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The Last Years of Austria-Hungary edited by Mark Cornwall (1989)

Volume 27 of the Exeter Studies in History series, The Last Years of Austria-Hungary, consists of seven essays.

Of the half dozen books I’ve read on the subject it is one of the most out of date, having been published in 1990. According to Amazon there is a new, updated edition but, like most academic books, I can’t really afford it, at £20, and have no access to an academic library so it remains, literally, a closed book. This old edition was free at my local library.

The Last Years of Austria-Hungary has by far the best and clearest couple of maps of the Austro-Hungarioan Empire which I’ve come across – one of the empire’s political divisions, one of its ethnic groups.

1. The Foreign Policy of the Monarchy 1908-1918 by F.R. Bridge

I found this a bit of a helter-skelter run through the countless international crises and shifting alliances.

2. The Four Austrian Censuses and their Political Consequences by Z.A.B. Zeman

Quite a technical and specialist essay focusing on the Austro-Hungarian censuses in the period before the war and what they showed about the extraordinary complexity of its ethnic mix.

It wasn’t just that there were various regions which had a dominant ethnic group and that, if you parcelled them off, had the potential to become independent nations. The real problem was that, in any one of those distinct provinces (Bohemia or Moravia, Galicia or Dalmatia) there were many sub-minorities getting in the way. Thus Bohemia might by three-fifths Czech but the German two-fifths were not a negligible minority; Galicia might be predominantly Polish and governed by a Polish aristocracy, but they ruled over a predominantly Ruthenian (or Ukrainian) peasantry. Down in the Balkans there were majority-Croat or Serbian areas, but these, too, included sizeable other minorities.

I.e. in every part of the Empire, there were fiendishly complicated intermixtures of groups and races who disagreed among themselves about what attitude to take towards independence, autonomy, union with the country across the border (be it Poland or Croatia or Serbia), and so on.

The central government didn’t have to just deal with a handful of rebellious nationalities; they had to deal with lots of nationalities who squabbled and argued and allied and fell out with each other according to complicated internal dynamics and/or foreign events (1905 Russo-Japanese war, the Empire’s 1908 annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina etc), and were governed by fierce inter-ethnic feuds and rivalries of their own.

Any government which tried to appease the Ruthenian majority in Galicia immediately alienated the minority Polish ruling class, and vice versa.

3. Parties and Parliament: Pre-War Domestic Politics by Lothar Höbelt

This is a surprisingly readable and fascinating survey. A table at the start lists all the parties in the Vienna parliament, and I counted 23, not including the Romanians, Serbs and Zionists. No wonder the empire became literally ungovernable.

After a detailed survey of all of them (there are eleven or so nationalities and each of the bigger ones had two or three, or even four or five distinct parties, all competing among each other) Höbelt comes to the conclusion that most of the smaller parties could be corralled or bribed into supporting an administration, but the biggest single stumbling block to producing a working government was the Czechs, and a history of the politics of the last decades leading up to the fall of the Empire is a history of the policies put forward to appease them.

Still, after a thorough review of domestic events and politics, the reader is persuaded by Höbelt’s conclusion that the Hapsburg dynasty was not fated to collapse. It was certainly stumbling from crisis to crisis, but it had been doing that for decades; even during the First World War most observers thought the empire would still survive.

It was international and foreign events which brought it down, not internal weakness.

4. The Hungarian Political Scene 1908-1918 by Tibor Zsuppán (13 pages)

Zsuppán is not a great stylist. His sentences are long and complicated, his points a bit difficult to extract. Take this characteristic sentence:

The Hungarian government’s defeat over the issue of Lajos Kossuth’s citizenship in 1889 and similar events had served to strengthen hope into near-certainty, sapping the ability to govern of the Liberal Party itself (with its emphasis on the maintenance of the Ausgliech), so that by 1904 opposition parties were united in demanding that Franz Joseph concede greater recognition to Magyar sentiment and nationality aspirations in the common army, an important step on the road to independence. (p.63)

But the main problem is he seems to assume an unjustified familiarity with Magyar history, for example casually referring to ‘the two Tiszas’ and ‘Kossuth the Younger’ as if we’re familiar with them and their policies, which I, at any rate, am not.

Also, maybe because he’s Hungarian himself, Zsuppán doesn’t give the sense of the backward peasant nature of Hungary –  of the repressive attitude of the Magyar majority to their ethnic minority peasants, and their aggressive policy of Magyarisation – which most other authors dwell on.

Höbelt gives you a very good idea of what was distinctive and odd about Cisleithana, whereas Zsuppán treats Hungary as if it were just another country when, plainly, it wasn’t.

He concludes by saying the final few decades of Hungary-in-the-empire revealed three irreconcilable forces:

  1. determination to retain Ausgleich Hungary within the Monarchy, best for Magyars, and assuming the non-Magyars would realise it was best for them, too
  2. growing nationalist feeling that Magyar interests weren’t respected in the union, with a long shopping list of grievances against the Empire
  3. pressure from the various non-Magyar nationalities who, despite the aggressive Magyarisation of the élite rulers, refused to give up their culture or identity

Zsuppán doesn’t mention the things which all the other historians mention about Hungary – namely the obstinacy of the Magyar ruling class, their aggressive Magyarisation process, the fact that even the Emperor Karl realised Magyar obstinacy was the single largest obstacle to reform of the Empire and then, after the ‘Hunger Winter’ of 1917, Hungary’s refusal to share its agricultural produce with Austria, adopting a policy of feeding its own population while the civilians of Vienna and Prague literally starved.

5. The Southern Slav Question 1908-1918 by Janko Pleterski

Better written than the Zsuppán essay, this is still a confusing read because the situation was so confusing. There were half a dozen or more Slav ‘nationalities’, and each of them contained various political parties – from out-and-out nationalists who wanted independence, to conservatives who wanted to remain within the Empire.

Following the changing policies of up to twenty different parties is confusing, and that’s even before you factor in the sequence of events in the Balkans (the pig war of 1906, Austria’s annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908, the two Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913).

Slowly there emerges from the maze of complexity a growing feeling among the ruling class that a joint South Slav state was required and in 1915, in response to Italy joining the Entente powers, a Yugoslav Committee was set up.

The essay turns out to focus on the policy of the independent Serb nation positioned just to the south of the Empire, its politicking inside and outside the Empire, until the assassination of the Archduke gave the hawks in the Hapsburg government the pretext they needed to crush this running sore just across the border. But it didn’t turn out to be as easy as they expected.

6. The Eastern Front 1914-1918 by Rudolf Jeřábek (14 pages)

This is an excellent essay on Austria-Hungary’s part in World War One. It is clearly written and packed with information and insights.

It summarises the erroneous assumptions which led Austria-Hungary to disaster early in the war, catalogues the litany of military disasters which undermined the trust in their rulers of all the Empire’s subject peoples, describes how the Austrians begged for help from the Germans and then spent the rest of the war resenting them, and gives shocking figures about the Empire’s losses and casualty rates.

The fundamental fact about the Empire’s war was that its military machine under-performed in every area.

This was compounded by strategic errors, starting right at the beginning, when Chief of Staff Conrad thought he would be able to take out little Serbia and still have time to move his forces north to Galicia to face Russia, based on the assumptions that a) Serbia was feeble b) Russia would be slow and cumbersome to mobilise.

Both proved to be wrong. Serbia inflicted repeated defeats on Austria’s armies, and the Russians – it turned out – had learned a lot from their defeat in the 1905 Russo-Japanese war, and had expanded their railway network behind their border, and so mobilised much faster than either Austria or Germany anticipated.

So within weeks of the start of the war, the Germans were surprised to find themselves being pushed back into Prussia in the north and German Chief of General Staff Moltke made the fateful, fateful decision to transfer corps from Belgium to East Prussia. Hence a string of defeats and humiliations for the Austrians.

Jeřábek shows how the Hapsburgs spent significantly less per capita on their army than all the other great powers. This was partly because of the stalemate and blockage of the parliament or Reichsrat in the 15 or so years leading up to the war, which had been described in earlier essays.

There was also the problem of managing a multi-ethnic army. The essay is brimming with just the right figures to inform and make its points. Thus Jeřábek shows that of every 100 soldiers in the Austro-Hungarian army, 25 were Germans, 23 Magyars, 13 Czechs, 9 Serbs or Croats, 8 Poles, 8 Ruthenes, 7 Romanians, 2 Slovenes and 1 Italian.

Jeřábek documents the Empire’s appalling, mind-boggling losses, especially around the battle for the fortress of Przemyśl in 1915. Like Verdun on the Western Front, Przemyśl became a catchword, a symbol, both militarily and politically, the morale of the army and the civilian population dependent on its survival.

The campaign fought around Przemyśl, the Carpathian campaign, from January to April 2015, resulted in terrible casualties. The 2nd Infantry Division which numbered 8,150 combatants on 23 January was left with just 1,000 by 2 February, seven thousand casualties in a little over seven days! Most were lost to frostbite and starvation. On 23 March Przemyśl was abandoned and 120,000 imperial soldiers surrendered to the Russians.

The new German Chief of Staff Falkenhayn sent no fewer than eight German divisions and German generals took over command of the Austrian army. Humiliated, the Austrians struck out on their own with the Rowno campaign of 26 August to 14 October 1915, to free East Galicia. This turned into an epic disaster with the loss of 230,000 men.

According to Jeřábek, this was a decisive moment, not only in the morale of the army and indeed of the high command; but it crystallised Germany’s conviction that the Hapsburg army was useless and, crucially, the Empire’s reputation and prestige throughout the Balkans suffered a terminal blow.

The Carpathian campaign had annihilated the pre-war generation of officers and NCOs. As they were replaced by non-German-speaking groups, discipline and effectiveness suffered. Entire regiments of Czechs went over to the Russians without fighting (as did some Polish regiments), creating the enduring legend of the Czechs as the traitors, as the ‘gravediggers’ of the Empire.

But the defections weren’t as important as the simple losses. During 1916 the Austro-Hungarian forces lost 1,061,091 officers and men.

The February revolution in Russia didn’t end the fighting, in fact it led to the last great Russian offensive, the Brusilov campaign ordered by new liberal prime minister Kerensky. This was at first dramatically successful, leading to a massive incursion across a 300 kilometre front which pushed 65 kilometres into imperial territory. However, the Germans, as ever, came to the aid of their weaker Austrian partners, and led a counter-attack which completely expelled the Russians from imperial territory.

The political ramifications were enormous because it was the utter waste of life incurred in the Brusilov campaign that finally broke the Russian army, leading to widespread revolts, strikes, and desertions. Along with the mounting food shortages resulting from the disrupted harvest, it was this catastrophe which set the scene for the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power in October 1917. As soon as they could, the Bolsheviks signed an armistice with Germany and Austria-Hungary which led to months of tortuous negotiations and then to the final Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

In quick succession in early 1918 the Empire signed peace treaties with Ukraine (February), Russia (March) and Romania (May). But they still managed to be at war with Italy, a conflict which also produced appalling losses.

In the last few pages, with the fighting on the Eastern Front over, Jeřábek switches focus to explain how the devastation of the richest food-growing areas of Hungary and Ukraine led to mounting hunger in Austria (Hungary kept its food for its own citizens).

A feature emphasized in several of these books is the importance of the prisoners of war held by the Russians who were allowed home after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Hundreds of thousands of working class men had come into close contact with the Russian revolution (‘Why are you fighting for rich kings and aristocrats, comrade?’) and brought these revolutionary ideas home with them. From April onwards there was a series of revolts and mutinies across the Empire.

But as the Mason book explains, quite possibly the Hapsburg empire could still have managed to stagger on and survive the war, except for one final decision.

Ever since the old emperor Franz Joseph had died in November 1916, his successor, the 29-year-old Emperor Karl, had been trying to extricate Austria-Hungary from the war. Since February 1917 Karl had engaged his cousin Prince Sixtus of Bourbon-Parma to negotiate a separate peace with the Entente (Britain and France). By March 1918 the prince had extracted from Karl a written promise to persuade the Germans to give up Alsace-Lorraine which he could show the allies. But the letter was leaked and published and the Germans went mad with anger, the Kaiser summoning the nervous young prince to Berlin where he was given an imperial dressing-down and forced to tie the Empire’s destiny ever-more closely with the Reich.

This was the straw that finally decided the Allies that Austria-Hungary couldn’t be trusted or negotiated with, was a mere vassal of the Germans, and persuaded France and Britain to acquiesce in President Wilson’s call for the Empire to be replaced by free independent nations.

That decision by the Allies – the decision to consciously support the independence movements and deliberately break up Austria-Hungary – rather than any of her military failures or the nationality question as such, was what doomed the Austro-Hungarian Empire to dissolution.

7. The Dissolution of Austria-Hungary by Mark Cornwall (23 pages)

Cornwall gives an excellent overview of the reasons for the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, referencing all the essays preceding his.

There are potentially quite a few reasons, and historians have been arguing about them for 100 years, but the most basic one is that Austria-Hungary was always a second division power. From the Congress of Vienna until the 1848 revolutions it was able to mask this fact because other nations were weak (France) or didn’t even exist (Germany and Italy).

After 20 years of instability following the 48 revolution, the Empire reinvented itself as the so-called ‘Dual Monarchy’ with Hungary. But what started out as a strength slowly mouldered into a weakness, because the Germanic minority who ran Austria and the Magyar minority who ruled Hungary proved absolutely unable and unwilling to cede any power or rights to their minorities, even as the latter grew more and more restive and disillusioned.

The previous essays have shown how Austria-Hungary spent those fifty years looking for stable partners and allies and kept returning to an alliance with Russia, despite tensions in the Balkans. According to Cornwall it was the abrupt Austrian annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908 which irretrievably ruined the diplomatic relationship with Russia. From that point onwards the Empire cast around for a stable ally and, although their interests in fact diverged quite a bit, in the end Germany was the nearest thing to a stable ally and support she could find.

By the time war broke out Austria-Hungary spend less per capita on its army than any of the other major powers, and also had created an officer class notorious for its insistence on traditions and fancy costumes, but who turned out to be useless in the field, right up to their commander, Conrad, who made a series of terrible decisions.

And these disasters in turn weakened the army, the first six months of the war decimating the old officer class and the majority of the NCOs who are the backbone of any army.

This military weakness turned out to be crucial because it meant that over the course of the war Austria-Hungary had to rely more and more on the Germans, steadily losing their independence. When it was revealed that the new emperor, Karl, who came to power in November 1916, had almost immediately started secret negotiations with the allies in which he had promised to persuade Germany to cede Alsace-Loraine, the Kaiser summoned the young puppy to Spa on 12 May 1918, humiliated him and tied the Empire’s military destiny inextricably to Germany’s.

In the same month Karl was forced to sign a number of treaties which bound the two countries closer economically and militarily, forcing the Empire to bow to Germany’s plans to create a unified Germanic Mitteleuropa.

And not only that but the German and Magyar ruling class wanted it that way. They saw the swirling currents of nationalism all around them, sedition and left-wing demagoguery being encouraged by the Emperor at home – and realised that their best chance of keeping things the way they were and holding on to their entrenched privileges, was an evercloser union with Germany.

Thus the combined German parties in the Austrian parliament compelled the prime minister Seidler to announce in 16 July 1918 that ‘a German course’ would be pursued in domestic affairs. In every way the ruling class tied itself to the Reich, and left its opponents of all stripes little alternative except to consider dismantling the entire edifice.

The Allies decided to promise the nations of the empire their independence. So the nationalities question was a real question, and the incredibly complex cultural and ethnic conflicts of the empire were real, and they did prompt soldiers, entire regiments even, to desert, and nationalists to lobby at home and to publish incendiary manifestos abroad – but none of this would have mattered if the Allies hadn’t decided to use it as a tool and to dismember the empire for good.

Details

Emperor Karl was weak and young. He was determined to gain peace at any price which made the old Kaiser loathe him. He lost a golden opportunity to reform the Dual Monarchy when he unhesitatingly took an oath to the Hungarian constitution when he was crowned, instead of demanding reform of the political and administrative structure.

Restoring the Vienna parliament in May 1917 sounds like a good liberal thing to do, but all that happened was it became a talking shop and sounding board for unpatriotic nationalist grievances which helped undermine the government.

Karl also passed an amnesty for political prisoners, which sounds nice, but the army was convinced this persuaded many soldiers to desert, confident in the idea that they, too, would be pardoned.

The Austro-Hungarian High Command gambled on a) Serbia being easy to defeat and b) Russia being slow to mobilise. Both assumptions (like Germany’s assumption that they could defeat France in 40 days) turned out to be wildly wrong.

Chief of Staff Conrad comes over as an idiot who combined personal pessimism with a determination that the Austro-Hungarian army should shine – and so ordered it into a series of military catastrophes. The Austro-Hungarian army lost every campaign it undertook unless it had the Germans there to help it.

Cornwall makes the neat point that, with the ascension of Emperor Karl, his liberal laws, and the general disrespect the army came in for, in Austria-Hungary the military was losing influence, at exactly the moment that the opposite was true in Germany, where generals Hindenburg and Ludendorff were establishing what became almost a military dictatorship.

Conclusion

If there’s one thing the reader takes from these few books, it is that the Fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire is a big complex historical event which is almost as over-determined as the outbreak of the First World War itself. Half a dozen attractive hypotheses and theories present themselves and historians will spend the rest of time inventing and reinventing and defending and demolishing them.

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Posted by Simon on October 24, 2019

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The Good Soldier Švejk, Part Two: At The Front by Jaroslav Hašek (1922)

In Volume One of The Good Soldier Švejk we were introduced to the implacably calm, unflappable anti-hero Josef Švejk, placid and middle-aged denizen of Prague under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a former soldier discharged on the grounds of incurable idiocy.

Volume One chronicles Švejk’s various difficulties with the authorities until, towards the end, he is called up to rejoin the army at the outbreak World War One, is assigned to one Lieutenant Lukáš of the 91st Imperial and Royal Infantry Regiment as his batman and, right at the end of Volume One, they are both ordered off to the Eastern Front to fight against the Russians.

In other words, if you only want to read about Švejk’s adventures in the actual war, you could easily skip Volume One.

The plot

Chapter 1 Švejk’s misadventures on the train

The story resumes with the Good Soldier Švejk already in trouble with his boss, because he’s mislaid some of his luggage as they entrain for the Front. In a gesture of typical dimness, Švejk was left to guard it but got bored and went to tell Lieutenant Lukáš it was all safe and sound but when he’d got back discovered someone had nicked one of the cases.

Once aboard the train, Švejk gets into trouble again. He speaks very freely back to Lieutenant Lukáš, and then makes some rude comments about the bald-headed old man who’s sharing their train compartment… until the old man erupts in a fury and reveals that he is Major-General von Schwarzburg and proceeds to give Lukáš a rocket. Trembling, Lukáš tells Švejk to get lost so the harmless dimwit wanders down the corridor to the guards van, where he gets chatting to the railwayman about the alarm signal and next thing they know, they have pulled it and the whole train comes to a thundering halt.

Švejk and the railwayman pull the emergency chain

Švejk is identified as the culprit, and at the next station is taken off the train to report to the station master and be fined. While this is taking place, the train puffs off and Švejk is left on his own, with no luggage and – crucially – no documentation, pass and identification, as it’s all with the Lieutenant.

A sympathetic crowd gathers round Švejk and one offers to pay his 20 crown fine and gives him the name of some useful contacts if he ever finds himself captured by the Russians. When he discovers that Švejk doesn’t even have a train ticket to catch up with his regiment, he gives him ten crowns to buy another.

A lot of the power of the novel comes from the circumstantial details: thus in this fairly simple little scene

  1. we are shown civilians sympathising with soldiers who they think are being harassed and bullied (from which we deduce that soldiers being bullied was a common sight)
  2. but at the same time a gendarmerie sergeant descends on the crowd and arrests someone (a master butcher, it turns out) who he claims was traducing the emperor (a typical example of the heavy-handed and over-officious attitude of the authorities which Hašek documents throughout the book)
  3. and in another detail, although none of the customers in the third-class bar where Švejk goes for a drink, saw the scene of his fine they have all made up far-fetched stories about how a spy had just been arrested or a soldier had a duel with someone about his lady love – in other words typical wartime paranoia and scaremongering

My point is that many of the scenes involving Švejk also feature bystanders, customers in pubs, other people in the police station or his cell, cops who take him back and forward, and then the numerous other soldiers he meets. It is a very sociable book, it has many walk-on parts for all kinds of men and women and this slowly builds up the impression of a whole world, a world in which people make up rumours, get arbitrarily arrested, help each other out or get shouted at by angry stationmasters.

Lots of the scenes involve or end with one of the central themes, which is Booze. More or less everyone drinks, often to excess. Švejk is continually ducking into pubs for a quick one, continually making friends with complete strangers over a jar. And thus it is that this scene ends with Švejk blithely drinking away the ten crowns the nice man gave him to buy a train ticket with, in the company of another war-weary fellow soldier, a Hungarian who doesn’t speak Czech or German, but conveys his unhappiness at having to abandon his three children with no income and nothing to eat.

Military Police turn up and drag Švejk before a young lieutenant at the nearby army barracks who is in a bad mood because he’s chatting up the girl in the telegraphy office who keeps turning him down (p.235).

Švejk recounts his story to date with such blank idiocy that the lieutenant (as so often happens) is disarmed enough not to charge him with anything, but has him taken back to the station and put on the next train to rejoin his regiment at České Budějovice (the capital city of South Bohemia) where the 91st regiment and Lieutenant Lukáš were heading.

But the escort and Švejk are back ten minutes later because the stationmaster won’t sell him a ticket because he’s a menace and so – the lieutenant tells him he’ll just have to walk to České Budějovice to catch up with his regiment.

Chapter 2 Švejk’s Budějovice anabasis

An ancient device of satire is to compare small and trivial things with mighty and venerable things, to create a comic disproportion. Švejk’ predictably enough, gets completely lost in his attempts to reach České Budějovice and so, for comic effect, Hašek compares Švejk’s chapter-length adventure to the anabasis of Xenophon, one of the most famous, and heroic, journeys of the ancient world.

The seven-volume Anabasis was composed around the year 370 BC, is Xenophon’s best known work, and ‘one of the great adventures in human history’ (Wikipedia)

České Budějovice is due south from the train station where Švejk was detained but, characteristically, he sets off with a brave and determined stride to the west and gets utterly lost in the wintry countryside of south Bohemia for several days. In the course of his peregrination he meets a sequence of characters, mostly poor villagers and peasants, who help him out, spare a drink or their food with him, recommend friends or relatives at towns along the way for him to call in on and generally provide a lot of human solidarity.

The reader remembers that Hašek himself was a notorious vagabond and long distance hiker who had plenty of experience of the kindness, or hostility, of strangers. Švejk’s jollily titled anabasis allows Hašek to depict the kindness which exists among the poor and downtrodden and outsiders:

  • the kindly old lady who gives him potato soup and bacon and guidance to find her brother who’ll help him
  • an accordion player from Malčín who advises him to look up his married daughter whose husband is a deserter
  • in Radomyšl the old lady’s brother, Father Melichárek, who also thinks Švejk is a deserter
  • near Putim a trio of deserters taking refuge in a haystack who tell him that a month earlier the entire 35th regiment deserted
  • one of them has an aunt in Strakonice who has a sister in the mountains they can go and stay with – give him a slice of bread for the journey
  • near Stekno he meets a tramp who shares a nip of brandy and gives him advice about evading the authorities, and takes him into town to meet a friend, even older than the tramp, and the three sit round a stove in the old gaffer’s cabin telling stories (p.277)

The Good Soldier Švejk with the two tramps

The adventure ends when Švejk finds himself circling back and re-entering the village of Putim where he is arrested and interrogated by a very clever gendarmerie sergeant Flanderka who lectures his subordinates at length about the correct and wise way to interview suspects and who thinks he can get Švejk into confessing that he’s a spy.

The thing about Švejk is that he is absolutely honest. He literally tells the truth, that he got detained by a stationmaster after pulling the emergency, cord, drank away the money he was given to buy a ticket, then they wouldn’t give him a ticket anyway, then set off on a long rambling walk all round the region – until the sergeant becomes convinced that no-one could be this ingenuous, wide-eyed and innocent – and therefore that he must be a most dangerous spy!

They keep a paranoid close guard on our hero, accompany him to the outside toilet, order a fine dinner from the local pub. Oblivious of the sergeant’s ludicrous paranoias, Švejk has a whale of a time and the sergeant and the lance-corporal he’s bullying get so drunk they pass out.

Next morning, badly hungover, the sergeant writes a preposterous report about Švejk, for example arguing that his lack of a camera just shows how dangerous he would be if he had one, and sends him off under armed guard to the District Command in Písek. As always happens, it doesn’t take much persuasion to get the lance-corporal accompanying Švejk to pop into a roadside pub along the way, and they proceed to get plastered, telling the landlord to keep them company drink for drink (p.277)

They set off again completely trashed, way after dark and, as the corporal keeps slipping off the icy road and down the slopes either side, decide to handcuff themselves together. In this state they arrive at the gendarmerie headquarters at Pisek where Captain König takes one look at them and is disgusted. He is fed up with being bombarded by useless bureaucratic edicts and now the moronic sergeant from Putim is chipping with crazy accusations like this one, that the drunk soldier in front of him is a master spy when he’s obviously a common or garden deserter.

König briskly orders Švejk put on the next train to České Budějovice and supervised by a gendarme who is to accompany him at the other end, all the way through the streets of the town to the Marianske Barracks. This he does, so that Švejk calmly walks through the door of the barracks main office just as Lieutenant Lukáš is settling into another shift. At the sight of Švejk rises to his feet and faints backwards (onto a junior soldier).

When he recovers the lieutenant informs Švejk an arrest warrant has been made in his name for desertion and he must report to the barracks prison. So off he goes, under guard, innocent and docile as usual.

In his cell he meets a fat one-year volunteer – whoe name we learn is Marek – who is more educated than most of Hašek’s characters and has a fund of stories to tell about soldiers being bullied, mistried and massacred, as well as scathing criticism of the authorities and of Austro-Hungarian authority which he sees as doomed to collapse (p.293).

All along the line, everything in the army stinks of rottenness.

Maybe he is a self-portrait of the rather tubby author (confirmed when he says that he was at one state the editor of a magazine named The Animal  World – as was Hašek).

He and Švejk get on like a house on fire and end up singing various bawdy ballads at the tops of their voices and keeping the other prisoners awake. In the morning they are both interrogated by a pompous officer named Colonel Schröder, an episode which satirises military incompetence and prejudice, before Schröder sentences the volunteer to the kitchens peeling potatoes and Švejk to three days ‘hard’. Schröder then drops by the office of Lieutenant Lukáš to tell him he’s given his batman three days hard but don’t worry, after that Švejk will be sent back to him.

Lieutenant Lukáš drops to his knees in despair. One of the funniest things about the book is Lukáš’s complete inability to shake off Švejk who, without consciously trying, makes his life a misery and destroys every one of his plans.

One element of comedy is predictability, generated by the audience becoming familiar with the way certain characters always behave, coming to expect it, and being delighted when they behave that way, or say that ting, again. Hence the joy of catchphrases, of hearing Corporal Jones cry ‘Don’t panic, don’t panic’. In this way, the ever-deepening chagrin of Lieutenant Lukáš becomes a core comic theme from this point onwards.

Chapter 3 Švejk’s adventures in Királyhida

Švejk and the one-year volunteer are marched along with the rest of the 91st Regiment to the České Budějovice railway station. Here things are chaotic and they get mixed up with Father Lacina, a chaplain, who has been roaming among various regimental messes the night before gorging himself and drinking himself insensible. Lacina hitches a lift into Švejk and the one-year volunteer’s train carriage, where he promptly passes out.

Švejk and the one-year volunteer had been accompanied and guarded by a timid lance-corporal and they now set about remorselessly teasing him, bombarding him with rules and regulations about the protection of prisoners which he has broken without realising it, including letting an unauthorised person (the drunk chaplain) into the prisoners’ van, and so on.

They also tell a wealth of stories covering a range of experiences and people: how a black entertainer slept with a posh white Czech lady who had a little black baby; about miscegenation between races, and how the war is leading to rapes of civilian women by occupying armies.

It is here that the one-year volunteer tells us at length about his spell as editor of the magazine The Animal World and how he got into trouble for writing articles about fictitious animals (pp.323-328).

The train draws into the outskirts of Vienna (p.347), where it is greeted by a tired welcoming committee patriotic old ladies (p.348). Hašek describes how the initial enthusiasm for the war, which saw huge crowds cheer the trains full of soldiers off to the Front, has long since waned.

Švejk and the volunteer are ordered along with all the other soldiers to report to the mess kitchens. Here Svejk, in the course of nicking a coatful of grub, bumps into Lieutenant Lukáš and tells him he was bringing it to him.

The narrative cuts rather abruptly to night over the army barracks at Bruck (p.350). It does this quite often. I found myself having to go back and figure out where we were in many of the scenes, and work out where the travel from one place to another took part. Maybe a function of the text having originally consisted of discreet short stories.

Bruck an der Leitha is also known as Királyhida, and hereby hangs a tale. The River Leitha formed the border between what was then Austria and Hungary. The town on the Austrian side was called Bruck an der Leitha, the town on the Hungarian side was called Királyhida. The Austrians referred to the land their side as Cisleithiana, the territory the other side as Transleithiana. And the Czechs were alien to both countries.

The central incident of this chapter is based on the simmering ethnic tensions and resentments between these groups. Švejk has now been released from the prisoners van (he was only sentenced to three days’ detention, if you remember) and has been restored to Lieutenant Lukáš as his batman. That evening Švejk is having a fag with the pock-marked batman of another officer from down the corridor of their temporary barracks, when Lieutenant Lukáš stumbles back from a drunken evening out.

He and a bunch of other officers went to a cabaret where the Hungarian dancers were doing high kicks and wearing no stockings or knickers, and had ‘shaved themselves underneath like Tatar women’ (p.356). Lukáš didn’t really like it and on the way out the theatre saw a high-minded woman dragging her husband away. They exchanged a meaningful look. Lukáš asked the cloakroom attendant who she was and finds out she’s the wife of a well-known ironmonger and her address. He goes onto a nightclub where he writes an elaborate and fancy letter basically asking if he can come round and have sex with her the following day. He drunkenly hand the letter to Švejk, goes into his room, and passes out.

Next morning Švejk wakes the Lieutenant to check he still wants the letter delivered, gets a sleepy Yes, and sets off to the ironmonger’s address. Unfortunately, he makes the mistake of letting a fellow soldier, Sapper Vodička, accompany him. The whole way Vodička informs Švejk how much he hates Hungarians, what cowards they are, and bullies, and how easy it is to shag their disreputable woman.

By the time Švejk politely knocks on the door of the house, and politely hands the little girl who answers a letter for her mummy, Vodička has worked himself into a fury and when they hear a rumpus from the living room and the woman’s husband emerges in a froth of indignation, the scene is set for a massive fight, which spills out onto the street, and which passersby and other soldiers all get caught up (p.355).

The fight over the ironmonger’s wife

Chapter 4 New sufferings

It is very funny when, as a result of this, Lieutenant Lukáš finds himself woken up and summoned to the office of Colonel Schröder who reads him out a series of reports of this riot in all the Hungarian newspapers. Not only that but the papers have taken it as an opportunity to complain about the hordes of rampaging Czechs infesting their streets and to castigate Czech character generally.

The Colonel makes Lukáš read out every word of every report, and we are wondering whether he, Lukáš, will be cashiered before the whole tone shifts and we discover the Colonel secretly sympathises. He says the incriminating letter was found on Vodička, so everyone knows about his proposition to the ironmonger’s wife. Had he slept with her yet, the Colonel asks, only increasing the Lieutenant’s discomfiture. The Colonel tells him he was once sent on a three-week geometry course in Hungary and slept with a different Hungarian woman every day. The Colonel pats him on the shoulder and says All Hungarians are bastards, we’re not going to let them get you.

And then he sets off on a new tack saying how admirably the good soldier Švejk defended him. When the police showed him the incriminating letter he first of all claimed to have written it himself, and then ate it. Good man, that, says the Colonel. And to Lieutenant Lukáš’s unmitigated horror, the Colonel proceeds to assign Švejk to him as the new Company Orderly! (p.378)

But first Švejk and Vodička are temporarily thrown in the clink where they bump into their old friend, the one-year volunteer. As usual there is a huge amount of yarning and story-telling before they are hauled up before Judge Advocate Ruller. He is another stern disciplinarian but, on the recommendation of Colonel Schröder, lets them go.

In a parody of farewell scenes from umpteen romantic novels, Švejk and Vodička now go their separate way, calling out across the ever-widening distance between them. Švejk tells him to come to The Chalice pub any evening at 6pm after the war’s ended.

Chapter 5 From Bruck an der Leitha to Sokal

To replace Švejk as batman, Lieutenant Lukáš has been given a big fat heavily bearded soldier named Baroun. He turns out to have an insatiable appetite and repetition comedy results from his inability not to eat everything in sight, including all of Lieutenant Lukáš’s rations and treats.

the first time this happens, Lieutenant Lukáš orders Baloun to be taken to the barracks kitchen and tied to a post just by the ovens so he can smell all the food for hours and not be able to move. Cruel, eh? (p.398)

Quartermaster sergeant Vanek expects to be able to lord it over Švejk  so it surprised when the latter announces he is now regimental orderly, clearly a post of some authority and respect.

There follows a prolonged (20+ pages) comic sequence based on the idea that Švejk now has access to the company telephone, and that the barracks operates an early primitive phone system on which he can overhear the conversations of everyone in the barracks. He is given orders to send ten troops to the barracks store to get tines of meat for the upcoming train journey but, as you might expect, this quickly turns into chaos and confusion.

Švejk having 40 winks between causing mayhem on the regimental phone line

Meanwhile Lieutenant Lukáš is absent at a prolonged meeting convened by Colonel Schröder at which he is holding forth at great length a series of military theories and ideas which have all been completely outdated by the war (‘He spoke without rhyme or reason…’ p.421). In his absence Švejk and some of the other soldiers, notably the Quatermaster, chew the fat, telling stories at great length, getting tipsy and falling asleep.

In fact it’s a characteristic of volume two that as Švejk gets drawn more into the army bureaucracy we encounter an ever-expanding roster of military characters, who come and go in the various offices, stopping to have long conversations, swap stories, moan about Hungarians or women or the senior officers. Quite often it’s difficult to remember where in the ‘story’ you are, after pages and pages of reminiscences about the old days, or about characters back home, or about something they once read in the paper or heard, told by one or other of the numerous soldiers.

It’s a new morning but the never-ending meeting convened by Colonel Schröder resumes. On the table is a big map of the front with little wooden figures and flags for troop dispositions. Overnight a cat kept by the clerks has gotten into the meeting room and not only knocked all the markers out of alignment, but also done a few cat poops on the map. Now Colonel Schröder is very short-sighted so the assembled officers watch with bated breath as he moves his hand airily over the map, getting closer and closer and then… yes! poking his finger into a pile of fresh cat poo! And goes charging into the clerks’ room to give them hell (p.437).

In this last section there’s a humorous grace note about the regimental cook who was, in civilian life, an author of books about the Occult and takes a supernatural approach to cooking.

Everyone is in a state of suspense. Are they going to move out to the Front, and when? Marek, the one-year volunteer appears, still in detention and awaiting some kind of sentence from the authorities. On the last page of volume two, while Švejk is telling yet another long story to Quartermaster Sergeant-Major Vaněk, Lieutenant Lukáš is in his office painfully decoding a ciphered message he’s received. The regiment will be proceeding to Mošon, Raab, Komárno and so to Budapest.

Here ends Volume Two of The Good Soldier Švejk.

Themes

Anti-war bitterness

Volume one tends to focus on the arrogance, aggressive behaviour and stupidity of a wide range of officials encountered in everyday life. As you might expect, once he’s re-enlisted in the army, Volume two focuses on all aspects of the stupidity and futility of war.

The young soldier gave a heartfelt sight. He was sorry for his young life. Why was he born in such a stupid century to be butchered like an ox in a slaughterhouse? (p.153)

And contains some really effective passages, visions of the desolation and deathliness of war.

Before the arrival of the passenger train the third-class restaurant filled up with soldiers and civilians. They were predominantly soldiers of various regiments and formations and the most diverse nationalities whom the whirlwinds of war had swept into the Tábor hospitals. they were now going back to the front to get new wounds, mutilations and pains and to earn the reward of a simple wooden cross over their graves. Years after on the mournful plains of East Galicia a faded Austrian soldier’s cap with a rusty imperial badge would flutter over it in wind and rain. From time to time a miserable old carrion crow would perch on it, recalling fat feasts of bygone days when there used to be spread for him an unending table of human corpses and horse carcasses, when just under the cap on which he perched there lay the daintiest morsels of all – human eyes. (p.230)

There’s more where that came from. Not particularly intellectual or stylish. But all the more effective for its blunt simplicity.

Casual brutality

The book is permeated by casual violence. All the officers take it for granted that they can slap, punch, hit in the mouth or round the ears, order to be tied up and even flogged whichever soldiers they wish. And the soldiers accept it too.

The old beggar tells Švejk about begging round the town of Lipnice and stumbling into the gendarmerie station by accident, because it was in an ordinary looking house. And the police sergeant leaping up from behind his desk, striding across the room, and punching the tramp so hard in the face that he is propelled back through the door and down the wooden steps. (p.251)

The same old man remembers stories his grandfather told about the army in his day, how a deserter was flogged so hard that strips of skin flew off him. How another was shot for desertion on the barrack ramparts. but not before he’d run the gauntlet of 600 soldiers who all beat and hit and whipped him as he ran through the human tunnel they’d formed. (p.247)

In the prisoners’ van Švejk watches the escorts playing what appears to be a popular game in the Austrian army. Called simply ‘Flesh’, where one soldier takes down his trousers, bares his bottom, and the other soldiers belt him as hard as they can on his bare buttocks, and the soldier has to guess which of his companions it was who hit him. If he guesses right, that colleague has to take his place. That’s the game. (pp.322-3)

There’s satire on military stupidity, like the story of a certain earnest Lieutenant Berger who hid up a pine tree during an enemy attack, and refused to reveal himself or come down till his own side counter-attacked. Unfortunately that took fourteen days, so he starved to death (p.256)

There are many stories like that, of ‘heroes’ who get awarded medals after they’ve been blown to bits or cut in half by a shell or blinded or maimed, and they come under the heading of Stupid propaganda with Švejk ending up in various offices where he sees posters proclaiming the bravery of our proud Austrian boys, and so on, or is handed leaflets describing glorious deeds of valour, or reads articles about gallant officers rescuing entire regiments.

Like most of his mates, he ends up using these handouts as toilet paper.

But they also form part of the vast, unending continuum of stories, of the stories working class men tell each other in pubs and bars and police stations and cells and barracks and trains, and they all evince the same bloody-minded, hardened attitude of the common soldier, squaddie or grunt who carries on living his heedless working class life despite all efforts of shouting sergeants and poncy officers to reform him – a life which tends to revolve around food and fags, booze and sex.

Drink

Thus all the characters are fond of not only drinking but getting drunk, obviously Hašek and his working class pals, but also a high proportion of the officers and even generals, starting with Lieutenant Lukáš who a) wins Švejk at a game of cards b) is an inveterate womaniser c) routinely gets plastered.

Almost every escort charged with escorting prisoner Švejk anywhere lets itself get talked into nipping into the first pub they pass and proceeding to get legless.

And there’s a special satirical edge to portraying the scions of morality, the army chaplains Katz and Lacina as hopeless drunks, Lacina no sooner being introduced than he passes out.

But booze is seen as the universal solvent of society, having a drink a bombproof way of getting to know your companion or settling differences.

Sex

Actually there’s less sex than you might expect. There are far far more stories about the brutal fates and mishaps of characters in the stories the lads tell each other, than sexual escapades. the cabaret where the girls do high kicks without knickers is a rare occurrence of sexy sexiness, and the Lieutenant’s attempt to seduce the ironmonger’s wife ends in farce, as we’ve seen.

One soldier tells an admiring story about a captain who knows three sisters who he’s trained to bring round to the officers mess and dance on the tables before presenting themselves on the sofa (presumably for the officers’ use and in what posture is left to the imagination).

And Colonel Schröder shows off to Lieutenant Lukáš about the time he went for training in Hungary and boffed a different woman every day for three weeks.

But these are a handful of sexy stories amid a vast sea of hundreds and hundreds of other stories about numerous other subjects. If sex is present it’s more as a steady hum of prostitutes in the background, and at random moments soldiers are discovered bargaining with the whores who hang around the railways stations where the troop trains stopped.

Bureaucracy

An army is, almost by definition, a kind of quintessence of bureaucracy and the satire on incompetence of Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy is now applied to the army, in spaces. At various moments harassed officers are shown drowning in bombardments of new regulations and memos, all of which are incomprehensible or irrelevant.

The text gives a list of the orders sent to Sergeant Flanderka, the pompous gendarme at Putim, which includes orders, directives, questionnaires, instructions and directives, including an index of grades of loyalty to the Emperor, according to which citizens who are interrogated must be classified as either Ia, Ib, Ic, IIa, IIb, IIc, IIIa, IIIb, IIIc, and so on. (p.259) which leads into how Sergeant Flanderka tried to recruit the village idiot Pepek as a spy on the local population and, when that fails, simply invents an informer, makes up reports he attributes to this invention, and claims an extra fifty crowns a month pay to fund him, which the sergeant pockets himself. (The same kind of problem – operatives who invent informers or spies so they can claim extra money – crops up in Somerset Maugham’s brilliant fictionalisation of his spying days during the Great War, Ashenden, and in John le Carré. Obviously, an occupational hazard.)

(Incidentally, the village idiot Pepek can barely speak and when, on his first report back, he simply parrots back all the incriminating phrases Sergeant Flanderka told him to listen out for, Sergeant Flanderka promptly has Pepek arrested as a traitor, tried and convicted to twelve years hard labour. That’s very much the helpless, heartless tone of the countless stories and anecdotes which make up the actual text of Švejk.)

The captain of the gendarmerie at Pisek was a very officious man, very thorough at prosecuting his subordinates and outstanding in bureaucratic manners. In the gendarmerie stations in his district no one could ever say that the storm had passed. it came back with every communication signed by the captain, who spent the whole day issuing reprimands, admonitions and warnings to the whole district. Ever since the outbreak of war heavy black clouds had loured over the gendarmerie stations in the Písek district. It was a truly ghostly atmosphere. The thunderbolts of bureaucracy rumbled and struck the gendarmerie sergeants, lance-corporals, men and employees. (p.279)

One moment in particular stood out for me as a sudden bit of Kafka embedded in Hašek, where Švejk is listening to yet another rodomontade from the furiously angry Sapper Vodička, who is wondering when the pair will finally be brought to court for their involvement in the riot with the Hungarian ironmonger.

‘It’s always nothing but interrogation’, said Vodička, whipping himself up into a fury. ‘If only something would come out of it at last. They waste heaps of paper and a chap doesn’t even see the court.’ (p.387)

The nationalities question

It is a crucial element of the situation in the Austro-Hungarian Empire that its constituent nationalities cordially dislike each other. Švejk buys the poor Hungarian soldier a drink but happily calls him a Hungarian bastard; the Hungarians slag off the Czechs for surrendering en masse as soon as the fighting starts (apparently this actually happened); the Czechs resent the Hungarians for being better soldiers; and everyone hates the stereotype of the furiously angry German-speaking Austrian officer.

This is broadly comic in the sense that all mechanical national stereotypes are comic. One aspect of it is language and here there is a Great Tragedy: the book’s translator into English, Cecil Parrott, makes clear in his wonderful introduction that a great part of the pleasure of the text in its original version is the interplay of languages of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Different characters may speak Czech, Hungarian, German or even Polish, and within those languages they may use polite and formal registers, or common and demotic registers, or may be non-native speakers mangling the language.

Almost none of this art and pleasure comes over in translation. Damn! Only at a handful of moments does the multicultural nature of the society being depicted, and of the most ordinary human interactions, become prominent. For example when Švejk and Vodička arrive at the house of the Hungarian ironmonger to hand over Lieutenant Lukáš’s letter. Bear in mind that they are in Királyhida, just across the border into Hungary proper.

The door opened, a maid appeared and asked in Hungarian what they wanted.
‘Nem tudom?’ said Vodička scornfully. ‘Learn to speak Czech, my good girl.’
‘Do you understand German?’ Švejk asked in broken German.
‘A leetle,’ the girl replied equally brokenly.
‘Then tell lady I want to speak lady. Tell lady there is letter from gentleman.’ (p.366)

If only Parrott had tried to capture the mix of languages and mishmash of registers which are obviously omnipresent in Hašek’s original, it would have made for a very different reading experience because, in the handful of places where he tries it, it really adds to the texture of the book, and is often funny.

Communism

The Good Soldier Švejk was written in the very early 1920s, so with full knowledge of the Bolshevik Revolution, of the end of the Great War, the complete defeat of the Alliance powers, Germany and Austria, and the collapse of their Empires – the German Kaiser going into exile and the Reich declared a republic, and more dramatically the farflung Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsing overnight into a collection of independent states.

Opposition to, or at the very least strong scepticism about, the Empire and the rule of the Hapsburg Dynasty, are expressed in different ways, at different levels of literacy, by numerous characters across the sprawling novel — but one moment stood out for me, a suddenly resonant moment when Hašek has the old shepherd Švejk encounters on his anabasis, prophesy the future:

The water in which the potatoes were cooking on the stove began to bubble and after a short silence the old shepherd said in prophetic tones: ‘And his Imperial Majesty won’t win this war. There’s no enthusiasm for it at all… Nobody cares a hell about it any more, lad… You ought to be there when the neighbours get together down in Skočice. Everyone has a friend at the front and you should hear how they talk. After this war they say there’ll be freedom and there won’t be any noblemen’s palaces or emperors and the princes’ll all have their estates taken away.’ (p.248)

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The Good Soldier Švejk

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The Weimar Years: A Culture Cut Short by John Willett (1984)

This is a large format Thames and Hudson paperback (27 cm by 23 cm) which is designed to foreground large black and white historic photos and images rather than text.

After a short 10-page introduction, almost the whole book consists of assemblies of original images from the avant-garde of the Weimar culture, with only a small amount of accompanying commentary. It is a visual history. Just to recap the main events, the period falls roughly into three parts:

  1. 1918-1923 Post-war economic and social chaos
  2. 1924-1929 Peace and stability
  3. 1929-1933 Wall Street crash prompts more economic and social chaos, leading to the appointment of Hitler chancellor in January 1933, at which point the republic ends

The three periods of the Weimar Republic

1. The First World War ended in November 1918. The Kaiser abdicated to be replaced by a civilian government. The two commanding generals Ludendorff and Hindenberg made sure that this civilian government signed the peace, thus allowing them forever afterwards to blame civilians for stabbing the army in the back. In the same month there were coups in Berlin, Munich and elsewhere to try and set up revolutionary councils and soldiers and workers, which is how the Bolshevik revolution started.

For the next three or four years the Communist International in Moscow held out high hopes that Germany would fall to communism and trigger a Europe-wide revolution. In the event all these insurrections were put down by Freikorps or locally organised militia. Right from the start the left-liberal government had to rely on the army to keep it in power, and this was to prove a fatal weakness.

In March 1920 some of the Freikorps tried to overthrow the Berlin government and the army did nothing; it was only a general strike and popular armed resistance which restored the government. In 1922 Freikorps elements murdered Walter Rathenau, the Republic’s Foreign Secretary who had negotiated a trade treaty with the USSR and was Jewish. This led to outbreaks of anti-republican and communist agitation in the streets.

The terms of the Treaty of Versailles, announced in summer 1919, caused great resentment. It blamed Germany entirely for the war, seized over 10% of Germany’s territory in the east (given to Poland) and west (Alsace-Lorraine returned to France), took away all Germany’s colonies and imposed a punishing reparations bill. In 1922 failure to keep up repayments led the French to send in troops to reoccupy the Ruhr industrial area.

The government replied by ordering a go-slow by German workers. This undermined an already weak economy and exacerbated inflation. Mid- and late-1923 saw the famous hyperinflation where a loaf of bread ended up costing a billion marks, where people carried bank notes around in wheelbarrows and eventually stopped using money at all. In November Hitler and his infant Nazi Party tried to mount a coup against the Bavarian government, in Munich, which was quickly quelled by the authorities.

2. The Americans drew up a plan devised by Charles G. Dawes to give Germany huge loans which it could use to invest in industry. Higher taxes from increased industrial productivity could be used to pay off the French (and the French could then pay off the huge war debts they’d run up with the Americans). The deal was finalised in the autumn of 1924.

The point is that as a result of the stabilisation of the currency and the confidence given to business by the certainty of American investment, the entire country underwent a great feeling of relief. Street fighting disappeared, strikes and industrial unrest diminished, the government could proceed with coherent economic policies. Leaders of the Soviet Union reluctantly abandoned the dream they’d been nurturing since 1919 that Germany would fall to communism. There were political ups and downs over the next five years but economic stability and increasing employment meant that extremist parties on both sides (Nazis, communists) lost support.

3. In October 1929 there was the Wall Street Crash. American banks withdrew all their loans in order to stay solvent and that included the loans to Germany. The German economy crashed, companies large and small went bust, and there was a phenomenal growth in unemployment. The effect was to revive the social unrest of the post-war period, to polarise political opinion and to encourage extremist parties to opt for street violence.

In the September 1930 Reichstag elections, the Nazis won 18% of the votes and became the second-largest party in the Reichstag after the Social Democrats. Hitler ran for President against the incumbent Hindenburg in March 1932, polling 30% in the first round and 37% in the second against Hindenburg’s 49% and 53%. By now the Nazi paramilitary wing, the Sturmabteilung, had 400,000 members and its running street battles with the SPD and Communist paramilitaries (who also fought each other) reduced some German cities to combat zones.

At the July 1932 Reichstag election the Nazis polled 37%, becoming the largest party in parliament by a wide margin. The Nazis and Communists between them had won 52% of the vote and a majority of seats. Since both parties opposed the established political system and neither would join or support any ministry, forming a majority government became impossible. The result was weak ministries forced to rule by decree.

During the second half of 1932 there was much behind the scenes manoeuvring. Chancellor von Papen, his successor Kurt von Schleicher and the nationalist press magnate Alfred Hugenberg, spent December and January in political intrigues that eventually persuaded President Hindenburg that it was safe to appoint Hitler as Reich Chancellor, at the head of a cabinet including only a minority of Nazi ministers – which he did on 30 January 1933. Hitler was Chancellor of Germany but still restricted by democratic forms.

The Reichstag fire on 27 February 1933 gave Hitler a pretext for suppressing his political opponents. The following day he persuaded the Reich’s President Hindenburg to issue the Reichstag Fire Decree, which suspended most civil liberties. On 23 March, the parliament passed the Enabling Act of 1933, which gave the cabinet the right to enact laws without the consent of parliament, in effect giving Hitler dictatorial powers.

Now possessing virtually absolute power, the Nazis established totalitarian control – they abolished labour unions, all other political parties and imprisoned their political opponents at the first, largely improvised concentration camps. The Nazi regime had begun.

The three periods of Weimar arts

1. The Expressionist years 1918-23

Before the war German art was dominated by Expressionism. This had two key elements: it was an art of personal expression; and this personal expression was influenced by current ideas about the spirit, about a great spiritual awakening, about a new world of art and culture about to be born etc, as a glance at the writings of Kandinsky or Franz Marc make clear. Paradoxically this highly personal view of the world could easily tip over into grand paranoia, fear, a sense of brooding catastrophe, anxiety, terror etc.

Unsurprisingly, it is these elements of the grotesque and nightmarish which artists felt and expressed during and immediately after the Great War. Thus the works made by artists like George Grosz or Bertolt Brecht in 1919 to 1923 can loosely be called Expressionist. Similarly the immediate post-war years in film were the high point of Expressionism, with horror films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) or Nosferatu (1922) famous for their jagged Expressionist sets.

Scene from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

Scene from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

Extreme emotion was exacerbated by disillusionment with the failure of the 1918 revolution by many of the artists involved in it such as Piscator, Brecht, Carl Zuckmayer, George Grosz. For the next few years their Expressionism was given extra bite by savagely satirical disillusionment, by the realisation that the SPD’s socialism was only skin deep and that the army would always step in to crush any revolt, any rebellion, any revolutionary forces. Hence the talismanic meaning, for years to come, of the murder in the streets by thuggish Freikorps of the two heroes of the Spartacist or communist party, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg on 15 January 1919.

Blood is the Best Sauce from the portfolio God with Us by George Grosz (1919)

Blood is the Best Sauce from the portfolio God with Us by George Grosz (1919)

The Bauhaus, a kind of bellwether for all these developments, was in its Expressionist phase. Although the director was Walter Gropius, the introductory course and much of the tone was set by the eccentric Johannes Itten, a believer in mystical Eastern religions, who imposed vegetarianism and breathing exercises on his students.

2. The high point – New Objectivity 1924-29

Around 1924, as the economy and political situation stabilised, the Expressionist wave in the arts was exhausted. Instead this is the golden era of the so-called Neue Sachlichkeit or New Objectivity. The term was coined by Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub as the title of an art exhibition staged in 1925 in Mannheim to showcase artists working in the new spirit, namely Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, and George Grosz. At the Bauhaus, the spiritualist Ittens was sacked and replaced by the tough-minded Hungarian émigré and polymath László Moholy-Nagy. Willett hesitates over the translation of Sachlichkeit – his 1978 book on the period prefers to translate it as ‘objectivity’. Here he suggests it means ‘matter-of-factness’ (p.81). It represented a completely new mood and approach. Hard edges and technology. Design for the machine age.

  • Instead of self-involvement – objectivity, interest in the social world, the masses.
  • Instead of art promoting the artist – artists sought collaboration, both among themselves (thus Grosz’s collaborations with John Heartfield on photomontages) and with the public (in the new forms of agit-prop or street theatre, often performed in factories and workplaces and calling for audience participation). From among hundreds of examples, Piscator’s 1929 production of A Merchant of Berlin had a set designed by Moholy-Nagy and music by Eisler.
The photojournalist Egon Erwin Kisch as depicted by photomontagist Otto Umbehr aka Umbo (1926)

The photojournalist Egon Erwin Kisch as depicted by photomontagist Otto Umbehr aka Umbo (1926)

  • Instead of vague romantic idealism – hard-headed practical engagement with the problems of the age. Hence a slew of movements with ‘time’ in the name Zeitoper, Zeitstück.
  • Instead of the ‘demented’ Expressionism of Caligari – the purposeful social criticism of All Quiet on the Western Front (1930).

Or, as the pioneering stage director Erwin Piscator said, in 1929:

In lieu of private themes we had generalisation, in lieu of what was special the typical, in lieu of accident causality. Decorativeness gave way to constructedness, Reason was put on a par with Emotion, while sensuality was replaced by didacticism and fantasy by documentary reality.

Scene from Hoppla wir Leben, directed by Erwin Piscator, Berlin, 1927

Scene from Hoppla wir Leben, directed by Erwin Piscator, Berlin, 1927

This is the period Willett loves. This is the heart of his enthusiasm. This is the moment Willett claims that artists, designers, architects, theatre and film directors in the Soviet Union and in Weimar Germany converged in a period of hyper-experimentalism, making massive breakthroughs in adapting their respective media to the demands and possibilities of the machine age. New media called for new ideas and the creation of photojournalism, documentary cinema, broadcasting, radio, and gramophone records. El Lissitsky and Rodchenko devised new styles of graphic design, magazine and poster layout. Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin (1925) rejected the crazy fairy tale sets of Expressionism, and instead used thrilling new technical techniques like montage, shock close-ups, setting the camera at high angles to the action and so on to tell an entirely realistic, in fact brutally graphic tale of revolutionary insurrection.

Brutal close-up from the massacre of civilians scene of Battleship Potemkin (1925)

Brutal close-up from the massacre of civilians scene of The Battleship Potemkin (1925)

Crucial to Willett’s view is that there was a tremendous amount of cross-fertilisation between the avant-garde in Russia and in Germany, though that idea is explored much more in The New Sobriety – this book focuses exclusively on the German side of the equation.

In 1925 the Weimar government withdrew funding from the first Bauhaus, which accordingly moved to Dessau, into purpose-built modernist buildings designed by Gropius. The buildings remain classics of modernism to this day, and the new, industrially-focused school dispensed with the arty farty flummery of the Itten years and began designing all kinds of practical fixtures and fittings which would suit the modern, stripped-back architectural style. From this period date the famous tubular steel and leather chairs, along with sets of tables, chairs for factory canteens and so on. Practical, sober, industrial.

Bauhaus Building, Dessau on opening day, 4 December 1926

Bauhaus Building, Dessau on opening day, 4 December 1926

It is during these years that Willett feels the collective effort of creative people in all media took modernism to ‘a new level’ (a phrase he uses several times) and stood on the brink of creating an entirely new civilisation. Willett’s passion convinces you with an almost science fiction feeling that a completely new society was trembling on the brink of appearing.

This explains his contempt for the workaday, wishy-washy, luxury goods associated with Art Deco in France. For Willett French culture sold out, compromised and abandoned the quest for a truly new world. This was because the economic and social structure of French society (as of British society) had remained unchanged by the war so that aristocrats kept on buying Lalique jewellery and holidaying on the cote d’azur decorated by tame artists like Dufy or Derain. French culture was both a) more centralised in Paris only and b) still reliant on the patronage of the rich.

By contrast German society was turned upside down by the war and the intense political upheavals of the post-war. An important factor was the way the last aristocratic principalities became fully part of the German nation, often turning over art galleries, schools, theatres and opera houses to the new state. The (generally socialist) regional governments took over funding for the arts from aristocrats and often lent a sympathetic ear to avant-garde experiments.

Poster for the 1923 Bauhaus exhibition by Joost Schmidt

Poster for the 1923 Bauhaus exhibition by Joost Schmidt

While French designers created Art Deco ink stands adorned with scantily clad nymphs, Marcel Breuer at the Bauhaus designed a completely new typography for the German language, rejecting all capital letters and serif styles, as well as designing the famous leather chair. Gropius and colleagues designed entirely new style of council estates for workers at Stuttgart. Moholy-Nagy oversaw his students’ new designs for lamps and chairs and tables, while the Bauhaus wallpaper department devised coolly objective, undecorative wallpaper designs which still sell to this day.

The pioneering Bauhaus chair of tubular steel and leather

The pioneering Bauhaus chair of tubular steel and leather

While Paris was staging the arch neo-classical works of Stravinsky and Les Six, politically committed German composers like Kurt Weill and Hans Eisler were working with communist playwright Bertolt Brecht to write songs for a new kind of play designed to convey powerful communist propaganda messages, and these were staged in an entirely new style by the revolutionary director Erwin Piscator, using bare, undressed sets, with the lights exposed and projecting onto bare walls relevant bits of movie footage or headlines or facts and figures and graphs showing the economic situation. The composer Paul Hindemith became associated with the notion of Gebrauchmusik i.e. music that was socially useful and Eisler took this to mean propaganda music, marching songs and the like, which could be widely disseminated among Germany’s many community music groups.

Not all these innovations worked or were very popular, but it was an explosion of talent experimenting in all directions. As Willett emphasises, many of their innovations are still used today – stark, exposed, non-naturalistic sets in the theatre – street theatre – abrupt cuts and high angles in experimental film – and a lot of the language of architecture and design developed by the Bauhaus architects went onto become a truly International Style which dominated the 20th century.

In 1925:

  • the Bauhaus moved to Dessau
  • Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (and Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush)
  • Ernst May is given the opportunity to deploy socialist architecture in a grand rehousing scheme begun by Frankfurt council
  • in Mannheim the artistic exhibition Neue Sachlichkeit
  • Bertolt Brecht moves to Berlin
  • December, Alban Berg’s opera Wozzek has its premiere
  • elementare typographie, was an influential supplement of Typographic Notes, the journal of the Educational Association of German Book Printers in Leipzig. The supplement was laid out by Jan Tschichold using innovative principles he’d picked up on a visit to the Bauhaus and included contributions from Bauhaus staff such as Bayer, Lissitsky, Moholy-Nagy and so on
elementare typographie designed by Jan Tschichold (1925)

elementare typographie designed by Jan Tschichold (1925)

3. The final crisis 1929-33

All of which was cut short by the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Throughout 1930 the Germany economy went into a tailspin and unemployment climbed out of control. During these three years of mounting crisis, 1930, 31 and 32, many of the artists he’s discussed reached new heights of commitment, especially Brecht who produced a series of his most stingingly anti-capitalist works.

But Willett shows how a reaction had already set in in Russia where, from about 1928, the chilly winds of Stalin’s influence began to blow through the arts. The suicide of the famous communist poet Mayakovsky in 1930 is often heralded as a tipping point. In 1932 the official doctrine of Socialist Realism was proclaimed and experimentation in the arts came to a grinding halt, to be replaced by kitsch paintings of happy smiling workers and the beaming features of the Great Leader, Stalin.

For completely different reasons a similar chilling came over the avant-garde in Germany. In 1930 nationalists took control of the state government in Thuringia and secured the resignation of the Bauhaus’s overtly communist director Hannes Meyer (who had replaced Gropius in 1928). Meyer quit and went to Russia, taking with him a dozen or so of the most politically committed students. He was replaced by the noted architect Mies van der Rohe, who was given the job of depoliticising the Bauhaus, especially the radical students. He did his best but the Bauhaus was on the list of institutions the Nazis considered enemy, and in 1933 they secured its final closure.

Summary

This is a visually powerful portfolio to support Willett’s thesis that a new fully modernist civilisation trembled on the brink of realisation in the uniquely innovative and experimental artistic culture of the Weimar Republic. This is more accessible and makes its points more viscerally than the often very clotted New Objectivity book, but probably both should be read together, not least to make sense of the Soviet connection which is omitted here but explored in numbing detail in the other book.

In passing I noticed that there’s no humour whatsoever in this book. Nothing for children, no book illustrations or cartoons. A handful of political cartoons radiating bitter cynicism but, basically, not a laugh in sight.

The other absence is sex. In the popular view Weimar is associated with the ‘decadence’ of the Berlin cabaret, with openly lesbian and gay bars and vaudevilles. Willett is having none of it. His Weimar is a puritan republic of high-minded artists, designers and architects devoted to bringing into being a better world, a fairer world, a workers’ world. There is a one-page spread about a volume of short stories whose cover showed a man groping a fully dressed woman but this is included solely to tell the story of how it was censored by the Weimar authorities. Sex is a bourgeois indulgence which undermines the dedication of the committed worker and intellectual.

Once you start pondering this absence, you realise there is little or nothing in either of Willett’s books about fashion, haircuts, dresses, about style and accessories, about new types of car and motoring accessories (gloves, goggles, helmets), about cartoons, popular novels, detective stories (this was the decade of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers). He mentions jazz, of course, but only as it inspired painters and German composers to include it as a theme in their serious works about social justice – not as a thing to relax and enjoy…

Only by looking at other books about the same period and reading about the explosion of pastimes and leisure activities, of ways to have fun, does it dawn on you how very intense, very urban, very cerebral and very narrow Willett’s view is. His dream of a ‘new civilisation’ is just that, a dream.

Which also makes you realise how thin and brittle this layer of hyper-inventiveness in the arts turned out to be, how little it had spread, how little it had influenced or changed the minds or lives of the vast majority of the German population. When the crunch came, they followed Hitler, and acquiesced in the burning of the books, the banning of the plays, and the ridiculing of ‘degenerate art’.

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by Simon on January 28, 2018  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on January 28, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/01/28/the-weimar-years-a-culture-cut-short-john-willett/

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