We’ve talked about the Austro-Hungarian Empire for over four years now, and not just
about the war in the field, but what was going on at home.
At this point, in 1918, that empire seems destined do dissolve.
Postwar, when that dissolution happened, the empire was most often portrayed as “doomed
to fail”, but was that really the case?
Let’s find out by looking at the Austrian part in particular.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to a Great War Special Episode about Austria-Hungary and
the First World War.
Now, the Hungarian and Austrian parts of the empire were equal and had shared financial,
foreign, and war policies, but had mostly independent inner workings.
In the Austrian part over the 5-6 decades before the great war, domestic conflicts with
the various minorities slowly led to the successive governments adopting minority demands, so
eventually they mostly had equal rights with the German majority, and in 1907 all men were
given suffrage.
In fact, the Austrian Reichsrat - Parliament - allowed the following languages in session:
German, Czech, Polish, Croatian, Serbian, Slovenian, Italian, Romanian, and Russian...
but did not provide translators.
As in other legislatures, filibustering was a common tactic for any of the 40 odd factions
to obstruct business, so members of the Reichsrat could hold endless speeches in their native
tongues that only a few other people could even understand, and it even became a tourist
attraction.
A Berlin journalist wrote: “Unlike the theaters or opera houses of the city (Vienna), visiting
the Parliament was free.”
The struggle between the political establishment and the minorities created multiple crises,
notably in 1897 and 1905.
We covered these in our specials about different parts of the empire and our Franz Josef special,
but to underline how serious the situation was in 1905, the Austrian Ministry of War
had plans to quell Hungarian troublemakers by bombarding Budapest with the Danube flotilla.
But it was a conflict with the Czechs in 1913, though, that had lasting consequences for
the war.
See, in the Reichsrat the Germans were blocking the local Bohemian Parliament’s work, Bohemia
being the Czech crown lands.
This led to Austrian Minister-President Count Karl von Stürgkh dissolving it.
This in turn angered the Czechs in the Reichsrat so they began blocking the Austrian Parliament.
Stürgkh then simply put the Reichsrat on hold.
This lasted from 1914 to 1917 and during that time Austria was governed by emergency decree.
The first major consequence of that was that during the July Crisis in 1914, Parliament
could not act as a controlling or stabilizing influence.
But I have to point out that though political crises were commonplace, none of these conflicts
ever usually questioned the existence of the monarchy itself since it provided stability,
even to the most minority politicians in Vienna.
But that view evolved over the course of the war and you can see that in Stürgkh’s assassination
in October 1916 by the son of a well-known Socialist.
You may think that such an assassination from the left would cause all sorts of issues,
but instead, everybody was mostly okay with it since most everybody saw him as a major
obstacle.
The Austrian population held him responsible for the deteriorating food and supply situation,
Army Command thought he was a roadblock on the path to military dictatorship, for the
minority peoples of the empire his steadfast loyalty to the Emperor meant growing tensions
between those peoples couldn’t be resolved, and even his German ally didn’t like him.
Fast forward, though, to Parliament being recalled in May 1917, and the situation was
so out of control that inner unity was no longer possible.
The German majority of Austria no longer cared about the minority peoples - they were loyal
to their German ally and winning the war would make all the hardships worth it and return
the Empire to its former glory.
Groups like the Czechs and Poles grew more and more alienated, and every day of hunger,
every issue that had not been resolved under the emergency decrees, and every dead countryman
lost in yet another military disaster was another reason for independence.
It’s also worth noting here that there are numerous reports of atrocities towards minorities
of the Empire committed by Austro-Hungarian troops in the frontier regions; certain officers
ruled by fear to “pacify the rear” and a whole village could be burned down if one
man was deemed too suspicious.
Ruthenians and Serbs particularly suffered from this, and of course news of this reached
home and only inflamed tensions.
As for the Austro-Hungarian economy...
Prewar, it lagged behind those of other European powers, but the Empire was economically stable
and not in danger of collapse as has sometimes been portrayed.
But there were problems.
The Austrian part of the empire was home to major heavy industry, but from 1906 the iron
industry stagnated, and the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 hit the textile and paper industries
hard (why?).
One major stabilizing force was the heavy arms industry, though, and one big part of
them was Steyr.
Up to the outbreak of the war, Steyr had delivered hundreds of thousands of rifles to Serbia,
Romania, and Greece.
The Empire had been self-sufficient in terms of food before the war as well.
A lot of the agricultural land, though, was in places like Galicia in the east and needed
to reach Austria by train.
When the war began, it became immediately obvious that there were not enough locomotives
or rolling stock to handle requirements, and existing ones could not be maintained because
they were needed non-stop.
Already in 1914, there were huge stores of grain and coal that just lay waiting around
for transport that was unavailable.
And what was available had to transport soldiers and supplies to both the Serbian and Russian
borders.
The military took priority and the civilians quite simply could not be kept supplied.
To worsen the issue, when huge numbers of farmers became soldiers, agricultural production
collapsed and the food situation in Vienna grew dire.
And imports of either food or trains were not an option because of the Allied blockade
of the Mediterranean; especially once Romania joined the war.
By the numbers, in 1915 a worker in Vienna got on average half the daily calories he
had in 1913; by 1918 it was half of 1915.
The Austrian economy shrank by 40% by 1918.
In 1919, it was estimated that 10% of civilian deaths in Vienna were directly because of
hunger, and 20-30% as a result of malnutrition.
During the war, civilian unrest over the food situation was commonplace, and in 1916 hunger
riots broke out - by which time 500,000 people were lining up daily for supplies.
By 1917 and 1918, riots and strikes were ever more frequent.
Germany – through the Hindenburg program – demanded that Austria-Hungary double the
output of its military production facilities, which made it worse for civilians.
Austrians tried their luck getting food from Hungary, which was more agricultural, so Hungary
enacted harsher border customs and police patrols.
When Imperial Foreign Minister Count Czernin pleaded with Hungary to send food transports
to Austria, the reply from the Hungarian Agricultural Minister was, “If Austria is starving, they
shouldn’t fight a war.”
By 1918, the striking had escalated.
Up to 700,000 workers at a time would strike for food and there was also a fear of a German
military invasion of Bohemia to secure military production and keep it running.
When the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk is signed in March, ending the war for Russia, Austria-Hungary
agreed to its terms on condition that the Empire gets part of the food supplies - those
supplies never arrive.
The Austrian Home Guard then seized 2,500 train cars of corn en route via ship to Germany,
desperate to alleviate the situation.
But as we know by now from the regular episodes, that situation is anything but alleviated,
and the centuries old empire is really by now an empire in name only.
I’ll end today with a quote from Swiss observers of the situation in late 1918, “The populace
is starving and freezing, the civil guards are not to be counted on, the constant greed
for food has a demoralizing effect on the entire people, theft is commonplace.
Beggars, cripples, homeless families, neglected families, riffraff on the streets: a mortally
wounded, dying city, this is what has become of the once so magnificent Vienna.”
We want to thank Michael Mallat for the research for this episode.
If you want to learn more about the Hungarian part of the Empire, you can click right here
for our special episode about that.
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See you next time.