12 ms·

The Austro-Hungarian Empire and Vienna in particular were an amazing place, a sort of proto-EU that really had a shot at creating lasting prosperity and peace i

The Austro-Hungarian Empire and Vienna in particular were an amazing place, a sort of proto-EU that really had a shot at creating lasting prosperity and peace in Europe. I highly recommend Stefan Zweig's "The World of Yesterday", his memoirs of life before WW1. It reads disturbingly like an account of today's world, written just on the cusp of WW3.

ViktorRay 2y ago
It’s interesting how the way that author you mentioned describes the attitudes and views of his parents and the upbringing he had when he was a young lad growing up in Europe of the 1890’s. It’s surprisingly very similar to the attitudes in parents of the 1990’s America and the upbringing many of us who grew up in the 1990’s…. Was interesting. Especially the way it all shattered after world war 1. Hell the author fled Europe to escape the Nazis. I read in a history book that that author committed suicide in despair because he thought the Nazis would win. His memoirs of his life are filled with sadness and melancholy. The enormous optimism that his parents had for him in his upbringing during the 1890’s. When his parents and many of their generation believed the march of science would lead to a new century of reason and peace and progress….and then in his lifetime the world descended into a level of brutality and violence and horror that would have been unimaginable in centuries prior… Poignant stuff
- eastbound 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - cambalache 2y ago
    Any word on the current genocide being perpetrated by Israel?
    - eastbound 2y ago
      Yes. If you’re a small country with little army, don’t throw 7,000 rockets on a bigger country’s living neighborhoods between Jan 1st 2023 and Oct 7 2023. This is not Dresden here.
- _ugfj 2y ago
  > I read in a history book that that author committed suicide in despair because he thought the Nazis would win. [citation needed] heavily so. https://web.archive.org/web/20101014145959/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,773116,00.html https://web.archive.org/web/20101014145959/http://www.time.c... > Friends in Brazil said he left a suicide note explaining that he was old, a man without a country, too weary to begin a new life.
- narrator 2y ago
  Dostoevsky really saw the gathering storm clouds, especially in his book, "The Possessed." He did a great job of criticizing the idle status seeking upper classes who were charmed and oblivious to the gathering power of radical ideologies like that of Pyotr Stepanovich and his gang of radicals in that book. James Lindsay has spent a lot of time talking about the Gnostic and Hermetic currents running through these disastrous revolts against liberal ideas that occurred throughout the 20th century.[1] It seems that the ancient Gnostic and Hermetic cult ideologies and their derivatives, imported into the modern world by Marx, Hegel and Rousseau are exploiters of many unfixed security vulnerabilities in the human psyche, especially in large groups, that are used to regularly create all sorts of mayhem, and pointless civilizational self-destruction by promising easy societal transformation in any way imaginable and a forthcoming great vague unspecified utopia where the details of how it actually would work are considered unimportant. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lk_w2-8snWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lk_w2-8snWk
  - b800h 2y ago
    To save me watching the video, can you articulate why you believe that Marx was influenced by Gnosticism and Hermeticism? Is this the Popperian "Plato was an enemy of open society"?
    - narrator 2y ago
      Gnosticism has the pattern that there is a demiurge that created this world as a prison. This is the capitalist economy. Gnosticism says that those initiated into secret knowledge will become of aware of the real nature of the world and seek to wake everyone else up. This is the idea of the revolution fixing all problems and bringing about the great communist utopia by transferring all capital ownership to the state. Marx doesn't say a whole lot about how the Utopia would actually operate, those were details Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky were figuring out in Vienna. Hermeticism, specifically the emerald tablet, says that we can make things become believable by just willing them with our minds. Those who believe the things should be treated preferentially, and those who don't should be persecuted because they stand in the way of the implementation of those things. This applies to Marx's beliefs in the labor theory of value among other totally non-empirically backed beliefs being treated as ideological indisputable truth.
- gopher_space 2y ago
  To the person who had a comment removed: The reason we don't talk like that is because it turned out to encourage wholesale murder. It's not that you're "wrong", it's that you're not singling out the responsible individuals when you could just do that. It comes across as intentionally painting with too broad a brush.
  - mrguyorama 2y ago
    No they are absolutely wrong. Painting the kinda normal violence of a city with richish criminals as a parallel to the beginning of a State sanctioned erasing of an ethnicity from their boarders is delusion. The case they reference is literally a gang banger who shot a cop. France is not experiencing a genocide FFS "We don't talk like that" because being that absurdly catastrophizing, that disingenuous about a situation, is called being a liar. Imagine calling Al Capone's violence a genocide.
    - gopher_space 2y ago
      I'm trying to convince, not vent.
FrustratedMonky 2y ago
Exactly. The modern take is to try and compare the US to Pre-WW2 Germany. But really the entire Globe is more like pre-WW1 so something like Ukraine or Gaza is the flame to start the bomb fire.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- quickthrowman 2y ago
  Maybe if you ignore the vast nuclear arsenals that various countries have aimed at each other at all times..
  - piombisallow 2y ago
    How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Let's hope that MAD will deliver lasting world peace.
    - CalRobert 2y ago
      What, me worry?
- ill13 2y ago
  Love the eggcorn as it works in well in context [bomb fire / bonfire]
- tgv 2y ago
  The US is a bit like pre-WW2 Germany, in the sense that a group of power-hungry, self-proclaimed defenders of the people want to overtake government, by whatever means, and suppress basic rights for large groups, based on political conviction and ethnicity. The world isn't pre-WW1. Russia stands alone in its conflict with Ukraine, and Palestine's neighbors don't give a shit. The only thing that could turn it into a wide scale war, is use of nuclear weapons. It would be a madman's hubris, not geopolitical games of a fading elite that drives the process.
trynumber9 2y ago
Though seen by many of its contemporaries as an anachronistic, oppressive state which was doomed to collapse (and it did indeed).
odiroot 2y ago
> I highly recommend Stefan Zweig's "The World of Yesterday", his memoirs of life before WW1 I'm only about 1/3 in but as far as I can tell Zweig only claimed Vienna to be this "enlightened" place. He's still writing quite a lot of critique of the rest of Austria. He's also fully aware of how fragile that Viennese subculture is.
surfingdino 2y ago
The Eastern European population ruled by Austrians lived in abject poverty and there was no talk about making them partake in the prosperity of the elites. The affluence of Vienna did not extend onto the rest of the empire.
- piombisallow 2y ago
  There were multiple projects meant to increase the standard of living in the outer provinces, especially in the ones ruled by the Austrians. Compulsory education, industrialization, electrification. Sarajevo had the first tram system!
  - mlinksva 2y ago
    And there was at least some moving to where the opportunity was. I got a hint of this doing some superficial family research; based on graves and directories, some people made their way from a town in Bohemia where everyone with a version of my rare last name seems to come from to Vienna and Trieste (the imperial port city). Reflected in the article too: > "While not exactly a melting pot, Vienna was its own kind of cultural soup, attracting the ambitious from across the empire," says Dardis McNamee, editor-in-chief of the Vienna Review, Austria's only English-language monthly, who has lived in the city for 17 years. Less than half of the city's two million residents were native born and about a quarter came from Bohemia (now the western Czech Republic) and Moravia (now the eastern Czech Republic), so that Czech was spoken alongside German in many settings.
  - RicoElectrico 2y ago
    The Austrian partition of Poland was the poorest (even if it has the most political liberties).
  - XajniN 2y ago
    Sarajevo had the first tram system in Sarajevo, not in Europe or the world.
- tpm 2y ago
  Which populations? Because most were ruled by Hungarians.
mamonster 2y ago
Zweig was hopelessly delusional about what was actually going on, especially when so many of his contemporaries (Kraus, Musil, Broch to name a few) understood what was happening. With regard to Vienna, Fröhliche Apokalypse(The happy apocalypse) is probably much more accurate than Zweig's cosmopolitan dreams.
- mttpgn 2y ago
  To be fair to Zweig, history's events could have unfolded differently than they did.
  - mamonster 2y ago
    They could've, but tbh its just very hard to read the memoirs of a guy who is extremely privileged, uses his family's money to travel around Europe just as it is ready to fall apart completely, and he is just stuck in this cosmopolitan idealism. I've found Mann to be absolutely insufferable for the exact same reason(although both are very good writers when one only considers literary skills and ignores the actual themes).
aaaasmile 2y ago
Also with the Wes Anderson movie "The Grand Budapest Hotel" you can get into the mood.
thruway516 2y ago
Interesting. I too see many parallels with present-day United States. Especially with all the current political turmoil and cultural ferment. History doesn't repeat perfectly but reading about Vienna and Austro-Hungary before the war and knowing what came after out of this melange- Nazism, Communism, Fascism, it feels somewhat portentous.
tgv 2y ago
I don't see how Austria-Hungary could be seen as a proto EU, unless you mean that they couldn't agree on many things and had muddy compromises on authority and autonomy. How it could have created lasting peace is beyond me. Germany was its natural, but more powerful ally, and France, England and Russia were sworn enemies of Germany, and didn't seem to care for the double monarchy. It had very little credit in world affairs, so how could it have swayed the whole continent? Also: we're not on the cusp of WW3.
- markus_zhang 2y ago
  > unless you mean that they couldn't agree on many things and had muddy compromises on authority and autonomy Kinda reminds of EU right now...
  - ryanmcbride 2y ago
    yes that's part of the point that the comment you're responding to was making
- IgorPartola 2y ago
  Russia also was a complete mess at this time. Its serfdom and class system were oppressive as hell. To give you one idea: soldiers could never be out of uniform. Officers could strike soldier at any time and routinely did. Soldiers were paid roughly 50 kopeks a month while officers go 50-1000 rubles (100k = 1r). Europe was also 60 years into the emergence of Communism at this point because there was very little upward mobility from general populace to the higher classes. Sounds more like author bias and wishful thinking but I will add this book to my list to see if I am wrong.
  - rad_gruchalski 2y ago
    Except for the last paragraph of your reply, what’s different today?
    - IgorPartola 2y ago
shadowtree 2y ago
It literally forced a bunch of peoples into a single entity run by a family (aka monarchy). It predates the nation state, it was blown up by the very desire of the peoples within it to get out. Vienna was the center of this entity, not a part of "Austria". Stefan Zweig, being Jewish, also wasn't connected to the native Austrian population - just like most the persons mentioned in the article. Vienna was an unaligned entity, what New York became later. The backlash against this amalgam fueled WW1 and WW2. It's still reverberating, as can be seen in various European issues today. Bolshevism and its reaction, fascism, geared up to eradicate the old Christian/Aristocratic structures across Europe. The Habsburg emperor wasn't just leading Austria/Hungary, but also the Holy Roman Empire (of German Nation). Christian god-given authority, verbatim.
- mschuster91 2y ago
  > Bolshevism and its reaction, fascism One might argue that fascism is a natural consequence of unfettered rabid capitalism, no need for Bolsheviks at all.
  - helpfulContrib 2y ago
    [dead]
  - BoingBoomTschak 2y ago
    And one would be wrong, unless by fascism you mean "Italian fascism".
    - missedthecue 2y ago
      I think a reoccuring problem here is that there really isn't a consistent definition of 'facism'. The miriam-webster definition is basically just describing any authoritarian state, including the USSR, North Korea, or Uganda. Some people try to add a racialist component to it, but then struggle to apply that definition to governments traditionally understood to have been fascist, like Pinochet's Chile.
inglor_cz 2y ago
Some of the nostalgia for A-H empire is driven by the hindsight of "what happened after 1914". Which tends to give you rosy glasses. The Austrian part (Cisleithania) was okayish place to live, relatively industrially developed (less than Prussia or England), but it had a massive problem with political dysfunction. The Babel of nations was unable to agree on pretty basic things, resulting in paralysis of local and central parliaments and frequent governmental crises. There also was visible, very nasty anti-Semitic resentment. Hitler learnt to hate the Jews from certain Georg Schönerer [0], a rabid Austrian Jew-hater who came up with the idea of a "Final Solution". The Hungarian part was outright backward and oppressive towards non-Hungarians, who constituted at least half of its population. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Ritter_von_Sch%C3%B6nerer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Ritter_von_Sch%C3%B6nere...
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  I was curious to learn more about that claim about Hitler's origins, because Hitler himself explained how he became an anti-semite and I don't remember Schönerer appearing anywhere in that explanation. But the wiki link doesn't explain either. It just makes the same claim and cites a book from 2017. It turns out that book is readable on Google Books and it also doesn't provide any evidence for the claim of a Hitler/Schönerer link. It just asserts it without presenting any evidence or any further citations, in fact, the entirety of the argument is that Hitler was "no doubt" influenced by Schönerer. This is a worse level of evidence than a tweet. Also you claimed Schönerer is the origin of the Final Solution but the Wikipedia page doesn't say that, so where did that come from? I honestly wonder if Wikipedia should cite books. It's too hard to check those references so people don't and that lets un-evidenced claims get treated as "reliably sourced". Putting something in a book doesn't magically make it more reliable than putting something in a blog, yet Wikipedia's policy strongly assumes that it does.
  - inglor_cz 2y ago
    The German Wikipedia article on Schönerer is a lot more extensive: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_von_Sch%C3%B6nerer https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_von_Sch%C3%B6nerer I was probably wrong about the Final Solution, though. It was first used during Sch\onerer's youth, but not attributed to him: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endl%C3%B6sung_der_Judenfrage#%E2%80%9EEndl%C3%B6sung%E2%80%9C https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endl%C3%B6sung_der_Judenfrage#...
lo_zamoyski 2y ago
It was certainly the most delicate of the 19th century European empires. Its attempts to Germanize its subjects was not what you saw in Prussia/later the German Empire, or as bad as Russification in the Russian Empire. I see some similarities between Austria-Hungary and Poland-Lithuania. I think their Catholicism is what permitted the tolerance you saw, because it was tolerance of the authentic sort, not the liberal ersatz: they were both Catholic confessional states that tolerated a variety of religious belief pragmatically, but the parameters were openly and decidedly Catholic. And because Catholicism acknowledges that forced conversion is not only impossible, but immoral, as well as counter to the common good, when accommodation of other religions occurs, it occurs genuinely and according to a clear, realistic, and substantive position. Liberalism, OTOH, simply pretends to be an impossibly big "neutral" tent, but it practices its jihad in secret. No religion is allowed to dominate or function as the organizing principle of the realm, it claims. But liberalism is itself a worldview rooted in a distinctive anthropology, and it is the worldview that reigns. The result is that: 1) Liberal doctrines become these organizing principles, which are sold as "neutral" and therefore beyond discussion and disagreement, something that leads to their imposition and the undermining of other worldviews. A supposed pragmatic doctrine forces other worldviews into the private sphere, and itself is elevated into an ideology that denies it is one. In a Catholic confessional state, no one is pretending to be "neutral", and so someone of another worldview can accept the Catholic terms of the polity on pragmatic grounds without ever being duped or coerced into thinking these are anything but Catholic terms. They are asserted as true, yes, but toleration is identical to acknowledging and accepting the existence of theoretical disagreement, even if there are pragmatic limits. 2) The public sphere becomes anemic and restricted to "pragmatic" things like economics, which vulgarizes the culture, elevating consumption into the religion of consumerism. This vulgarization not only produces a vulgar public culture for the polity, but it necessarily spreads into the private sphere and suffocates the dynamism, richness, and higher ends offered by other, more substantive worldviews, hence negating the very tolerance that it purported to have. The net effect is decadence.
- ClumsyPilot 2y ago
  > The public sphere becomes anemic and restricted to "pragmatic" things like economics, which vulgarizes the culture In correct. This is more recent Neoliberalism, which is an attempt to remove public democratic participation from as many walks of life as possible and to claim that’s ‘freedom’. They play tricks on you, Freedom from democracy is freedom from government intervention, leave it to the capital class / aristocracy to make all these decisions.
screcth 2y ago
Life as a rich person in the capital city of an Empire is great. I doubt that people in conquered territories felt the same way about the Empire.
- tasuki 2y ago
  We in Bohemia and Moravia, despite being conquered, relatively prospered and were allowed significant freedoms by the Austro-Hungarian empire. Much more so than under the occupation of the Soviets...
- 0rzech 2y ago
  And your doubts are well founded. The Polish have been liking it so much, that "Mazurek Dąbrowskiego" (the Polish anthem) has references to Bonaparte (perhaps not exactly deservingly) and Italy because of the Partitions of Poland and currently Poland issues passports with jubilee cover due to 100th anniversary of regaining independence after its Partitions.
mortenjorck 2y ago
If the Assassin's Creed franchise ever decides to do the Twentieth Century, 1910s Vienna certainly seems like a leading candidate for the setting.
vondur 2y ago
It certainly would be interesting if the Austrian-Hungarian Empire survived into current times. Every nation that wanted to leave it probably ended worse off if they had stuck together.
0rzech 2y ago
I can't believe someone would make such claim with a straight face considering Partitions of Poland.
rcbdev 2y ago
Austria-Hungary was as much a proto-EU as Yugoslavia. Make of that what you will.
onetokeoverthe 2y ago
[dead]

ViktorRay 2y ago

It’s interesting how the way that author you mentioned describes the attitudes and views of his parents and the upbringing he had when he was a young lad growing up in Europe of the 1890’s. It’s surprisingly very similar to the attitudes in parents of the 1990’s America and the upbringing many of us who grew up in the 1990’s…. Was interesting. Especially the way it all shattered after world war 1. Hell the author fled Europe to escape the Nazis. I read in a history book that that author committed suicide in despair because he thought the Nazis would win. His memoirs of his life are filled with sadness and melancholy. The enormous optimism that his parents had for him in his upbringing during the 1890’s. When his parents and many of their generation believed the march of science would lead to a new century of reason and peace and progress….and then in his lifetime the world descended into a level of brutality and violence and horror that would have been unimaginable in centuries prior… Poignant stuff

eastbound 2y ago
[flagged]
- cambalache 2y ago
  Any word on the current genocide being perpetrated by Israel?
  - eastbound 2y ago
    Yes. If you’re a small country with little army, don’t throw 7,000 rockets on a bigger country’s living neighborhoods between Jan 1st 2023 and Oct 7 2023. This is not Dresden here.
_ugfj 2y ago
> I read in a history book that that author committed suicide in despair because he thought the Nazis would win. [citation needed] heavily so. https://web.archive.org/web/20101014145959/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,773116,00.html https://web.archive.org/web/20101014145959/http://www.time.c... > Friends in Brazil said he left a suicide note explaining that he was old, a man without a country, too weary to begin a new life.
narrator 2y ago
Dostoevsky really saw the gathering storm clouds, especially in his book, "The Possessed." He did a great job of criticizing the idle status seeking upper classes who were charmed and oblivious to the gathering power of radical ideologies like that of Pyotr Stepanovich and his gang of radicals in that book. James Lindsay has spent a lot of time talking about the Gnostic and Hermetic currents running through these disastrous revolts against liberal ideas that occurred throughout the 20th century.[1] It seems that the ancient Gnostic and Hermetic cult ideologies and their derivatives, imported into the modern world by Marx, Hegel and Rousseau are exploiters of many unfixed security vulnerabilities in the human psyche, especially in large groups, that are used to regularly create all sorts of mayhem, and pointless civilizational self-destruction by promising easy societal transformation in any way imaginable and a forthcoming great vague unspecified utopia where the details of how it actually would work are considered unimportant. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lk_w2-8snWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lk_w2-8snWk
- b800h 2y ago
  To save me watching the video, can you articulate why you believe that Marx was influenced by Gnosticism and Hermeticism? Is this the Popperian "Plato was an enemy of open society"?
  - narrator 2y ago
    Gnosticism has the pattern that there is a demiurge that created this world as a prison. This is the capitalist economy. Gnosticism says that those initiated into secret knowledge will become of aware of the real nature of the world and seek to wake everyone else up. This is the idea of the revolution fixing all problems and bringing about the great communist utopia by transferring all capital ownership to the state. Marx doesn't say a whole lot about how the Utopia would actually operate, those were details Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky were figuring out in Vienna. Hermeticism, specifically the emerald tablet, says that we can make things become believable by just willing them with our minds. Those who believe the things should be treated preferentially, and those who don't should be persecuted because they stand in the way of the implementation of those things. This applies to Marx's beliefs in the labor theory of value among other totally non-empirically backed beliefs being treated as ideological indisputable truth.
gopher_space 2y ago
To the person who had a comment removed: The reason we don't talk like that is because it turned out to encourage wholesale murder. It's not that you're "wrong", it's that you're not singling out the responsible individuals when you could just do that. It comes across as intentionally painting with too broad a brush.
- mrguyorama 2y ago
  No they are absolutely wrong. Painting the kinda normal violence of a city with richish criminals as a parallel to the beginning of a State sanctioned erasing of an ethnicity from their boarders is delusion. The case they reference is literally a gang banger who shot a cop. France is not experiencing a genocide FFS "We don't talk like that" because being that absurdly catastrophizing, that disingenuous about a situation, is called being a liar. Imagine calling Al Capone's violence a genocide.
  - gopher_space 2y ago
    I'm trying to convince, not vent.

FrustratedMonky 2y ago

Exactly. The modern take is to try and compare the US to Pre-WW2 Germany. But really the entire Globe is more like pre-WW1 so something like Ukraine or Gaza is the flame to start the bomb fire.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
quickthrowman 2y ago
Maybe if you ignore the vast nuclear arsenals that various countries have aimed at each other at all times..
- piombisallow 2y ago
  How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Let's hope that MAD will deliver lasting world peace.
  - CalRobert 2y ago
    What, me worry?
ill13 2y ago
Love the eggcorn as it works in well in context [bomb fire / bonfire]
tgv 2y ago
The US is a bit like pre-WW2 Germany, in the sense that a group of power-hungry, self-proclaimed defenders of the people want to overtake government, by whatever means, and suppress basic rights for large groups, based on political conviction and ethnicity. The world isn't pre-WW1. Russia stands alone in its conflict with Ukraine, and Palestine's neighbors don't give a shit. The only thing that could turn it into a wide scale war, is use of nuclear weapons. It would be a madman's hubris, not geopolitical games of a fading elite that drives the process.

trynumber9 2y ago

Though seen by many of its contemporaries as an anachronistic, oppressive state which was doomed to collapse (and it did indeed).

odiroot 2y ago

> I highly recommend Stefan Zweig's "The World of Yesterday", his memoirs of life before WW1 I'm only about 1/3 in but as far as I can tell Zweig only claimed Vienna to be this "enlightened" place. He's still writing quite a lot of critique of the rest of Austria. He's also fully aware of how fragile that Viennese subculture is.

surfingdino 2y ago

The Eastern European population ruled by Austrians lived in abject poverty and there was no talk about making them partake in the prosperity of the elites. The affluence of Vienna did not extend onto the rest of the empire.

piombisallow 2y ago
There were multiple projects meant to increase the standard of living in the outer provinces, especially in the ones ruled by the Austrians. Compulsory education, industrialization, electrification. Sarajevo had the first tram system!
- mlinksva 2y ago
  And there was at least some moving to where the opportunity was. I got a hint of this doing some superficial family research; based on graves and directories, some people made their way from a town in Bohemia where everyone with a version of my rare last name seems to come from to Vienna and Trieste (the imperial port city). Reflected in the article too: > "While not exactly a melting pot, Vienna was its own kind of cultural soup, attracting the ambitious from across the empire," says Dardis McNamee, editor-in-chief of the Vienna Review, Austria's only English-language monthly, who has lived in the city for 17 years. Less than half of the city's two million residents were native born and about a quarter came from Bohemia (now the western Czech Republic) and Moravia (now the eastern Czech Republic), so that Czech was spoken alongside German in many settings.
- RicoElectrico 2y ago
  The Austrian partition of Poland was the poorest (even if it has the most political liberties).
- XajniN 2y ago
  Sarajevo had the first tram system in Sarajevo, not in Europe or the world.
tpm 2y ago
Which populations? Because most were ruled by Hungarians.

mamonster 2y ago

Zweig was hopelessly delusional about what was actually going on, especially when so many of his contemporaries (Kraus, Musil, Broch to name a few) understood what was happening. With regard to Vienna, Fröhliche Apokalypse(The happy apocalypse) is probably much more accurate than Zweig's cosmopolitan dreams.

mttpgn 2y ago
To be fair to Zweig, history's events could have unfolded differently than they did.
- mamonster 2y ago
  They could've, but tbh its just very hard to read the memoirs of a guy who is extremely privileged, uses his family's money to travel around Europe just as it is ready to fall apart completely, and he is just stuck in this cosmopolitan idealism. I've found Mann to be absolutely insufferable for the exact same reason(although both are very good writers when one only considers literary skills and ignores the actual themes).

aaaasmile 2y ago

Also with the Wes Anderson movie "The Grand Budapest Hotel" you can get into the mood.

thruway516 2y ago

Interesting. I too see many parallels with present-day United States. Especially with all the current political turmoil and cultural ferment. History doesn't repeat perfectly but reading about Vienna and Austro-Hungary before the war and knowing what came after out of this melange- Nazism, Communism, Fascism, it feels somewhat portentous.

tgv 2y ago

I don't see how Austria-Hungary could be seen as a proto EU, unless you mean that they couldn't agree on many things and had muddy compromises on authority and autonomy. How it could have created lasting peace is beyond me. Germany was its natural, but more powerful ally, and France, England and Russia were sworn enemies of Germany, and didn't seem to care for the double monarchy. It had very little credit in world affairs, so how could it have swayed the whole continent? Also: we're not on the cusp of WW3.

markus_zhang 2y ago
> unless you mean that they couldn't agree on many things and had muddy compromises on authority and autonomy Kinda reminds of EU right now...
- ryanmcbride 2y ago
  yes that's part of the point that the comment you're responding to was making
IgorPartola 2y ago
Russia also was a complete mess at this time. Its serfdom and class system were oppressive as hell. To give you one idea: soldiers could never be out of uniform. Officers could strike soldier at any time and routinely did. Soldiers were paid roughly 50 kopeks a month while officers go 50-1000 rubles (100k = 1r). Europe was also 60 years into the emergence of Communism at this point because there was very little upward mobility from general populace to the higher classes. Sounds more like author bias and wishful thinking but I will add this book to my list to see if I am wrong.
- rad_gruchalski 2y ago
  Except for the last paragraph of your reply, what’s different today?
  - IgorPartola 2y ago

shadowtree 2y ago

It literally forced a bunch of peoples into a single entity run by a family (aka monarchy). It predates the nation state, it was blown up by the very desire of the peoples within it to get out. Vienna was the center of this entity, not a part of "Austria". Stefan Zweig, being Jewish, also wasn't connected to the native Austrian population - just like most the persons mentioned in the article. Vienna was an unaligned entity, what New York became later. The backlash against this amalgam fueled WW1 and WW2. It's still reverberating, as can be seen in various European issues today. Bolshevism and its reaction, fascism, geared up to eradicate the old Christian/Aristocratic structures across Europe. The Habsburg emperor wasn't just leading Austria/Hungary, but also the Holy Roman Empire (of German Nation). Christian god-given authority, verbatim.

mschuster91 2y ago
> Bolshevism and its reaction, fascism One might argue that fascism is a natural consequence of unfettered rabid capitalism, no need for Bolsheviks at all.
- helpfulContrib 2y ago
  [dead]
- BoingBoomTschak 2y ago
  And one would be wrong, unless by fascism you mean "Italian fascism".
  - missedthecue 2y ago
    I think a reoccuring problem here is that there really isn't a consistent definition of 'facism'. The miriam-webster definition is basically just describing any authoritarian state, including the USSR, North Korea, or Uganda. Some people try to add a racialist component to it, but then struggle to apply that definition to governments traditionally understood to have been fascist, like Pinochet's Chile.

inglor_cz 2y ago

Some of the nostalgia for A-H empire is driven by the hindsight of "what happened after 1914". Which tends to give you rosy glasses. The Austrian part (Cisleithania) was okayish place to live, relatively industrially developed (less than Prussia or England), but it had a massive problem with political dysfunction. The Babel of nations was unable to agree on pretty basic things, resulting in paralysis of local and central parliaments and frequent governmental crises. There also was visible, very nasty anti-Semitic resentment. Hitler learnt to hate the Jews from certain Georg Schönerer [0], a rabid Austrian Jew-hater who came up with the idea of a "Final Solution". The Hungarian part was outright backward and oppressive towards non-Hungarians, who constituted at least half of its population. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Ritter_von_Sch%C3%B6nerer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Ritter_von_Sch%C3%B6nere...

mike_hearn 2y ago
I was curious to learn more about that claim about Hitler's origins, because Hitler himself explained how he became an anti-semite and I don't remember Schönerer appearing anywhere in that explanation. But the wiki link doesn't explain either. It just makes the same claim and cites a book from 2017. It turns out that book is readable on Google Books and it also doesn't provide any evidence for the claim of a Hitler/Schönerer link. It just asserts it without presenting any evidence or any further citations, in fact, the entirety of the argument is that Hitler was "no doubt" influenced by Schönerer. This is a worse level of evidence than a tweet. Also you claimed Schönerer is the origin of the Final Solution but the Wikipedia page doesn't say that, so where did that come from? I honestly wonder if Wikipedia should cite books. It's too hard to check those references so people don't and that lets un-evidenced claims get treated as "reliably sourced". Putting something in a book doesn't magically make it more reliable than putting something in a blog, yet Wikipedia's policy strongly assumes that it does.
- inglor_cz 2y ago
  The German Wikipedia article on Schönerer is a lot more extensive: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_von_Sch%C3%B6nerer https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_von_Sch%C3%B6nerer I was probably wrong about the Final Solution, though. It was first used during Sch\onerer's youth, but not attributed to him: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endl%C3%B6sung_der_Judenfrage#%E2%80%9EEndl%C3%B6sung%E2%80%9C https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endl%C3%B6sung_der_Judenfrage#...

lo_zamoyski 2y ago

It was certainly the most delicate of the 19th century European empires. Its attempts to Germanize its subjects was not what you saw in Prussia/later the German Empire, or as bad as Russification in the Russian Empire. I see some similarities between Austria-Hungary and Poland-Lithuania. I think their Catholicism is what permitted the tolerance you saw, because it was tolerance of the authentic sort, not the liberal ersatz: they were both Catholic confessional states that tolerated a variety of religious belief pragmatically, but the parameters were openly and decidedly Catholic. And because Catholicism acknowledges that forced conversion is not only impossible, but immoral, as well as counter to the common good, when accommodation of other religions occurs, it occurs genuinely and according to a clear, realistic, and substantive position. Liberalism, OTOH, simply pretends to be an impossibly big "neutral" tent, but it practices its jihad in secret. No religion is allowed to dominate or function as the organizing principle of the realm, it claims. But liberalism is itself a worldview rooted in a distinctive anthropology, and it is the worldview that reigns. The result is that: 1) Liberal doctrines become these organizing principles, which are sold as "neutral" and therefore beyond discussion and disagreement, something that leads to their imposition and the undermining of other worldviews. A supposed pragmatic doctrine forces other worldviews into the private sphere, and itself is elevated into an ideology that denies it is one. In a Catholic confessional state, no one is pretending to be "neutral", and so someone of another worldview can accept the Catholic terms of the polity on pragmatic grounds without ever being duped or coerced into thinking these are anything but Catholic terms. They are asserted as true, yes, but toleration is identical to acknowledging and accepting the existence of theoretical disagreement, even if there are pragmatic limits. 2) The public sphere becomes anemic and restricted to "pragmatic" things like economics, which vulgarizes the culture, elevating consumption into the religion of consumerism. This vulgarization not only produces a vulgar public culture for the polity, but it necessarily spreads into the private sphere and suffocates the dynamism, richness, and higher ends offered by other, more substantive worldviews, hence negating the very tolerance that it purported to have. The net effect is decadence.

ClumsyPilot 2y ago
> The public sphere becomes anemic and restricted to "pragmatic" things like economics, which vulgarizes the culture In correct. This is more recent Neoliberalism, which is an attempt to remove public democratic participation from as many walks of life as possible and to claim that’s ‘freedom’. They play tricks on you, Freedom from democracy is freedom from government intervention, leave it to the capital class / aristocracy to make all these decisions.

screcth 2y ago

Life as a rich person in the capital city of an Empire is great. I doubt that people in conquered territories felt the same way about the Empire.

tasuki 2y ago
We in Bohemia and Moravia, despite being conquered, relatively prospered and were allowed significant freedoms by the Austro-Hungarian empire. Much more so than under the occupation of the Soviets...
0rzech 2y ago
And your doubts are well founded. The Polish have been liking it so much, that "Mazurek Dąbrowskiego" (the Polish anthem) has references to Bonaparte (perhaps not exactly deservingly) and Italy because of the Partitions of Poland and currently Poland issues passports with jubilee cover due to 100th anniversary of regaining independence after its Partitions.

mortenjorck 2y ago

If the Assassin's Creed franchise ever decides to do the Twentieth Century, 1910s Vienna certainly seems like a leading candidate for the setting.

vondur 2y ago

It certainly would be interesting if the Austrian-Hungarian Empire survived into current times. Every nation that wanted to leave it probably ended worse off if they had stuck together.

0rzech 2y ago

I can't believe someone would make such claim with a straight face considering Partitions of Poland.

rcbdev 2y ago

Austria-Hungary was as much a proto-EU as Yugoslavia. Make of that what you will.

onetokeoverthe 2y ago

[dead]