Danubia

It is always the same old story. I read a bestseller, and the author wrote one or more follow-up books, but they didn't meet my expectations. This was the case with Umberto Eco, who landed a world bestseller in 1980 with The Name of the Rose. In 1988, I found Foucault's Pendulum quite entertaining, whereas The Island of the Day Before, published in 1994, demanded some effort to reach the last page. 

In 2000, I had placed high hopes for Eco's fourth book, Baudolino, a historical novel that deals in part with Emperor Frederick Barbarossa's military misadventures in Northern Italy. I "worked" myself through half the book, then put it aside. The sequence was somewhat different with author Dan Brown.

 

I first read The Da Vinci Code (2003), then found the CERN and stolen antimatter story in Angels & Demons (2000) somewhat weird. When The Lost Symbol was published in 2009, I bought the hard copy on my way back from Madison to Freiburg at O'Hare Airport, started reading it on the plane, and eventually fell asleep. Last year, my son offered me Brown's latest novel, Inferno, but I came across some mediocre reviews and had other books to read, like Danubia. I have not even opened Inferno.

Danubia, by Simon Winder, is a sort of follow-up to his bestseller Germania. Winder impressed me in 2010, so I jumped on his latest "history book."

In Danubia, the author traces the Habsburg dynasty from its rise in 1278 to its fall in 1919. Around 1230, descending from their ancestral Habichtsburg seat in the Aargau (today a Swiss canton), the Habsburgs acquired the Austrian provinces around Vienna. They enlarged their territory in the Upper Rhine region of Alsace and the Breisgau, including Freiburg, in the 14th century. Later, the dynasty extended its reign instead by marriages: "Bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria, nube! (Let others wage war; you, happy Austria, marry!).

The Habsburgs supplied German emperors and Spanish kings, so the sun never set on Charles V's empire. Frequent intermarriages eventually led to inbred rulers, and not only Winder considers it a miracle that the Habsburg dynasty ruled for more than 600 years.

Winder's Danubia is less dense than his book on Germania. He fills many pages with cultural and musical details from his own experience. I felt like book critic Noel Malcolm, who wrote in the Daily Telegraph: There were times, reading this book, when I felt like someone who had been given a gallon bucket of whipped cream and ordered to eat it. But somehow, by the end of the meal, I found that I had absorbed a large quantity of hidden nutrients. I just wished that it hadn't given me so many hiccups along the way.

Nevertheless, after finishing the book, it became clear to me how much potential a multicultural society contains, what the Austro-Hungarian monarchy possessed at the end of the 19th century, and how much it repressed, with majorities dominating minority groups. 

It was the Romanian Aurel Popovici from the German-speaking Banat who wrote in 1906: The great origin, language, customs and mentality diversity of different nationalities requires, for the whole Empire of the Habsburgs, a particular state form, which can guarantee that not a single nationality will be threatened, obstructed or offended in its national political life, in its private development, in its national pride, in one word - in its way of feeling and living. 

Popovici's proposal clearly followed the American example and aimed to transform the existing Austrian/Hungarian monarchy into the United States of Greater Austria. His map draws borders that define ethnic groups, leaving some minority enclaves at the mercy of the majority.

©Wikipedia

Popovici's idea came too late and was highly controversial. In particular, the Hungarians bitterly opposed such a federal construct, insisting on dominance over the vast Romanian and Slavic territories of Transylvania. Such domination naturally spurred nationalist sentiment and eventually led to the breakup of the multinational empire after the First World War. 

Consequently, the Peace Treaty of Trianon reduced Austria to its German-speaking population, leaving the Sudeten at the mercy of the Czechs. Similarly, Hungary lost seven-tenths of its territory, with substantial Hungarian minorities living in Romania and bordering Slavic states. 

The Nazis forced changes to the borders in the Balkans in favor of the allied Hungarians during the Second World War. However, the Soviet Union later corrected these changes by integrating the entire region into the Communist Bloc after the war. 

The Communist breakdown in 1989 not only opened the Berlin Wall but old wounds, too. This resulted in genocide and ethnic cleansing, particularly in former Yugoslavia, which was only stopped by a massive American military intervention. Meanwhile, the US has pulled out, but other NATO troops remain in the region, "keeping the peace."

With all I said at the beginning about bestselling authors continuing to write, I am eagerly looking forward to the one Winder may already be writing: Rhenania, Germany's stream but not its boundary (Der Rhein, Deutschlands Strom, aber nicht Deutschlands Grenze).

**