16.Austria, the Country That Nobody Appreciated Until It no Longer Existed

THE present Republic of Austria has 6,000,000 inhabitants and 2,000,000 of these live in the capital city of Vienna. As a result of this extraordinary arrangement, the country is top-heavy and the marvellous old town on the Danube(which is a muddy gray and not at all as blue as the famous waltz might make you expect)is slowly degenerating into a dead city where disheartened old men and women wander aimlessly among the ruins of their former glory, while the younger generation has fled abroad to start a new existence amidst happier surroundings or has committed suicide because life at home had become intolerable.Within another hundred years the gay city of Vienna(one of the few cities where the people seemed to be really happy, if often in a sort of childish and careless way),that old, important center of science and medicine and the arts, will have become a second Venice.From being a capital of an empire containing more than 50,000,000 people it has become a mere village dependent upon the tourist traffic and what little importance it retains as a port of call for the boats that carry the products of Bohemia and Bavaria to Roumania and to the Black Sea.

At present the geography of the ancient Danube monarchy(this name, by which Austria was formerly known, expressed the true nature of the country about as well as anything could do)is extremely complicated, for it has been hacked to pieces in such an arbitrary fashion as to be almost unrecognizable. But the former dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary was a perfect example of how natural conditions will influence the formation of strong centralized states.Forget all about frontiers for a moment and look at the map of this region, which was situated almost in the very heart of the European continent, as far away from the toe of Italy's foot as from the nose of the Danish peninsula.It was really an immense circle of flat lands and rolling territory, entirely surrounded by high mountain-ranges.On the west there were the Alps of Switzerland and the Tyrol.In the north were the Erz Mountains and the Riesengebirge(the Giant Mountains)of Bohemia, and the Carpathians, which formed a semi-circle sheltering the Hungarian Puszta(or steppes)against invasions from the side of the Slavic plains.The Danube separated the Carpathians and their southern part, the so-called Transylvanian Alps, from the Balkan Mountains, and the Dinaric Alps were the barrier that protected the plains from the raw winds of the Adriatic Sea.

The people who founded this state had very imperfect maps and their theoretical knowledge of geography was quite negligible. But just as our pioneers who conquered the West followed certain definite tracks and routes without ever having consciously studied an outline of the road that carried them to their final destination, so did those medieval conquerors accumulate their vast holdings by merely doing what was“immediately practicable”without bothering themselves about the theoretical side of the problem.Such things took care of themselves.Nature provided them with certain unavoidable“consequences”and Man, whenever he is wise, quietly obeys her commands.

During the first thousand years of our era, the great Hungarian plain was a veritable no-man's-land, invaded by all the tribes who followed the course of the Danube on their way from the Black Sea to the west and were without any settled form of government. Charlemagne, during his life-long warfare upon the Slavic people from the east, founded a small“mark”or frontier post, as we would call it, which being the eastern mark or“Oester Reich”(the same word as our Austria)gave birth to the principality that eventually was to dominate that entire part of the world.Although at times overrun by the Hungarians and the Turks(the last siege of Vienna by the Turks took place long after Harvard University had been founded)the little mark firmly handled and efficiently administered, first of all by the Babenberg family and afterwards by the Habsburgs, our Swiss friends whom I mentioned a few pages ago, always came out on top.Eventually these rulers of a petty, frontier state even managed to get themselves elected as Emperors of that Holy Roman Empire, which was neither Roman nor Holy nor an Empire, but merely a loose federation of all the different Germanspeaking races.They held this title until the year 1806 when Napoleon threw it on the scrap-heap because he intended to put an imperial crown on his own proletarian brow.

But even thereafter these not over-brilliant but tenacious Habsburgs managed to keep a finger—and a most important finger—in the German pie until finally in 1866 Prussia pushed them back across their own mountains and bade them stay where they belonged.

Today the old Eastern Mark, reduced to the rank of a seventh-rate nation, torn by internal strife and without any hope for a better future, consists, for the greater part, of that mountainous region which is but a continuation of the Swiss Alps and which contains the remnants of those famous Tyrolean mountains which were handed over to Italy by the treaty of Versailles on the ground that once upon a time they had been part of the ancient Roman Empire. This mountainous region contains two towns of some importance, Innsbruck, where the ancient route to Italy via the Brenner Pass crosses the River Inn, and where everything reminds one of the Middle Ages, and Salzburg, the birthplace of Mozart, which is one of the most beautiful cities of Europe and which tries to keep alive today by providing the world with a few musical and theatrical performances.

Neither these mountains nor those of the Bohemian plateau in the north produce anything of any value. The same can be said of the so-called Viennese basin where the Romans founded an armed camp called Vindobona(or Vienna),a small settlement which gained some notoriety when the famous philosopher-emperor, Marcus Aurelius, died there in the year 180 after one of his many campaigns against the barbarians of the northern Germanic plains.The town, however, did not come into its own until ten centuries later, when the great migrations of the Middle Ages, also called the Crusades, made it the point of departure for all those who tried to reach the Promised Land by following the Danube rather than by entrusting themselves to the racketeering ship-owners of Genoa and Venice.

In the year 1276 it became the residence of the Habsburg family and the center of their vast domains, which eventually included all the land between the mountain-ranges enumerated a few pages back. In the year 1485 the Hungarians captured the city.In 1529 and again in 1683 the Turks laid siege to it.But the town survived all these misadventures until the beginning of the eighteenth century, when it began to disintegrate as a result of a mistaken policy which entrusted every position of any importance in the monarchy to noblemen of strictly Germanic origin.Too much power is a hard thing for all people, and the amiable Austrian knights were no exception.They ceased to be merely amiable and became feeble and weak.

In the old dual monarchy,47% of the people were of Slavic origin and only 25%(or one-quarter)were Germans, while the rest consisted of Hungarians(19%)and Roumanians(7%)with about 600,000 Italians(1. 5%)and about 100,000 Gypsies who stuck pretty closely to Hungary where they were treated more or less like respectable citizens.

The German“masters”apparently were never able to learn the lessons which the rest of Europe was slowly beginning to take to heart. Monarchies and an aristocracy can only survive as long as they are willing to assume leadership.The moment they begin to talk about“service”instead of“leadership”,they are doomed.After the endless defeats of the Austrian armies during the Napoleonic wars, the people of Vienna got into such a state of irritation in regard to their princely and grandducal and baronial rulers that they practically forced them to leave the town and retire to their country estates, where they vegetated and got completely out of touch with the rest of the land.

It was then that geography came to the assistance of the city. With the nobility out of the way, the merchants and the manufacturers could at last come into their own.Vienna, freed from its ancient fortifications(they were so enormous that the sale of the land they covered paid for the different extensions of the town),rapidly developed into the most important commercial, scientific and artistic center of eastern Europe.

The World War made a sudden end to both riches and glory. The country now called Austria bears practically no resemblance to the empire of which it was the head until only a few years ago.Its future is entirely behind it.It is a state in name only.The refusal of the French to let it join the German Republic was the last straw.

It might just as well be put up for public sale. But who would want to buy it?