340 pages, Little, Brown and
Company, ISBN-13: 978-0316585323
As
I was still reading Frederic Morton's A Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888/1889, and wondering how best to describe the author's approach to
history, the perfect metaphor came to mind: some historical writers (mainly, it
seems, those of public school textbooks) adhere religiously to objective,
undeniable fact: dates, names, places and the other minutiae that so often
make their books better studies in tedium more than of history. Perhaps we can
describe their works as "photographic history"; that is, absolutely accurate
in every aspect but devoid of imagination and interpretation. Morton, to continue
the analogy, writes "artistic history"; or, using an artist's brush
rather than a camera to paint his word pictures. In his hands, history is interpreted on a canvas, and the
reader sees all of the colors, swirls, and textures of the scene.
But,
we may ask, is not the camera more trustworthy than the artist's interpretation
of events? It may very well be but, then again, the photographer chooses what
objects to photograph, the angle from which each photograph is taken and what
highlights and shadows to include. Whenever one reads history, from whatever
view the author has taken, he is reading the author's interpretation of that
history and would do well to remember that what he is reading has been filtered
through another mind first. A Nervous
Splendor gives us Morton's view of the culture, society and political
manipulations afoot in Europe, particularly in the Austro-Hungarian Empire of
the dying Habsburg dynasty in the year 1888 and the first fateful months of
1889.
With
the use of a wide range of source materials, including newspapers, periodicals,
memoirs and unpublished diaries, Morton presents an intriguing
account of a short, yet important, period in Vienna's (and Austria's) history. Morton chooses
July 1888 through April 1889 as a watershed period because these years marked
the time when "the western dream started to go wrong". Morton paints
the Austro-Hungarian Empire of the late 1880s as backward and stagnant, still obsessed with protocol, tradition and keeping up
appearances. The Habsburgs still hung on to their monarchy and modern classes (modern up-and-coming industrialists, for example, having little to no access to the court). Morton
looks at the elite of society in a number of areas like science (Freud), music
(Brahams, Strauss, Buckner), theater (Herzl, Schnitzler); even the rise in
prophylactic sales during Carnival is described, as is the pursuit of the
Crown Prince's affections by the girls of the fashionable crowd.
Naturally, what
I found to be the most interesting in a morbid sorta way are the chapters that focus on the Crown Prince Rudolf, the liberal-minded (and disturbed) heir to the Austrian throne. The progressive Crown Prince
was stifled by the traditions of the court, forced to entertain guests
he did not like (such as Kaiser Wilhelm II; I mean, did anybody like Kaiser Bill?) and was only able to voice his
ideas through unsigned articles in the newspapers. His choice of the Mayerling
incident to solve his problems still seems odd for an intelligent, 30 year-old
prince, while his choice of taking Mary Vetsera with him seems more for convenience
than for some love tragedy as she was willing to go along with his plan whereas
his regular mistress laughed it off.
Morton's
scholarship and care for detail are obvious throughout, but he goes far beyond
most other historians in his ability to involve the reader and make him
empathize with the long-dead people in his book. In his hands the events at
Mayerling become understandable, though no less tragic. One can only wonder how
history might have changed if Rudolf had been a partner with his father,
Emperor Franz Joseph, rather than a powerless heir in the wings, and if the bloody 20th Century may not have taken a different course instead.
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