Nostalgia for Galicia (2003)

You don't have to walk far in Cracow to find a restaurant, pharmacy, bookstore, bar, or antique shop called "Galicia." This nostalgia, though commercially attractive, might seem ironic, since the Austrian province of Galicia formed part of the system under which the surrounding Great Powers occupied Poland from the late eighteenth century until the First World War. Furthermore, Galicia was the poorest and most backward Austrian province. "Galician poverty" was a byword.

On the one hand, the universal human longing for a past that is perceived as simpler and less turbulent combines with the reality that the Austrians did cede a degree of autonomy to Cracow and Galicia. (They did so because their ethnically diverse empire was under pressure from within and without.) This was at a time when the rest of Poland lay under far harsher occupation by Prussia and Russia. For Cracow, if not the hard-scrabble villages in the rest of the province, Galician autonomy under the Austrians was a key circumstance favoring the development of the city we see today. 

On the other hand, tradition is not something you inherit; it's something you have to create. When Cracow fell under Habsburg rule, the city shared almost nothing except conservative Catholicism with its new overlords. At first, the Austrian hand lay heavy on Cracow, attempting almost as ruthlessly as the Prussians to germanize their new possession. Soon, however, Austrian weakness forced Vienna to loosen the reins. Poles in Galicia realized how well off they were, relatively speaking, in comparison with their brothers and sisters under Prussian and Russian rule. This led to the rise of attitudes condoning, and even actively supporting the increasingly indulgent supervision exercised by Vienna. 

The conservatives who dominated the media and public opinion in nineteenth-century Cracow were the greatest beneficiaries of loyalty towards Austria, and they took the lead in forming the pro-Austrian tradition. Creating tradition  well often pays off. For decades, the conservatives made political capital of the tradition they created. A century later, the revived tradition can still be taken to market. Thus, at least, the owners of all those establishments called "Galician-this" or "Galician-that" must believe. Galicia is one of the most reliable brands in Cracow. 

No surprise, then, that this lightly-written but widely researched guide to Galicia should be one of the biggest sellers of the last decade. 

When talking about this tradition, you have to start with the Habsburg rulers, and especially "Franz Josef." He personified  Austro-Hungarian Galicia, both for his subjects over a century ago and for those who still feel the nostalgia today. Francis Joseph the First still peers down from the walls of many Cracow homes and shops, even those that do not have "Galicia" in their title. Placed in charge during the revolution in 1848, when he was eighteen, he was skilled at dancing, fencing, and riding, as well as being a trained bookbinder (according to the Habsburg custom of educating each member of the dynasty in an honest trade, just in case they ever ran out of thrones to occupy). 

He would remain on the throne for almost seventy years, more than long enough to become a figure of legend. 

He was fanatical about his blood sports. In his old age he met the most renowned American big game hunter, Teddy Roosevelt, who allowed as to having shot over 500 head of game. Francis Joseph replied that his own total was 55,000. Yet even in the heat of the chase, he never lost his aplomb; on one occasion he charged over a fence and his horse's momentum carried him right through a country funeral procession. Francis Joseph had such personal dignity that he managed to look towards the coffin and raise his hat in respect before disappearing into the next field. Or so, tongue-in-cheek, Czuma and Mazan assure us in one of the innumerable anecdotes, apocryphal or not, that make up their panoramic ramble through history.

The emperor was punctilious about little things, like well-shined shoes, and he had his aversions, including patent leather. Towards the end of his reign, one of his subjects survived the sinking of the Titanic and was brought before the emperor to give a first-hand account of the most sensational event of the time. As she approached, Francis Joseph noticed how beautifully shined her shoes were, and spent the entire audience quizzing her about her technique with brush, rag, and polish. 

He regarded elevators, telephones, and typewriters as inadmissible novelties, although he did come in his later years to accept the flush toilet. His conservatism had a more fatal side to it. He steadfastly refused to supply his army with the breech-loading carbines that had become the European standard in the second half of the nineteenth century. When other armies had gone over to the breech-loaders, an official Austrian commission concluded that, while the new-fangled rifles could indeed deliver a continuous stream of fire, they were nevertheless impractical because they would lead troops to exhaust their ammunition too quickly. In 1866, the Prussians with their carbines routed the muzzle-loader-toting Austrians in the Seven Weeks' War, dealing the Habsburg empire a knockout from which it never recovered. 

Yet Francis Joseph remained up a local favorite, despite his empire's military weakness. He learned over the years how to play to the feelings of his Polish subjects. When he first visited Cracow in 1851, he used the German version of his name when putting pen to the university guest book. Twenty-nine years later, he boldly signed himself in Polish: "Franciszek Jozef." In 1900, alas, he made a "sleeping visit," during which the imperial train only paused for a few moments on the viaduct over ul. Lubicz in the dead of night, but he had become so well-loved that the locals accepted the subsequent official explanation that, while he had not appeared at the window, his majesty had indeed noted and taken an interest in the city.

All the factoids in the previous four paragraphs turned up during a few moments of leafing through this book and following the plentiful cross references. They reflect the way that the authors deal with weighty material in a breezy, gossipy way. Their obvious reliance on original sources produces an impression of seeing the age through its own optics, of being introduced to the things that people must have joked or whispered about during the reign of Francis Joseph.

There is scandal aplenty, of the sort that must have spiced up conversation in Cracow cafes. We learn that the last emperor, Charles, who succeeded Francis Joseph in 1916 and served for two years, attended a normal public secondary school in Vienna, was a compulsive moviegoer, and carried on unabashedly with a Prague streetwalker sneered at as "a Snow White from the urban cesspool." Secret police agents had to follow the young duke discreetly, retrieving the jewels that he left behind in the hooker's bed. Then again, Charles's own father had been uninhibited enough to emerge from a private dining room at Sacher's wearing only his sword; the wife of the British ambassador looked up from her meal to see him in this attire and nearly succumbed to apoplexy.

Or take Francis Ferdinand, later the victim of the Sarajevo assassination that sparked the First World War. He was a pathological miser. Perhaps that is why rumor emerged from his palace that he and his morganatic spouse, Sofia Chotek, carried on a vigorous sex life that included practices "unrelated to the begetting of an heir." They were so obvious about it that even the staff knew, and so stingy that the staff blabbed. 

Snaring a royal spouse and getting an heir is what it was all about for the Habsburgs. It was also an age when the press had grown powerful and public opinion needed to be massaged: a situation in which both scandal-mongering and  self-promotion thrived. An adroit university professor from Cracow earned himself honors and a standing invitation to Francis Ferdinand's meager table by discovering that Sofia Chotek indeed had royal blood and that, conveniently, it was Jagiellonian blood, from the line of the great Polish kings. Similarly, it must have been a source of some pride in the city that the notoriously prominent Habsburg lip could reputedly be traced back to a medieval Polish princess who married into the family. 

A local obstetrician, Dr. Henryk Jordan, stepped in at the last minute to deliver a little Habsburg to a princess who was passing through Cracow; he made such an impression that the family called him to Vienna for all subsequent births. He became known as "the stork of the Habsburgs," and his practice and honors mounted into such a fortune that he was later able to fund the outdoor recreation facility in his hometown, Park Jordana, that still bears his name.

Dr. Jordan intended his park as a venue for outdoor physical exercises, and he furnished it with the necessary equipment. By doing so, he emulated Francis Joseph's empress, the tragic Sissy, who went riding in a special sweat suit, installed gymnastic apparatus in her bedchamber (purely for exercise purposes), and never let her weight go above 110 lbs., even though she was strikingly tall (5' 8") and bore four children. With all his riding and fencing, and his simple, frugal diet, Francis Joseph I cut the best figure among European royalty, at a consistent 154 lbs. (while England's Victoria, for example, was a two-hundred-pounder). With little details like this, Czuma and Mazan keep reminding us that while the Habsburg rulers may have been conservative and devoutly Catholic to a degree hard to imagine today even in Cracow, they were no fuddy-duddies. 

They were, in fact, suckers for health fads, especially the various water cures then fashionable. After all, we learn, this was the empire that gave us not only Sigmund Freud, but also the shower ("prisznic" in Polish, after the name of its inventor, Preissnitz), which was originally designed to be taken cold, in order to lend energy and counteract concupiscence. Francis Joseph was a great believer in cold bathing. On the other side of the coin, Czuma and Mazan show us the figure of the scandalous Galician novelist Leopold Sacher-Masoch, whose father, as the feared head of the Austrian police in Lwow, had helped to organize the slaughter of the Polish landowners in 1846. From this surname, we derive the term masochism. 

In their numerous short articles on battlefields, military cemeteries, and participation by Cracow natives in Austrian military adventures all over the globe, Czuma and Mazan also face up to the aspect of the Habsburg empire that appalled some of its best writers, like Hasek and Joseph Roth. Namely,  the Austro-Hungarian empire was not only militarily inept, but also obscenely profligate in squandering the lives of its soldiers, right up to the end. Many young cadets from Cracow decided to serve under Austrian colors rather than to waste their lives in another hopeless national uprising against the Russian and Prussian occupiers; they died for Austria as far away as Mexico. Yet it was also in Austrian-occupied Cracow that Pilsudski trained his Legion to fight for Polish independence, at the same time that Lenin was living here and mulling over the chances that the revolution would ever break out. 

Not only as genealogists and obstetricians, but also as magnates, politicians, and particularly as masters of the daunting "Spanish etiquette" that the Habsburgs cultivated, Cracovians made names for themselves in Austria. The Austrians in turn, came to be accepted in Cracow. God knows, it wasn't through their military success, but rather through their mild rule and, surely, through all the little human touches that Czuma and Mazan recount. Poles hated the Russians and feared the Prussians, but they generally accepted, and perhaps even sincerely loved, the Austrians. The sentimental songs, the gossip, and the press clippings assembled here must all have been ingredients in creating an indulgent tradition of docile loyalty.

In their best-selling 1998 compendium, Czuma and Mazan form part of a new traditional perception of the tradition that was manufactured eighty or more years earlier. The trend seems to be slackening now, but the good old times under Francis Joseph were a definite point of reference in the decades preceding and the years following the collapse of communism in Poland. That tradition pointed to a vanished but still highly conceivable world of good feelings, laissez-faire government, and a bureaucratic system that may not have been wholly democratic, but enjoyed the consent of the governed and, in any case, was not quite competent enough to make life really miserable. To turn an old Austro-Hungarian chestnut on its head, what Cracow got as punishment for its loss of independence from 1846 to 1918 would have seemed like a reward in 1945. 

That is why, if you look at a manhole cover here today, you can often read the abbreviation "C. i. K." (Cesarskie i Krolewskie, the Polish equivalent of Kaiserlich und Koeniglich -- Imperial and Royal), but you might not be immediately sure whether the manhole cover antedates the First World War or is quite new, for the city  went back after 1989 to its old Austro-Hungarian designation, as embodied in those initials, as an "Imperial and Royal" city. And it is also why you see all those establishments advertising themselves under the name Galicia. 

A review of: Mieczyslaw Czuma and Leszek Mazan. Austriackie gadanie czyli Encyklopedia galicyjska [Austrian Palaver, or a Galician Encyclopedia]. Cracow: Anabasis, 1998. 596 pp., illus. 

© Cracow Letters, 2003