Book Review: Danubia
Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe
They defended Central Europe against wave upon wave of Ottoman attacks. They intervened decisively against Protestantism. They came to stand - against their will - as champions of tolerance in a nineteenth-century Europe driven mad by ethnic nationalism. They developed marital or military relations with pretty much every part of Europe they did not already own.
"Through cunning, dimness, luck and brilliance the Habsburgs had an extraordinarily long run," Winder tells us in his typically engaging prose. "All empires are in some measure accidental, but theirs was particularly so, as sexual failure, madness or death tipped a great pile of kingdoms, dukedoms and assorted marches and counties into their laps."But he admits right at the start of Danubia that he's a strict amateur when it comes to that Imperial history, and he intends to remain one. "I have restricted myself simply to writing about some of the things I personally find fascinating," he admits. "Similarly, some emperors are simply more alluring than others and I have preferred to spend time on a fascinating handful rather than colour in all the duds too." This approach necessarily leads to a much more anecdotal volume than, say, Andrew Wheatcroft's The Habsburgs: Embodying Empire, and it runs the risk of letting the whole book fall between two stools. A book that styles itself as a combination of history and travelogue stands a good chance of ending up as a double failure rather than a partial success.Winder has done a fair amount of research on the thousand years he's touring; his book has a dozen-page bibliography of novels and secondary sources, and the heft of his narrative here is noticeably more satisfying than anything he achieved in Germania. And he often manages to incorporate the "personal" part of his "personal history" quite smoothly, as when he visits the last known address of the 13th-century Rudolf I:
Rudolf died at Speyer and is buried in the Imperial cathedral there. I was lucky enough to arrive in Speyer late in the evening in winter and slip into the cathedral shortly before it shut. It is a staggeringly powerful, harsh and threatening building with its sheer weight of stone a perfect symbol of Imperial power. For anyone growing up in England and France and used to Gothic it is very alarming to be surrounded by Romanesque gigantism, particularly when made expressionist by malevolent pools of darkness and weird echoes from shuffling feet.
And although he peppers his prose with far too many slangy bits for my taste ("duh!" and the like), he's got a knack for evocative descriptions. He has nothing new or historically insightful to say, for example, about the emperor Franz Josef II, but his summation of the man sticks in the memory:
Joseph II spent his reign at the heart of a gimcrack, exhausting machine of his own invention, which required him to pull all the levers and crank all the handles. It was as though he was personally atoning for all his predecessors' blank-faced lack of interest in administrative reform. The effort killed him and there is something a bit mad and depressing about the whole performance ...
There are signs throughout the book that Danubia may have been written in haste or in distraction. Winder's many personal enthusiasms - for food, for classical music, for architecture, for literature - crop up frequently in passionate asides like this one about Aharon Appelfeld's piercing 1978 novella Badenheim 1939:
The genius of Badenheim 1939 is the way that it panders to the idea of the spa as a place which is necessarily harmless and charming, while allowing tiny glances of horror to intervene, which until the end almost everyone refuses to notice. It is a much more subtle book than simply an attack on Jewish passivity - Appelfeld sees the whole idea of the great Central European spa as an evasion and in effect a monstrous trick. This framework for polite, empty circulation, a regulated, closed environment for the right kind of people, now seems to stand for a lost and enviable pre-1914 world, but in practice it has always been toxic and peculiar.
But even while I was enjoying this nod to a book I'd like more people to know, I was pausing over the hurried tone of the prose: "panders" is the wrong word in its sentence, as is "intervene" and very likely "evasion" as well, and those kinds of bumbling approximations carry a reading-weight far out of proportion to their actual seriousness - as, indeed, a spirited reader like Winder himself must surely know. The infectious storytelling, the sheer sprawl of his gaudy, disorganized story, more than compensate for the occasional such slip, luckily, and the book's surprisingly plaintive final segment - the one that, inevitably, searches for some sign of the Habsburg Empire in today's world - is guaranteed to please. For 500 pages, Winder manages to get the fabled "Sick Man of Europe" to stand up and prance, and that's an interesting enough trick in its own right.