secret police. Schubert himself was not as innocuous as one might believe. He occasionally used coded metaphors to spice up the texts of some of his best-known Lieder.
¹⁰
Eduard Hanslick, Wagner's subsequent
bête noir
, moved to Vienna from Prague in 1846 and recalled the two years before the revolution of March 1848 as offering only a diet of empty virtuoso recitals; intellectual and artistic life had stagnated. The secret police made political discussion impossible and censorship of all publications became obsessive. Metternich's suppression of national ambitions by keeping all debate under tight surveillance was a wilful misunderstanding of the aspirations of the growing middle classes and it inflamed rather than controlled the national mood. Yet powerful voices were being heard. The genteel age, peopled by genteel ‘Biedermeier-Burgers’ who were themselves mindful of recent revolutions in France and the Netherlands, were heading inevitably towards a very un-genteel revolution.

As revolutions go, the Revolution of 1848 was a peculiar affair. Though bloody and by appearances initially successful, it was ultimately unable to achieve its primary objectives of liberalising either society or the economy. It also largely failed in its most important ambition, which was the unification of the German Federation into a single German state, under a constitutional monarch. At its conclusion, exhausted revolutionaries managed at least the
abdication of the feeble-minded Emperor Ferdinand I, Metternich's pawn for the past dozen years, and had him replaced by his 18-year-old nephew, ‘Franzl’. Metternich fled to London, though three years later, with most of the important revolutionary leaders executed or imprisoned and the others compliantly subsumed within various local assemblies, he returned to Vienna as advisor to Austria's fresh-faced 21-year-old Emperor, now known as Franz Joseph I.

A short-lived but important achievement to grow out of the revolution was the freely-elected National Assembly or Nationalversammlung that met from March 1848 until its dissolution in May/June 1849. Like the ‘Bundestag’, it also met in Frankfurt, but at the Paulskirche (St Paul's Church). It was an elected assembly of lawyers, professors, intellectuals and idealists, and provided a forum in which the shape and nature of a united German State could be debated.

The complexities of the debate should not be underestimated. The notion that disparate German states and far-flung German enclaves in Russia, Poland, Hungary, Romania and other corners of Europe could somehow join together to become a single state was fraught with conflict. Though the rise of France under Napoleon had made it obvious to everyone except the delegates at the Congress of Vienna that a united German state was a necessary survival tactic, the diplomacy needed to create this was more than even the
bien-pensant
members of the Paulskirche Assembly could achieve. Germany was simply not the tidy country then that it appears today. In the nineteenth century, the concept of ‘German’ was quite literally everywhere in Europe that wasn't Slavic or Latinate. The English king was represented in the German Bundestag by the House of Hanover, as were countless other non-German holdings which historically had ended up under the rule of various German heads. This extremely wide concept of ‘German’ extended beyond Britain and into the Netherlands and Scandinavia.

Unification debates in the Paulskirche led to discussion of the pros and cons of a ‘Greater’ or ‘Lesser’ German solution. The ‘Greater’ solution included Austria and its many non-German holdings; the ‘Lesser’ solution excluded Austria altogether, which meant losing Vienna, the seat of the Habsburg Emperor and until then, the figurehead of all that was German. Defenders of the ‘Greater’ solution, who simply could not envisage a unified German state without such central players as Bohemia and Austria, toyed with the idea of subsuming non-German Austrian and Prussian holdings as satellites of a Greater Germany. Ultimately, however, it was clear that only with Austria excluded could the resulting enterprise be purely German. The price to pay would be high, so another solution was put forward to hive off Austria's German holdings, and allow them to join the united German state
while excluding the non-German holdings altogether. This was not an arrangement that the Habsburgs were prepared to accept.

Thus the Lesser German Solution eventually won through, and with Austria excluded from the newly mapped out German State, the National Assembly offered the Imperial German crown to the Prussian King, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, in April 1849. He refused, since he did not see it as a gift that was the people's to give. He would only accept the title if offered by other ruling families within the German Federation. As he is apocryphally reported to have put it, the offer ‘should come from God rather than the gutter’.

With the king's refusal and plans for a unified Germany in disarray, the Paulskirche National Assembly, without an army to enforce its will, was powerless. Friedrich Wilhelm unilaterally called a Prussian Parliament into being (backed by the Prussian army), and the National Assembly was dissolved in late spring of 1849.

In 1848, the playwright Franz Grillparzer, a patriotic Austrian, wrote the following verses: ‘Oh God, please come and see / That the Germans are set free / That their bellyaching ceases to be.‘
¹¹
More chilling was his rhyming prediction that ‘The path our latest lessons shows that Humanity / Moves along towards Nationality / Into bestiality.‘
¹²
This may have been seen at the time as a reactionary and typically Austrian point of view, but Grillparzer nonetheless identified that nationalism had the ugly tendency to define itself not so much by who could be part of a nation, but more crucially, by who would need to be left out.

The Legacy of the Revolution

Metternich's return to Vienna in 1851 only underlines how wrong it would be to assume that the Emperor Franz Joseph was in any way more sympathetic to the idea of self-determination expressed by the many nations under Habsburg control. The nominal head of the German-speaking people of Europe was also ruler over numerous Slavs, Hungarians and Italians, as well as Jews, who were perceived as just another nation which, though living in Europe, was not considered fully European. The concept of any state, even Austria, as a unified body was not an idea that Franz Joseph would even begin to entertain. Indeed, whenever he could, he removed the word Austria from official documents and replaced it with his own name. In his view, and that of Metternich, it was easier to rally support around a ruler supposedly appointed by God rather than around a mere man-made state. In addition, too many Germans were Protestant for Franz Joseph's liking. Austria thus represented a Catholic German Universalism that had little room for the secular nation state in the modern sense.

A German Showdown between Austria and Prussia

The third quarter of the nineteenth century is riddled with wars and tensions that were meant to establish a meaningful balance within Europe's powerful dynasties. The only tangible achievement of the 1848 Revolution was a number of liberalising concessions that allowed the greater German economy to boom, thus further expanding the influence of the middle-classes. At the same time, German-speaking Europe spent the ensuing 20 years fighting a number of extremely illiberal wars involving a dizzying combination of various alliances and enemies.

The ‘Holy Alliance’ between Austria, Prussia and Russia which had once defeated Napoleon was maintained after the Congress of Vienna. Until the Crimean War of 1853, Russia's absolutist influences within Austria and Prussia were not only a guarantor of Europe's feudal order – helping to restore the forces of reaction following the revolution – but also a staying hand on Prussian expansionism.

Austria joined the French and British in the Crimean War ostensibly to defend the decrepit Ottoman Empire against Russian expansionism, but in reality it was to remove Russian influence from Western Europe.

Another war in 1859 between Austria and France provided the basis for Italian unification with Austria's loss of Lombardy. Italian unification, which served as a model for German unification a few years later, was completed when the Italians sided with Prussia in the Seven Week War ending in Königgrätz in 1866. Austria (referred to by Italian freedom fighters as ‘German rulers’) was thus ejected from the rest of the peninsula apart from the port of Trieste.