#simon winder

[zmkccommonplace]

It is a odd feature of so many holidays that they are structured around having far worse facilities for cooking and cleaning than at home.

Simon Winder, Germania

[apricops]

The former Habsburg lands are places where a principal battlefield has been the interpretation of history. […] The extraordinarily toxic legacy of the Empire’s obsession with linguistics, archaeology, ethnography, sigillography, numismatics, cartography and so on makes me feel, in my darker moods, that the spread of these subjects and the use to which they were put was nothing but a disaster for Central Europe and that academics more than anyone else are (with help from priests) some of the greatest villains. Indeed, in comparison with academics, the politicians and military men were mere puppets, with even Hitler simply a disgusting by-product of various poisonous Viennese nationalist and scientific teachings.

- Danubia, by Simon Winder

[bobdobalina]

It is important to remember just how vague much rule over Europe was until mass literacy, telegraphs and railways started to tie together regions and countries. The Habsburgs loved to look at maps, genealogies and heraldic shields, making sweeping hand gestures over these symbolic shorthands for their ownership, but there is little reason to believe such gestures had much substance. Apart from a few mountain and forest communities, nobody was left completely alone, but the sense of obligation to Vienna was often remote and convoluted, with innumerable local, noble and religious privileges making a mockery of modern dreams of unitary efficiency. Many histories tend to present a narrative angled from the perspective of the ruler. Most dramatically this is expressed in the term 'rebellion', a word which presupposes failure (by definition: if it succeeds then it is a change of dynasty). It is too easy to see a narrative where any rebellion is an annoyance, a drain on resources, a desperate piece of backwardness, and so on. But this is to take a man wearing a crown in Vienna too seriously and I hope to make it clear just how many perfectly reasonable arguments against Habsburg rule there were. Indeed, at one point or another (and repeatedly in Hungary) virtually everybody took a turn at being 'disloyal' and this should be a valuable clue. Joseph II's war with the Turks went so badly wrong in 1788 because the Hungarian nobles would not supply him with food, because they hated him and thought he was a tiresome creep. As his vast army fell apart and he raged impotently, it is impossible from a world-historical point of view not to feel a bit sorry for him, but Europe is filled with groups of all kinds who are annoyingly insubordinate, and they should be celebrated a bit more.

One much-loved figure in so many anecdotes and novels is the Hungarian minor nobleman who lives only to drink and hunt, and refuses to open any letters or telegrams he receives, on the grounds that they are mere insolent intrusions into the life of a gentleman. The Habsburgs were always dealing with variants on such characters: defenders of feudal rights, stubborn communes, bizarre religious groups and obstreperous guildsmen. Even great aristocrats might plump for the high-risk pleasures of treason with the Turks. Generations of Viennese officials would bang their heads on their cherry-wood desktops with fury: why won't these people just do as they're told? But theirs was just a sickness generated by too many maps, charts and budget projections. A possible novelty of this book is that it attempts to avoid seeing Vienna as the clearinghouse for all right-minded political, religious, social or strategic thinking. A Styrian farmer, Transylvanian serf or Adriatic pirate each saw Vienna in a different way, and that view was not necessarily wrong.

— Simon Winder, Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe (Picador, 2013)

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #21 – Danubia by Simon Winder

I picked this up because I’ve been trying to read one history book a month, and I happened to scroll past a viral tumblr post with a quote from its introduction as I was figuring out which book that would be for April. Helpfully, there was no one ahead of me waiting for it in the library. A one-paragraph quotation and the book’s cover aside, I went it basically entirely blind. The book took a bit of adjusting to.

The book is a history of Central Europe through the lens of the Habsburg Dynasty, and it is a history of the Habsburg Dynasty through Winder’s extensive travelogue visiting every historical city and museum exhibit in the Danube basin. A roughly chronological sequence of events is followed (common and sometimes extensive tangents and diversions notwithstanding), but nearly every new section is introduced with an anecdote of visiting some town, castle or church that was relevant to the events about to be discussed, and a contemplation of its aesthetic significance to the modern traveller.

Meandering aside, the book does a good job of covering the broad sweep of a millennium of history and hits all the high points you expect it to (Charles V, Rudolph’s Prague, the 30 Years War, 1848, 1866, 1914, etc). The basic dynastic and political history is broken up and intermixed with a surprising amount of time dedicated to the cultural products of each era, which one does very much get the sense are what really fascinates Winder. The painters, composers and architects features get space that’s determined less by their general modern fame or contemporary significance and more because they happened to capture the author’s interest. I certainly came out of this with far more opinions about Vienna’s classical music output across the ages than I expected.

Winder’s voice is strong to the point of overpowering throughout. Which is quite deliberate I’m sure – this is a breezy read full of cute trivia, not a monograph – but even still, it sometimes gets a bit much. Instead of an academic lecture the effect is similar to listening to a guy whose perhaps not quite as insightful or interesting as he thinks he is hold forth over drinks in what only barely qualifies as a conversation. The effect is usually quite charming! But it does wear on you. It also makes getting particularly caught up on the precise accuracy of every bit of trivia feel kind of beside the point.

Winder is also a middle-class guy from southern England, which I might feel bad about saying ‘and you can tell’ if he didn’t bring it up himself quite so much. Anyway, knowing this makes the whole pitch of the book as ‘a walk through the age and region where all the slaving and massacres and depopulation and brutality we associate with Over There happened in Europe too” make so incredibly more sense. Even if it perhaps still shows an ever-so-slightly naive view of what preodern history also looked like in Western Europe.

Still, a significant portion of the book is dedicated to the sheer brutality of early modern religious warfare, both between the Ottomans and various Christian princes and coalitions, and between different sects of Christians. Winder thankfully has no taste at all for grand battles or heroic violence, and devotes as little wordcount to the various epoch-defining wars as he can get away with. He’s more interested in the consequences of them, the brutal and brutalizing violence that led to the depopulation and resettlement of what became the Hapsburg empire several times over across its history.

Which leads into the book’s other main theme. Winder is very much not a fan of nationalism, especially of the kind that made the region’s 20th century such an apocalypse. The book views it as an absurd horror in general, and even moreso in a region where every city and ‘national homeland’ was hopelessly intermixed, and every land continually resettled. The last chapters make the point that the ‘nationality’ of much of the population was, if not arbitrary, then certainly contingent, with massive amounts of assimiliation across national and ethnic lines happening quite late into the 19th century (and before that, historical nationality being more happenstance of language and religion that any primordial cultural essence). It is only as the Habsburg’s legitimizing mythology fell apart that nationalism became the only vital organizing force in the empire, and the grounds on which battle lines were drawn and spoils competed over.

The book does portray the whole latter 19th century as a dialectic between increasingly absurd and ineffectual but (and so) increasingly benign Hapsburg rule to the rising and inevitably exclusionary and vicious nationalisms that would tear it apart. The closest thing to the political left that makes a sustained appearance is Napoleon. Which is somewhat excusable in terms of what the post-Habsburg political situation did end up looking like, I suppose, but given the size and significance of the SDAPO it’s a bit of a gap. One more way the author shines through, I suppose.

The tragic epilogue is of course that Europe now is full of (more-or-less, if you squint) neat and semi-homogenus nation-states. Not because of any peaceful triumph of liberal nationalism and self-determination, but rather one outburst after another of apocalyptic violence, of emptied cities and gore-soaked fields. The book was written before both the current invasion of Ukraine and the most recent war in Gaza, but had either been ongoing they probably would have gotten referenced as further examples of the bloody logic of nation-building (Winder have basically categorized Zionism as the Jewish iteration of the general outburst of homeland-conquering nationalisms in later Austria-Hungary, with the Palestinians in the same unfortunate position as the inconveniently-non-Romanian Magyars in Transylvania.)

Anyway, overall a fairly charming read, and Winder’s steadfast belief that the only real justification for the Habsburg Dynasty is all the weird art they paid for is very endearing. But more entertaining than enlightening, I suppose? And if I hadn’t read it in small daily chunks Winder’s voice would have worn on me until I wanted to reach through the pages and pour a drink on him halfway through the second tangent about his family vacation in Paris.

[literary-illuminati]

Just a compelling mental image. I can imagine this in the form of a 19th century political cartoon almost perfectly

[literary-illuminati]

Not entirely sure the degree to which I trust him about its exact scale, but Winder keeps making the point that the nationalist mythologies and 'ancient homelands' of south-eastern Europe politics get at least several degrees more absurd when you remember that basically the whole region got depopulated and resettled at least once over the course of the centuries of brutal early modern religious warfare/mass raiding/massacres and mass expulsions.

Which like, yeah. Adds a certain tragicomic air to the whole thing.

[literary-illuminati]

We are entering the Weird About It peripd of Habsburg dynastics now.

[literary-illuminati]

Yknow I was really not aware that Habsburgs were ritually disembodied after death.