The Death of Otto von Habsburg

Otto von Habsburg—the son of the last Emperor of Austria-Hungary—has died at the age of 98. A champion of traditional European values, and public enemy of the Nazis (when German troops were sent across the Austrian border on March 12, 1938, Hitler called it ‘Operation Otto’), his passing reminds us that we are truly at the end of an age. As a gesture of respect, I’d like to make available a piece I published in StAR on the beatification of Otto’s father, Charles of Austria.

The Beatification of Charles of Austria

“No Catholic,” wrote Christopher Dawson when Austria was absorbed into Germany by the Nazis in 1938, “can regard the passing of Austria with indifference. The state which took its form and historical character from the struggle to defend Catholicism against the Reformation and Christianity against the Turk, and which has been for so many centuries the embodiment of Catholic culture in Central Europe, has ceased to exist and with it a whole epoch in the history of Christendom has ended.”[1]

Old Austria was a model of Europe in its true sense, for “Europe is a society of peoples; it is a spiritual unity based on the tradition of Christian culture.” [2] The Austro-Hungarian Empire, wrote the great Czech historian Palacký[3], was a union of equal peoples under the Habsburg sceptre.”I am not a German…. I am a Bohemian of Slavonic stock.” “Truly,” he went on to say, “had not Austria already existed, it would have been necessary to create her, in the interests of Europe and of humanity itself.”

It was a gracious, courteous culture. It was supremely a musical culture; the culture of Mozart, Haydn, and Schubert.[4] Shakespeare reminds us that

The man that hath no music in himself,

Nor is moved with concord of sweet sounds,

Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils;

The motions of his spirit are as dull as night,

And his affections dark as Erebus:

Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.

This musical culture brought political and social harmony to Europe. The Congress of Vienna—unlike the ruinous and vindictive diplomacy that followed both World Wars in the twentieth century—restored peace to Europe (even France) after the terrible 25 years of war and chaos following the French Revolution. During the course of the Congress, whenever rancour threatened to destroy the goodwill necessary to the restoration of a tolerable European order, Metternich, that greatest of modern statesmen, would throw a ball. Waltzes swept through the palaces of the capital, and goodwill was restored by the end of the evening. The Prince de Ligne quipped, “le congrès ne marche pas, il danse.” It was a typically Austrian solution…and it worked. In the nineteenth century, under Franz Joseph, Austria knew peace for forty-eight uninterrupted years before World War One; an unmatched, almost incredible record.

Along with music, the Austrian tradition is loved for its wit and sense of humour: a virtue—an elasticity—which has come in handy in times of adversity. In the mid-1930s, with the collapse of the central European economy, it quickly became known that Berlin was saying “The situation is serious but not desperate,” but Vienna was saying “The situation is desperate but not serious.”

With the widespread immigration the West has experienced in recent decades, and the advent of the European Union, perhaps the most striking feature of Austria-Hungary was its multiculturalism. Theirs was, however, a true multiculturalism: neither the incoherent modern secular multiculturalism, relentlessly hostile to all profound cultural differences and identities; nor the nineteenth and twentieth century tradition of the pure nation-state, cut off from the rest of Europe. Joseph Roth—a Jew from the Polish part of the Habsburg Empire, who grew up hating Austria, but ended life as a Catholic and pro-Habsburg—has a character in one of his later stories say: “My former home, the Monarchy, was different, it was a large house with many doors and many rooms for many different kinds of people. This house has been divided, broken up, ruined. I have no business with what is there now. I am used to living in a house, not cabins.”[5] In Old Austria, Austrian, Hungarian, Czech, Jew, Croat, Pole, Italian, Slovak, Slovene, Rumanian, remained distinct but lived in peace and comparative harmony, in a society whose pattern of life united them all. It was the closest we have ever come to Isaiah’s words in today’s reading: “For My house will be called a house of prayer for all peoples.” [6]

When I was a lad, the primary objection to Austria-Hungary was that it was “old-fashioned” and anachronistic; yet no criticism was ever more misplaced, for this was the culture which produced Schrödinger, Boltzmann, Gödel, Tesla, Mach, and Mendel in science; Freud, Adler and Allers in psychiatry; Husserl, Buber, Popper and Wittgenstein in philosophy; Bruckner, Mahler, Janáček, Bartók and all the major twelve-tonalists in music; Hofmannsthal, Kafka, Rilke, Schnitzler, Zweig, Musil, Roth, Kraus and Trakl, Čapek, Krudy, Broch in literature; Klimt, Mucha, Schiele, Kubin, Orlík and Kokoschka in the graphic arts; Otto Wagner, the architects of the Sezession, and the Wiener Werkstette in architecture and design; Hanslick in music theory; Mises and Hayek in economics; Reinhardt and Lotte Lenya in theatre; Stroheim, Lang, Sternberg and Pabst in film; Karl Eugen Neumann in Oriental studies; Rudolf Steiner the Anthroposophist; Steinitz in chess.[7] Here is fifty per-cent and more of the entire achievement of the twentieth century. I’d say that’s a pretty good record for an “old fashioned” country.

On the other hand, we were reminded that the destruction of Austria-Hungary after World War One created a power gap in central Europe. Palacký warned in the mid-nineteenth century that the absence of Austrian authority in central Europe would lead straight to the interference of Russia or Germany—and that is exactly what followed the breaking of the Sceptre, as first Nazi Germany and then Communist Russia moved in with the most bloodthirsty, malevolent regimes Europe has ever known. The apocalyptic horror that overtook the West with the removal of the keystone of the European Order overtook it with a ruthless, Sophoclean logic. The intelligent student of Europe cannot be surprised at Austria’s neutrality in the Crimea. Nor was it an accident that Revolutionary France declared war first against Austria, recognizing in her both the crucial balancing force in Europe, as well as everything the French Revolution stood against: tradition; proportion; prudence; a humane, realistic order; and a religious view of life. Charles’s Austria should be a model for the Europe of the future—if it is to have a future.

His widow Zita’s funeral in 1989, sixty-seven years after his own, heralded the end of European Communism: the ideology most relentlessly dedicated to the eradication of the old order; of the past; of tradition. The cortège was followed by tens of thousands who had lived in that ungodly new order for half a century and found it ill-adapted to human beings.

The past lives on in the present, whether we have the eyes to see it or not. In Austria, it was this faith in European tradition—in a settled social order rooted in the truths of the Catholic Faith and lived human experience—that made possible the great modern achievements of Austrian culture. The great Catholic historian, Lord Acton, once said, “Our studies ought to be all but purposeless. They want to be pursued with chastity like mathematics.” In a society which has accepted the truth about God and man, and developed a realistic and humane social environment in which to live this truth, the arts and the sciences can flourish: they are not at risk of becoming mere vehicles of ideology; they are free, like the men and women in such a society, to be themselves.

Not until we begin to learn this lesson can we hope to see—much less deserve—another Charles of Austria.

Ladies and Gentle men, I give you Blessed Charles of Austria.

 This after-dinner speech was given at Chavagnes International College on 3^rd October, 2004, on the occasion of the beatification of Charles of Austria.