In Europe

Ball, on 6 February there will be a Hofburg Gala Ball, on 12 February the Scientists’ Ball, and on 13 February the Jurists’ Ball.
    ‘Everyone knew everyone by name, as though they were all brothers, but they greeted each other as one ruler greets the other,’ wrote Joseph Roth. ‘They knew the young and the old, the good horsemen and the bad, the gallants and the players, the quick-witted, the ambitious, the favourite sons, the heirs to an ancient, time-honoured, proverbial and generally venerated stupidity, as well as the intelligent ones, who would be taking power tomorrow.’
    The Austro-Hungarian Empire was a textbook example of what anthropologist Benedict Anderson called an ‘imaginary community’, a nationbound together by people who had never met, but who in their minds sensed each other to be family, brothers and sisters.
    Emperor Franz Josef I took the throne in December 1848 and held it until November 1916, one of the longest recorded reigns. Throughout all those decades he remained a binding element, partly because he did not try to forge national unities where there were none to be forged. As king of Hungary he spent weeks each year in Budapest, dressed in Hungarian uniform, with Hungarian ministers and a Hungarian parliament. He always spoke of ‘my peoples’, and never of ‘my people’.
    He was the heart of this imaginary community. In the Hofburg I had felt the ambience that was still his: in the cabinet conference room with its white walls, right beside his dressing room; in his austere bedroom with the single iron bed; in the bedchamber that once belonged to him and his wife, with Empress Sisi's gymnastics equipment still against the wall; in his study, with the little desk, the portrait of Field Marshal Joseph von Radetzky and his telephone, number 61.
    The significance of Franz Josef lay not in what he did, but in what he was. His was a symbolic role, and one he took very seriously. He adhered strictly to Spanish court etiquette, and the story goes that the royal physician who rushed to his deathbed was upbraided by the emperor for the way he was dressed. Unlike the German kaiser, Franz Josef had a sincere dislike of all innovation. Flush toilets were only installed at the Hofburg after persistent requests from the empress; he distrusted telephones and trains, and refused to tolerate electric light because it hurt his eyes.
    He lived according to the Habsburg concept of
Hausmacht
, the unshakable conviction that the Habsburg dynasty was God's instrument on earth. As long as the aristocracy and the people remained true to God and the emperor, all would be well. Revolution and godlessness, on the other hand, could undermine the system swiftly and fatally. In the end, that was exactly what happened.
    In addition to the
Hausmacht
, there was also a clear-cut hierarchy of high-born nobility and ‘service nobility’, the nobility appointed for reasons of merit. Only high-born nobility and officers were
hoffähig
and allowed to attend the court. Consisting of no more than eighty families, they spent from December to May attending each other's parties and funerals, and intermarried to such an extent that they were indeed one big family.
    In France and England, the wealthier citizenry had broken the power of the aristocracy; in Vienna that had not happened, and the well-to-do never succeeded in merging with the aristocracy. Strictly speaking, the liberal citizenry ruled along with the emperor and his nobles, but they did not have the upper hand. In addition, an enormous chasm yawned between the sensual, loose culture of the aristocracy and the orderly, rational and puritanical culture of the bourgeoisie. The middle-class citizen of Vienna remained a desperate onlooker, a failed parvenu, a person dying to belong, who lived behind façades, staircases and vestibules full of aristocratic ornaments, but who, in the long run, lacked the means, the language and the culture.
    But during the second half of the nineteenth century, something strange occurred: real life began slipping away from beneath the imaginary kingdom. The empire became an increasingly hollow shell, believed in by the nobility and citizenry only for lack of an alternative.
    The rebel nationalists, however, had no part in the fantasy: in
The Radetzky March
, for example, Joseph Roth's Hungarian officers begin excitedly chattering away in their own language when they hear of the attempt on Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand's life in