One of the weirder things about the “Enlightenment” in Central Europe was the proliferation of titles of nobility which were granted by absolutist rulers. One would expect interest in the feudal institution of “aristocracy” to diminish as reason, ‘meritocracy’ and commerce swept the globe. On the contrary, newly-rich merchants and industrialists; careerist soldiers; and self-promoting professors were only too eager to surround themselves with social accolades from the time of the previous “incompetents”…
This “new aristocracy” was not evenly disbursed inside the Austrian Empire. The heartland territories of the Austrian Alps and the Reformation-hotbed of Bohemia suffered most from the displacement of their traditional elite. While Bohemians were well represented among the peasants who found patronage under Franz Joseph, real Austrians— whether aristocratic or commoners— were uniformly excluded from leadership positions throughout the 1804-1918 period. The surprising reality of elite demographics in the Hapsburgs’ “feudal” empire show that the failed state was neither feudal, nor Austrian. The ‘elite’ around Franz Joseph were Reich Germans, Jews, Hungarians and Poles; Austrian commoners, who formed the reliable core of the military which held the empire together, were almost completely unrepresented at the top.
What a strange situation this was: the Austrian imperial household consciously avoiding sharing power with the leading families of its core demographic.
In order to explain this situation, I’m going to provide a few excerpts in English from historian Nikolaus von Preradovich’s 1955 work, Die Führungsschichten in Preußen und Österreich 1804–1918. Mit einem Ausblick bis zum Jahre 1945, a book that is not easy to find in the English-speaking world but which quietly informs the footnotes of better scholarship dealing with Redl’s era. The reason Preradovich’s work is quietly referenced is because his writing from the 1980s was labeled “right wing extremist” by the government over Berlin; Preradovich was outspoken opposing the criminalization of speech “denying the holocaust”.
What makes Preradovich’s study of HRE/Imperial Austrian/Austro-Hungarian elites so compelling is that it is data-driven. He combed through the various compendiums of court membership and noble families which were published by the state press and examined the genealogy of the titled personages contained therein. His generalizations about the set surrounding Emperor Franz Joseph and his two predecessors are based on statistics:
The sociological groups listed under the last three points [new nobility, bourgeois, petty bourgeois] are classified as the rising civic element. In spite of the titles they bear, the newly aristocratic families, i.e. families who were ennobled a few years or decades before the birth of the person concerned who appears in the statistical tables, can in no way be attributed to the nobility.
Preradovich received his doctrate in history just after WWII from Graz University: the university in the city from which Max Ronge ran Austria’s post-war intelligence networks. Preradovich’s dissertation was on the Bosnian Annexation of 1908/09— a politically fraught event driven by Austria Hungary’s Foreign Ministry and liberal “fifth column”— which was as hot an issue as a grad student could touch in 1949. Graz had for a long time prior been the retirement depot for Austria-Hungary’s intelligence elite. Urbanski retired there after the Redl scandal and Hans Gross, the world’s leading criminologist and informant network specialist over the period of Redl’s career, ran his criminology department from Graz University too.
Therefore, when it comes to the history of fifth columns in government, Preradovich had excellent training even if his oppinions were not politically correct later in life. Sometimes dissident voices are the most interesting to hear because they challenge the sacred cows of modern historiography.
So how does Preradovich explain Alpine Austria’s lack of elite representation? His argument is based on an ethical bifurcation that split the Hapsburgs’ social peers in the early 1600s: some of Alpine Austria’s elite families abandoned traditional feudal obligations to become imperial courtiers, while the remaining aristocracy were denied recognition by the absolutist-imperial power structure which developed over the seventeenth century:
The same sociological background stratum [lower Noblitiy, “niedere Adel”) in the Austrian Alpine countries and in Bohemia-Moravia did not withstand the strain of the centuries, or did so only for a much shorter time. The incision took place at the beginning of the 17th century. At that time, in Austria and Bohemia, the provincial nobility, whose leading position had been undisputed until then, was ousted in the wake of absolutism and the Counter-Reformation. The landed nobility became court nobility, since only the court, personified in the figure of the monarch, could bestow favors. It was precisely through the complete redistribution of property that the nobility was deprived of its connection with the people…
This lost connection would become increasingly relevant as Emperor Franz Joseph established democratic institutions in the 19th century. However, there was also an ethnic element to the aristocratic displacement:
… The numerous strangers who came to court also deprived them [Austrian Alpine aristocracy] of their biological connection with the country. Since that time the nationally- and socially-dislocated pedigrees of the Austrian nobility can be determined— in complete contrast to the situation in Poland and Hungary. Austrian Alpine nobility no longer married neighbor to neighbor, but fathers from all over the world gave their daughters to the then still Austrian nobility of Austria, which then detached from the Austrian people in a vacuum, rallied around the throne, and become a peopleless class solely responsible to the emperor, which naturally, as can be clearly seen from [19th century] parliamentary representation, did not enjoy the confidence of the rest of the Austrian population.
What Preradovich is talking about with respect to parliamentary representation is that members of this “new aristocracy” of the imperial heartlands were almost never elected as Abgeordnetenhaus representatives by the people over which they had responsibility. In places where the old feudal structures were still intact: Hungary, Galicia and the Austrian outlier of Tyrol, voters elected aristocrats to the Abgeordnetenhaus all the time. These representatives were ethnically and culturally similar to their constituents. The people of the Austrian heartlands were victims of their own state’s success as well as the Hapsburg aversion to sharing power.
Which brings us to the Alpine aristocrats who did not pull anchor and cast their lot in with the Imperial Enterprise. These “landed gentry” aristocrats, still connected with the culture and even genetics of the people they were responsible for, became an open threat to the imperial family:
The court nobility needed the highest possible titles to visibly confirm the favor of their monarch, while the landed gentry became neither more respected, nor more powerful, nor richer if they were able to put the word “Baron” or “Count” in front of their old name. The Austrian nobility, which represented a mixture of the Alpine families with Bohemians and Moravians as well as the immigrant Romans [Italian/Spanish/Lorraine], does not show a single untitled noble family flourishing at court. Moreover, the man who enjoyed only the simple title ‘Lord of’, while his family could be as old as anyone could wish, was not considered noble at all [by the court]. It was not the age of the noble family, which according to widespread belief was the main vector of culture and tradition and formed the basis of nobility, but exclusively the title that mattered. In addition to Northern Germany and England, Galicia and Hungary showed an almost opposite development. In these areas there were numerous families who can be identified as nobility and counts, even princes, next to each other and with equal status (Potocki, Korytowski, Lonyay, Semsey). The reason for the almost complete disappearance from public life of the actually native Austrian families of the old nobility is therefore the fact that they were alienated from the country by absolutism and were obligated to turn to the court alone.
This, according to Preradovich, is the genesis of ‘a Patriot for Me’-style thinking among the Hapsburgs.
As a result of the political effects of the Counter-Reformation, the [Alpine Austrian] nobility left the land of its original rise, the countryside. Wherever this was not the case, there one could rightly speak of the land-based nobility, as was for instance the case in Galicia and Hungary, as well as in northern Germany and in England, [places where] it is evident that the nobility could maintain its position in charge for much longer, even until the middle of the 20th century.
One glaring problem with the Hapsburgs’ new “title” way of manufacturing a domesticated “aristocratic” class was that this new class did not fit into the fabric of society anywhere in the HRE/Imperial Austria/Austria-Hungary. I discuss the consequences of this for Redl’s generation of officers in my book, with particular reference to the avant gard press, like Die Zeit, which targeted these officers.
According to Preradovich, the traditional aristocratic classes did have a way of absorbing new members, but this method was based on social consensus rather than being controlled by His Imperial Highness:
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries up to about the middle of the eighteenth [i.e. War of Austrian Succession) numerous families succeeded in being absorbed into the old nobility in a relatively short time. According to those indicated periods of time, however, it is only in isolated cases that lineages can be determined who actually became nobles through the granting of nobility and who joined the old aristocracy through marriages. The patent of nobility itself was at no time a “membership”, but at best an “entry ticket”. A family only acquired actual recognition by the established nobility through the family connections that followed the grant (of the patent of nobility). These are almost completely absent in the clans of leading officials and enobled-military in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the decades examined [1804-1918], two layers of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy can be clearly distinguished: the old nobility, on the one hand, who were socially very respected but lost their political influence at an ever-increasing speed, and on the other hand the newly ennobled, who were socially weightless, rising citizens, but who held real power in their hands as leading officials, officers and politicians. There were no family ties between the titular upper class and the other bourgeois upper class, and social connections were primarily limited to official representation.
This disconnection was particularly painful with respect to the military officer class. As the military was really the only institution holding Austria-Hungary together by the time of Col. Redl, the reluctance of established aristocratic families to embrace these new “risen” men as their own represented a serious social fault-line. The libertine, sometimes selfish and very nouveau-riche/urbane attitudes of much of the officer class, as expressed on the pages of Die Zeit, further alienated these functionaries from traditional society. Franz Joseph’s new “elite” were equally disconnected from the common people, and particularly fighting Austrian Alpine soldiers:
…Austrian nobility was not used to serving in those regiments which were recruited from the narrow sphere of their homeland. Neither in the cavalry— the Alpine dragoon regiments 3, 4 and 5 were not socially respected— nor in the infantry, nor even the artillery enjoyed social prestige. The nobleman, mostly of non-Austrian origin, who lived in Styria, Carinthia or the two Austrias, preferred to serve in the Uhlan or Hussar regiments stationed in Galicia or Hungary. In the presumably subconscious realization that things were indeed aristocratic over there, for the Polish aristocrats served almost exclusively with Uhlans, the Hungarians with hussars, the latter sometimes even preferring to serve in the Royal Hungarian Honved (Landwehr), although this branch of service enjoyed less respect, because Hungarian was the official language in these regiments, while the k. u. k. Regiments were commanded by Germans. The simple man from Carinthia or Styria, for example, who served in the 7th, 27th and 47th Infantry Regiments or in the dragoons already mentioned, did not see the noble owner of the property closest to him during his military service. There was no shared experience of the front, and the farmer who had returned had the impression that the count probably hadn’t taken part at all. These [new-aristocratic] attitudes, which were preoccupied with social prestige, were not adopted in Tyrol, because a large part of the Tyrolean nobility served in the Kaiserjäger regiments and—similar to the situation in Hungary—also in the Kaiserschützen of the local Landwehr. The Tyrolean farmer had the opportunity in the field to observe the behavior of his noble neighbors and to form comradeship with them. After what has just been said, it is not surprising that even today [1955] two-fifths of the South Tyrolean deputies in the Italian Parliament are nobles whose ancestors had distinguished themselves in the struggles of Andreas Hofer and who can trace their lineage back to Tyrolean free farmers (Braitenberg, Guggenberg).
The officers who built their careers alongside Alfred Redl enjoyed none of the “comradeship” Preradovich describes above, but rather they had the siege mentality of impostors— deracinated “Tornisterkind”. It’s hard to imagine this state of affairs not contributing to Redl’s (lack of) ethics and his ultimate betrayal of his homeland to (multiple) enemies.
Archduke Franz Ferdinand is often criticized for his ‘backward’ and ‘feudal’ policies; perhaps this is justified. It could also be, however, that he understood something about the society he was slated to govern. Franz Ferdinand’s calls to reintroduce aristocrats into Austria Hungary’s military make no sense if he considered the “Dienstadel” to be genuine aristocrats. I think it’s more likely that in 1913 the Archduke recognized the same disconnects that Preradovich documented in 1955, and that the Archduke was trying to undo the mistakes of his ancestors.
It becomes clear that the anational aristocracy, those Austro-Bohemian-Romanesque “Austrian” aristocrats, who were devoid of any connection with the people in a nationalist era, had to lose the last remnants of their elite position. The relentless logic of History shows they [Austrian “aristocrats”] had to lose in the fight for the Empire against nationalist Prussia; they had to lose in the fight for the Austrian Empire against nationalist Hungary; and they had to succumb to the Polish elite in Galicia in the fight for the leadership of the kingdoms and countries represented in the Reichsrat. The Austrian monarchy was neither feudal nor Austrian. Austria did not rule the Austrians, but the Austrians Austria.
Col. Alfred Redl 