The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [82]
Emmy, with her new baby, struggled in these first weeks and both she and Rudolf became weaker and weaker. The English economist William Beveridge, visiting Vienna six weeks after the Austrian defeat, wrote that ‘A heroic effort is being made by the mothers in nursing their own children to keep them alive for their first year, but this is now done only at the expense of the mothers’ own health, and is largely done in vain.’ There was talk of trying to get Emmy and Rudolf out of the city and away to Kövesces, even of taking Gisela and Iggie away too, but there was no petrol for the car and the trains were in chaos. So they stayed in the Palais in the marginally quieter rooms with their backs to the Ringstrasse.
At the start of the war the house had felt very exposed, a private house surrounded by public spaces. Now, the peace seemed more frightening than the war: it was not clear who was fighting who, and it was not clear whether or not there was going to be a revolution. Demobilised soldiers and prisoners of war returned to Vienna with first-hand accounts of the revolutions in Russia and of the workers’ protests in Berlin. There was plenty of ‘free firing’ – random gunfire – at night. The new flag of Austria was red, white and red, and some of the younger and more riotous element found that, with a quick rip and stitch, you could make a good red flag.
From every corner of the old Empire imperial civil servants with no country came to Vienna to find that whole imperial ministries to which they had sent their careful reports had closed. There were many Zitterer on the streets – men trembling and shaking from shell shock – as well as amputees with medals pinned to their chests. Captains and majors were to be seen selling wooden toys on the streets. Meanwhile large bundles of imperial monogrammed linen somehow found their way into the households of burghers; imperial saddles and harnesses were found in the markets; and, it was said, security detachments had found their way into the cellars of the palace and were drinking with decreasing speed through the Hapsburg wine-vaults.
Vienna, with just under two million inhabitants, had gone from being the capital of an empire of fifty-two million subjects to a tiny country with six million citizens: it simply could not accommodate the cataclysm. Much of the talk was whether Austria was lebensfähig, viable, as an independent state. Viability was not just an issue of economics, it was psychological. Austria seemed not to know how to cope with its diminishment. The ‘Carthaginian Peace’ – harsh and punitive – formalised in the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye of 1919 meant the dismemberment of the Empire. It sanctified the independence of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Yugoslavia and the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs. Istria went. Trieste went. Several Dalmatian islands were lopped off and Austria–Hungary became Austria, a country 500 miles long. There were punitive reparations. The army was reconstituted as 30,000 volunteers. Vienna, went the bitter joke, was a Wasserkopf, the hydrocephalic head of a shrunken body.
Many things changed, including names and addresses. In the spirit of the times, all imperial titles were to be abolished – there were to be no more von, no more Ritter, Baron, Graf, Fürst, Herzog. Every member of the post office