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By Root 893 0

The authorities watched helplessly as Czech and South Slav deputies openly demanded their own independent states and demonstrators took to the streets in support throughout the provinces. That August, Czechs, Poles and South Slavs met in the southern city of Ljubljana to demand their respective freedoms. The Allies, who had up to this point insisted that they had no intention of destroying Austria-Hungary, now gave up on it. The signs were there for friends and foe alike to see: Allied support for an independent Poland (most dramatically in Wilson’s Fourteen Points), France’s recognition in June 1918 of the Czechoslovak National Council, Wilson’s statement the same month that “all branches of the Slav race must be completely liberated from German and Austrian domination.” For Poles, Czechs, Rumanians, Slovaks, Slovenes or Croats, the prison doors were opening, whether or not they were prepared to escape.4

On September 15, 1918, his armies collapsing, Karl defied his German ally and issued a public appeal for a peace conference. The Allies, seeing victory at hand, rejected the offer. Two weeks later, after Bulgaria had dropped out of the war, Germany agreed that the Dual Alliance should ask for an armistice. On November 3 representatives of Austria-Hungary signed an armistice agreement. While Karl waited for an end to the fighting, the links that had bound his empire finally snapped. One by one the nationalities declared their independence: the Poles on October 15, the Ruthenes on October 19, and the South Slavs on October 29. On October 28 independent Czech and Hungarian governments took office in Prague and Budapest. Two days later, the German-speaking Austrian deputies in the parliament in Vienna appointed a German-Austrian government for what was left of the empire. The Social Democrats, who were particularly strong in what was an increasingly revolutionary Vienna, took the main offices. Renner became the first chancellor of the new republic of Austria.

Almost unnoticed, Karl renounced his part in the government of the two halves of his empire on November 11 and 13. In what was a forlorn attempt to keep the succession alive for his heirs, he did not formally abdicate. He kept his titles, the products of so many marriages, bargains and conquests: Emperor of Austria; King of Hungary, of Bohemia, of Dalmatia, Croatia, Slovenia, Lodomeria, Galicia, and Illyria; Archduke of Austria; Grand Duke of Tuscany and Kraków; Duke of Lothringia, of Salzburg, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola and Bukovina; Grand Duke of Transylvania; Margrave of Moravia; Duke of Upper and Lower Silesia, of Modena, Parma, Piacenza and Guastella, of Auschwitz and Sator, of Teschen, Friaul, Ragusa and Zara; Princely Count of Habsburg and Tyrol; and on and on. It was all gone, and he himself was to slip quietly from the world in 1922, when he died in Madeira of influenza. In March 1989, a few months before the division of Europe into East and West ended, his empress, Zita, died.

Preoccupied with satisfying Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Rumania, the peacemakers had tended to overlook Austria and Hungary. The territorial commissions drawing new borders had assumed, like almost everyone else, that little Austria, reduced to its German-speaking territories, and Hungary, already shorn of the ancient kingdom of Croatia and of Slovakia, were lying inert, ready to be sliced into. What was fair to Austria and Hungary, according to the principles of self-determination, what was necessary if they were to survive, were questions that caused little concern in Paris. Neither country even had its own commission.

The greater part of the old empire had been transformed with the end of the war into friends. This raised an awkward question. Who was going to pay Austria-Hungary’s reparations? Poland or Czechoslovakia or Yugoslavia? “We cannot,” said Beneš firmly, “be held responsible for a war which we condemn.”5 The Allies agreed, which left as enemies only Austria and Hungary, two countries linked over the centuries at the core of the empire. Their representatives