🇦🇹 Austria: a history

Austria is a country that never came into being on purpose. It began as a border district, went on as a marriage bureau and ended as an Alpine republic roughly the size of Bohemia and Moravia - and in between, half of Europe belonged to it for seven centuries.

This is the story of a family that made marriages instead of war, and of a country that then had to learn to live without an empire.

The district that turned into a country

In 996 the word Ostarrîchi, the eastern realm, turned up in a document. It meant a few villages on the Danube set to guard the frontier against the Hungarians, and it occurred to nobody that the name would outlive a thousand years.

The Babenbergs administered them and did well: in under two hundred years they turned a border district into a duchy and Vienna into a seat. In 1246 the last of them fell in battle against the Hungarians, left no son, and the dynasty was over.

The Habsburgs arrive by accident

The Czech king Přemysl Otakar II claimed the vacant Austria and held it for a time. The electors, meanwhile, were looking for a new king of the Romans and deliberately picked a poor count from somewhere in Switzerland whom they assumed would be no danger to them. His name was Rudolf of Habsburg.

In 1278 he met Přemysl on the Marchfeld, the Czech king fell there, and Rudolf handed Austria to his sons. The electors' assumption turned out to be a mistake that lasted six hundred and forty years.

Let others wage war; you, marry

The Habsburg method can be summed up in a Latin line that was meant as mockery and became their calling card: let others wage war; you, happy Austria, marry.

It worked better than an army. In 1477 Maximilian I married the heiress of Burgundy and gained the Netherlands. His son married a Spanish infanta and his grandson Charles V then ruled an empire on which the sun did not set. In 1526 Louis, king of Hungary and Bohemia, fell at Mohács; he was childless and had a Habsburg brother-in-law - and Prague and Buda found themselves under Vienna for the next four hundred years.

The country that was Lutheran

In the middle of the sixteenth century Austria was largely Protestant; among the nobility the estimates run to three quarters. The Habsburgs stayed Catholic and put up with it for a while, because they needed the estates' money for the wars with the Turks.

Then they turned the screw. Recatholicisation commissions came, patents ordering conversion or emigration, and Jesuits, who were given the schools. Protestants were still leaving Carinthia and the Salzkammergut in the 1720s, two hundred years after Luther.

The result is one of the most Catholic countries in Europe and a baroque church in practically every village. And also a few Carinthian valleys where Protestantism survived in secret the whole time and came into the open only after the patent of toleration.

The Turks at the gates

Twice it looked like the end. In 1529 Suleiman the Magnificent besieged Vienna and withdrew because of rain, mud and the coming winter. In 1683 the Ottomans came a second time; the city held for two months until the allied armies under the Polish king Jan Sobieski came down from the Kahlenberg and scattered the besiegers.

The stories that Vienna opened its first coffee house from the captured stores and baked a croissant in the shape of a crescent are charming and, unfortunately, both date from the nineteenth century. The real consequence was more prosaic: the Ottomans gradually gave up Hungary and Austria became a great power overnight.

Maria Theresa

In 1740 the twenty-three-year-old Maria Theresa inherited the throne and the neighbours took their chance at once: Frederick of Prussia took Silesia from her and never gave it back. The rest she defended, and then spent forty years rebuilding the state.

She introduced compulsory schooling, a census, house numbers and uniform measures - a modern state in the sense that for the first time it knew how many subjects it had and where they lived. On top of that she had sixteen children. She married the youngest daughter into France; her name was Marie Antoinette and that wedding did not end well.

Joseph II, who was in a hurry

Her son Joseph II ruled alone for ten years and managed to issue some six thousand decrees. He abolished serfdom, issued the patent of toleration, opened the Prater to the public and closed hundreds of monasteries which in his view did nothing useful.

One decree, though, went too far even for his taste: to save wood, the dead were to be buried in cloth and the coffin reused. Vienna revolted and the emperor withdrew it after six months. It is the one decree of his that everybody still remembers.

Metternich and the police in the hall

After Napoleon, a congress met in Vienna in 1815 that redrew Europe and at which the main activity was dancing. Chancellor Metternich ran it, and for the next thirty years he ran Austria too: censorship, secret police and quiet.

The middle classes withdrew into their flats, into music and furniture. That period is called Biedermeier and it is the only style named after an invented character from a comic magazine. In 1848 it burst, Metternich fled to England and the eighteen-year-old Franz Joseph came to the throne.

The emperor who reigned sixty-eight years

He reigned until 1916 - longer than any European monarch after Louis XIV. He got up at four in the morning, slept on an iron bed and read the files himself. He was the most conscientious official in his empire and one of its worse politicians.

His family died out in front of him: his brother Maximilian was shot in Mexico, his son Rudolf shot himself at Mayerling, his wife Elisabeth was stabbed by an anarchist in Geneva and his nephew Franz Ferdinand was shot in Sarajevo. That last shot began the First World War.

An empire that spoke a dozen languages

In 1867, after a war lost to Prussia, the empire split into two halves with one emperor: Austria-Hungary. It was a composite state where business was done in a dozen languages and where everything important carried the abbreviation k. u. k. - imperial and royal.

Robert Musil invented the name Kakania for it and described it as a state that was next to last in everything and world-class in bureaucracy. It held together surprisingly long for something bound by no idea at all, only by habit and the civil service.

The state nobody wanted

In 1918 the empire fell apart and what was left became a republic of six and a half million people, two million of them in Vienna. It called itself German Austria and wanted to join Germany; the peace treaty forbade it both, the name and the union.

Historians use the label the state that nobody wanted. Almost no one at the time believed that an Alpine republic with no coal, no sea and an oversized capital could exist at all.

The Anschluss

In 1934 democracy ended in civil war and an authoritarian regime whose chancellor Dollfuss was murdered by the Nazis in the same year. Four years later, in March 1938, the Wehrmacht marched in without a shot and Hitler - born in Braunau am Inn - took the ovations of a crowd of hundreds of thousands on Vienna's Heldenplatz.

Austria as a state disappeared for seven years. Austrians made up less than a tenth of the population of Greater Germany, yet were markedly over-represented among the perpetrators of Nazi crimes; at the same time tens of thousands of them ended in prisons and camps. Both are true, and with the first of them the country took forty years longer to come to terms.

Ten years of occupation and one signature

In 1945 the Allies occupied Austria and divided it into four zones, Vienna into four sectors plus an international centre patrolled by four armies in one jeep.

The occupation lasted ten years. It ended on 15 May 1955 with the signing of the State Treaty, which chancellor Figl showed from the balcony of the Belvedere to the crowd in the garden. In return Austria committed itself to permanent neutrality - and the day it approved it is still a national holiday.

Exported music and imported skiers

For its size, Austria gave the world a disproportionate amount of music. Haydn, Mozart, Schubert and Strauss were born here, Beethoven and Brahms moved in and stayed. There is no mystery in it: there was a court, there was a nobility that paid, and there was Vienna, where all of it met in a single city.

In the twentieth century a second export arrived, this time from the mountains. Alpine skiing technique was brought to perfection by the mountain man Hannes Schneider, who founded a ski school in St. Anton am Arlberg and taught a style that was then skied all over the world. Within fifty years the poor valleys people used to emigrate from became the most expensive addresses in the country.

Tourism is today one of the pillars of the Austrian economy and its share is among the highest in Europe. A country that once exported people now imports guests.

What is left of it

Austria today has over nine million inhabitants, is among the richest countries in Europe and has been in the European Union since 1995, which it joined on the condition that it keep its neutrality.

It took a long time to square up to its past. The official version, that it was Hitler's first victim, held for forty years and began to crumble only in the 1980s, when it turned out that the presidential candidate Kurt Waldheim had a hole in his wartime CV. It took a few more years before an Austrian chancellor said publicly that Austrians had been among the perpetrators too.

The rest is quiet, mountains, coffee and a remarkably well-run state that likes to think of itself as smaller than it actually is.