History as Novel: Tschuppik on Francis Joseph

I don’t suppose Karl Tschuppik’s Francis Joseph I (1930) is likely to win any popularity contests any time soon. For one thing, it is out of print: I had to scare it up second hand (I was prompted by Clive James in his Cultural Amnesia—where, I think, he boosts it for reasons quite different from my own). So it’s a specialized taste, but as Abe Lincoln probably did not really say: if you like this kind of book, this is the kind of book you will like.

I do like it, for reasons of my own. One, as I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been trying to get myself up to speed on Central Europe, and, and Tschuppkik’s book, though nominally a biography, is really fairly close to qualifying as a full-bore history of the Austrian (oops, Austria-Hungarian) Empire through Francis Joseph’s 64-year reign. Two, Tschuppik offers the kind of product which, these days, serious academics would pass around only in a plain brown wrapper—a sustained narrative, with characters and something close to plot (though I guess it might get him a slot on the Jim Lehrer News Hour).

Writing after the collapse of the Empire, Tschuppik (like so many others of his time) betrays a wry affection for the great exhausted volcano, and a good feel for its equivocal virtues. Perhaps more important, he seems to have a discerning eye for what is (to me) the most interesting part of the story—the polycentric conflict between (a) the old, quasi-feudal aristocracy; (b) the “liberals”—meaning here mostly new men of industry and commerce, some almost inconceivably wealthy; and (c) the “nationalists”—who could be the Hungarians, with a feudal tradition even more alive than the Austrian’s own, or the Czechs, who simply didn’t understand why they couldn’t have a place at the table.

Even on these, Tschuppik’s presentation is far from complete. I found myself backstopping Tschuppik with Arno J. Mayer’s the Persistence of the Old Regime (1981), flawed-but-impressive in its own way. Mayer does offer a lot more specific data on the economic transition, though not carefully organized (and inexcusably unsourced). Tschuppik is also strangely silent on some huge issues about which I would like to know more—the emergence of modern culture, for one and for another, the place of Jews (no mention of Freud, Herzl, Klimt, Schiele). Granted: a history of Vienna without Freud is like a history of Rome without the pope—but then, strictly speaking, a history of Vienna is not what Tschuppik undertook to write.

Being the kind of narrative that it is, there’s a sense in which Tschuppik’s FJ reminds me less of any pure history and more of the great novels of social change—perhaps in particular, Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, which offers a somewhat similar take on the same period in another part of the forest. In the end, I admit it was a long slog (FJ—Buddenbrooks is another of those books I think of as too short). But then the 64-year reign of Francis Joseph was a long slog, and very likely seemed so even to those who lived it, perhaps even to the old emperor himself.