DACH

The man who would be Emperor - 2

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the eventful life of the Habsburg monarchy's last Crown Prince, Otto, who died in July aged 98.

Paradoxically, it was announced that the man who had not been allowed back into Austria until he renounced his claim was to be given an imperial burial. Criticism of this plan came from both left and right, with monarchists complaining that as Austria had no interest in restoring Otto in life it should not be allowed to make tourist capital of him in death. Many socialists, meanwhile, felt that the ceremonies were unfitting for a Republic. I take a more relaxed view: monarchists could see this as Austria’s attempts to make peace with the past, forgetting the bitterness of the post-1918 years. They will never again bury an Archduke, born in the purple of the imperial era.

Otto’s coffin made its journey from his home town of Pöcking to Vienna, lying in state in Mariazell en route while mourners filed past. It was joined by that of his wife, Regina of Meiningen, who died in 2010 and had lain temporarily interred with her own ancestors until then. The funeral, held in Vienna's Cathedral, the Stephansdom, was attended by royal, ex-royal and diplomatic representatives from around the world. Many even sang the former anthem, the Kaiserhymne, though the Austrian President, Heinz Fischer, abstained for obvious reasons. Afterwards, a cortege more than a kilometre long traced the route that Otto himself had walked as a young child at the funeral of Franz Josef, bearing the coffin to the imperial crypt. As it passed the Hofburg, soldiers fired a military salute. 

At the door to the crypt, itself one of Vienna’s most strange and atmospheric tourist attractions, the coffin bearers enacted the famous ritual of knocking and requesting entry for Otto, using his full string of imperial titles. Monks inside duly declared that knew him not, and entry was requested a second time using the academic and political titles he had earned in his career. Again, entry was refused, and only when the erstwhile Crown Prince was announced as "Otto, a sinner" did the priests swing open the door. This ceremony, which seemed designed poignantly to echo Otto's path in life, is actually said to have been enacted at every imperial funeral for centuries. Austrian officials, however, would unromantically insist that the triple knock is nothing but a legend, and that Otto himself first caused it to be used for his mother’s funeral in 1989!

[The tomb of Karl VI in the Imperial Crypt in Vienna; picture by Welleschik from Wikimedia Commons]

By tradition, Habsburg hearts are buried apart from the rest of the body. Otto chose to have his interred in the Benedictine Abbey at Pannanholma in Hungary, where he had spent time as a boy learning the Hungarian language. With this act, he seemed to lay to rest the awkward – sometimes even poisonous - relationship that had existed between the later Habsburgs and the Kingdom of Hungary, that prickly junior partner in the Dual monarchy.

[Janet Ashton]

The man who would be Emperor

On July 4th, a retired politician died at his home in Bavaria. If this were a fairy story, the astonished neighbours would only then have learned of the extraordinary life and pedigree of the modest old man next door. But it isn't a fairy story, and everyone who knew his name recognised the genial Dr Otto von Habsburg as the former pretender to the Austro-Hungarian throne, the last Crown Prince of the empire that once dominated central Europe.

Born in November 1912, Franz Joseph Otto Robert Maria Anton Karl Max Heinrich Sixtus Xaver Felix Renatus Ludwig Gaetan Pius Ignatius, Archduke of Austria, would claim later in life to remember being photographed with his great-grand-uncle, Kaiser Franz Josef I, who succeeded to the throne in 1848 and was a last link with figures from the Napoleonic era. The span of their joint memories could claim to cover the best part of two centuries.  Aged four, newly elevated to Crown Prince, Otto walked through Vienna in Franz Josef's funeral procession. It was the last funeral held for an Emperor, though not quite the last to observe the particularly imposing ceremonies associated with Habsburg burials. Shortly afterwards, Otto attended the last Habsburg coronation, when his father assumed the Crown of Hungary in Budapest. Within two years, the Dual Monarchy would be defeated and the Habsburgs in exile, albeit without formal renunciation of their rights and powers.

Following the premature death in 1922 of his father Karl I, Otto was considered by monarchists to be the rightful Emperor. He learned most of the languages spoken in the former Habsburg lands, gained a doctorate in political science, and worked for his own restoration. It came tantalisingly close: for a time, the Nazis considered restoring him as a puppet monarch to bring legitimacy to their own regime in Austria. This option would have seemed attractive to many of his contemporaries in the German-speaking royal houses, but Otto refused to be a party to it or even to meet Hitler. Sentenced to death for his opposition to the Anschluss, he sought refuge in the United States, from where he lobbied against both Nazis and Communists with equal ferocity. After the war, he returned to Europe, but was barred from entering Austria until 1961, when he formally renounced his imperial claims.

For the rest of his long life, the former Archduke and Prince wrote books on politics and history [examples in the BL at YA.2001.a.17846 and YA.1995.b.6229] and worked for European unity, serving as a member of the European Parliament and head of the Paneuropean Union. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this descendant of so many Holy Roman Emperors was Christian and conservative in his politics, even admitting admiration for Francisco Franco, but he was tolerant to other faiths and had helped many Jews escape from Nazi Austria. He married a princess of one of the former German houses and they had seven children, several of who are also active in politics, the arts or the media.

Dr Habsburg was the last survivor of a world gone beyond recall, and a remarkable figure in his own right. Austria would mark his passing in a truly memorable way.

                                            ………..to be continued

Janet Ashton

Remembrance of Bohemia past

I recently returned from a holiday in the beautiful region of the Czech Republic known as South Bohemia.

Back when I was a teenager, I liked to wind people up with my interest in the artist Egon Schiele, whose tortured representations of the human body in the throes of sex or death found him few friends in early twentieth century Austria either. When I mentioned to friends who know of my interest in him that I had visited a museum in Cesky Krumlov devoted to him, I was greeted with a few exclamations of surprise. "Really? I didn't know he was Czech?!" 

Of course, Schiele wasn't Czech; he was a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, born in Tulln near Vienna in 1890 to an ethnically Austrian father, and a mother who would probably have described herself as "Bohemian" (Böhmisch), and who came from the town then known as Krumau an der Moldau. This was Cesky Krumlov, today’s idyllic UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Czech Republic’s second biggest tourist attraction after Prague.  In Schiele’s day, it was almost 70% German-speaking, just one more stop on the network of railway lines that criss-crossed the vast Empire, covering territory that comprises the modern-day states of Austria, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and large swathes of Poland, Italy and Ukraine.  The artist fled there to lie low when his growing reputation for sexually explicit pictures left Vienna too hot to handle. He soon ran into problems in Krumau too, but before he did he managed to produce a good body of work portraying local people and a whole series of innovative roof-and-landscapes. A lot of these pictures are illustrated in Egon Schiele und Krumau: die Stadt am blauen Fluss by Franz E. Wischin [BL shelfmark: LB.31.b.16502] and Between ruin and renewal: Egon Schiele’s landscapes by Kimberly A. Smith [YC.2005.b.2315].

Dissolution of the Empire in 1918 placed Krumau in the new republic of Czecho-Slovakia and gave it a Slavic name, but it was not until after 1945 that the town ceased to be mainly German-speaking. Understandably, the expulsion in 1945-6 of Czechoslovakia’s substantial German-speaking minority still evokes powerful emotions on both sides. I hesitate to wade into the matter, but the complex issue is well-summarised in "National Mythologies and Ethnic Cleansing: The Expulsion of Czechoslovak Germans in 1945" by Eagle Glassheim  (Central European History, Vol. 33, No. 4 (2000), pp. 463-486, accessible electronically within the BL ). Many other books in our collections deal with the topic in more detail, from academic studies to memoirs. Flag wars and stone saints: how the Bohemian lands became Czech by Nancy M. Wingfield [YC.2008.a.1072], is an English-language study, while there are examples of German texts at YA.2002.a.38378, and YF.2007.a.31124, and Czech at YF.2007.a.20491. There is even fiction: Brücke über den Fluss by Johannes Gramich [English translation at H.2009/1503].

The Germans of the Sudentenland and South Bohemia made their new homes in Austria or Bavaria, where, ironically, for forty years they enjoyed a higher standard of living than they would have done had they been allowed to remain in Czechoslovakia. Following the disintegration of the Communist bloc, they have begun to return, usually as tourists, to the places where their ancestors lived, and many Czechs in those border regions once more speak excellent German as a second language. Anecdotes talk also of Germans who are learning Czech in order to converse more freely when they visit their grandparents' native cities.

Some people have a bigger vested interest than others. One notable name is that of Karel Schwarzenberg, the Czech Minister of Foreign Affairs and former EU Council President. Schwarzenberg is a scion of the old Austro-Hungarian nobility, but his family originally hailed from Germany in the days when its states were part of the Holy Roman Empire. For centuries they held the title Dukes of Krumau and owned the vast, looming castle at Cesky Krumlov, as well as extensive estates elsewhere in South Bohemia. Although the last owner of these estates was a notable anti-Nazi, the castles and lands were confiscated by the Communist government after World War Two, under the so-called Lex Schwarzenberg. Born in Prague in 1938, Karel, the current head of the family, grew up in Austria, but is now a Czech citizen once more, tied by family history to a country which once rejected his family as alien by virtue of their name, language and class.

When I was first interested in Egon Schiele, a visit to his former home in central Europe would barely have been possible except as a member of a guided tour. I grew up thinking of the Communist world as grey and strange, utterly apart from the Europe I knew and the old Europe of 1914, which I learned about as a keen history student. Without wishing to sound too portentous or naïve, I find something very hopeful in seeing how much things have changed in social terms since 1990, and in having the privilege of witnessing Central Europe relax and reclaim its own complex history again.

Janet Ashton (West European Cataloguing Team Manager)

Two texts - Two revolutions?

Near the beginning of my research break I blogged about the anniversary of the end of the Austrian revolution. Paradoxically, my last days of study leave are coinciding with the anniversary of the beginning of the revolutions in both Vienna and Berlin. Two very different texts published 162 years ago this month highlight some of the differences between the revolutions in the two cities.

As the Berliners were recovering from the violent street fighting of 18 March they read King Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s proclamation ‘An meine lieben Berliner’. This address to the king’s ‘beloved Berliners’, written ‘in the night of 18/19 March’ tried to lay the blame for the violence on a handful of foreign agitators, and appealed for peace and loyalty. The beloved Berliners themselves took this with a pinch of salt and the term ‘lieben Berliner’ became something of a catch-phrase for satirists in the months that followed. One parody appeared in which the king announces his intention of bombing his ‘beloved’ city and its people, and a satirical broadside shows the original proclamation posted on a street fountain which has been damaged by an army grenade during the fighting.

The preferred reading matter of the Viennese was not a proclamation but a poem, ‘Die Universität’ by Ludwig August Frankl [BL shelfmark: C.175.cc.6.(5.)], celebrating the role of students and academics in the revolution. This was also written overnight, on 14/15 March, while the author was on guard duty, and 8,000 copies were printed in the morning. Because many of these were given away in the streets, the poem quickly reached a large audience and became hugely popular. It was reprinted several times in Vienna and other cities (there was even a French translation) and set to music by nineteen different composers.

Frankl wasn’t the only poet to celebrate the revolution. Indeed, the outbreak of revolution in Vienna was accompanied by an outbreak of poetry which suggests that anyone with access to pen, ink and paper was jotting down some lines in praise of the revolution, the students, the Emperor or the press freedom which enabled them to publish their effusions. There were also poets at work in Berlin, but their verses, at least as represented in the BL, tend to have a more satirical or vitriolic edge: understandably, since there were at least 270 dead by the end of Berlin’s ‘March Days’ compared to the relatively low death toll of 35 in Vienna.

So while the Viennese generally looked forward to a brave new word, the Berliners’ enthusiasm was tempered by looking back to a bloody conflict. Similarly, many Berliners considered their King to have been the instigator of violence, while many Viennese actually saw their Emperor as having been liberated with his people from wicked counsellors. Hence the long afterlife of an admonitory royal address as a basis for satire in Berlin and of a celebratory poem taken at face value in Vienna.

[SR]

Friedensreich Hundertwasser RIP 19 February 2000

Today ten years ago, Friedensreich Hundertwasser died. If you do not know Hundertwasser, it could have something to do with the fact that he never seems to have made a big impression in the UK. Several buildings were either built on Hundertwasser’s colourful and often unsquare designs or refurbished and restructured in Austria or Germany. Many of his artistic reshaping went to such degrees that the old, uniform façade and interior structure of the original houses wasn’t recognisable any more. In Austria and Germany the visual concepts of a Hundertwasser Haus (house) are well known, as is the first of such buildings in Vienna.

[Photo by Lucian Ilica (granted as “in public domain”, see Wikimedia)]

For many eco-conscious Austrians and Germans in the 1980s and 1990s, Hundertwasser and his eco-aesthetic were an important symbol of a paradigm shift: from the closed and uniform, cold and grey, as well as square and boring of post World War II to the open and polyform, warm and colourful, as well as multi-dimensional and intriguing. There are quite a number of realisations of Hundertwasser’s visions for a new way of living in Austria and Germany (there is also one example each in Switzerland, the USA, the Netherlands, Japan and New Zealand).

[Photo taken by Gerbil ; used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license]

Who wouldn’t want to go to this day care centre in Frankfurt am Main? It is one of my favourites of all the architecture based on Hundertwasser’s design. As far as I know, ten years after his death there are still some concepts which haven’t been realised yet. Maybe someone out there will be tempted, and fund a Hundertwasser building in the UK?

If you need inspiration, search the internet, go to http://www.hundertwasser.de/ (a web page which is also available in English), or consider your local library. The BL, of course, has many books on/by/about Hundertwasser. I will briefly summarise some of my personal favourites:

• Schmied, Wieland, Hundertwasser / (Salzburg : Galerie Welz, c1974.)
  LR.416.bb.10
  gives a good introduction to his pre-architectural thinking, his aesthetics and politics, and his oeuvre of paintings and presents some photos of Hundertwasser himself. All these can be found later in his approaches to architecture.
• Hundertwasser, 35 Tage Schweden / (Stuttgart : Paul Eckhardt Verlag, 1967.)
  X.808/5043
  with short, autobiographical stories, gives an insight into the earlier years of Hundertwasser as a painter.
• Koschatzky, Walter. Friedensreich Hundertwasser : das vollständige druckgraphische Werk 1951-1986 / (Zürich : Füssli, 1986.)
  LB.31.b.4520
  is a catalogue showing a much wider range of his oeuvre; in addition, some of the reproduced art works here show his interest in architecture, and in certain forms (such as the onion dome), and hint at his designs for buildings in the 1980s.
• Hundertwasser, Schöne Wege : Gedanken über Kunst und Leben / (München : Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, [1983])
  YA.1986.a.6708
  provides a lot of Hundertwasser’s writings; furthermore, this handy volume features a useful Hundertwasser glossary (all in German).
• Hundertwasser, Hundertwasser architecture : for a more human architecture in harmony with nature. (Hong Kong ;London : Taschen, c2007.)
  LC.31.b.4874
  is the most useful publication on Hundertwasser’s architecture; it not only features the models and often the architectural sketches but also a photo of the final building based on his plans (when realised).

[CG]

The Day of Remembrance for the Victims of National Socialism

You might be a bit surprised about the title of this post. You might be asking yourself “didn't he mean to write 'Holocaust Memorial Day' back there?” In November 2005 the United Nations recommended that each member state commemorates today, the 27th January, 'as an annual International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust' (see http://www.un.org/holocaustremembrance/docs/res607.shtml).But there is a longer history of marking this day of the year as a day to reflect on the suffering of victims of the Holocaust. Unsurprisingly, in Israel the 27th January (the day of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet Troops) has been a day of mourning for more than half a century.

Photo by Timo Klimoff (granted as “in public domain”, see Wikimedia)

The Federal Republic of Germany , perhaps equally unsurprisingly, took a bit longer to address Germany's own past with an official day of commemoration. However, the anniversary of the brutal acts of the night of 9th November 1938 (Reichspogromnacht, for many historians the night which started the anti-Jewish pogrom) has since 1978 been a yearly occasion for Germans to think about the Holocaust, and specifically the systematic acts of violence against Jewish citizens living in the Deutsches Reich. Thus calling the 27th January 'The Day of Remembrance for Victims of National Socialism’ is a reminder not only of the overwhelming numbers of Jewish victims, but also of other groups persecuted by the Nazis: including homosexuals, Roma and Sinti people, and outspoken political opponents of the regime. The official UK Holocaust Memorial Day also seeks to remember all these and indeed victims of other genocides since 1945.

However, you choose to remember, may I invite you to commemorate this day? You could explore the BL Sound Archive's Voices of the Holocaust, visit your local library and search for works on the Holocaust and on victims of Nazism, or find out about the collections of the Wiener Library which is not only the 'World's oldest memorial institution', but is based on documents and books collected since the 1930s. Whatever you do, please remember, so that history teaches us something.
[CG]

Small ads

Trawling through the first issue of a revolutionary periodical from the Vienna of 1848, I found my attention sidetracked by the advertisements on the back page. The first to catch my eye was within the scope of my professional interest in printers and publishers: a job advert for a corrector in the shop of the magazine’s own printer. But then I spotted the alarming offer underneath from one Wilhelm Gollmann, advertising his services as surgeon, midwife, dentist – and vet. His waiting room must have been quite a scene. If the medical profession has moved on since then, another advert showed that estate agents’ language has stayed much the same: ‘Not to be missed’ is the heading of an advertisement for a shop for sale.

These inspired me to check out the small ads in other issues, and they are a fascinating insight into both the personal and the political. Many are what you would expect – people seeking or offering jobs and accommodation, tradesmen advertising their wares, and individuals selling goods ranging from a grand piano to a National Guard uniform (‘to fit a tall gentleman’) by way of ‘two good horses with harness and travelling carriage’.

from Knötel, Uniformenkunde, VIII. Band, No. 7, @ BL 8827.dd.9

Some of them throw interesting sidelights on social assumptions, such as the woman seeking a teaching position, who emphasises that, coming from northern Germany, she ‘speaks a very pure German’ – one in the eye for the Viennese dialect there. Some also raise more pertinent questions: were so many shops up for sale or rent because the unrest and uncertainty of the times was driving tradesmen out of business? Or was this par for the course? (Obviously a comparison with pre- or post 1848 papers would answer this one quite easily.)

Alongside these general advertisements, anyone willing to pay could and did use these columns to express their own opinions, often at some length. These might concern urgent political issues and events, but also involved more personal grievances such as an accusation that a butcher is selling short weight, or a traveller’s complaint that due to the lack of programmes at Herr Strauss’s concerts he ‘continually had to get up and go over to the orchestra to see what was being played!’. I was rather taken by the combination of political and romantic sentiment behind the appeal by ‘a German-minded girl’ for Archduke Johann’s morganatic marriage to be formally recognised and his wife and children given full royal status

Finally, there are the genuinely personal ones, such as the man seeking to meet ‘an educated spinster or widow … of noble and gentle character, healthy and cheerful’ between the ages of 30 and 45 (he himself was 50!). And the cryptic ones: an assurance to ‘Dear Hanni in Ischl’ that the new apartment ‘has many nooks and numerous entrances’ (surely a code for something?), and the request to ‘the lady in the blue veil’ to ‘give the desired answer.’ I wonder if she did?
[SR]

Laugh? I nearly did

Nothing dates as quickly as political humour. Watch a satirical comedy show from six months ago and already the most topical jokes have lost their edge. Watch one from ten years ago and it’s hard to remember what all the fuss was about. Watch one from before you were born, and it’ll be largely meaningless, any jokes that you do get being filtered through historical knowledge rather than your own experience. So studying the satirical and humorous material in our 1848 collections is particularly difficult. Often the items refer to events or people whose significance at the time is not mirrored by their role in formal histories, or they use catchphrases and in-jokes of the day which are lost on posterity.

Nonetheless, sometimes the joke can be recognised, even if it’s never going to make you laugh out loud. Many Berlin satires played on the title of Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s address to the people after the March revolution, ‘An meine Lieben Berliner’, an easy thread to follow through. Plays on the names of public figures can also be easily identified – as long as the men in question themselves can be identified. One example is the radical writer and demagogue Friedrich Wilhelm Held, whose critics made full ironic use of the fact that his surname means ‘hero’. A more elaborate (and laboured) word-play is found in a broadside describing the Austrian General Windischgrätz as ‘Grenade-Prince Bombowitz’; the author goes on to explain that removing the first and last letters of the General’s name gives the word ‘indischgrät’, i.e. ‘indiskret’ (indiscreet), which the author sees as characteristic of all Windischgrätz’s actions.

Even the humour in visual images, although harder to identify, can sometimes be detected. Clothes are often used as cartoon shorthand to identify political or social groups, and one image (sadly not in the BL’s collections) even provides a handy guide. Similarly, many cartoons use the pigtail traditionally sported by conservative bureaucrats as a symbol of reactionary forces, and coinages such as ‘Zopfentum’ (‘Pigtaildom’) are also used in written satires to refer to the old order.

Finally there is the kind of humour which is recognisable because it’s based on enduring clichés: the nagging wife who asks her husband a string of questions but never lets him answer; the barber who listens to his clients’ different political views and tells them what they want to hear; the dim-witted provincial in the big city. And yesterday I found a prime example of the evergreen very long compound German word joke: a spoof news item in a satirical journal explained that one Herr Duncker had been appointed ‘Volksversammlungs- auseinandertreibungswidrigenfallseinhauenlassungs-Direktor’ (‘Director of dispersing popular assemblies or failing that having them laid into’). Of course, if I’d known which of the two Dunckers involved in Prussian politics at the time was meant and what event had prompted the joke, it would have been funnier. But the sheer ridiculous length of the word still made me smile.
[SR]

Points of view

Points of view : Capturing the 19th Century in Photographs is the current main exhibition, which follows from Henry VIII. In a previous post I linked that current exhibition to Germany and German Collections. For the latest exhibition, I will just highlight a couple of German and German-related items; I hope that this will entice you to visit this free exhibition which is open to the public until 7th March 2010 (otherwise, there is always the nicely illustrated exhibition catalogue).

Hermann Seligman Emden’s South side of the nave of Mainz Cathedral, ca. 1858, looks fairly unremarkable at first, but if you ever have been to this place of worship you will know how dark and depressing the interior can feel. So Emden (1815-75) capturing this building in a relatively early photograph in such a good light shows a proper photographer at work (BL shelfmark: 1264.ee.16. ; p. 90 in exhibition catalogue).

Frog x-rays from Josef Maria Eder and Eduard Valentia, Versuche über Photographie mittelst der Röntgen’schen Strahlen (Vienna, 1896) (BL shelfmark Shelfmark: 1818.c.4 ; p. 119 in exhibition catalogue) looks a bit spooky, and at first I thought that this photograph would be much more recent, both due to its high quality and to what’s depicted.

Neatly, the final item is representative of our collections in many ways. First, after a photo of a building in Germany, and a scientific picture by two Austrians, what you see to the left represents Switzerland. Second, after two photographs which are part of German Collections, the final photo is part of the Maps Collection. It illustrates nicely that if you are looking for something specific in the British Library (in this case a photograph) you might have to search across different areas and collections of the library. Adolphe Braun’s The Staubbach Falls and the Lauterbrunnen Valley (BL shelfmark: Maps 184.s.1(11.) ; p. 57 in exhibition catalogue), ca. 1866, contrasts the power and magnitude of nature with the rural human civilization of the 19th century.

There are a couple of other “German” items, some of them depicting medical, military and “ethnological” ‘objects’, which I leave for you to discover.
[CG]

161st anniversaries

161st anniversaries don’t really have the ring of major significance. But there’s still a certain added interest in reading about events which happened ‘on this day in history’, and that has been my experience during the last weeks, looking at documents from late October 1848. Those days marked the end of the revolution in Vienna. Following a violent attempt to overthrow the government earlier in the month, the Emperor and his court had fled, leaving the city governed by an uneasy alliance of the Reichstag, Security Committee, National and Civil Guards, and students. In reprisal, Imperial forces beseiged the city, finally forcing its surrender on 31 October.

In a world of 24 hour rolling news and almost inescapable communications technology, it’s hard to appreciate the importance to both besieged and besiegers of printed placards and flyers. But the sense of urgency conveyed by many of them gives an insight, as well as being a stark reminder of both the limitations and advances of contemporary technology. For example, a printed dispatch From the tower of St Stephen’s describes the approach of troops, but explains that the fog makes it impossible to identify them. Peering through the fog from a cathedral tower may have been the only way to see what was happening outside the city, but at least the latest printing technology meant that the limited information available could be made known as quickly and widely as possible. More immediate still is a small, unsigned and undated flyer declaring the intention not to be moved “until the military retreats from Vienna for ever”. Was it made to distribute to fellow-citizens to show the defenders’ morale, or to be smuggled or thrown over the walls to the besieging army?

In their official proclamations, the remaining city authorities were obviously keen to present an image of order, unity and courage, counteracting the besiegers’ claims that Vienna was in the hands of anarchists and terrorists. In fact such extremists were officially disapproved of within the city too; one placard warns of them rather than reactionaries as the enemy within. But political radicals certainly were among those governing the city, and extreme language was used: the Student Committee proclaimed that “the skulls of our murdering and ravaging foes will shatter” on the barricades, while the Commander of the National Guard, Wenzel Messenhauser, called Windischgrätz “the enemy of the whole human race”.

Eventually the majority of the city authorities were forced to accept the bitter truth that the defending forces were simply too weak and ill-supplied to resist the Imperial army if it came to pitched battle. After days of encouraging heroic defence, the Guard command issued a proclamation telling the Viennese, “You have fought like heroes; accept the inevitable like men.” The inevitable, however, would be hard to accept: vicious reprisals and a loss of the freedoms gained in March 1848. All of it 161 years ago this November.
[SR]