The best books on Austria

Before we get to the books, could you give a quick introduction to Austria and why we might be interested in it?

There are two sides to that. One is current and one is historical. Austria is now a small country, a republic with nine bundesländer, but originally it was the center of a great empire that hugely influenced the history of Europe. Under the Habsburgs, it went on for nearly six centuries. So it’s a massive chunk of European history.

It’s iconic for what’s called Central Europe, an idea born out of one of the great empires of the world, which is now almost a distant memory, because it was dismantled after the Versailles peace conference at the end of the First World War. The distinction is quite important, although, of course, it’s entirely artificial. I have a German historian friend who delights in telling me that the actual geographical center of Europe is Minsk. But we shouldn’t forget that Prague, for example, which we think of as Central Europe, is to the west of Vienna, geographically.

This is relevant to the first book I want to mention, which is Central Europe by Lonnie Johnson. It’s an excellent book, and its subtitle gives the game away: Enemies, Neighbors, Friends. For centuries, these countries that we principally think about when we think of Central Europe—although, as I say, it’s more an idea than a real geographical concept—were under the hegemony of the Habsburgs, as the Holy Roman Empire.

The Holy Roman Empire is even more difficult to define. Whole books have been written about what it was. Voltaire once said that the Holy Roman Empire was neither Holy nor Roman nor an Empire (he was inclined to say things like that, to be a gadfly). It was the successor of the Western Roman Empire, which began to exist in rather a numinous form after Constantine split the empire between Rome and Constantinople.

The first Holy Roman emperor was actually Charlemagne, crowned in Rome on Christmas Day in the year 800. The whole concept, therefore, stems from him, and that means that there is a significant political and cultural divide between the Orthodox countries and the Western Catholic (until the Reformation) Christian countries. We incorporated so much of the Greco-Roman, Judaeo-Christian civilisation, and the absolute lynchpin of it was the central European countries ruled from the middle of the 15th century by a Habsburg emperor.

Now, when I say ruled, there is a concept in the Roman church, ’subsidiarity’, which was local autonomy (The EU also pretended to adopt this, but nothing happened: quite the reverse). The emperor was owed a personal loyalty as emperor and also as the mainstay of the Catholic Church. He was a symbolic figure, but he did have certain legislative powers over individual countries or ‘lands’, which also had their own Diets. This later was a source of problems, because many of the diets became Protestant, and that was one of the big struggles in the Counter-Reformation, to try and stop the drift towards Protestantism.

Also important to mention about Lonnie Johnson’s book, Central Europe, is that it has a very good description of how the idea of modern national identity arose. Remember that it didn’t exist as such in the Middle Ages. There was serfdom. Territories were exchanged from one ruler to another just by sitting down and making a treaty. This situation is generally conceived of as having undergone what the historians irritatingly call a paradigm shift at the end of the 30 Years War (Possibly the worst war ever in Europe: more than 8 million people died, either of famine or in the warfare).

Johnson’s book looks at the nurturing of a national cultural identity in the late 18th century, partly as a product of the Enlightenment and partly as a product of late Romanticism. The person behind it, intellectually, was an extraordinary Lutheran pastor, a German, called Johann Gottfried von Herder. He had this mystical idea of the spirit of an individual people residing chiefly in its language. People began to think, ‘Why are we subservient to this empire? We are individual nations, and we have a great culture behind us!’ That really boomed in the 19th century, up to the revolutions of 1848, which were the first violent political expression of it.

I want to read a little bit, if I may, from the book:

“It would be difficult to underestimate the breadth and depth of Herder’s impact. Isaiah Berlin, the famous British historian of ideas, maintained that all regionalists, all defenders of the local against the universal, all champions of deeply rooted forms of life, both reactionary and progressive, both genuine humanists and obscurantist opponents of scientific progress owe something, whether they know it or not, to the doctrines of Herder, who introduced this into European thought.”

“It is important to distinguish between Herder’s intentions and the consequences of his work, because he was the sort of genius whose insights could easily be misinterpreted. Hence, there is a theory in history of the Herder-to-Hitler progress.” He uncovered this mare’s nest of nationalism, which went on to national populism and so on, and unleashed a Pandora’s box. It’s not really fair. “Herder was a Protestant minister, a Christian humanist, and a pacifist who thought that a natural harmony among all peoples and cultures based on empathy and understanding was possible. He was the first modern champion of cultural pluralism or diversity and a forerunner of contemporary multiculturalism. The critique of the white European and Eurocentric version of civilisation by contemporary multiculturalists is based to a considerable extent on the early 19th century German Romantic concept of culture and roots.”

Now, if you’re looking at the history of this area, and Austria in particular, it was actually an Archduchy, not a kingdom, but the Emperor’s seat was there (with only two historical exceptions.) His aegis extended over a huge area. It began to crumble as a result of Herder’s ideas mingling with liberalism and the quest for freedom. The revolutions of 1848 were suppressed, but these ideas were now firmly in the respective national psyches and were eventually to come to fruition with the collapse of the Empire in 1919.

The ‘Holy Roman Empire’ itself was actually dissolved at the time of Napoleon because he was of the opinion that there was only room for one emperor in Europe, and that would be him. So the Empire was dissolved in 1806, a move anticipated by the last Habsburg Emperor in 1804 when he redesignated himself simply as ‘Emperor of Austria.’ The territories merged into the Austrian Empire became the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1867, which ended in 1919.

So this book gives a wonderful survey of the underlying inspirations and cultural ideas that give us the history of Central Europe, whose center definitely is not Minsk.

At the beginning, you said we might be interested in Austria on the one hand for the history, and on the other hand for the present. Could you say a bit about the contemporary angle?

The Habsburg history is still very much alive. The coat of arms for the Austrian Republic is actually partially based on the old icon of a double-headed eagle. That’s because, far from being simply a rapidly declining empire as so often depicted, it was in many ways successful at modernising. As a result, when Austria became a republic, there was an element of modernisation already there.

Austria is extremely adept at diplomacy. After World War II, it was occupied until 1955 by the four victorious Allied Powers, which eventually prevented it from falling into the Russian sphere during the Cold War, even though its eastern border was with the Soviet Union and its satraps. This enabled it to get Marshall Plan funds, and as a result, it developed rather quickly. The Austrians even managed to make a deal to get the Russians to withdraw from Austria, the former being not very keen to give up the Austrian oil. A deal on oil deliveries to the Soviet Union was accompanied with a guarantee of the neutrality of the Austrian state, something which has even survived Austria’s entry into the EU in 1995. It is now a little problematic because of the Russian aggression in the Ukraine which has forced formerly neutral states like Sweden and Finland to join NATO, of which Austria is not a member.

Austria also became a very important center for diplomatic exchange, as it still is, and for spying. After the war, Bruno Kreisky, the socialist chancellor in the 1970s and 80s, put Austria well and truly on the map. It is, for example, now the fourth United Nations city, hosting the United Nations Development Organization (UNIDO). It also hosts OPEC. It was the first country in Europe to open an office for the PLO.

It also has a long historical tradition of being an entrepôt, an east-west, north-south trading centre. For example, the amber trade, which was absolutely crucial in the early Middle Ages, went very close to Vienna, up to a place called Carnuntum (you can still see the museum there), and down to Aquileia. Crucially, Austria was geostrategically always a kind of Drehpunkt, and it still is, to some extent. You had the meeting between Khrushchev and Kennedy in Vienna, and other significant meetings have occurred there in our times.

You mentioned the Habsburgs, who you also write about in your book, The Shortest History of Austria. How was one family able to stay in power for more than half a millennium?

There was a saying—tu felix Austria nube—that they built their power through marriage diplomacy. It was a gigantic marriage brokerage, and that’s how they spread their wings. At one stage, they were related to half, if not more, of all the royal houses in Europe.

Again, there was a paradigm shift (a phrase I don’t like, but I can’t think of a better one) with Charles V. He was the first Habsburg who had to confront the Reformation, and he tried to curb it. He ruled over an empire “on which the sun never set,” because, being Emperor also in Spain, he had the South American territories obtained by the conquistadors. He felt that one man just couldn’t rule such a big territory, and he initially divided the Habsburg patrimony between himself and his younger brother Ferdinand, before eventually retiring to a Spanish monastery in 1556 (his son, Philip II, inherited the Habsburg Spanish Empire.)

Besides Spain, Philip ruled the territories in Southern Italy (which the Habsburgs kept until their Spanish line became extinct), while Ferdinand and his successors ruled in Central Europe. Ferdinand also succeeded Charles as Holy Roman Emperor. He acquired Hungary and Bohemia through a marriage contract that dated back to the reign of Maximilian I. The acquisition followed the 1526 disaster of the Battle of Mohács in southern Hungary, when the Hungarians were massacred by an Ottoman army and the young Hungarian king, Louis II of the Jagiello dynasty but married to a Habsburg, died by drowning while trying to escape.

The Habsburgs had two main missions. One was to protect the Catholic Church against the rising tide of Protestantism, a struggle which became very violent at one stage. The other was to protect the Christian West from Ottoman invasions, in which Austria had a pivotal function. These incursions started as early as the 14th century and got steadily worse. The next book I want to mention is, in fact, about the high-water mark of the Ottoman invasions.

Yes, let’s turn to The Siege of Vienna (1964) by John Stoye. This is about when the Ottomans nearly took Vienna in 1683. Tell me more.

Vienna had been besieged before, just after the Battle of Mohács in 1526. Three years later, the Turks did reach the outskirts of Vienna, but they only had a fairly short fighting season, and their supply lines were very stretched, so they abandoned the siege.

This time, in 1683, they were determined to succeed. The Ottoman army tramped all the way from the Sublime Porte, gathering all their vassals and Tatars from the Crimea and Hungarians from Transylvania who were in rebellion against Habsburg rule. They enrolled them in a massive army: some estimates say there were 100,000 men, others 170,000. They brought their harems and everything with them, lock, stock, and barrel. They needed huge sustenance, so 16,000 head of cattle came along too.

It took the Ottoman army two years to get to its destination, which was an advantage for the Habsburgs, who had spies at the Sublime Porte and knew what was going on. This time, Vienna was prepared. They had built huge new fortifications all around the city, with enormous bastions, which are illustrated in Stoye’s book. They were built by an Italian architect, rather in the style of some of those big, fortified, North Italian cities whose inhabitants were always besieging each other. They also added a Glacis in front of the city, which was a steep, extended ramp, so that they could more easily attack the Turks as they advanced.

The Ottomans, however, were well prepared with knowledge about the fortifications.

By the way, one country that was not cooperating with the defence of Christendom was France. This, I’m afraid, followed a long and undistinguished pattern, because the French actually wanted—and only Napoleon de facto achieved it—to become Emperors in Europe. At the time of the siege, Louis XIV was focused on acquiring Alsace and Lorraine, not on saving the Christian West. The Pope had declared, ‘This is the Holy League, we’ve got to save Christendom,’ but Louis XIV was unimpressed. The French even undermined the Austrians, because they had advisors and engineers at the Sublime Porte, and possibly even a few French troops accompanied the Ottoman army.

Let me read a passage from the book—it’s very vivid, detailed, good stuff.

“While the ring of fortifications buzzed with activity inside Vienna, the civilian world struggled to survive under conditions of siege. The schools had closed, the churches soon opened again. Stocks of food were still ample and prices steady. The flurry of excitement which had first called out the burgher guards and companies recruited from artisans died down, and the siege began to follow an orthodox course.”

The Ottomans encircled most of Vienna and started digging tunnels; then they put explosives in the tunnels to try and blow up the city. But the defenders were alert, and they could work out where the incursions were from the sound of digging. A baker became famous for reporting the sounds of the Ottoman saboteurs right under his bakery, whereat explosives were laid to stop them.

Charles of Lorraine was the official leader of the Holy League. He was later joined by Jan Sobieski, King of Poland, who reckoned that, as a king, he was superior and insisted on being the first to lead his troops down from the Kahlenberg (just to the west of Vienna) as the counter-attack was launched.

“The civil administration was, in fact, being pulled into shape. It had a very good defender, Count von Starhemberg. A number of useful measures were agreed. When incendiary bombs began to fall in quantities, fire brigades were used and did their work admirably. All the householders provided themselves with buckets, barrels or skins kept filled with water. They had to dismantle roofs made of shingles in order to lessen the risk of fire, and there were other instructions to scour the streets, to remove the refuse of dead animals and so on and so forth.”

This is quite remarkable, considering that Vienna had only just recovered from the worst plague they ever underwent only four years earlier, in 1679. There was a good Dutch doctor who came and tried to implement an enforced lockdown, not entirely successfully. The Viennese were decimated, with huge loss of life, but those who survived were pretty tough and stoical.

The emperor, Leopold I, took to his heels and went off to Linz until it was all over. He was greeted on his return by Sobieski at Schwechat, who said, ‘I am honoured to have rendered Your Majesty this small service’—which was perhaps diplomatic speech, for ‘Where were you?’

Sobieski had arrived late and then insisted on taking charge. He was supposed to come with a Lithuanian army, a reminder of the scope of Central Europe. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which still existed, was a huge tract of territory. Norman Davies says it was the largest tract of single-ruled territory in Europe at that time, stretching from the Baltic down to Ukraine. Anyway, they didn’t turn up in time.

There was also some tension between the arriving troops, because some of them were Protestants, and we must remember how bitter the struggle was between the new Protestants—who had managed to obtain a lot of property and establish themselves, particularly in Bohemia, where there had been proto-Protestants known as Hussites after their first leader, Jan Hus—and those trying to maintain the authority of Catholicism.

Incidentally, the Ottoman leader, the Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa, retreated as far as Belgrade, where he was murdered in the traditional manner with a silken cord. That was how they got rid of people who’d failed in those days: no failing upwards, like today—you most definitely failed downwards.

Leopold I, the great survivor, was known as the Baroque emperor. You normally expect that, at a time of continuous war, culture and money spent on culture will be lacking. This was actually not the case.

A writer who captures the moods, the atmosphere of Vienna at different periods brilliantly is Ilsa Barea who wrote a book called Vienna: Legend and Reality published in 1921. It is a kind of love-hatred letter to the city that she had had to flee and captures the feelings of nostalgia tinged with melancholy. She evokes the Baroque city and even more the Biedermeier age (after the Napoleonic war, 1815-1848) very vividly.

The earlier Baroque architecture was largely Italian in its source—because the first great musicians at court were from Italy and the first great architects in Austria, like Fischer von Erlach or Hildebrandt, were trained in Rome. But the Baroque was a world also all of its own. The Austrians have a wonderful phrase, Sein und Schein, which denotes the worlds of ‘illusion and reality,’ which the Baroque combined in a single mindset. In my book, I quote the cultural historian Egon Friedell (1878-1938):

“Then came the Baroque with its double reversal of the idea of worldliness. It first rejected the world as a mere dream. But since at the same time it affirmed the dream as the only reality, it again returned to the world in a roundabout way. Thus, it became the philosophy of the most worldly worldliness, since it rejected every accountability on the grounds that the world is just a dream. So arose that odd mixture of withdrawal from life and love of life, of submissiveness and pride, of incense and musk.” So that’s a good bit of Baroque prose—or we might call it neo-Baroque prose—and it describes the atmosphere of Baroque Austrian cities very well.

Leopold was incredibly extravagant. A famous opera, Il Pomo d’Oro (The Golden Apple), was played in the open air over two days. This was to celebrate the wedding of Leopold and his young Spanish bride. She was 15 and called him uncle throughout their marriage (which, in fact, he was. She was also his first cousin).

So this is the period when a great cultural and architectural awakening occurs. Then it goes further when, for example, Baroque music develops into the Viennese Classic period of Haydn and Mozart, and later early Romanticism with Beethoven.

The successor culture to Baroque was the age of Enlightenment. And one of the best books on that—or at any rate the most enjoyable—is by Edward Crankshaw. It’s a biography of Maria Theresa, who was very remarkable both as a person and as a ruler. First of all, she was astonishingly talented. Indeed, she was such a gifted singer that they wanted her to join the opera, but royalty didn’t do that kind of thing, so she just sang at court, at receptions.

Maria Theresa’s correct title was Archduchess because her father had not managed to establish that there should be inheritance in the female line. He touted something called ‘the Pragmatic Sanction’ around Europe, which everyone hastened to sign while he was still alive and discarded as soon as he died. Rival claimants invaded Austria, and Maria Theresa was put under enormous pressure. She complained that her cabinet, such as it was, all looked as if they’d escaped from the Capuchin Crypt. She had to replace them, which she did with great acuteness, bringing in people from abroad. Her personal doctor, Gerard van Swieten, was Dutch and the founder of a health service in Austria. Joseph von Sonnenfels was a converted Jew (his father had been a Rabbi), which was a rarity for the times, and was instrumental in the abolition of judicial torture.

She also cleaned up the wretched army. I quote her in my book, but it comes from Crankshaw:

“Who would believe that there was not the slightest attempt to achieve uniformity among my troops? Every regiment had its own separate drill on the march, on manoeuvres, on deployment. One fired in quick time, another in slow time. The same terms and words of command meant different things to different regiments.”—which became a great problem also later with the Austro-Hungarian Empire. “No wonder the Emperor was beaten all the time during the ten years before my accession, no wonder the state in which I found my army was indescribable.”

The mixture of extravagance, inattention, and incompetence had made the Austrians very vulnerable, and she was nearly overwhelmed. It was the only time—between the mid-15th century and 1806—that the Habsburgs did not obtain the title of Holy Roman Emperor for some five years.

Maria Theresa did have the advantage that she ruled for 40 years. Frederick III had done the same in the 15th century. You simply outlived all your enemies, and when they had satisfactorily died, you could regain lost lands or titles.

Maria Theresa married Franz Stephan of Lorraine and it was a love match. Lorraine was originally heir to the rich Lorraine territories, which, however, he exchanged for the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in a deal with the French. A gifted administrator, he rescued the finances of Austria. Indeed, he made himself so rich that he more or less propped up the notoriously rickety Habsburg finances. He was also elected Holy Roman Emperor and the Habsburg dynasty became that of Habsburg-Lorraine, Maria Theresa being able thereby to assume the title Empress as his consort. He himself hardly intervened in ruling her Empire but concentrated on cultivating his scientific interests and on finance.

In the last couple of years, there’ve been at least two new biographies of Maria Theresa. Have you looked at those?

Actually not, but of course they’ll be more up to date with new research. Currently in Vienna there is even a forthcoming Maria Theresa musical being advertised! However I chose this biography because it is extremely readable and entertaining—like, for instance, the descriptions of the extravagance at court that she tried to rein in. She herself was eating too much and getting larger and larger. Her physician, van Swieten, said, ‘I can do something about this.’ He sat with her as she had her dinner, placed a pail beside her chair, and for every course that she took, he put the same amount in the pail. After about an hour, she’d finished her supper, and he held up the pail and said, ‘This is why Your Majesty is ill.’ It was a very tactful way of telling her to rein in her appetite.

Remarkably, Maria Theresa had 16 children, one of whom was the unlucky Maria Antonia, better known as Marie Antoinette, who ended up on the guillotine. France was still the great enemy. The English were paying subsidies to the Austrians through the early 19th century, to try and keep the French down—the traditional English policy. Later, Marie Louise, the daughter of Francis I of Austria, became the wife of Napoleon in 1810 as a way of satisfying Napoleon’s dynastic ambitions.

But back to Maria Theresa, who initiated a period of political and social reform. For example, she reformed education so that there was obligatory primary school education for the first time. Her son Joseph was an even more zealous reformer. He was co-regent with his mother after Francis Stephen died in 1765, and was then sole Emperor after her death in 1780.

Traditionally, one of the great missions of the Habsburgs was to oppose Protestantism, but Joseph II, recognizing the futility of endless religious strife, promulgated an Edict of Tolerance. You were now allowed to profess your own religion. This even included, to a certain extent, the Jews, who had a long history of persecution, although they still faced discriminatory taxation and other obligations (such as taking Christian names).

Earlier, Leopold I had expelled all the Jews from Vienna in 1670 simply for dogmatic reasons. This was probably a policy urged on him by Spanish advisors, and particularly his devout wife, who’d been brought up in Spain. The Jews were blamed for all sorts of things, including that part of the Hofburg had burned down shortly after it had been rebuilt. The Jews were all cleared out from what is now the second district of Vienna, called the Leopoldstadt. There’s a big church there, which is built on the site of the destroyed synagogue. There is a lot of literature on the history of the Jews in Austria, their periodic expulsions and return, which I summarise in my book.

Speaking of Vienna, you’re recommending two books that look at how Austria gave the modern world so many of its economic, scientific, and philosophic ideas, including Sigmund Freud and the Chicago School of Economics. Tell me about Richard Cockett’s Vienna: How The City of Ideas Created the Modern World (2023).

It’s a very, very good book. If you think of some of the 20th-century thinkers—Wittgenstein, Popper, Friedrich von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Joseph Schumpeter—that’s quite a lot from a smallish country, which was by then a republic.

There are also many others who are less known to the general public. Hans Kelsen was a constitutionalist who went to America and became the greatest constitutional lawyer in the West. The constitution that Austria still has—when the Second Republic was revived after the Second World War—is, in fact, based on his constitution.

There was also Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi, who knew everybody everywhere, including Einstein, Adenauer and Churchill. The idea of what we now call the EU was really born with him, and he was the first person to receive the Charlemagne prize in Aachen for services in respect of the unification of Europe. He was a typical cosmopolitan Austrian.

Another inspiring figure was Bertha von Suttner, who was the first pacifist. If you go to page 167 of my book, you’ll see a cartoon with her. She was a determined peace campaigner avant la lettre. She believed that it was not so much that there should be rules for warfare, but that war itself should be banned completely. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1905 and died in June 1914, just before World War I.

You also wanted to mention a book that focuses on Vienna’s philosophers.

Yes, The Murder of Professor Schlick: The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle by David Edmonds. It’s not a crime novel, but an account of how the influential school of positivism—secular, empirical, and contemptuous of metaphysics—flourished in the 1930s. The book vividly brings alive the leading lights from Gödel to Wittgenstein, some of whom were pretty eccentric. It was all in the shade of a deteriorating political landscape. The shooting of Moritz Schlick, considered the Circle’s founder, on the steps of the university in 1936, was followed by the group’s decline with the flight into exile of its leading members.

Many of those thinkers who made good abroad were the inheritors of the ethos of the Vienna Circle. They envisaged an entirely rational world, based on the Enlightenment, where all problems were subjected to empirical analysis. And if they couldn’t be subjected to that, they didn’t exist. The philosopher AJ Ayer used to come to the Vienna Circle’s meetings. He wrote a book which was heavily based on their outlook, and which was called Language, Truth and Logic. I recommend that book if you want to have a bird’s eye view into the way they looked at the world (even if Ayer more or less disowned it later). It’s quite a short book, and, even for non-philosophers, mostly understandable.

Finally, let’s turn to literature and the Austrian novels you’ve recommended. If you were to pick just one, would it be The Man Without Qualities (1930) by Robert Musil?

I think so. I’ve treated the task you set me a little bit like Desert Island Discs. I would take this book to a desert island for a very good reason, which is that I’d never get to the end of it! It’s one of the longest unfinished novels ever written.

The first part of the book is set in 1913 and is a mere 100,000 words. He didn’t publish it till 1930, so some people view it as a picture of a society where everybody’s rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. It’s very easy to do that with hindsight, but the autumn of the Empire is more interesting than that.

Robert Musil was one of the Vienna café literati. He took refuge in Zurich during the war, where he died. He was strongly in the positivist tradition, a scientist himself and a trained engineer. What he does is he hangs the whole book on the peg of something that never happens. It’s a sort of anti-philosophy, even though he was a philosopher. He says something that perhaps underlies his whole work, namely that “Philosophers are people who do violence but have no army at their disposal and so subjugate the world by locking it into a system.”

The actual plot—if you can call it a plot—is the story of an attempt to think of something suitable to do for the celebration of Emperor Franz Joseph’s 70th year in power. He had come to power in 1848, so we’re talking about 1918. The novel has this somewhat surreal quality, partly because we, as readers, know that the Jubilee is never going to happen. There is a somewhat desperate search for a name to emphasize Austria’s superiority over Germany since, most inconveniently, Kaiser Friedrich of Germany would also be having a Jubilee in 1918. Would it be ‘The Year of Austria’, ‘The World Year’, ‘The Austrian Peace Year’, or ‘The Austrian World Peace Year?’ It reminds me of Yes Minister, when Sir Humphrey says at one stage, ‘We must do something; this is something, we must do it.’

Ulrich, who is the man without qualities—a good description—is a successful bureaucrat. He’s an intellectual and very difficult to pin down. The other characters in the book aren’t exactly cardboard characters, but they are typologies of people living in a dream world. One is une grande horizontale, another is a frustrated artist—very common in the late monarchy. One is a salon hostess and another is a shrewd businessman, who is trying to get his hands on the oil fields of Galicia (Galicia at the eastern end of the monarchy, not the one in Spain).

There’s an underbelly which keeps emerging, really through press reports of another world—the real world, as it were—and is deeply sinister. A figure called Moosbrugger flits through the pages. He has murdered a prostitute, and bits of his trial are constantly being reported. Like most Austrian trials, it goes on and on and on, and it introduces a jarring note into this whole beau monde that these people live in. They’re not really prepared for what’s coming next, but there’s no reason why they should be.

So it’s a very interesting series of philosophical essays, sometimes rather nihilistic, sometimes rather cynical, sometimes progressive and altruistic in the tradition of the Viennese positivists.

The other Austrian writer you recommend is Joseph Roth. On Five Books, people have mostly recommended The Radetzky March, but you’ve chosen another one, I think.

It’s a duology, I believe. It’s the saga of the von Trotta family. You might say it is the absolute incarnation of Habsburg nostalgia. It begins with the father saving the life of the Emperor at the Battle of Solferino in Italy. The army was very loyal—it was Franz Joseph in many ways. Unfortunately, he was very incompetent as a commander.

Joseph Roth was Jewish. He believed that the emperor was the cement that held the Austro-Hungarian monarchy together and was the protector of the Jews. This was true. Franz Joseph did not tolerate anti-semitism. There was a famous and significant mayor of Vienna called Karl Lueger, who was a populist and, though elected and re-elected, was rejected three times by the Emperor because of his open anti-semitism.

Lueger, in fact, started his political life going round with a Jewish gentleman doing humanitarian works in the poorer suburbs of Vienna. Then he decided—and this was quite common at the time—that the finance sector was entirely in the hands of the Jews and founded his own bank for Vienna. His famous remark was, “I decide who is a Jew.” It was opportunistic and materialistic anti-semitism, and not based on bogus racial mythology as it was for the Nazis.

After the period of left-wing government in Vienna in the 1920s and 30s, Austria became what’s called the Ständestaat (‘corporatist state’) in 1934. It was a continuation of Lueger’s Christian Social party, but in a new form and very autocratic. It was like the Estado Novo in Portugal, which Salazar founded. It wasn’t at all nice, and you can’t pretend it was a democracy, but it wasn’t like the Nazis.

And the book by Joseph Roth you’re recommending is The Capuchin Crypt (also known as The Emperor’s Tomb in English)?

Yes, the title is an act of homage. That’s where all the Habsburgs are laid to rest—in a Capuchin church in Vienna. Poor old Joseph Roth remained loyal to the Habsburg idea to the end, just like his characters, the Trottas in the books, and he died in exile in Paris.

He’s a very good writer. Lots of his work has been translated, so you don’t need to choose a particular book. I just think people should read Joseph Roth if they want to understand that side of Austria’s cultural history.

Another highly significant Austrian writer is Arthur Schnitzler. Most people have either read or seen his stage plays. Freud regarded him as his Doppelgänger. He said Schnitzler had put his (Freud’s) ideas into fiction. Schnitzler is very acute on the louche side of Viennese life. There was massive repression, officially, on sexual desire, which naturally had to find an outlet—Vienna was the city with the most prostitutes in Europe.

There’s La Ronde by Schnitzler, which is a drama that’s particularly about that over-sensualised world. He was really a very, very good writer.

Stefan Zweig is the last writer you mentioned. I interviewed Jeffrey Archer a few years ago, and he is a big fan. He said, ‘You must read Stefan Zweig!’

You most certainly must. This is another forced exile; Stefan Zweig ended up in Brazil, where he committed suicide. The World of Yesterday is a very vivid memoir of pre-World War I Austria. He then came back after the First World War to an utterly changed Austria. The world he knew had vanished. It’s a classic, and maybe we can end with a passage from it:

“From the standpoint of reason, the most foolish thing I could do after the collapse of the German and Austrian arms was to go back to Austria, that Austria which showed faintly on the map of Europe as the vague, gray and inert shadow of the former Imperial monarchy. The Czechs, Poles, Italians, and Slovenes had snatched away their countries; what remained was a mutilated trunk that bled from every vein. Of the six or seven millions who were forced to call themselves ‘German-Austrians'”—when the First Republic was first declared, they wanted to call it German Austria but that was forbidden by the Allies because they didn’t want Germany, having been defeated, to get another large slice of land—”two starving and freezing millions crowded the capital alone; the industries which had formally enriched the land were on foreign soil, the railroads had become wrecked stumps, the State Bank received in place of its gold the gigantic burden of the war debt. Boundary lines were still unsettled, the peace conference, having scarcely begun; reparations had not been fixed, there was no flour, bread or oil. There appeared to be no solution other than a revolution or some other catastrophe. According to all human prevision, it was impossible for the country—an entity created artificially by the victors—to exist independently and, in the unanimous opinion of all parties, socialist, clerical and nationalist, it had no wish to exist independently. It was the first instance in history, as far as I know, in which a country was saddled with an independence which it exasperatedly resisted.”